Research Engineer - Structural/FEA for Maritime Drone Operations

About the role

The School of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering at NTU is looking for a Research Engineer to study the risk that multirotor drone collisions pose to vessels in maritime environments. The role focuses on finite element analysis (FEA) simulations of drone-vessel impacts, estimating structural damage to critical vessel subsystems and turning simulation outputs into damage severity classifications and risk matrices that feed the project's separation-assurance framework and the Maritime Digital Twin. It also involves building data-driven or physics-informed surrogate models of the FEA simulations for fast, generalisable damage predictions.

Key responsibilities

• Develop FEA frameworks to estimate structural damage from multirotor drone-vessel collisions.
• Formulate impact analysis problems, including impact trajectories, weight classes, vessel component geometry and material properties, and damage severity classification.
• Run nonlinear/explicit dynamic FEA simulations (e.g. ANSYS, Abaqus) for mid-flight and landing-phase crash scenarios on different vessel types.
• Translate damage severity into functional-impact and risk classifications for critical vessel subsystems.
• Build surrogate models trained on FEA outputs to speed up damage-prediction.
• Integrate damage estimates with crash-area prediction and separation-assurance models within the risk framework and the Maritime Digital Twin.
• Work with vessel operators and the classification society to obtain structural data, and design simulation experiments, sensitivity analyses and validation studies.
• Support system integration, testing, validation and demonstration with PhD students, research fellows and project collaborators.
• Prepare technical reports, publications, presentations and project deliverables.

Required profile

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Aerospace, Mechanical, Materials, Civil/Structural Engineering or a closely related field.
• Strong academic or project background in FEA, structural mechanics or impact/crash simulation.
• Experience in maritime/naval structures, impact studies or structural damage assessment is advantageous.
• Hands-on experience with nonlinear/explicit dynamic FEA solvers such as Abaqus Explicit, LS-DYNA or ANSYS Explicit Dynamics.
• Ability to scope, build and validate simulation models independently and deliver research outcomes within project timelines.

Required skills

• Competence in structural mechanics, dynamic loading and failure/damage modelling.
• Scripting (e.g. Python) for simulation automation, post-processing or coupling FEA outputs to risk models; Python or MATLAB is an advantage.
• Familiarity with surrogate modelling and physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) is an advantage.
• Experience translating simulation results into risk matrices or decision-support outputs is beneficial.