Papers published in Maritime Engineering are eligible for awards from the Institution of Civil Engineers. Papers from any of the ICE journals can be nominated for several awards. In addition, each journal has awards dedicated to their specific subject area.
On Friday 15 October 2021, ICE president Rachel Skinner presented awards to the following papers published in Maritime Engineering in 2020. The editorial panel nominated their best papers and an awards committee chaired by Tim Broyd allocated the awards.
Bill Curtin Medal
The Bill Curtin Medal, presented to the best paper on research innovation in civil engineering that leads to real-world impact, was awarded to Oliveira-Pinto and Stokkermans (2020).
Abstract
The offshore environment represents a vast source of renewable energy, and marine renewable energy plants have the potential to contribute to the future energy mix significantly. Floating solar technology emerged nearly a decade ago, driven mainly by the lack of available land, loss of efficiency at high operating cell temperature, energy security and decarbonisation targets. The vast majority of the available technology and projects in operation are located in inland freshwater bodies. Currently there is momentum in the sector to develop floating solar systems to be deployed in marine environments. Experience from inland floating solar projects could open up possibilities to scale up and move to nearshore or even offshore conditions. Hence, it is relevant to explore the technical feasibility and challenges of designing floating photovoltaics (FPV) in marine environments, with a natural transition of FPV applications first to nearshore locations and then further exposed offshore environments. This research study provides a literature review of the potential of marine applications of floating solar plants, exploring the current available technologies, the technical challenges and the risks in designing and building these projects in the marine environment.
Halcrow Prize
The Halcrow Prize, presented to the best paper published in Maritime Engineering, was awarded to Hames et al., (2020).
Abstract
This paper investigates the inherent inaccuracy in the estimation of various extreme response variables (RVs) for different sea defence structures using joint exceedance curve approaches in common use around the UK. Utilising stochastically generated nearshore datasets that include extreme wave and sea-level conditions determined at regular intervals around the English coastline as part of a previous study, and asset information from the Environment Agency's Asset Information Management System database, this paper assesses 592 sea defence structures and their associated extreme response using different joint exceedance curve approaches when compared against the RV approach. This paper highlights that extreme RVs are often underestimated when using a joint exceedance curve approach, which in many cases can be significant. This suggests that the performance of many sea defence structures are incorrectly estimated. As a consequence, joint exceedance curve approaches may under-design sea defence structures to a greater level than previously indicated, or significantly underestimate extreme RVs when assessing the performance of existing structures.
