Week One in Norway

Hello from Trondheim, the former capital of Norway (until 1217, anyhow), located at 63˚ 36’N, 10˚23’E. In relation to the rest of Norway, it’s located at the red A:

 

The city is located where the Nidelva River meets the Trondheim Fjord. The center of the city is the roughly triangular area nearest to the fjord. Although you can’t really tell from this map, the valley around the river is fairly steep, so it’s quite hilly. I’ve found it much easier to find my way around here compared to the Netherlands – the waterways and the topography really help!

I’m currently living near Gløshaugen, the main campus at NTNU, but my home building is at Tyholt. In the Marine Technology building, the lowest floor is for classrooms and labs, the middle floor is the Centre for Ships and Offshore Structures, which is where I work and which is part of the university, and the top floor is Marintek, which is an independent research company that owns the basins and facilities.

Classes start on the 23rd, so I’ve had a bit of time to explore and try to get settled. I bought a bike, which gives me a lot of freedom to get around since it’s pretty compact, and I’ve been enjoying using my camera, as usual.

This is a view from the Bakke bridge, which is near downtown. It’s kind of amazing how everything is built right up to the water in certain places.

And this is a view out toward the fjord on the northern port of the city. It’s a little hard to tell from this perspective, but there’s an island in the fjord called Munkholmen, which you can see behind the lighthouse. That’s the “Monk’s Island,” which was an execution ground before the Benedictine monks built a monastery there.

 

I like climbing up the hill to the main campus in the evenings because the view is great. I haven’t figured out how to capture the view with a photo yet, but the sun goes below the hills long before it really sets and you can see the fjord and the hills behind the fjord all tinted pink. With the church spire and town in the foreground, it’s quite pretty.

 

 

If you turn around from looking at that sunset, you see the main building of the NTNU campus, a pretty imposing sight!

 

 

A view along a section of the river south of the Bakke Bru. I like the style of the various building colors. 

At the center of town, there’s a statue of Olav Tryggvason, the king who is said to have founded Trondheim and have converted many Vikings to Christianity. The statue is kind of strangely tall, but it’s an important landmark.

Here’s a view of the area east of downtown from the walking path along the river.

This is what I can see out the window from my desk at work. The Marine Technology building is located right next to the communications tower, so it’s definitely uphill to get here from the water. I can see the fjord from where I sit!

It’s been a little slow getting started with work and getting to know people, but I think that’s to be expected. I am still working on getting my work/residence permit and national ID number all sorted out, and I can’t really get much done as far as university paperwork until then, but I have been meeting with my advisor about classes and the basic idea of the project. This term, I will probably take 3 courses. One is an advanced structures course (project-based), one is on non-linear stochastic analysis (which is important for what I'll be working on; I've seen some of the material before, but there's also some new stuff) and a controls class (assuming that there are enough non-Norwegian speakers in the course that they elect to lecture in English).

The PhD project is basically to compare some different mooring system designs for offshore wind turbines in 30-70 m water, including performance criteria as well as cost evaluations, and will be in collaboration with Prof. Sclavounos' group at MIT, Statoil, and NOWITECH. (Statoil is a Norwegian energy company and NOWITECH is the center for offshore wind technology in Norway). Some of what I need to do involves improving the existing analysis codes particularly for the structural analysis, some will be looking at some experimental results (my work will be more computational, but I’m hoping to take part in the experiments as well), and there will be some use of existing codes to analyze different conditions.

That’s all for now, I think this will be a great adventure!

Ha det godt!
Erin