Leigh McCue, a researcher in Virginia Tech College of Engineering, has won two highly competitive grants to support her research on saving lives and ships by improving the stability and safety of sea-going vessels. She is an assistant professor in Virginia Tech’s Department of Aerospace and Ocean Engineering and has received a $410,000 Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation and a $300,000 Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award from the Office of Naval Research.
McCue is developing tools to help ship designers better understand ship motions and, thus, help prevent capsizing and other dangers caused by ship instabilities. McCue said that each year ships’ instabilities take several lives, cargo, and craft, often in vessels meeting or exceeding current safety regulations. The main objective of McCue’s research is to develop an understanding of large-amplitude ship motions. According to her by arriving at mathematical approximations for the boundary between stability and capsize, we will have a better physical understanding of vessel behaviors.
The research will also validate computer simulations of nonlinear large-amplitude ship motions, which can lead to instability. She said that the vessel instabilities are often viewed as a binary issue, either a vessel will capsize or won’t capsize. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that a simulation is more accurate and physically relevant than something like a coin toss, say McCue.
McCue also aims to develop on-board, real-time motion prediction tools. According to her the ultimate goal of this component of the research is to provide ship captains with warning of imminent dangers to their craft for a range of dynamic stability phenomena.
