Chapter 68 - 51: Still Just Working to Make Money for You
Engineer Pan’s voice echoed through the conference room, and Chen Lin could sense his professionalism and meticulousness.
But for Chen Lin, the non-mathematical aspects of the design proposal were completely foreign. He understood almost none of it.
The technical jargon from the fields of engineering and materials science left him completely bewildered.
He even started to miss Sun Yu a little.
During their previous two consultations, he had relied entirely on Sun Yu, who had acted as his translator, diligently converting complex engineering problems into the pure mathematical language he could understand.
Now that this intermediary was gone, he could only feign attentiveness out of sheer boredom. In reality, his mind had already begun to wander, and he started to discreetly size up the others in the room.
The conference room was quite large. Besides President Peng and him, there were a dozen or so engineers seated.
A few of them were clearly fresh graduates, no more than a couple of years out of school. They still had a student-like air about them, sitting with ramrod-straight posture, their eyes a mixture of curiosity and a trace of anxiety.
Then there were the ones in their early thirties. They had faint dark circles under their eyes and slightly rumpled shirt collars, and they exuded the unique exhaustion of people repeatedly beaten down by projects and KPIs.
The remaining two or three were around Engineer Pan’s age. ’Yep,’ he thought, ’you can tell how experienced they are from their universally receding hairlines, gleaming with the light of wisdom. The aura of true power!’
"...And that concludes the background of the issues our project is currently facing."
After a full fifteen minutes, Engineer Pan finally finished his project overview. He set down the laser pointer and looked toward President Peng.
President Peng, understanding the cue, took over with a smile. "Chen may not be too familiar with the specific details of engineering design. Sun Yu mentioned to me that Chen’s preference is for our engineers to abstract the problems in a proposal into pure mathematical models and questions."
His gaze shifted, landing on Engineer Pan.
Engineer Pan immediately nodded and beckoned to a young employee sitting in the corner. "Ji, you’re up."
He then introduced him to Chen Lin. "This is Ji. We hired him two years ago. He’s a mathematics Master’s graduate from a top-tier university, so his fundamentals are very solid."
The young man named Ji immediately stood up. He didn’t look much older than Chen Lin and wore a pair of half-rim glasses that gave him a scholarly air. He nervously pushed them up, took a deep breath, and began to speak.
The moment he opened his mouth, it was clear he knew his stuff.
"Chen, our project’s current proposal treats the caisson as a rigid body, mainly considering its six-degrees-of-freedom motion under wave action, which includes sway, surge, heave, roll, pitch, and yaw. The wave load calculation uses a method combining Morison’s equation, based on linear potential flow theory, with diffraction and radiation theory."
"To accurately solve for the caisson’s dynamic response under wave action, we must establish fluid-structure coupling equations. This involves solving a coupled system of Laplace’s equation for the velocity potential, which describes fluid motion, and the Newton-Euler equations, which describe the caisson’s rigid body motion."
"Our team currently uses industry-standard software employing the 3D frequency-domain Boundary Element Method, or BEM, to solve for hydrodynamic coefficients like added mass, radiation damping, and wave excitation forces and moments. We then substitute these coefficients into the rigid body motion equations to solve for the motion response amplitude operators for each degree of freedom."
"The problem we’re facing," Ji said, his pace unhurried but his explanation perfectly clear, "is that under certain design wave conditions, there is a significant discrepancy between the caisson’s pitch response amplitude calculated by the software and the team’s estimates, which are based on simplified empirical formulas and model test data."
Just as he finished, a senior engineer with the sparsest hair added, "The software’s results are too high. This means a design based on these figures could result in an excessive angle of rotation for the caisson, compromising its stability and the safety of the superstructure. We need you to provide a new method—one that is computationally efficient and has better numerical stability—to either verify or replace the core computational process for solving hydrodynamic coefficients in the current commercial software. We need to pay special attention to the coupling effects of the pitch degree of freedom."
’Okay, now I get it.’
As Chen Lin listened to the explanations from Ji and the senior engineer, his eyes darting to the mathematical formulas and parameters displayed beside the structural diagrams on the screen, his "Little Mathematician" title seemed to activate on its own.
Those concepts—Laplace’s equation, the Boundary Element Method, coupling effects—became crystal clear in his mind. All the logical chains automatically connected and reassembled. In the same instant they finished speaking, a completely new solution had already materialized, fully formed, in his mind.
"I understand." Chen Lin nodded. He motioned for Engineer Pan to switch the projector screen back to the slide introducing the calculation method.
Looking at the screen, he asked, "I didn’t bring any paper or a pen. I’ll need to borrow some."
"I had the administration prepare some." President Peng, standing nearby, seemed to have anticipated this and gestured to an assistant waiting outside the door.
Soon, a stack of pristine A4 scratch paper and several pens of different colors were delivered to Chen Lin. At the same time, a technician deftly switched the projector’s input source to a high-definition camera focused on the blank paper in front of Chen Lin.
This way, everyone in the conference room could see the derivations and calculations he would write on the scratch paper.
Chen Lin picked up a black pen, tested its tip, and looked up. "Shall I present the new method now?"