IROE team showcasing ocean engineering at Southampton Science and Engineering Festival

The IROE team were out in force at the annual Southampton Science and Engineering Festival’s hands-on Science and Engineering 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!

IROE Team (top left image): Left to right, Susan Gourvenec, Benjamin Cerfontaine, Katherine Kwa, Sunke Trace-Kleeberg, Noor Laham, Piotr Kowalczyk, Oscar Festa, Hitesh Halai, Jared Charles, Hugo Putuhena, Dave White, Chrysoula Anastassopoulos and junior helpers, Thomas and Helen.

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; and 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.

Celebrating the culmination of British Science Week 2023, the University of Southampton welcomed almost 5000 members of the public to campus on Sunday for the Science and Engineering Day.

Find out more about the SOTSEF at https://www.sotsef.co.uk/ 
More about British Science Week at https://www.britishscienceweek.org/