September 2021
Name: Ian Black
Department: Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry (OEB)
School: Oregon State University (OSU), College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences (CEOAS)
Project: Open-source Flow Camera (OSFC)
Research Advisors: Dr. Maria Kavanaugh and Dr. Clare Reimers
Ian Black will begin a PhD program in Ocean Ecology and Biogeochemistry at Oregon State University in September 2021. Some would describe Ian as an OSU lifer, having received a BS in Earth Science in 2015 and a MS in Marine Resource Management in 2018 from OSU. Following graduation, he continued to work for OSU as a technician specializing in autonomous moored profilers for the National Science Foundation’s Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI). Ian is interested in creating open-source software and hardware solutions to some of the technological issues he has experienced while performing observational oceanography. He is also driven by a strong personal interest in developing accessible and inclusive tools that assist in encouraging the next generation of researchers, engineers, and citizen scientists. While working under Drs. Kavanaugh and Reimers, Ian hopes to develop a low-cost and modular camera system built upon local artificial intelligence for the real-time classification of phytoplankton and to deploy it on research vessels in the Pacific Northwest. The interconnectivity between the camera and nearby sensor systems could facilitate a greater understanding of regional phytoplankton community structure and dynamics and enable more frequent observation of phytoplankton species that have societal and economic impacts, such as those that populate harmful algal blooms. Ian envisions the creation of outreach products that engage science and non-science users alike and plans to make the camera design and code publicly available, allowing anyone to modify it for their own application. Ian dreams of one day living in a world where oceanographic sensor vendors follow an ISO8601 timestamp format in their documentation, software, and data.
Name: Rachel J. Suitor
Department: Aerospace Engineering
School: University of Maryland
Project: Cooperative Estimation and Control for Autonomous Underwater Sensor Networks
Research Advisor: Dr. Derek A. Paley
Rachel Suitor is a PhD student in the Department of Aerospace Engineering at the University of Maryland (UMD). She earned the BS degree in Aerospace Engineering along with the BA degree in Mathematics from the University at Buffalo (UB) in 2019. A Clark Doctoral Fellow with the Collective Dynamics and Control Lab, Rachel’s research interests lie within dynamics and control for aerospace systems, specifically swarming autonomous vehicles and underactuated robotic systems in the air, sea, and space. She is collaborating with National Geographic on their Driftcam project where her focus is adaptive swarming control strategies for the Driftcam. Driftcam is an autonomous buoyancy-controlled vehicle for imaging marine life in the midwater acoustic scattering layer at depths of 200-1000 meters. The underactuated, submerged vehicle remains passively stable by taking advantage of the ocean currents, making Driftcam capable of observing the scattering layer in close proximity using actuation that is much less disruptive than typical thrusters. A swarm of cooperating Driftcam vehicles deployed together would be able to non-intrusively obtain a more holistic view of the pelagic ecosystem near the acoustic-scattering layer. The deployment of multiple vehicles simultaneously enables observation of the layer from multiple perspectives, providing more informed data on the overall behavior of the scattering layer ecosystem. A swarm operating with increased autonomy would minimize disruption to marine life and allow for longer observation of the pelagic environment.
Name: Hannah Walker
Department: Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
School: University of California, San Diego
Project: Tropical Hypoxia Study Using Novel, Affordable Aquatic Eddy Correlation Technique
Research Advisor: Dr. Geno Pawlak
Hannah Walker is a PhD student in the Mechanical and Aerospace (MAE) Department at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) studying Engineering Science (Applied Ocean Science). She received her BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California (USC) in 2020. While at USC, Hannah was involved in research with Professor Patrick Lynett to design and build an autonomous device to map nearshore bathymetry. This motivated her interest to pursue graduate study at the crossroads of engineering, coastal processes, and fluid dynamics. For her future work, with the help of the Link Fellowship, Hannah will measure benthic oxygen fluxes using the Aquatic Eddy Correlation technique. This work will be completed while validating the in-situ application of a novel, affordable 3D velocity measurement system developed in the Jaffe Laboratory at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. This Video Velocimetry (VIV) instrument will be paired with dissolved oxygen concentration measurements so the turbulent transport of oxygen to and from the benthic ecosystem can be resolved. Hannah’s work will include critical testing of the VIV, and will help resolve the oxygen budget of water bodies, and will provide a better understanding of hypoxia dynamics in coastal regions.
Name: Galen Wolfgang Ng
Department: Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering
School: University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
Project: Hydrostructural Analysis and Design Optimization of Smart Composite Platforms
Research Advisors: Dr. Yin Lu Young and Dr. Joaquim R. R. A. Martins
Galen is a PhD pre-candidate in the Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering (NAME) Department at the University of Michigan. He received his BS in NAME from Webb Institute in 2020 where he also had the opportunity to study for a semester at the University of Southampton. His undergraduate thesis was advised by Dr. Adrian S. Onas and focused on extracting the hydrodynamic performance for hydrofoils using non-intrusive, kinematic flow measurements from particle image velocimetry. Throughout his undergraduate degree and engineering internships, he solidified his interests in hydrodynamics and materials science so fluid-structure interactions (FSI) was a logical research topic. As such, his graduate research is on the hydrostructural design of multi-functional composite structures for advanced vessel and platform applications. The goal of the work is to develop and apply multidisciplinary design algorithms that account for the numerous trade-offs between structural integrity and hydrodynamic performance as well as constraints on failure modes and instabilities to produce marine designs optimized for their missions. These mission objectives can be anywhere from maximizing energy intake of a coastal device for a given bathymetry by designing for maximum amplitude vibrations to optimizing a propeller or rudder’s sensing/feedback control capabilities in high-performance operations, such as near the free surface, at high speeds, and in severe sea states where operators have split seconds to make decisions. The current design challenge for marine composites is designing for the dynamic response because current methods focus on steady-state performance; to address this, Galen proposed a multi-fidelity modeling approach that provides a balance of computational speed of reduced order models in initial iterations and the accuracy of high-fidelity computations for final iterations. Galen hopes to see his work utilized in the multidisciplinary design of modern commercial ships, coastal energy harvesters, offshore platforms, autonomous marine vehicles, and more. Success will result in new and computationally practical marine design algorithms that consider all important aspects of the design problem together and take advantage of advances in materials science.
If you would like to find out more about our Link Foundation Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation Fellows and projects that have been funded in the field of Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation by the Link Foundation, please visit the Link Ocean Engineering and Instrumentation webpage at http://www.linkoe.org/.