Job vacancy for Faculty (Professor/Associate Professor) positions and Post-doc positions at Ningbo University
About Ningbo University and these positions
Ningbo University is a young, but dynamic university, celebrating its 35th anniversary in 2021, with steadily developing its activities and human resources and expanding its infrastructure. The university is one of the Double first-class universities in China.
In Ningbo University, we are recruiting two faculty staff (Professors/Associate Professors) and two postdoctors in ocean engineering, with a focus on emerging ocean technologies. The research activities will be under the leadership of Professor Torgeir Moan, and Professor Wan Ling, who are both professors in Ningbo University, with the aim to address research challenges in areas of fast growing, emerging ocean engineering sectors. These positions will be strongly related to an Academician Workstation, being established by Ningbo Orient Cable Company (NBO), and led by Prof. Torgeir Moan. The Workstation will also involve professors at NTNU and researchers in SINTEF, and have a strong potential to supply technology and services to the international market.
We would like to receive your expression of interest for these positions as soon as possible.
General research scope in emerging ocean engineering at NBU
The use of the oceans is important in meeting the needs for energy and resources in a sustainable manner - to limit climate change. Renewable offshore energy, especially from wind at a large scale, are crucial to reach these goals. These technologies are at an early stage and requires research efforts to develop technologies and methods to document the serviceability and safety of the novel facilities.
In addition, to meet the need for seafood production with limited environmental footprint the focus is on aquaculture in open sea, i.e., exposed areas, with increasing size of each fish farm, design and operation to improve the well-being of the fish, reduce the influence of parasites, algae etc.
Finally, there is a potential use of very large floating structures for bridges, terminals and other purposes in the society.
Moreover, to develop a sustainable energy and food production and to further reduce the LCOE, developing integrated multipurpose system, e. g. by developing combined facilities for aquaculture production and offshore renewable energy generation may be an alternative, requiring further conceptual development and validation.
Some relevant research topics are listed in the following.
· Developing a basis for concept selection and enable cost-effective design and fabrication of
- offshore renewable energy systems, with a focus on wind energy considering an integrated system of wind turbines, substations and power cables
- large scale aquaculture cages for open sea seafood production
- very large floating structures for floating bridges, terminals etc
through reduced uncertainty and application of novel methods
· Develop methods and tools for efficient and safe marine operations and logistic planning for installation and maintenance of offshore systems, such as wind farms, fishfarms etc.
· Efficient fully coupled analysis of offshore renewable energy infrastructure system, aquaculture facilities etc
· Cost-effective integrated system of multipurpose facilities; i.e. by combining offshore renewable energy with aquaculture facilities
· Hybrid model testing technique for offshore wind energy system
· Machine learning and digital twin development of offshore renewable energy system and other emerging ocean technologies
The research will be supported by use of world leading software in ocean engineering and naval architecture, like the DNV SESAM package, and model tank facility in NBU.
Depending on the applicant’s background and research interests, one or more sub-topics can be selected, and the collaborations of candidates with different topics are encouraged to develop multidisciplinary research. The post-doctor positions will focus on the wind energy sector – in close cooperation with NBO. Some more details about the research topics in this sector are given below. Involvement by faculty members in these activities are welcome.
About the Professorship/Associate Professorship
The Professors/Associate Professors will have a responsibility to contribute to teaching/supervision and research. Their research activities are expected to be within the research scope for the emerging technologies mentioned above. The position is intended to strengthen the research activity on theoretical, numerical, and experimental methods bridging the gap between macro-level and micro-level structural analysis for marine structures. The successful applicant to the faculty position is expected to participate actively in the collaboration with NBO Workstation. In addition, the Professors/Associate Professors will follow the requirements from NBU in terms of teaching and curriculum development, supervising students etc.
The relevant candidates should have solid background in one or more of the following disciplines:
· Structural mechanics and hydrodynamics
· Fluid-structure interaction
· Probability theory, stochastic dynamic analysis, reliability analysis
· Advanced model testing technology
· Machine learning and digital twin
Number of positions: 2
Position requirements:
The position requires Doctoral degree in Naval Architecture, Ocean Engineering, Mechanical/Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics or other related disciplines, and demonstrable academic excellence in the relevant subject area.
Continuous research activity is a prerequisite for professorial positions. Strong emphasis will be placed on publication of research results in recognized international journals within the subject area. Particular emphasis is placed on academic work undertaken during the past five years.
About the Post-doc position
The Post-doc positions will be within the general research scope, but will have specific research responsibility for analysis and design of offshore wind turbines, possibly by combining wind turbines with aquaculture facilities.
Modern design principles of structures, are based on rational determination of load effects (internal forces, stresses) due to external loads and comparing the load effects against the corresponding strength, and using appropriate safety factors to account for the inherent uncertainty in load effects – e.g. s measured by reliability analysis.
The rrelevant scope of the research for the present post-doctor announcement: Development of accurate and efficient methods for integrated analysis of floating wind turbines in a reliability perspective.
The scientific focus is on developing
- integrated aero-hydro-servo-elastic models for floating wind turbines subjected to stochastic wind and wave loads and accounting for the inherent aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties involved. The ultimate goal is to determine load effects in the various sub-systems that the wind turbines consist of. Hence, the research represents an extension of previous efforts by Moan’ group on stochastic load effect and reliability analysis of ocean structures in general and floating wind turbines in particular. The analysis could refer to wind turbines during operation or installation/maintenance operations.
- methods to assess the ultimate or fatigue strength of unique wind turbine system components such as power cables (products of NBO) and mechanical components, etc.
The main scientific research areas are as follows:
· Develop novel, efficient procedures for determining the combined static and dynamic load effects in floating wind turbines (FWTs), and recognizing the stochastic short- and long-term variation of the environmental loads as well as their dynamic effects in a proper format for design.
· Develop fully coupled aero-hydro-servo-elastic time-domain analysis to account for the tight coupling between wind- and wave-induced response and used to establish novel efficient, uncoupled approaches, including e. g. using linearization of nonlinear loads and frequency domain approaches. This analysis is based on consideration of all the subsystems in the modelling and obtaining load effects needed for the design of the different subsystems.
· Establish more efficient methods to deal with the long-term variability of environmental conditions without accounting for all the environmental conditions that can occur, i. e. by simplified long-term and contour surface methods.
· Establish more accurate methods to assess the internal response of the dynamic power cables during laying and operation.
· Establish the uncertainty in the load effects in FWTs and used together with existing uncertainty measures for the resistance to obtain reliability measures of FWT hulls as a background for possible changes of the safety factors used for the load (effects) to ensure a desirable safety. Prof. Moan is a member of the IEC committee for floating wind turbine standards and will bring this matter forward.
The successful applicant to postdoctoral position is expected to participate actively in daily research activities, take responsibility for some tasks within the areas given above, in cooperation with other researchers and students involved. The intention with the post-doctor position is to qualify for a faculty position after the end of contract.
Number of positions: 2
Position requirements:
· Have received or will soon receive a Doctoral degree in Naval Architecture, Ocean Engineering, Mechanical/Civil Engineering, Applied Mathematics, or other related disciplines.
· Be able to carry out the research work independently, and have good communication, reading, and writing skills in English.
· High motivation to complete Post Doc research tasks.
We offer
· Exciting and stimulating tasks in a strong international academic environment
· An open and inclusive work environment with dedicated colleagues
· Necessary numerical and experimental tools and equipment to carry out in-depth research
· Internationally competitive salary and employment benefits
· Full support in future faculty position application and funding applications.
Notification of interest
A candidate interested in a position should notify Professor Moan or Prof. Wan with a brief documentation of
· CV including details of the projects you have managed, with information about funding, duration and size, certificates of diplomas
· Academic works - published or unpublished - that you would like to be considered in the assessment (up to 10 works)
· Name and contact information (including email address) of three referees
In the email title, please indicate application type in the format of “prof./associate prof./postdoc + name”.
Questions about the positions can be directed to
Torgeir Moan, telephone +47 95050791, e-mail: tormo@ntnu.no
Ling Wan, telephone: +86 18538321601, e-mail: [email protected]