The 31st ONR Symposium on Naval Hydrodynamics (31ST SNH) was held in California (Monterey), the United States, from Sept. 11th to Sep. 31st, 2016. The Symposium was hosted by Office of Naval Research (ONR) of the United States and was organized by the Stanford University. More than 170 top leading experts, scholars, professionals and graduate students in the field of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering attended the meeting, who are from Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, UC Berkeley, Johns Hopkins University, University of Michigan, University of Maryland, University of Iowa, Technical University Berlin, Hamburg University of Technology, Technical University Munich, University of Southampton, Strathclyde University, Newcastle University, Universte de Nantes, Delft University of Technology, Chalmers, Seoul National University, Osaka University, Shanghai Jiao Tong University and other well-known universities, as well as the United States Taylor Pool NSWC Korea KRISO Institute, China 702 Research Institute and other famous Marine research institutes.

ONR SNH has a long history and its first meeting was held in 1956. Ever since then, it has been held once every two years, as an exhibition and communication platform for the latest research development and results in the field of naval hydrodynamics and also as one of the highest referred academic conferences, which not only has a major influence in the international naval hydrodynamics, but also plays a leading role in the frontier research.

The conference received more than 330 papers, and after three times’ strict review and final comments of experts, 136 were eventually collected into the conference papers. Two research papers from Prof. WAN Decheng Team, at School of Naval Architecture, Ocean and Civil Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University (NAOCE, SJTU), Free Maneuvering Simulation of ONR Tumblehome Using Overset Grid Method in naoe-FOAM-SJTU and URANS Studies of Ship-to-Ship Interactions During Lightering Operations, are collected into the conference papers, which are the only two collected ones among the applied 11 papers from the China mainland scholars. Prof, WAN Decheng was invited by Dr. Ki - Han Dr Kim, the chairman of the Conference Organizing Committee, and the Director of ONR, Pro. Parviz Moin at Stanford University, the conference chairman, to serve as the chairman of the Viscous Ship Hydrodynamics parallel session, which is the first time for Chinese mainland scholars to act as chairman on ONR conference.

WANG Jianhua and ZHAO Weiwen, the doctoral students from Prof. WAN Decheng Team, respectively made academic reports in Maneuvering and Control parallel session and Viscous Ship Hydrodynamics parallel session. The participating experts and scholars paid high attention to naoe-FOAM-SJTU, CFD solver for naval architecture and ocean engineering which is based on OpenFOAM, showed strong interest in the extraordinary results in ship maneuvering, motion control and ship interaction, and also made heated discussion and communication on some technical details. The symposium not only played a great role in promoting the development of numerical methods and the applications in engineering field but also enlarged SJTU’s international publicity and influence in the field of naval hydrodynamics.

By TIAN Na