Ports are important nodes that facilitate about 80% of the worldwide trade volume via sea. Accidents occurring in ports to vessels and infrastructures do not only imply huge economic losses but also high risk for the workers and people living nearby. Most of the documented accidents on vessels and cranes mainly occurred during severe storms. However, engineers and port operators currently rely mainly on atmospheric boundary layer (ABL) winds, while experimental data and numerical simulations on isolated vessels are limited and rarely accessible. In the absence of such analyses, semi-empirical functions derived from ABL data are used, but they may underestimate loads under non-synoptic winds, increasing the risk of accidents such as mooring line failure, collisions, and container stack collapse. The project aims to provide a reference experimental database on wind fields and aerodynamic coefficients for ships and port infrastructures under extreme wind conditions. Case studies involving an isolated containership and a containership moored in port will be investigated under four wind conditions: ABL winds, thunderstorm downbursts, downbursts embedded within ABL winds, and tornadoes. The experiments do not include wave–wind–ship interactions, which will instead be studied through Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations. The results will be used to improve existing semi-empirical models and develop new ones for estimating loads on vessels under different wind scenarios.

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The PhD candidate should have knowledge of Computational Fluid Dynamics, data analysis and statistics, structural engineering, programming skills in Matlab or Python and C++ as well as knowledge of signal processing. Team working attitude and excellent knowledge of spoken and written English are highly desirable.

The PhD candidate will be part of a double PhD degree program, between IUSS of Pavia and University of Western Ontario. The student will be supervised by prof. Alessio Ricci from IUSS and prof. Girma Bitsuamlak from University of Western Ontario, Canada, and will benefit from the extensive experience of the two groups in climatology, wind measurement and modeling; wind effects on infrastructures and environment; impact assessment of extreme natural events; risk management of natural and anthropogenic hazards.