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The University of Southampton
Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering – Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Emerging TechnologiesNews and Events

IROE team showcasing ocean engineering at Southampton Science and Engineering Festival

Published: 9 May 2022
Science and Engineering Festival

The IROE team were out in force at the annual Southampton Science and Engineering Festival’s hands-on day #SOTSEF to share with the public how ocean engineers and ocean engineering impacts our everyday lives, to share some of the challenges and solutions, and do a bit of ocean engineering too!

The hands-on demos let visitors to install offshore foundations and then try to pull them out to see which are easy to get in but provide the best holding capacity to keep offshore wind turbines in place in the ocean during extreme weather events; to design a build a mooring systems for an offshore wind turbine, test how far the turbine moves for a given load, and see how adding a stretchy section reduces loading on the anchor, enabling smaller anchors to be used; to look at and touch different seabed sediments in a physical display and then explore where different seabed sediments exist around the UK via an interactive digital map, showing the challenge of the range of seabeds that anchors and mooring lines need to be installed in to meet the offshore wind targets set by the government to reach our net zero targets; and to see a scale model of our geotechnical centrifuge –which spins complete with on board camera! demonstrating how field scale conditions can be created to test the geotechnical capacity of anchors – that in reality might be 10 m in diameter and 30 m deep – but at model scale can fit in the palm of your hand.

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Ocean engineering fun with the IROE team and the public at #SOTSEF 2022
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Intelligent & Resilient Ocean Engineering SOTSEF team (Left to right, back row - Hugo Putuhena, Benjamin Cerfontaine, Noor Laham, Oscar Festa, Susan Gourvenec, Dave White, Jared Charles, and front, Chrysoula Anastassopoulos, Katherine Kwa and junior helpers, Thomas and Helen
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