Pedro Veras Guimarães, a Centrale Nantes PhD student, wins the Admiral Daveluy international thesis award

Admiral Daveluy Award

Created by the chef d’état-major de la Marine (head of the French Navy) in 1996, the "Admiral Daveluy" Prize recognises historical, geopolitical and legal research and reflection in the fields of naval thinking and maritime action.
 

Sea Motion and Interaction with Marine Structures

The PhD thesis defended by Pedro Veras Guimareas the 17th of Janurary 2018 at Centrale Nantes is entitled « Sea Surface and Energy Dissipation ». Pedro's thesis was supervised by Yves Pérignon (LHEEA), Fabrice Ardhuin (Ifremer Brest, Laboratory of Physical and Spatial Oceanography, thesis director), and Pierre Ferrant (LHEEA, thesis director). Co-funded by Centrale Nantes and Ifremer, it contributed to the joint research program conducted within the Labex Mer - Axis 7 "Dynamics of sea states and interactions with marine structures".

In this research, Pedro has taken advantage of advanced measurement techniques with stereo-video measurements and deployments of drifting wave buoys (BBWAVES campaigns, Iroise Sea). Those observations have enlightened the conditions related to white capping in cases of waves modulated by tidal currents or longer waves. Through comparisons to numerical modeling, measurements have demonstrated that not all processes were currently properly accounted, and that wind-current-wave coupling could hold strong influence in those area.
This work opens the path to more advanced studies for a proper estimation of energy dissipation by whithecapping in sea states models as well as ad-hoc coupling in ocean-atmosphere numerical models.

This, in the end, would contribute to a better knowledge and estimation of conditions at sea.
 

After the PhD...

Pedro Veras Guimaraes is now a post-doc at SHOM, where he pursues his research on wave measurement.