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Can we predict how accidents really happen?

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Ship accident on ice

Lloyd's Register Foundation's ten-year relationship with the Pusan National Research Centre has grown its capability and capacity for pioneering marine and offshore research.

Predicting accidents

The Centre’s vision is to prevent catastrophes by better predicting how structures respond under extreme conditions. To understand and assess the complex, uncertain and ambiguous train of events when things go wrong, the Centre champions an advanced, probabilistic approach. This is needed because accidents don’t happen in a straightforward, linear way.

Over the past decade, the Foundation (along with its predecessor, the Lloyds Register Education Trust) has actively supported PNU to push at the boundaries of our knowledge of structural integrity. Cutting-edge research has been turned into transformative design and software applications for industry. As a direct result of our funding and support, we have seen the adoption of key patents that have improved safety at sea. This has included developments in gas detection, fire walls and heat shields, and we are now more informed than ever on how structures respond to abnormal, complex, nonlinear events. From collisions, groundings and explosions to rogue waves, corrosion, ageing and accidental denting, through the Foundation-funded work of PNU, industry is now better equipped to anticipate and respond to such incidents.

In creating advanced methods which can more accurately predict extreme and accidental events in shipping and offshore structures, the researchers we support are able to explore new ideas with expert leaders and contribute to the creation of innovative solutions. We are becoming increasingly aware that great ideas do not happen in isolation. They are the product of often unforeseen combinations made possible in collaborative environments.