Robert F. Beck

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA


31st Georg Weinblum Memorial Lecture (2008/09)

Seakeeping Computations in the Time Domain


Short Biography

Robert F. Beck, born in 1943, received two Bachelor’s degrees in naval architecture and in aeronautical engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1965, his Master’s degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1968, and his PhD in 1970 under the supervision of John N. Newman. After one year as a post-doctoral researcher with Ernest O. Tuck at the University of Adelaide, he returned to the University of Michigan. There, he has been director of the hydrodynamics laboratory and chair of the Department of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering. He was the Herbert C. Sadler Collegiate Professor from 2005 to 2007 and is currently the Richard B. Couch Professor of Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering.

Prof. Beck was editor-in-chief for 14 years of the Journal of Ship Research and is/was a member of many national and international committees including those of ITTC, ISSC and SNAME. Further, he has hosted a number of international conferences. He is a Fellow and Honorary Member of SNAME. In addition, he is the recipient of various awards for outstanding achievements in research and teaching, including the Davidson Medal from SNAME, an Honoring Symposium on Marine Hydrodynamics at OMAE2015, and a lifetime achievement award from the Ocean, Offshore and Artic Engineering Division of ASME.

Prof. Beck has worked on a broad range of marine problems. His early career research involved ship maneuvering and seakeeping in confined waters including ship/ship interactions and bank suction. Recognizing the need for improved wave resistance and seakeeping computations, he started working on panel methods using free surface Green functions in the early 1980’s. Of particular note is the work on time-domain methods. He and his students developed seakeeping computations at forward speed using linear panel methods and the time-domain Green function. The work advanced to fully nonlinear computations using a newly developed desingularized approach to improve the computational speed.

Prof. Beck’s recent research has focused on increasing the speed of ship hydrodynamic computations. In conjunction with colleagues and students at the University of Michigan, complementary RANS and velocity decomposition methods have been developed to speed up viscous flow computations. High speed computations for the prediction of maneuvering performance of a ship in a seaway have been investigated using blended, body-exact, and fast Fourier transform methods. Under support from the Office of Naval Research Environmental Ship Motion Forecasting (ESMF) program, an onboard ship system to predict future ship motions has been developed.


Additional Documents

[–] Presentation given by Robert F. Beck


External Links

[–] Wikipedia entry for Robert F. Beck
[–] Robert F. Beck at University of Michigan


Last update: February 2018