The UC rewards a project developed from an internship at IHCantabria as one of the best Final Degree Projects in innovation.

On Friday, May 19^th, the University of Cantabria (UC) celebrated the awards ceremony for the best final degree project (TFG), final master’s project (TFM) and doctoral thesis of the first call for the “Proyecto Cátedra de Innovación”. This act was presided by the rector of the UC, Angel Pazos, and the General Director of Innovation, Technological Development, Entrepreneurship and Industrial of the Government of Cantabria, Jorge Muyo, among others.

In total, 23 projects from different faculties of the UC stood out −11 TFG, 11 TFM and a doctoral thesis−, for their “ability to generate and develop innovations applicable to the productive sector”. One of the awarded TFGs was developed by Paula Desiré Valdor, whose work was developed at the Faculty of Sciences from an extracurricular internship carried out during the summer of 2022 at IHCantabria, in the Offshore Engineering and Marine Energies Group.

Paula Desiré’s work focused on improving the OASYS numerical model, developed at IHCantabria for the simulation of large floating marine structures. Her contribution consisted in the mathematical implementation of the interaction of the mooring lines with an irregular seabed, in addition to updating the models of contact forces between the lines and the ground. Its implementations were verified and validated with experimental tests.

The tool developed by Paula Desiré with the guidance and advice of the IHCantabria staff will allow, for example, to more accurately analyse and optimize the implementation of floating offshore wind power in areas with highly changing bathymetries, such as the Canary Islands. This work was framed in the European project Horizon 2020 – COREWIND and one of its academic achievements is having supported the publication of a first decile paper in the Ocean Engineering journal. This paper is available on: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.oceaneng.2023.113827

The work referred to in this publication is part of the COREWIND project −which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program−, as well as the OASYS project, which has been funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICIN), through the Spain’s Recovery, Transformation and Resiliency Plan , with NextGenerationEU funds.

Paula Desiré’s TFG was directed by Luis Alberto Fernández, tenured professor at the Department of Mathematics, Statistics and Computing at the UC, and co-directed by Alvaro Rodríguez, member of the Marine Energy and Offshore Engineering Group at IHCantabria. Therefore, this is a successful case of the fruitful collaboration between these two research groups, for the completion of TFGs and internships at IHCantabria. In recent years, various physics and mathematics students have benefited from this collaboration and some of them have joined the staff of this institute.

Paula Desiré is currently working at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (known as CERN, in French), in Switzerland, so she was unable to personally attend the awards ceremony at the UC. From Geneva, she has highlighted the illusion of receiving this award for her TFG in Mathematics, as she believes that this is a great opportunity to demonstrate that this area has endless applications.

“I consider myself very lucky to have been able to participate in such an ambitious and interesting project and to have been guided by such a capable and motivated group”, she said. The message that Paula Desiré would like to convey is that, although mathematics may sometimes seem too abstract, her work and many other research produced by the rest of her colleagues “are excellent examples of how much this discipline can do to improve everyday life”.