Warm congratulations to Libby Freeman, senior coastal engineer at Advisian, the 2022 winner of PIANC’s prestigious De Paepe-Willems Award.
At the Annual General Assembly (AGA) of PIANC held in Liège (Belgium), from 31 May to 3 June 2022, Chairperson of this year’s jury, and outgoing Vice-President of PIANC International Ms Valérie Chabrier presented the jury report and handed over the first prize to Ms Libby Freeman.
Ms Freeman presented her submission to the PIANC International AGA: ‘Dynamic Motions of Piled Floating Pontoons and Their Impact on Postural Stability’.
‘It was a great experience’, Libby said, ‘attending the AGA and meeting some of the international PIANC members.’
Based in regional NSW Libby has over 16 years industry experience in the fields of coastal and maritime engineering and has worked on a range of projects both locally and internationally.
Libby recently completed her postgraduate studies at UNSW’s Water Research Laboratory investigating how the dynamic motions of floating pontoons impact on a standing person’s stability. She developed a set of safe motion limit criteria, acceleration and rotation limits, in order to guide engineers to design better more stable pontoons and investigated how the pontoon dimensions (beam/draft) influence motion response. Her research also examined how pontoon beam and draft affect wave attenuation performance.
Libby is only the third person from our region to win the de Paepe-Willems award. Previous A&NZ winners are Benjamin Popovic (New Zealand) for his 2020 paper on ‘Tsunami Resilience of Pile-Supported Wharves: A First Principles Approach’, and A/Prof William Glamore (Australia) in 2008 for his work – ‘A Decision Support Tool for Assessing the Impact of Boat Wake Waves on Inland Waterways’.
Other proud A&NZ place winners include Shane Freeman who won third prize in 2018 for his work on ‘Impacts of X-Ray Screening 100% of Import Containers within Small to Medium Container Terminals’ and Jeong Hun Ha who received third prize in 2017 for his ‘Bow and stern sinkage coefficients for cargo ships in shallow open water’.
The PIANC De Paepe-Willems Award (DPWA) is an excellent way for Young Professionals to stand up and be recognised for their technical endeavours in the field of waterborne transport or related marine infrastructure. The first prize includes Free membership of PIANC for a 3-year period, a cash component of € 4,000, as well as hotel accommodation for 3 nights and payment of travel expenses in economy class to the AGA, where the winner delivers a presentation of their paper to the assembly.
For more information about the DPWA see here.
