Introduction

The 9th Conference on Computational Methods in Marine Engineering (Marine 2021) will be held online.

The previous conferences of these series were held in Oslo (Norway) on 27-29 June, 2005, in Barcelona (Spain) on 5-7 June, 2007, in Trondheim (Norway) on 15-17 June, 2009, in Lisbon (Portugal) on 28 – 30 September, 2011, in Hamburg (Germany), on 29-31 May, 2013, in Rome (Italy), on 15-17 June, 2015, in Nantes (France) on 15-17 May, 2017 and in Goteborg (Sweden) on 13-15 May, 2019

Marine conference is one of the Thematic Conferences of the European Community on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences (ECCOMAS) and a Special Interest Conference of the International Association for Computational Mechanics (IACM). It is also supported by other scientific organizations in Europe and worldwide.

The objective of Marine 2021 is to be a meeting place for researchers developing computational methods and scientists and engineers focusing on challenging applications in marine engineering.

By marine engineering we include applications within the maritime and offshore industry as well as scientific and engineering challenges related to the marine environment. The conference goal is to make a step forward in the formulation and computational solution of marine engineering problems accounting for all the complex couplings involved in the physical description of the problems.

The conference topics will include: ship hydrodynamics, structural analysis of marine structures, offshore structures, sea-pipe mechanics, advances in mechanical methods for marine engineering (new finite element, finite difference, finite volume and boundary element methods, particle methods, meshless methods, etc.), computational environmental mechanics in marine problems, algorithms for solving multidisciplinary problems in marine engineering, marine engineering applications.

Marine 2021 is co-organised by the Universities of Edinburgh and Strathclyde together bringing a long heritage of Marine and Offshore Engineering with Naval Architecture primarily applied to the Energy and Transport Sectors. The marine economy in Scotland generates over £5 billion in GVA accounting for more than 4% of its total economy and employs more than seventy-five thousand people. The importance of the Marine Economy is set to increase dramatically with the development of offshore wind and marine renewable energy not only in Scotland and Northern Europe but right across the world. This coupled with a desire to reduce the carbon footprint of the Marine Transport sector as a result of the climate emergency makes conferences such as Marine 2021 more important than ever.

We are delighted that Marine 2021 has teamed up with Elsevier’s Ocean Engineering Journal to produce a special issue of invited papers representing contributions and themes from the 2021 conference.

We look forward to receiving your papers and that we can all make Marine 2021 next June a special, invigorating and productive experience particularly following a very difficult 2020.