On 14 November 2019, Prof. Ing. Claire De Marco, Prof. Ing. Tonio Sant, and Dr. Inġ Simon Mizzi from the University of Malta attended the co-ordinator’s induction meeting in Brussels for TWINNING projects funded by the European Commission’s Research Executive Agency.
The main objective of TWINNING projects is to strengthen a research field in a widening EU country via institutional networking across the EU.
Spanning over three years with a budget of € 800,000, VENTuRE seeks to strengthen the maritime engineering field in Malta specifically in a towing centre for the design and characterisation of energy efficient sea-fairing via experimental and numerical means. The University of Malta is collaborating with long standing academic institutions in the maritime engineering academic field namely Strathclyde University, Glasgow, United Kingdom and Universita degli studi di Genova, Genoa, Italy with the professional contribution of Naval Architectural Services Ltd (NAS), Malta.
The project will enable intensive knowledge exchange and is particularly aimed at developing the numerical and experimental skills locally here in Malta The project is integral in developing the skill set required to design, build and operate a state of the art experimental maritime engineering tow tank earmarked within the Sustainable Living Centre at the University of Malta. Academics from the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering are leading the VENTuRE project set to kick off in January 2020.
TWINNING projects are extremely competitive. With a 6% success rate, VENTuRE was one of the 37 successful proposals to be chosen from 456 applications.
The meeting served as a good induction for the co-ordinators to understand various mandatory features of TWINNING projects ranging from ethical to legal to dissemination requirements. The meeting also served as a good networking exercise between the various accepted TWINNING proposals.