Technology Challenges for the Future Development of Hovercraft Seminar
For more information regarding this seminar, please telephone Dr Yeping Xiong on +44 (0)2380 596619 or email Y.Xiong@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Whilst developing new hovercraft products for the first time in many years Griffon Hoverwork Ltd have found that the huge variety of interesting new technologies and research areas available and appear to be of interest at first glance are overwhelming. Therefore in order to focus and prioritize efforts within budget and timeframe constraints they have developed a list of technology challenges for future hovercraft which support the improvement of their product range and allow them to rate potential solutions for consideration of investment.
In this seminar Mark Downer will discuss those challenges and explain the underlying issues associated with them as well as the potential benefits of finding viable solutions.
The high level Technology Challenge Categories are:
1. Product Safety
2. Payload Cost
3. Maintenance & Availability
4. Environmental Performance
5. Passenger Experience
Speaker information
Mark Downer, Griffon Hoverwork Ltd. CEng MEng MRINA. A Ship Science graduate in 1992 Mark spent 8 years as a Marine Engineer Officer in the Royal Navy where he served in Hong Kong and later on HMS Invincible before lecturing Naval Architecture at HMS Sultan. On leaving the Royal Navy Mark joined BAE Systems for 6 years on the Type 45 Destroyer project as part of the Prime Contract Office Warship Team leading the Naval Architecture and Survivability Design Teams and overseeing the build at Vosper Thornycroft in Portsmouth. Mark then joined Lloyd's Register firstly leading the Naval Design Support function before being promoted to manage the largest Design Support Office, based in London. Mark joined Griffon Hoverwork 2 years ago as the Chief Engineer and since then has been working hard to implement a robust design procedure which is able to deliver support to customer build projects in a rapidly growing company. In the last 12 months Mark has been able to lead on the development of new Hovercraft designs and this has resulted in the conduct of research and development in the area for the first time in many years.