George Stephenson Medal awarded to Professor Thorsten Stoesser

Professor Thorsten Stoesser, leader of the School of Engineering’s Institute of Environment and Sustainability, is to be awarded the George Stephenson Medal by the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE).

The medal has been presented annually since 1881, and is one of the ICE’s most prestigious awards. It recognises the second-best paper published in ICE Publishing’s ‘Energy’ category. The best paper receives the James Watt Medal.

Professor Stoesser secured this year’s prize for his paper ‘Calculation of fluid structure interaction: methods, refinements, applications’, which was published in Engineering and Computational Mechanics in 2015.

Commenting on the award, he said: ‘I had not known that this paper was considered for an award, so it caught me by surprise. I am humbled and honored, and also thankful to my former PhD student Mustafa Kara and current postdoctoral research associate Richard McSherry for their contributions.’

Regarding the research, he added: ‘The paper is on computer simulations of fluid structure interaction (FSI). We have summarized the literature on this topic, refined a numerical methodology to simulate FSI and applied it with success to predict vortex induced vibrations of structures that are subjected to unsteady fluid forces.’

The paper is to be made freely available through the ICE Virtual Library, and Professor Stoesser will be presented with the medal at an awards ceremony to be held at the ICE’s London headquarters in October.