▌ Offshore Engineering
India has one of the largest Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of about 2 million square km. The EEZ is a great national asset which are divided into deep-water regions and shallow water regions. In EEZ, there is a huge potential of oil extraction, mineral mining, etc. To tap these huge resources expertise in offshore engineering is essential. The offshore engineering is a branch in ocean engineering which focusses on design and development of offshore drilling technology, deep-sea technologies, sub-sea systems, fixed and floating platforms, mooring lines, umbilical cables, marine renewable energy devices, etc. The applications of such technologies are used for oil extraction in deep-sea regions, deep-sea mining of rare earth minerals, energy production, design and development of floating cities, etc. Therefore, there is a continuous development in this field. The knowledge in ocean environmental loads such as forces due to waves, winds and ocean currents are desirable to design the offshore structures deployed in harsh ocean environment. Creative, rational and critical thinking skills are essential in designing and developing experimental, computational and analytical models to investigate the hydrodynamics of the offshore structures. Fluid-structure interaction is an important part of this branch which focuses on hydrodynamics, flow dynamics and flow profiles for rigid and flexible bodies. A new field which is gaining popularity is the application of machine learning methods using a number of neural network models, to predict the flow profiles and hydrodynamic coefficients by training the data sets available already.
There are number of courses being taught for U.G., P.G. and Ph.D. streams. The most important ones are wave hydrodynamics, vibrations of marine structures, design and analysis of ocean structures, reliability studies, floating body dynamics, offshore structure installation, marine hydrodynamics, etc. To incorporate the computational knowledge, courses such as Numerical methods, applied FEM and mesh-free computation methods are offered. Experimental methods & measurements, marine instrumentation and laboratory modelling in marine hydrodynamics are offered to handle laboratory facilities available in our department and to conduct experimental model studies.
The research topics that are currently focused on is Fluid-structure interaction for flexible and rigid bodies, development of novel wave and tidal energy devices, ocean thermal energy, dynamic responses of offshore floating platforms/wind turbines, mooring analysis, wave-structure interaction, sloshing of fluids in a confined tank, health monitoring systems for offshore structures, vortex-induced vibrations (VIV), hydroelasticity, drag reduction methods, development of hydrodynamic models, etc. We constantly collaborate with universities/institutions from abroad, conduct international conferences, workshops, encourage international student exchange programs.