Short Courses

Date: Saturday, June 21, 2025
Course Length: Approximately 6 Hours
Instructor: Hayden Marcollo, Director – AMOG

Aims and Objectives: The aim of the course is to provide a working knowledge (including CPD) for the practicing maritime engineer and/or project manager, with respect to Experimental Uncertainty Analysis (EUA). The objective is to, for the practicing engineer, build competency through broader engineering knowledge and, for the project manager, inform decision making when precuring/contracting hydrodynamic tests.

Topics Covered: The course will introduce the fundamental concepts of EUA, and the underlying mathematics. It will provide case study examples for typical hydrodynamic situations, that will be tackled in an experiential learning environment. It will cover the roles of regulatory bodies and present the methodologies agreed in the hydrodynamic community for standard experiments.

The course will culminate in participants grouping in pairs to perform a very small scale model physical experiment in the classroom of a heave decay test on an offshore spar structure.

Pre-requisites and Materials:

• Introductory level understanding of statistics and basic naval architecture.
• Bring a pen, paper, and a laptop with Spread Sheet application (Excel or similar).

Date: TBD (Weekend prior to conference)
Course Length: Full Day (approx. 8hrs)

Instructors

Dr. Junbo Jia
Odfjell Technology, Norway

Prof. Bernt Johan Leira
University of Science and Technology, Norway

Course description: An understanding of the principles of structural dynamics and vibrations is important for assuring system integrity and operational functionality in different engineering areas. However, practical problems regarding dynamics are in many cases handled without success, despite large expenditures of investment. It is essential in approaching dynamic analysis and design that one develops an “intuition” to solve the relevant problems at hand; both academic knowhow and professional experience play equally important roles in developing such intuition. To meet the objectives above, this course aims to address a wide range of topics in the field of offshore structures, starting from fundamentals and moving on to relevant and practical engineering challenges and solutions. Topics covered will include (i) engineering failures due to inappropriate accounting of dynamics; (ii) Newtonian dynamics and stochastic dynamics; (iii) nonlinear dynamics; (iv) characterizing environmental loadings and responses; (v) dynamics in assessing different limit states (extreme, fatigue, etc.) (vi) vibration mitigation measures. Special emphasis is placed on engineering applications that utilize state-of-the-art knowledge, the finite element method, relevant codes, probabilistic methods, and recommended practices.

Target Audience: This course is primarily intended for industry professionals, researchers, and graduate students in offshore, civil, and marine engineering who desire an introduction to principles of dynamic analysis and design as well as those who are eager to learn advanced and efficient techniques used to mitigate vibrations for offshore as well as land-based structures.

Date: (TBD – Weekend prior to the conference)
Course Length: (Half Day Course)
Instructor: Allan Magee, Consultant, OMAE24 Conference Chair

Instructor Bio: Allan R. Magee, is now working as a consultant. He was previously Director of Operations at Technology Centre for Offshore and Marine, Singapore (TCOMS), Principal Investigator for the Centre for Autonomous and Remotely Operated Vessels (CEAOPS), and Professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering at National University of Singapore (NUS). He holds an MSE and PhD in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering from the University of Michigan, and a BS from the University of Arizona in Engineering Physics.

He has over 30 years' experience in Marine and Offshore projects and R&D – 15 of those for Technip in Houston, TX and Kuala Lumpur Malaysia. He is a recognized expert in offshore platform design, mooring, hydrodynamics, and model testing and has over 120 publications. He took a leading role in the development of the Next-Generation Ocean Basin for TCOMS, and several projects, taught courses and supervised PhD students at NUS. He helps organize international conferences like OTC Asia and OMAE, which he will co-chair in 2024. He is a Fellow of SNAME and Institution of Engineers Singapore and Council Member of the Society of Floating Solutions, Singapore and has won several awards.

Course Outline:

• Introduction: An overview of VLFS, including their history, examples, and engineering challenges
• Examples of VLFS: Mobile Offshore Base (MOB) floating bridges, floating solar farms, fish farms, floating cities
• Design Basis: Requirements for payload, motions, location & standards
• Global Performance & Stationkeeping: Global analysis of VLFS, including structural and mooring design
• Hydroelastic Analysis: The unique hydroelastic response of VLFS due to their horizontal extent and flexible structures
• Cost: Elements of cost and their estimation; local content

Course Title: Wave Energy Converter Control Design
Date: TBD (Weekend prior to the conference)

Course Instructors

Daniel T. Gaebele is a Research and Development Electrical Engineer at Sandia National Laboratories’ Water Power Technologies Program. His research focuses on wave energy converter (WEC) control co-design and control co-optimization. Dr. Gaebele holds a Bachelor’s and a Master’s degree both in Engineering Cybernetics from the University of Stuttgart, Germany, and a Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Oregon State University.

Jessica Nguyen is currently working as a Research and Development Mechanical Engineer in the Climate Systems program at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL). She obtained her Bachelor and PhD in Mechanical Engineering from Cornell University and University of Massachusetts Amherst, respectively. Her graduate research focused on fluid-structure interactions and nonlinear behaviors of highly flexible cable dynamics with the applications in mooring systems for offshore platforms. At SNL, Jessica is involved in developing and supporting theoretical and numerical modeling of resource characterizations; performances of marine and hydrokinetic systems; as well as their influences on the surrounding environment.

Course Description: This full-day course will provide a deep dive into wave energy converter (WEC) dynamics and their control co-design (CCD) for maximizing electricity output. WEC CCD utilizes methods from systems, control, and optimization theory to concurrently consider the multidisciplinary subsystems and their physical limitations during the early stages of design.

Course Highlights:

1. Wave mechanics and hydrodynamic fundamentals
2. Energy conversion in an oscillatory resource: Power transmission and reflection
3. Introduction to wave energy converters and hybrid systems (e.g., wind-wave, wave-desalination)
4. WEC Systems Thinking: Subsystems as input/output multiports and first principle models
5. Numerical modelling: Various levels of fidelity and trade-offs with design codes
6. Experimental modelling: System identification of multi-input WEC systems in wave tanks and subcomponent identification in bench tests
7. WEC control: Optimal numeric control, feedback controllers and control authority WecOptTool: Demonstration of an open-source WEC Optimization Software Toolbox

Pre-requisites & Materials:

1. Familiarity with "Ocean Waves and Oscillating Systems: Linear Interactions Including Wave-Energy Extraction" by Johannes Falnes beneficial, but not required
2. Laptop is not required, but software to work along will be provided

Target Audience: This course is primarily intended for industry professionals, researchers, and graduate students with previous experience in Wave Energy Conversion

Date: Saturday, June 8th, 2024
Course Length: Approximately 4 Hrs
Course pre-requisite: Slides and reading materials will be provided.

Course Description: This course focuses on the integration of mechanics and dynamical systems with machine learning (ML) via data-driven modeling and physics-based ML (PBML). The course begins with a review of calculus, linear algebra, regression analysis and various statistical methods. In the first part, prominent reduced-order models and model reductions techniques for physical systems will be systematically covered via coding examples. It is known that general-purpose black-box ML techniques do not perform well beyond the data they are being trained, and they lack physical interpretability and reliability for engineering applications. To address these issues, this course will introduce hybrid physics-based ML techniques using a variety of neural network architectures. New developments pertaining to physics-based ML techniques and software development will be taught using examples from diverse marine/offshore engineering applications.

What will students learn in this course:

• Be able to perform dimensionality reduction of CFD and experimental measurements using singular value decomposition & various projection-based reduced-order models
• Be able to intuitively understand and use deep neural networks for classification, control/optimization and flow-field predictions
• Learn integration of projection-based model reduction techniques with various deep learning architectures

Course Instructors

Rajeev K. Jaiman is currently a Professor and NSERC/Seaspan Industrial Research Chair in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of British Columbia (UBC), Vancouver, Canada. Prior to his current appointment at UBC, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National University of Singapore (NUS). Before joining NUS, he was the Director of CFD Development at Altair Engineering, Inc., Mountain View, California. Dr. Jaiman earned his first degree in Aerospace Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai. He received his master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) with a Computational Science and Engineering option. His research interests broadly include multiphysics simulations, fluid-structure interaction, high-performance computing, data-driven modeling and physics-based machine learning. He is currently an Associate Editor of ASME-OMAE Journal, guest editor of Physics of Fluids, a senior member of AIAA and members of APS, ASME, USACM, SIAM and SNAME.

Jasmin Jelovica is currently an Associate Professor and NSERC/Seaspan Industrial Research Chair in the Departments of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He obtained his M.Sc. from University of Rijeka, Croatia, and D.Sc. from Aalto University, Finland, both in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. His research focuses on structural analysis, failure prediction and optimization using integrated data-driven models and FEA. He is currently a Deputy Editor for Ocean Engineering journal and member of SNAME, ISSC and ASME, and has P.Eng. license from Engineers and Geoscientists of British Columbia, Canada.