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A Curious Case of Ph.D.
A Curious Case of Ph.D. Cargo Transport Using Sailing Boats TEXT SAHAR IMTIAZ ILLUSTRATION LINDA CNATTINGIUS
Besides managing the magazine, our team also does podcasts through the channel Qampuspodden, which you can listen to by tuning in at osqledaren.se/podcast. Here, we are covering the first-ever podcast in English from Qampuspodden, where two Ph.D. students were invited as guests. One of them, Ulysse Dhomé, is pursuing a Ph.D. at KTH and is working with sailing boats to replace the large ships for cargo transport in the future. We were curious to know more about his work and Ph.D. in general, so let us start. What are you working on in your Ph.D.? – My topic is sailing, basically. We are trying to build the largest sailing ship ever, together with a shipping company. The goal is to reduce carbon emissions from ships. Now, 90% of the goods transported by ships represent 3% of the global emissions. If we can reduce this, we can gain quite a lot of CO2 reduction. Basically, he is working on designing cargo ships with sails, shaped like wings, since they are more efficient than regular sails. But one of the main concerns is that we do not know the wind characteristics in the ocean, for a height of 100-150 meters above sea level. So this makes it difficult to design a ship with large sails.
What kind of work you do in the lab? – We do different things in the lab we call maritime robotics laboratory. We mostly use robots to measure things at sea. Before this project, I was working with an autonomous sailing boat. But in the lab, we mainly do data acquisition, using two different submarines. The idea is always to measure stuff at the sea since we don’t know the ocean at all. Is it true that you recently arrived in Europe after a cross-Atlantic trip? – Yes, it is! That trip was for the wind measurement campaign. We got all the equipment for wind measurement acquisition and installed it on the ship, for the first time to see how things would go. We did so at the beginning of November in Gothenburg and I stayed on the ship for two weeks to cross the Atlantic. But I was working: I checked how the data is going to change the parameters, and things like that. But yeah, it was pretty cool!
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Do you have to be smart in addition to being a hard-worker? Or is interest and passion more important? – To study hard for an exam to then forget it all, will not work. I think it’s more a matter of mindset. If your idea is that you are just gonna pass the courses and get a Ph.D. just what I used to do for my exams - it’s not enough. Because you need to publish things, go to conferences. You can’t really just work like “Yeah, I’m gonna get that paper published but I don’t care about the content”. Lastly, can you give one tip to the students doing Masters now and considering getting into a Ph.D.? – One thing I would say is: Try to get to know your supervisor! You will have to work with that person for four to five years so it’s best to have a good relation with them. I have seen people who don’t like their supervisor and it really affects their work.
