Research area
Hydrodynamics and Floating Systems
Nonlinear time-domain simulation of ships and offshore structures, including the panel-method solvers behind HydRA.
We build the numerical machinery for predicting how ships and offshore structures respond to waves — frequency-domain panel methods for added mass, damping and diffraction forces, and nonlinear time-domain simulations for the cases where linear theory is not enough.
HydRA
This work underpins HydRA (Hydrodynamic Response Analysis), the lab’s web application for simulating and visualising linear and nonlinear motions of ships and offshore structures in regular and irregular waves. The tool is free to use in the browser so students and practising engineers can run fluid–structure interaction studies without a licence or a local cluster. Validation work includes comparisons against WAMIT for added mass, damping, diffraction forces and response amplitude operators.
Ongoing directions
Development continues on forward-speed hydrodynamics for ships, second-order force calculations, mooring, irregular-frequency removal, hydroelastic response, and physics-informed neural networks as a route to faster surrogates. The same hydrodynamic core is intended to feed an indigenous ship simulator for autonomy research and training.