Maurizio Collu

Dr Collu is the Course Director of the Advanced Mechanical Engineering MSc, and a lecturer in Fluid Mechanics and Loading, CEng, MRINA and MEI. He is particularly involved in the conceptual and preliminary design of offshore support structures for the emerging floating wind turbine industry.

He has been in charge of the conceptual design of the floating support structure in the £2.8m ETI funded project NOVA, and he is now leading the development of a coupled model of dynamics for floating wind turbines for the EU funded FP7 project H2Ocean.

He regularly presents his work at international seminar and conferences on the topic (such as OMAE, EWEA, ISOPE international conferences), and is Session Organiser and Chair at OMAE.

He is the designated representative of the School of Engineering, Cranfield University in ITTC, regularly publishing on the topic on international, peer-reviewed journals (see below), and is reviewer for a number of ocean engineering and energy international journals.

Maurizio is also involved in the conceptual and preliminary design of aerodynamically alleviated marine vehicles (AAMV), focusing on their novel dynamics and stability, hybrid between the dynamics of high speed marine vehicles and Wing In Ground effect vehicles. For his work in this field, he was awarded the prestigious RINA Calder Prize (Best paper published by the Institution on the subject of small or high-speed craft, by a member under the age of 30). He published on the Royal Society Proc A journal (doi:10.1098/rspa.2009.0459), and he is now the Principal Investigator and Project Manager of an industry funded project on the conceptual/preliminary design of an AAMV configuration.

Based on his PhD work, he also patented a novel trim control mechanism for high speed marine vehicles (Patent GB2472266).