Two small pleasure boats have been designed, constructed and tested by two final year students reading for a degree in B.Eng.(Hons) in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Malta.

The university said that the two students, Ryan Cachia and Jeremy Cortis, have followed, together with other students, the Ship Studies course modules, enabling them to design the hulls using the Naval Architecture principles.

They have undertaken these projects as their final year dissertation, under the academic supervision of Dr Claire De Marco and Prof. Carmel Pule'.

Ryan Cachia's work concentrated on a wooden displacement hull using a plywood stich and glue technique.

The resulting hull, achieving a design speed of seven knots, is 3.89 m long with a 1.62m beam and a depth of 0.76m.

Jeremy Cortis, used near typical moulding techniques and worked on a fibre glass, double bottom planning hull 3.14 m long and 0.6 m deep, beam 1.53. It is capable of reaching speeds in excess of 20 knots. The boats are registered with the Small Ships Section at Transport Malta.

The test results achieved good comparison with professional Naval Architecture software obtained as part of an ERDF project (part-financed by the European Union under the European Regional Development Fund 2007 – 2013), aimed at setting up a Mechanical Engineering Computer Modelling and Simulation Lab, CAE, at the University of Malta.