Projects per year
Personal profile
Personal Statement
I have been a Lecturer (2014-2019), then a Senior Lecturer (2019-2022), and then a Reader (2022- ) in the Department of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Marine Engineering at the University of Strathclyde at Glasgow. I received my PhD degree at Strathclyde in 2014 on Ocean Engineering. My research activity mainly focused on the Marine Hydrodynamics and Offshore Renewable Energy, and I have published more than 100 peer-reviewed articles on these areas. I is currently acting as the Deputy Editor of Ocean Engineering, and editorial board member for couple of international journals. I am an ITTC committee member and sectary of ITTC Maneuvering Committee. I has been the PI/CoI for more than 10 research projects, securing more than £3M grants from various funding sources, and I was invited by Prof. Ronald Yeung to carry out joint research at UC Berkeley under Sir David Anderson Bequest Award. I am currently leading the Hydrodynamics and Ocean Renewable Energy Laboratory (HOREL) at Strathclyde, acting as the first supervisor of 9 PhD students. My research work on wave interference has been selected as Focus on Fluids article of Journal of Fluid Mechanics and highlighted by Nature (Nature. 565(7741):538), and these works have also been widely reported by TheTimes, DailyMail, Today Headline, ScienceNews, etc. In 2022, I shared the Ig Nobel prize in the field of Physics for “trying to understand how ducklings manage to swim in formation”.
For more information about our research group, please visit our webpage Hydrodynamics & Ocean Renewable Energy Laboratory @ Strathclyde
Research Interests
The recent research directions carried out by my group include:
- Offshore renewable energy system, including offshore wind, solar and wave energy;
- Controllability and autonomous ships;
- Offshore hydrogen;
- Floating Offshore PV;
- Hydrodynamics of ship and offshore structures;
- Multibody hydrodynamic interaction and wave interference;
- Ship-bottom, Ship-bank, Ship-lock, Ship-ship interactions;
- Very large floating structures;
- Real-time control of wave energy converters;
- Free surface waves and the bio-mimetic study on animal swim.
Expertise related to UN Sustainable Development Goals
In 2015, UN member states agreed to 17 global Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all. This person’s work contributes towards the following SDG(s):
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Collaborations and top research areas from the last five years
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Development of short-term wave prediction method for the motion control of offshore installation and crew transfer vessels
Incecik, A. (Principal Investigator) & Yuan, Z. (Co-investigator)
1/03/25 → 28/02/27
Project: Research
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CPD course on seakeeping and manoeuvring
Yuan, Z. (Principal Investigator), Dai, D. (Co-investigator) & Terziev, M. (Co-investigator)
1/03/24 → 1/03/26
Project: Knowledge Exchange (Training / Short Course)
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WEC spacing effects on the performance of a floating energy harvesting platform
Wu, H. & Yuan, Z., 30 May 2025, In: Ocean Engineering. 327, 120971.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
Open AccessFile -
A time-domain BEM for instantaneous interaction by two ships head-on encountering in incident waves
Zhang, X., Cheng, Y., Dai, S., Li, M., Yuan, Z. & Incecik, A., Mar 2025, In: Engineering Analysis with Boundary Elements . 172, 106128.Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review
File4 Downloads (Pure)
Datasets
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Data for: "Steady hydrodynamic interaction between human swimmers"
Yuan, Z. (Creator) & Li, M. (Creator), University of Strathclyde, 8 Feb 2019
DOI: 10.15129/a0737f35-8162-4b7e-a6b8-ac4fba9b61fa
Dataset
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Data for "Wave energy extraction for an array of dual-OWSC (oscillating wave surge converter) with different layouts"
Yuan, Z. (Creator), University of Strathclyde, 11 Nov 2021
DOI: 10.15129/e44a6220-f185-4f44-856f-9d47ea4b85f0
Dataset
Prizes
Activities
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BSI Committee SME/32 – Ships and Marine Technology (External organisation)
Yuan, Z. (Advisor)
Dec 2024Activity: Membership types › Membership of committee
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China Ocean Engineering (Journal)
Yuan, Z. (Peer reviewer)
Nov 2024Activity: Publication peer-review and editorial work types › Editorial board member