Four key takeaways from INEC 2022

IMarEST Fellow, Cdre Stuart Henderson of the Royal Navy, shares his highlights from this year’s INEC (International Naval Engineering Conference and Exhibition), which he helped chair in Delft, The Netherlands from 8-10 November. 

This year’s INEC programme was immense. It ran across three days, with up to five streams of concurrent activity, 96 papers, and more than one hundred presentations. Held, once again, in conjunction with the International Ship Control Systems Symposium (iSCSS), it saw delegates from fifteen different nations coming together to consider the overall theme for this year’s event — Adapting and innovating while building resilience for naval operations.

Adapting

Adapting is about organisational learning in a world that is changing around us. Issues such as climate change, war in Europe, and the speed of technological development mean that, in order to stay relevant in the maritime battle space, navies have to stay attuned to external factors and keep their capabilities at the forefront of technical developments. We do that by ensuring that the research and development taking place in academia and industry is linked to the demand signals coming from the naval community, and that industry is able to leverage the latest thinking in ship and equipment design so it can respond to naval demands in a timely manner — which was reflected very well in many excellent papers, such as Model-Based Engineering and the Digital Thread, and Considerations For Future Fuels in Naval Vessels.

Innovating

Historically, navies had large research development programmes, but today the commercial sector is the driving force in research and development, except in very niche activities. So, in order to stay at the forefront in the battle space, navies need to be examining the latest commercial technological innovations. Notable papers in this area included A review of the potential of hydrogen carriers for zero emission, low signature ship propulsion systems and A moment of maritime opportunity? The operational energy challenge. There were also some very good papers on the latest Hull Form Design ideas, such as The hydrodynamic comparison between a conventional and an Axe Bow frigate hull.

Cdr (E) dr.ir. Rinze Geertsma RNLN, chair of the iSCSS 2022 Technical Advisory Sub-Committee

Resilience

Resilience is something the naval community has become increasingly aware of as a key factor in ship design. It’s the ability to cope with uncertainty and having the capacity to keep on operating when things go wrong. This includes being resilient to battle damage, equipment defects and changes in threat.  It also now includes being resilient to climate change, where vessels will, for example, need to be able to cope with more extreme weather and greater temperature variations.  Cyber security proved a very popular subject matter in this area, with many first-class papers, such as The threat of Intentional Electromagnetic Interference to Maritime Vessels.

Future operations

The Sir Donald Gosling Award — a £5,000 prize, judged at INEC-ISCSS, for the best paper by those 35 years of age or younger — went to Underwater Radiated Noise from Small Vessels in Shallow Water — presented by Tom Smith and co-authored by Margarita Kourounioti.  The paper reflects an interest in a future where maritime warfare may involve many small autonomous vehicles.  Understanding their underwater noise and the impact of different propulsion systems, such as the design of propellers which are often not optimised for noise for commercial reasons, could have both operational and environmental implications for navies to pay attention to.  The paper analysed these issues through fascinating practical research.  A key part of the conference is allowing paper authors to be questioned by their conference delegate peers in open forum, and the authors of this winning paper were impressively knowledgeable under this scrutiny.  A key attraction of the conference is that, as a learned society event no sales pitches are allowed, and presentations, from naval personnel, industry and academia are all checked for the rigour of their technical content by a Technical Advisory Committee.  Practical engineering, human factors, safety and engineering programme papers are all encouraged.

Rear Admiral Nigel Guild (left) with the winners of the Sir Donald Gosling Award, co-authors Margarita Kourounioti and Tom Smith, with Cdre Henderson (back right)

IMarEST support 

The next INEC conference is due to be held in 2024, with the call for papers expected twelve months earlier, while INEC’s sister conference — the Engine As A Weapon Symposium — is due to be held next year. Both conferences will be sponsored by the IMarEST.

Cdre Stuart Henderson FIMarEST was in conversation with Dennis O’Neill

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