The impact of atmospheric winds on complex seaport areas and ships

Seaport areas are the “entry” and “exit” of countries and since decades they keep expanding in order to host larger cruise ships and container ships. Although essential for the global trade, port areas are considered among the most vulnerable and risky in the world. Here accidents frequently happen, human lives are lost and ships and goods are damaged. Among the meteorological and climatological events, the wind is the most destructive natural phenomenon and most frequently the prime cause of accidents in coastal areas. Despite the important milestones achieved in the past decades by the Wind Engineering research community to characterize the atmospheric winds over flat terrain for structural designing, it is still unclear how the wind behaves in more complex and “hybrid areas” (as seaport areas) composed of open areas surrounded by built-up environments. This is the main topic of the present project. The project aims at providing the scientific community and the port stakeholders with a novel multidisciplinary approach able to predict atmospheric wind flows over seaport areas in order to better estimate wind loads acting on ships and cranes. The research project will also provide a comprehensive overview about the strengths and weaknesses of numerical and experimental techniques when dealing with this kind of applications.