Published on: Tuesday, 23 September 2014

CIT's Brian Hand Final Year Undergraduate Engineering Project 
'An Analysis into wind induced loading effects on a ship-to-shore (STS) crane and investigation into design optimisation' wins Best Paper Presentation Award at CADFEM Ireland Conference 2014 in Engineers Ireland HQ Dublin.

Brian's self-devised final year undergraduate capstone project arose from his work placement at Liebherr Container Cranes of Killarney, Co. Kerry and was carried out under the supervision of Dr Andrew Cashman. 

Details of Brian's award winning work, including illustrated summary, full capstone project report, and two developed videos can be found at this link.

Brian had already been extended the exceptional honour for an undergraduate student of being invited to publish and present his findings at this major conference. Competing against primarily PhD students at the conference, Brian's achievement, as the sole undergraduate presenter, in winning the CADFEM Ireland award is a remarkable testament to the rigour and innovativeness of the work undertaken.

Over 90% of the world's cargo is transported by sea. Ship-to-Shore (STS) cranes play a pivotal role in the provision of this safe and reliable means of transporting goods. The increasing transport demands of the maritime industry has dictated that STS container cranes are significantly increasing in size. The environmental locations of these cranes invariably leads to exposure to damaging meteorological effects of storms and other adverse weather phenomena. 

Currently traditional and highly conservative standards are utilised to quantify wind loading on these structures. The traditional standards based design approach leads to high mass crane structures and creates foundation problems in many harbour and quay structures - a problem exacerbated by the increasing trend towards larger STS cranes. The complex physical geometry of modern STS cranes combined with the dynamic and unpredictable nature of wind flow poses a major challenge to the designer/analyst wishing to diverge from the standard based approach.

Extensive computational fluid dynamics (CFD) models were created and analyses conducted by Brian to examine the airflow around critical modelled sections of a Liebherr STS crane. Physical scale model generation and wind tunnel testing were undertaken by Brian to validate the determined CFD results. The CFD approach is indicated as an optimal analysis method - allowing the designer to accurately determine locations and magnitudes of high pressure and make informed design decisions based on these results.

Design optimisation is conducted by Brian on the critical crane tie-down system - this system significantly influenced by Brian's CFD determined critical wind loading. A systematic design and prototype production approach was adopted by Brian to create and optimise a functional and dynamic design.

Brian is to graduate on 20th October 2014 at CIT with a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering Level 8 First Class Honours Degree.

Brian has also been awarded a CIT Rísam PhD Scholarship.

Derek Sweeney of CadFem Ireland presents Award to Brian Hand.