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Home : Media : News
NEWS | Feb. 28, 2020

A Look Back: The Legacy of Carderock’s Dr. Young Shen

By Benjamin McKnight III, NSWC Carderock Division Public Affairs

An abundance of inventors throughout the years contributed to the legacy of innovation at Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division. Some of these creations were to benefit the United States Navy and others benefitted industry partners.

In Carderock’s Computational Fluid Dynamics Division, Dr. Young Shen has seen his work benefit both sides in his over 40 years with the command. Shen recently retired, closing out his career with 19 patents to his name, many contributions to the developments of ship technology and even more relationships with leadership, subordinates and peers alike.

“I remember the first time I met him,” said Scott Gowing, who spent almost 39 years with the command before his retirement in 2018. Gowing was looking to borrow some equipment from Shen for a project he was working on, and the foundation for his relationship with Shen as a colleague and friend was set. “He’s such a nice guy and we soon started working together on things.”

Early in his career, Shen changed the trajectory of ship technology for the Navy with his work redesigning propeller blades. Propellers on surface ships were running into issues with cavitation, as Gowing recollects. Standard designs were effectively minimizing the drag to reduce the torque on the propellers, but cavitation created noise and limited the top speed. The solution presented by Shen was to change the design of the cross-section of the propeller blade, and subsequent tests in a water tunnel at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) proved its advantages.

“They had to name this section, so Caltech combined Shen’s initials and some design parameters to call it the YS-920,” Gowing said.

One of Shen’s most notable accomplishments came at the turn of the century when hydroplane races were highly popular. The Anheuser-Busch-sponsored Miss Budweiser boat was a dominant competitor since its beginnings in 1962, but looked to reach higher speeds as the end of the century approached. Their team reached out to Frank Peterson who at the time was an engineer in the Hydrodynamics Department to take their request to Shen. What Shen discovered was that the way the boat operated allowed for a new skid-plate design.

In the summer of 1999, the Miss Budweiser boat debuted his new skid plate during the Budweiser Columbia Cup in Tri-Cities, Washington, and set a course record of 163.451 mph according to an email to Shen from Boeing engineer Derrick Rogers. Success continued with another course record at Lake Okanagan in British Columbia two weeks later. On Sept. 19, 1999, Miss Budweiser set a world lap-speed record in San Diego, California, at 173.384 mph.

“I took personal satisfaction to witness that the new concept works as demonstrated by Miss Budweiser,” Shen said to Rogers. “We are very happy that we were able to make a contribution to the success of the team.”

Shen’s skid plate made the Miss Budweiser boat so dominant that by 2002, racing authorities banned the design from competition.

“I think the Miss Budweiser story is a great reflection on his creativity,” Gowing said.

What might be Shen’s most renowned innovation was the Twisted Rudder, a patented design to alleviate cavitation noise and erosion damage on rudders of the Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers (DDG 51). Aligning the rudder section to the inflow was a simple, yet effective concept, and it eventually transitioned to the fleet. Later on, he added a tip plate innovation for delaying tip vortex cavitation to the design. The plate design came from observing cavitation in the 24-inch Water Tunnel on a rudder model and modifying the plate with a file and its final shape was determined in one day.

Shen’s forward thinking continued to stand out well into the new millennium. While best known for work on surface ships, he delved into the world of undersea vessels in the back end of his career. That is when Michael Hughes in the Carderock’s Hydrodynamics and Maneuvering Simulation Branch and David Hess in the Submarine Maneuvering and Control Division crossed paths with Shen.

“When I first started working with Shen, I found out that he was a very careful researcher,” said Hess, who has known Shen for around 10 years. “When he was beginning a new problem, he would perform a literature search and learn as much as he could about the problem from all appropriate sources.”

According to Hess, Shen was the reason for their division’s revamped method for scaling model vessels that more accurately reflected their full-scale counterparts. At the time, the division was looking for a way to make their submarine models emulate a full-scale submarine’s maneuvering behavior when they ran trials, primarily in the re-creation of a vessel’s non-skid coating. They lacked a standard to ensure the division met their desired outcome until Shen developed a scaling formula that would help engineers determine what the size of the coating should be on the models.

Hughes teamed up with Shen to get a patent on further scaling research, receiving one in 2017 for “Ship-Resistance Prediction Using a Turbulent Spot Inducer in Model Testing.” This work concentrated on creating the appropriate turbulent flow about the model in order to provide a more accurate prediction of the full-scale resistance.

“I think that’s how he came up with more innovative things,” Hughes said. “Our tendency a lot of times is to say, ‘OK, we have standard operating procedures for how we do things,’ and we get stuck on that. He’d sort of always start from scratch and come up with theories, which is how he came up with different ideas.”

Those who have worked with Shen throughout the years know there is a void his retirement has left. After four decades of service under Carderock, his efforts have left a lasting impact on countless people in and outside of the Navy.

“He was a wizard, which is a funny thing to say because when you think wizard, you think a guy that can do magic,” Hess said. “Of course, it wasn’t magic but sometimes it looked like that because of his depth of knowledge. We need people like that who have the depth of knowledge in several different disciplines and can draw from that to create solutions that are more complex. He’s not an easy guy to replace, and we will miss him.”