Acquisition of offshore engineering design skills on naval architecture master courses through potential flow CFD tools

This paper presents a teaching–learning methodology focused on the acquisition of basic design principles in offshore engineering for a course entitled Projects in Offshore Maritime Structures, in a Master of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering. A new teaching procedure (including the Project-Based Learning approach), is proposed, for ensuring that students acquire skills related to the ability of analyzing and designing ocean structures. The roles of the Information and Communication Technologies, Computational Fluid Dynamics, potential flow methods and structural analysis are some specific features of the proposed methodology. The method increases the satisfaction of the students in a significant manner, and opens their fields in research and development on offshore engineering