About OffCoast

OffCoast, Inc. (OCI) is a small business specializing in analysis and design for the offshore and coastal engineering industries. The owners, Drs. R. Cengiz Ertekin and H. Ronald Riggs, have collaborated in research and development for over 18 years as professors (Departments of Ocean Engineering and Civil Engineering, respectively) at the University of Hawaii and have served as independent engineering consultants.  They formed OffCoast, Inc. in 1996. Cengiz Ertekin has a Ph.D. in naval architecture and offshore engineering and Ron Riggs has a Ph.D. in structural engineering, both from U.C. Berkeley. They specialize in computational methods and have extensive experience in software development.

Dr. Ertekin worked previously at Shell Oil Company in Houston and Chevron Oil Co. in San Francisco; his expertise is in computational hydrodynamics, naval architecture, and offshore and coastal engineering.  Dr. Riggs worked previously at Exxon Production Research Co.; his expertise is in computational structural mechanics, structural dynamics, offshore engineering and the finite element method. Their collaboration has focused primarily on hydroelastic analysis of floating structures. They were co-organizers of the NSF-sponsored First International Workshop on Very Large Floating Structures, held in Honolulu in 1991, and Co-Chair and Organizing Committee members of VLFS '96 held in Hayama, Japan in 1996.

OffCoast, Inc. has developed a number of commercially available software products that are used in the design and analysis of offshore structures.  Among them are VISUAL HYDRAN^TM and HYDRAN^TM (HYDroelastic Response ANalysis of offshore structures), and GREEN3D^TM  (evaluates the Green Functions for both finite water depth and deep water). HYDRAN and  GREEN3D can operate in UNIX, Windows and Macintosh environments. OCI-HydroMoB  runs on Win95/98/2000 PCs, and VHYBRID/C ^TM (Visual Hydroelastic analysis of BRIDges in Current or VHC ^TM) for Win98/2000 PCs (VHC analyzes the response of floating bridges in current).

Some of the past/present clients of OffCoast, Inc. include Bechtel National, Inc.; Office of Naval Research; J.R. McDermott Engineering Houston; Offshore Structure Analysis; Pacific International Center for High Technology Research; MCA Engineers, Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center, M.K.H. Yee Structural Engineers, and U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers.

Drs. Ertekin and Riggs have more than 150 publications in the area of offshore and coastal engineering, mostly concentrating on hydrodynamics and structural  mechanics.  

© 2000-2008 OffCoast, Inc.  All rights reserved.