The Meta Level Nature of Layout in Ship Design – Award funded by US Navy ONR

Mechanical Engineering
Marine Research Group
3 years duration (can start immediately)
£15,590 per annum stipend (equivalent to a salary before tax of £26,000 and rising annually) plus total coverage of tuition fees, etc.

The internal arrangement of a ship is key to its efficient performance and provides the spatial and environmental envelop in which the personnel on-board undertake their working and living functions. Traditionally the layout of a multi-role vessel, such as a naval ship, is produced with little more than drafting tools once the main hull form is already determined. Other CAD based approaches to ship layout have subsequently been developed specifically at the University of Michigan and at the Technical University of Delft. These three leading ship design research centre have recently been jointly funded to explore how their parallel research activities could better interface and to jointly further advance the design of ship layout.

One aspect of this new research is a funded PhD to be undertaken under the supervision of Professor David Andrews, (www.mecheng.ucl.ac.uk/research/marine/design-research). This PhD project is to study the nature of ship layout, particularly exploring the underlying issues which could be seen to govern the choices in initially determining a given ship’s configuration, itself key to elucidating with the end users and stakeholders the requirement for a new design.

This cutting edge design research will seek to improve the dialectic process of investigating, discussing and understanding the complex design process through integrating different conceptual representations of a ship layout. There is a need to consider how both the task of layout determination enhances the early stage configuration determination and the technical aspects of the designer’s user interface can be improved.

This research requires a candidate who is an engineer with a strong visual sense, interested in research in Computer Aided Design and preferably some coding skills, but also enthusiasm in pursuing a demanding topic addressing the design of Physically Large and Complex Systems, with a significant human factors component. However it is not necessary for the candidate to be familiar with ship design or even be a naval architect graduate as relevant ship design skills can be readily acquired in the PhD programme drawing on the Department’s taught post graduate courses. It is more important that they have general design, visual and systems engineering aptitudes. The applicant should possess or expected to obtain to a good honours degree in Engineering, Physics, Mathematics, Computer Science or a relevant discipline.

Due to funding requirements, only UK nationals (or EU nationals with over 3 years’ residency in the UK) are eligible to apply.

Enquiries regarding submitting an application and admission for a PhD should be made to Dr.
William Suen at email address: [Email Address Removed]

Applicants need to submit a formal application to
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/admission/graduate‐study/application‐admission/ where a formal application pack can be obtained. Interested applicants are encouraged to make informal enquiries to Professor David Andrews at email address: [Email Address Removed] or Dr. Richard Pawling at email address: [Email Address Removed].