National Subsea Centre

The National Subsea Centre (NSC) is the multi-million-pound Centre of Excellence for subsea research and technology development, delivered through partnership between Robert Gordon University and The Net Zero Technology Centre (NZTC), through the Aberdeen City and Region Deal. The NSC is harnessing RGU’s academic expertise, research capability and facilities to establish a world-class research and development centre. The NSC aims to develop smart digital and engineering technologies to enable a faster, more cost-effective and sustainable transition to a net zero energy basin, locally in the North Sea and globally in energy environments. Currently, the NSC has four core research programmes:

Transparent Ocean
Led by Professor Jinchang Ren, this programme aims to develop leading-edge capability to detect, monitor and understand subsea and marine activities. This includes the condition of supporting infrastructures and surrounding environments, using the full range of state-of-the-art platforms and sources for data acquisition, visualisation, analysis, interpretation and prediction.

Integrated Energy
This programme is led by by Professor James Njuguna and aims to develop cutting-edge capability to design, model, evaluate and construct an integrated marine energy grid to support the transition to decarbonised energy, using smart materials, digital twins, robotics and mixed energy vector power systems.

Net Zero Operations
Led by Dr Ciprian Zavoianu, this programme aims to develop leading-edge capability to reduce carbon emissions, resource consumption and environmental footprint of marine industry operations using digital twins, machine learning and optimisation for operations planning and management, workforce transition planning and supply chain re-design.

Cyber-Physical Systems
This programme, led by Dr Andrei Petrovski, aims to develop cutting edge capability to maintain and protect equipment, assets and infrastructures of marine industry through the convergence of operational and information technologies by seamless integration of physical components with modern computation, control and automation algorithms.

These four programmes are delivered through interdisciplinary research projects which address complex industry challenges and are periodically reviewed and adapted to ensure continued relevance to emerging technical developments and industrial needs.