Is ocean engineering the career for you?

Date of original post October 5, 2023

Do you love the ocean and excel at math and science? Have you considered being an ocean engineer? This article provides information on the types of problems ocean engineers will solve to help you navigate the road to a future in an ocean engineering career. These jobs are highly in demand, pay well, include a wide variety of specialties, and will provide you with a challenging and fulfilling career.

Ocean Engineering Specialties

If you are considering a career in ocean engineering, it is helpful to be aware of the many options within this niche. Specialties include coastal protection, port and harbor design, wave loading analysis, ocean data collection, analysis and modeling, marine robotics and sensor design, underwater communications, remote sensing, marine renewable energy harvesting, offshore structure design, buoy design, marine materials selection and corrosion protection and more. There is a wide variety of opportunities for students with different strengths and interests.

Here are several examples of ocean engineering specialties:

Buoy Engineering

 

You might design a buoy that will host environmental sensors to monitor the oceans health.  You would be required to check the environmental conditions for the buoy, predict the expected currents and waves, and study the seafloor bottom type.  Then, you design the buoy and anchoring system.

 

Coastal Modeling and Protection

 

You could be responsible for modeling the effects of seasonal waves, currents, and sea level on the coastline. Given these parameters, you might determine the impact of sea level rise for community planning, design a seawall structure to withstand the forces of the ocean, or create a living shoreline to prevent erosion.

 

Marine Renewable Energy

To improve our country’s access to renewable energy, you might be interested in developing systems that harvest power from the ocean, called marine renewable energy (MRE).  Part of your job as an engineer might be to analyze wind or current turbine blade effectiveness using computational fluid dynamics, design a turbine platform, be responsible for the environmental permitting and community outreach, select the best materials for the structure supporting the energy harvester, or monitor the power output as a few examples.

 

Materials Selection and Corrosion Control

 

Any object put into the ocean is subject to some of the most harsh conditions on the planet. High pressure, extreme temperatures, salt water corrosion, marine organisms growing on any surface, and UV degradation are all working against us. If you like biology and chemistry, you might consider specializing in marine materials, designing corrosion and biofouling control methods, or even develop innovative materials to survive ocean installations.

 

Ocean Data Collection and Analysis

There are a vast number of methods to collect important data to better understand our oceans, track trends, establish the basis of the design for new structures, or to model the hydrodynamic forces imparted by the sea.  You could be involved with designing ocean experiments, deploying sensors, or reading remote satellite data.  Maybe you would like to spend time offshore on a research vessel collecting data in a remote environment?  Or maybe you prefer writing code and analyzing data?

 

Offshore Structures

 

There are different types of structures intended to reside in the ocean.  We call these offshore structures;  oil rigs, a wind turbine platform, seafloor-mounted structures with sensing equipment, pipelines, and more. These require a tremendous amount of planning and engineering from numerous trades. The part of the ocean engineer is to establish how the ocean will interact with the structure – loads imparted from the seas, strength of the materials required to withstand a long life submerged, and planning how a structure is deployed into the sea.

 

Undersea Robotics and Communication

 

 

This certainly isn’t an exhaustive list but should provide you with enough examples to get the idea of what an ocean engineer does. Please send comments to the email below if you have anything to add to the list or would like to provide any advice to someone considering a career in OE. For additional resources, please go to our other articles on Which companies hire ocean engineers and What colleges offer ocean engineering degrees.