Maritime traffic in the Arctic region is rapidly increasing. But there has been a huge increase in marine casualties in this region due to its extremely harsh environment and the severe safety challenges for ships’ navigation teams. SEDNA will develop an innovative and integrated risk-based approach to safe Arctic navigation, ship design and operation, to enable European maritime interests to confidently fully embrace the Arctic’s significant and growing shipping opportunities, while safeguarding its natural environment. More specifically SEDNA will create and demonstrate the improved safety outcomes of: 1. The Safe Arctic Bridge, a human-centered operational environment for the ice-going ship bridge using augmented reality technology to provide improved situational awareness and decision making whilst enabling integration with new key information layers developed by the project using innovative big data management techniques. 2. Integrated dynamic meteorological and oceanographic data with real time ship monitoring and ice movement predictions to provide reliable decision making for safe and efficient Arctic voyage optimisation. 3. Anti-icing engineering solutions, using nature inspired approaches, to prevent ice formation on vessels, eliminating ice as a ship stability and working-environment hazard. 4. Risk-based design framework to ensure that vessel design is connected to all key hazards of ship operation in the Arctic. The holistic treatment of the ship design, operating regime and environment will improve safety and minimise impact over the entire life cycle. 5. A CEN Workshop Agreement on a process to systematically address safety during bunkering of methanol as a marine fuel along with safety zone guidance for three bunkering concepts: Truck to Ship, Shore to Ship and Ship to Ship. To maximise impact, SEDNA will provide formal inputs to international regulatory regimes regarding regulation adaptation requirements for its safety solutions.

The project is a feasibility study on the use of flexible blades to increase the durability and survivability of tidal turbines. The highly turbulent flow experienced by tidal turbines leads to continuous load variations limiting the fatigue endurance. It is proposed to use flexible blades in order to control the flow field around the blades and allow constant stresses on the turbine's blades and shaft. Under the effect of a variation of the onset flow velocity at a certain location along the blade span, the flexible blade will change the local angle of attack and the foil shape. The new flow field around the blade section will be as such to minimise the load change on the blade section. The reduced, if not completely avoided, load variations will enhance the fatigue endurance of the blade and the shaft.

The coastal zone is a unique geological, physical and biological area of vital economic, cultural and environmental value. More than two-thirds of the world's population is concentrated in coastal zones, where the coastline is either central or of great importance to trade, transport, tourism, leisure and the harvesting of marine food. Breakwaters are commonly adopted to protect and enhance the utility of coastlines. Worldwide, the combined costs for building new breakwaters and maintaining the existing ones are in the order of tens of billions of pounds a year.Breakwaters are vulnerable to the liquefaction of the seabed foundation, a process that can often lead to significant degradation of the foundation in as little as a few years after construction and sometimes even result in total collapse. The inappropriate design or maintenance of breakwaters can lead to catastrophic coastal disaster. For example, the failure of Sines Breakwater in Portugal caused damage equivalent to almost US$1 billion in reconstruction alone, excluding the huge economic and social impacts on the region. A recent example of coastal tragedy due to failure of breakwaters is that of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, putting 80% of the city under as much as 6 m of water and causing deaths and personal and economic chaos. The economic loss from the disaster was more than US$15 billion.In this study, we will firstly extend the existing 2D wave and soil models to 3D, and then integrate them into a single model to provide a better prediction of the wave-induced liquefaction around breakwater heads. A series of physical model experiments will be conducted for the verification of the proposed theoretical models. The proposed research is an essential step towards significantly improved engineering design and remedial action to address foundation-related damage to coastal structures. The underlying conceptual innovation of the project comes from three factors that combine to enable the proper understanding of the WSSI phenomenon: 1) the integration of all three components of wave/seabed interactions around breakwater heads; 2) the treatment of the seabed as a general porous media with large deformation; and 3) the use of 3D rather than 2D modelling. This approach is essential as it is the only way to simulate wave patterns around breakwater heads, model wave energy dissipation in marine sediments (including the critical phenomenon of flow through porous media) and account fully the interactions between waves, seabed and structures. .

Risk is the potential of experiencing a loss when a system does not operate as expected due to uncertainties. Its assessment requires the quantification of both the system failure potential and the multi-faceted failure consequences, which affect further systems. Modern industries (including the engineering and financial sectors) require increasingly large and complex models to quantify risks that are not confined to single disciplines but cross into possibly several other areas. Disasters such as hurricane Katrina, the Fukushima nuclear incident and the global financial crisis show how failures in technical and management systems cause consequences and further failures in technological, environmental, financial, and social systems, which are all inter-related. This requires a comprehensive multi-disciplinary understanding of all aspects of uncertainty and risk and measures for risk management, reduction, control and mitigation as well as skills in applying the necessary mathematical, modelling and computational tools for risk oriented decision-making. This complexity has to be considered in very early planning stages, for example, for the realisation of green energy or nuclear power concepts and systems, where benefits and risks have to be considered from various angles. The involved parties include engineering and energy companies, banks, insurance and re-insurance companies, state and local governments, environmental agencies, the society both locally and globally, construction companies, service and maintenance industries, emergency services, etc. The CDT is focussed on training a new generation of highly-skilled graduates in this particular area of engineering, mathematics and the environmental sciences based at the Liverpool Institute for Risk and Uncertainty. New challenges will be addressed using emerging probabilistic technologies together with generalised uncertainty models, simulation techniques, algorithms and large-scale computing power. Skills required will be centred in the application of mathematics in areas of engineering, economics, financial mathematics, and psychology/social science, to reflect the complexity and inter-relationship of real world systems. The CDT addresses these needs with multi-disciplinary training and skills development on a common mathematical platform with associated computational tools tailored to user requirements. The centre reflects this concept with three major components: (1) Development and enhancement of mathematical and computational skills; (2) Customisation and implementation of models, tools and techniques according to user requirements; and (3) Industrial and overseas university placements to ensure industrial and academic impact of the research. This will develop graduates with solid mathematical skills applied on a systems level, who can translate numerical results into languages of engineering and other disciplines to influence end-users including policy makers. Existing technologies for the quantification and management of uncertainties and risks have yet to achieve their significant potential benefit for industry. Industrial implementation is presently held back because of a lack of multidisciplinary training and application. The Centre addresses this problem directly to realise a significant step forward, producing a culture change in quantification and management of risk and uncertainty technically as well as educationally through the cohort approach to PGR training.

A key concern for tidal farm developers and investors is resource quantification. The ultimate aim of this project is to develop a tidal farm design tool that produces trustworthy results while requiring a level of computing power that is appropriate to industrial design. Once developed, the model can be extended towards analysis of sediment transport and thus can be used to understand the effect of large farms on the marine environment, which will be a key area of concern to stakeholders in the future.