John Young, Ph.D., associate professor and Rob Adams, Ph.D., professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering are the recipients of a one-year grant extension of their original three-year award from the Office of Naval Research for their project, “Permanent Magnetization and Corrosion-Related Field Prediction of Complex Structures.” 

Young, the principal investigator, and Adams, co-investigator, have been awarded $538,194.00 over four years for their work, which aims to predict electromagnetic fields in seawater to facilitate design of corrosion-protection systems and model electromagnetic fields near marine structures. 

Description
The prediction of low-frequency electromagnetic fields in and around marine structures is critical in the design of a variety of systems such as corrosion protection systems. Prediction of these fields is complicated by the electrically conducting seawater, the variety of materials comprising the structure, the complicated geometry of the structure itself, and the extremely large size of many marine structures. Special methods are required to meet each of these computational challenges, and this effort, funded by the Office of Naval Research, investigates and implements techniques to efficiently and accurately predict low-frequency electromagnetic fields in marine environments on commodity computing hardware. Areas of particular interest are the modeling of structures constructed from non-linear electromagnetic materials, prediction of fields due to corrosion-related processes such as those that occur when a metal is immersed in an electrolyte, and prediction of fields due to eddy currents induced in conductors.