Coastal & Marine Engineering & Management

Objectives

• To offer high quality and innovative education in the field of Coastal and Marine Engineering and Management
• To add distinctive value of each of the European partner institutions' expertise
• To educate students in fundamental and specialized knowledge and intellectual skills in the field
• To train students in the most advanced tools and research techniques available within the field
• To build on existing fundamental knowledge and to offer advanced knowledge and understanding of specializations accessible through the CoMEM partners communities
• To create awareness and educate students in the ethical and integral dimensions of their future profession
• To develop an informed understanding of the social, ethical and professional responsibility in coastal management strategies
• To prepare students for employment in challenging careers within the field of coastal and marine engineering and management in Europe and worldwide

Competencies

Generic competencies

Students with a Master's Degree in Coastal and Marine Civil Engineering should be able to:

• Design methods for coastal structures, shore protection, ports, waterways, and other coastal facilities
• Dredging and disposal solutions for contaminated sediments
• Design and operation of inland waterways hydraulic structures and riverbanks
• Coastal hydrodynamics (e.g., waves and currents) and their actions on the coast and man-made interventions, spanning from short (storms) to decadal scales considering the climate-change dimension
• Physical processes responsible for coastline evolution
• Data analysis, and synthesis of data and information from different sources with contemporary techniques and technologies
• Management of planning activities from a local scale to a regional and national scale
• Socio-economical exploitation of the coastal zone (recreational and/vs production activities)
• Teamwork, cross- and inter-disciplinary work, communication (oral and written)
• Social responsibility of business and entrepreneurship

Specific competencies

After completing the programme, students will have acquired:

• A track combining fundamentals of engineering projects (NTNU and UPC) and environmental and administrative knowledge
• Advanced knowledge and training at UPC in topics related to coastal dynamics and their implications, protection and coastal management, based on the mechanical concepts for the marine environment and design of coastal structures introduced at the NTNU
• The bases to continue with more advanced concepts in coastal morphodynamics and in the great multiplicity of the space and time scales that are required for the management of coastal zones
• A better vision and ability to define and solve coastal problems, through the mobility provided in the program, that allows studying in diverse cultures (such as the Scandinavian and Latin cultures).

Knowledge

After completing the programme, students will have knowledge of:

• The physics of the ocean (currents and waves) and the basic processes occurring in the coastal zone (hydro- and morphodynamics), and their effects on the coast, port and waterways infrastructure
• Coastal and oceanographic numerical modelling and laboratory modelling techniques
• Design of coastal structures and shore protection (hard vs soft engineering, engineering with nature)
• Geotechnical aspects related to foundations for port and waterways structures
• Port planning and operation
• Environmental issues before and after construction of e.g., a port
• Coastal vulnerability within a sustainable framework
• Field campaigns and data treatment to evaluate problematic situations and plan/design solutions
• Developing beach management strategies for real-world coastal systems
• Integral coastal management assessing the efficiency of strategies in a global spatial framework from the watershed, river mouth to shoreline evolution and risk assessment for coastal flooding and coastal erosion
• Understanding the basis behind climate change and its effect on the coast
• Socio-economic effects and consequences of coastal protection and adaptation strategies, resilience and adaptation to climate changes
• How to cooperate with administrations and private companies
• Corporate responsibility, ethics and self-consciousness in the workplace

Skills

After completing the programme, students will be able to:

• Analyse and interpret collected field data in order to understand the physical drivers at short, mid and long-time or climatic scales
• Perform time and frequency domain analysis of MetOcean data to provide operational and design values
• Quantify natural forcing on the coastline (waves, currents, surges)
• Apply state-of-the-art numerical model for coastal hydro- and morphodynamics for different design purposes (CFD, wave phase-resolving, wave phase-averaging, short term morphodynamics, long term morphodynamics)
• Design coastal interventions and understand and predict the impacts of such interventions
• Offer alternatives to hard coastal engineering
• Design navigational infrastructure with resilience and adaptation to climate change in mind
• Compute the risk, vulnerability and hazards including the decadal (climatic) scale
• Perform risk management (concepts and techniques)
• Know how to make the stakeholders and community to work together to make a project acceptable and wanted
• Manage conflicts in the work environment and assess socio-economic and social impacts of different coastal adaptation and protection strategies

Students begin the first semester of the first year at the NTNU. The second semester, depending on the track chosen, can go to the UPC (Track 1: Future Ports and Waterways and Track 2: Coastal Environmental Engineering) or to the Università di Genova (Track 3: Coastal Management).

During the second year, students spend the first semester at the ESITC-Caen and at the Universitè Caen Normandie (which includes an internship period) and choose, in the 2^or semester, the university in which they want to write their Master's Thesis.

Track 1: Future Ports and Waterways

Track 2: Coastal Environmental Engineering

Students enrolled at UPC for the Master's Degree in Coastal & Marine Engineering & Management can access the following information:

The Master's Thesis is an original exercise to be done individually and presented and defended before a university panel consisting in a project in the sphere of the specific computational mechanics synthesizing and integrating the competences acquired on the course.