PhD Studentship: Reducing shipping emissions through accurately quantifying ship powering performan

Fluid Structure Interactions Group

Location: Highfield Campus

Closing Date:  Monday 13 February 2017

Reference: 825317AT

Project Reference: CMEES-FSI-136

Global shipping is responsible for 3.1% of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, yet is outside of UNFCCC commitments to reduce emissions. The International Maritime Organisation has recently committed to a roadmap to develop a strategy for reducing emissions from shipping by 2018.

Central to efforts to reduce shipping’s global CO2 emissions is an ability to measure accurately the fuel consumption of a ship during its operation.

This relies on accurate fuel consumption measurements, which is in practice hard to achieve due to the lack of measurements made during ship operation and typically propeller shaft power is measured and used as a ‘proxy’ for fuel consumption. Interpreting such data is difficult due to measurement uncertainties.

Working with a large commercial ship owner and operator, this project aims to address these uncertainties through combining naval architecture understanding with statistical techniques to derive reliable estimates of fuel consumption with environmental and operational parameters, together with quantification of uncertainties and statistical reliability.

In order to improve accuracy and to integrate uncertainty arising, this project will develop rigorous hierarchical statistical models (HSMs) for measurements that ultimately calculate ship power and fuel efficiency. HSMs, postulated in a Bayesian framework, are ideally suited for this problem since they allow synthesis of information from different disparate sources, such as environmental, mechanical, meteorological and operational, into a unified model that allows the propagation and presentation of integrated uncertainty.

Candidates should possess a 1st Class Masters-level (or equivalent) qualification and be willing to engage in cross-disciplinary research. The project is ideally suitable for a candidate with an engineering or mathematical sciences background.

You will be ideally placed to communicate the results of the research to national and international decision-makers as well as benefit maritime stakeholders in the ship owning and chartering community. The understanding and communication of results using clear and appropriate language is of utmost importance for this project and you will thus be able to demonstrate excellent communication skills.

You will participate in the SMMI Maritime Futures LTDS Cohort Training programme, present at least one research paper in the Lloyd’s Register-SMMI Seminar series and will be expected to produce at least one journal quality paper. You will be required to undertake the FEE Faculty research student training programme.

This is a fully-funded PhD at standard UK/EU fees rates with stipend. Candidates must apply via the University application procedure using: http://www.southampton.ac.uk/courses/how-to-apply/postgraduate-applications.page

Shortlisting of candidates will take place in February 2017. Interviews will be held in March 2017.

If you wish to discuss any details of the project informally, please contact Professor Dominic Hudson, Fluid-Structure Interactions group, Email: dominic@soton.ac.uk Tel: +44 (0) 2380 59 2306.

Further details:

• Job Description and Person Specification