With the latest purchase of Sesam, Shanghai Jiaotong University now have a total of four installations of Sesam at their School of Naval Architecture and Oceanic Engineering. This most recent Sesam package provides the university with a hydrodynamic tool for their industry-focused project, allocated to them by the Chinese Ministry of Education.
The project aims to develop an integrated system for optimisation of ship design. DNV Software are pleased to be given the opportunity to interview Professor Gu Yong Ning, head of the project’s expert consultancy team from the University. In addition, Professor Gu is also taking the consultancy expert role on behalf of the China Classification Society (CCS). “It has been more than 20 years since I first became familiar with the Sesam system, when I was a member of a student exchange project initiated by Norwegian and Chinese universities. In the early 1990s, I introduced Sesam to Shanghai Jiaotong University; we were the first client of DNV Software in China,” Professor Gu recalls.
The advantage of Sesam
“Since then, the software has been heavily involved in most of our research and industry projects. In 1998, for instance, we used Sesam for the global analysis of the Baohai-JZ93 Oil Storage and Living Unit designed by CNOOC. It was a rather complex analysis, because we had to take into consideration the influences of wind, wave, current and temperature on a steelcement coupled offshore structure. This demonstrated the advantage of Sesam, which was a highly integrated system for calculating the complex environmental loads, and with the ability to transfer data back to the structure model. This is very unique and extremely helpful for the engineering work compared with other finite element solutions,” Professor Gu adds.
“In 2000, we used Sesam for the stochastic fatigue analysis of several FPSOs in the Qin Huang Dao field. The analysis being very complicated, the designers approached the university for assistance, and we carried out the study using Sesam,” Professor Gu continues.
“This is the way industry and universities interact with each other. Universities are strong on theory and research, whilst design offices or yards are strong on engineering and production disciplines. Engineering software such as Sesam supports both industry and universities. Sesam containsa large amount of domain theory and engineering experience. This provides the users with a very powerful tool, but at the same time it is a challenge for users to learn all that Sesam has to offer. For this reason the universities, with their expertise, are playing an important role supporting the maritime and offshore industries. I am glad to see that an increasing number of universities are now opting for Sesam and Nauticus as their tools of choice. Students excel at learning, whilst DNV’s software tools are good at engineering. We all collaborate in supporting the maritime and offshore industries in the end.”
Booming development
Looking into the future, Professor Gu believes China’s maritime and offshore industries are experiencing a booming development period and attaching more and more importance to technology innovation. “DNV as a class society will play a very important role in the growth of the industries, and DNV Software will contribute much more to the industries. I am glad to see that you are already a key player in the Chinese market,” Professor Gu ends happily.