Solange van der Werff

Profile

Solange van der Werff has a background in naval architecture; she graduated on Ship Hydrodynamics at the faculty of Mechanical Engineering (ME). Besides at TU Delft, she has spent a semester at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology (NTNU) in Trondheim. Her graduation project was conducted with the Hamburg Ship Model Basin (HSVA) in Germany. 

After this she has worked for several years at the Maritime Research Institute in the Netherlands (MARIN), conducting monitoring campaigns on ships and research in the model basins, and at Bluewater Energy Services, working on the design and assessment of mooring systems for offshore structures. 

In 2020, she started as a PhD candidate at Hydraulic Engineering to broaden her view from considering individual ships to an entire fleet, and to contribute to making the port and waterway networks more efficient and future-proof.
 

Research

In her PhD project, Solange evaluates the performance of port and waterway networks at an arbitrary scale; the size of the network can vary between a single port to an entire corridor crossing several country borders. The aim is to assess the benefits of potential interventions, as well as the trade-offs. Therefore, multiple parameters are considered. For example, when proposing changes to the fleet and/or infrastructure at the benefit of reducing emissions, the impact on system capacity, operational costs and timeliness is assessed as well. For her analysis, she uses data sets that have a global availability, for example Automatic Identification System (AIS) data. The project is funded by SmartPort.

ResearchGate