PORT HUENEME, Calif. –
Naval Surface Warfare Center, Port Hueneme Division (NSWC PHD) is leveraging its local college and university partnerships to solve materials issues and develop new industrial targets for range testing.
Armen Kvryan, PHD's lead materials engineer, is working with the University of California, Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) Mechanical Engineering Department and Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, and California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo’s (Cal Poly SLO) Materials Engineering Department on three Navy-funded capstone projects.
Capstone projects enable higher education students to coalesce specialized focus of their studies while solving a particular problem, while providing hands-on and experimental learning opportunities.
Kvryan’s first capstone project is with UCSB’s Mechanical Engineering Department, and aims to build a customized immersion corrosion test machine that tests materials found on naval combat testing systems for corrosion. The second project is with the university’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and seeks to construct a drone that addresses materials and corrosion issues found on topside combat systems, while the third is with the Materials Engineering Department at Cal Poly SLO and intends to create environmentally-friendly industrial balloons for range testing at sea.
The students are tasked with completing the three capstone projects with Kvryan serving as their mentor and checking in with him weekly to ensure they are on track and meeting their goals. In addition, the students have creative freedom to design the corrosion testing devices and balloons but still must follow Kvryan’s recommendation to ensure it is useful for the Navy.
Kvryan said he’s excited to give these college students real-world experience with Navy applications that, if successful, can have long-lasting effects on the naval workforce. The projects also have the potential to help students with their future engineering careers.
“Throughout my academic career, I've done a lot of projects, and I think it's very rare to work on projects that have an actual application that you get to see,” Kvryan said. “The conclusion of this project is that they’re going to build a corrosion tester that the Navy will own. So, what the students make is what I am going to use, and that gives them a sense of responsibility and pride in what they’re going to do.”
Blake Robinson is a fourth-year materials engineering student at Cal Poly, who is working on the range-testing balloons as his capstone project. His future plans are to enter Navy Officer Candidate School and become a submarine officer. His strong interest in the Navy led him to select the surface warfare target balloons as his capstone project, he said, and he expects to learn a lot that will aid him in pursuing a naval engineering career.
“This is the first big-scale project in which we are communicating with many people, setting up meetings with a lot of project managers and getting in touch with the manufacturers of the current surface warfare targets, so there are a lot of moving parts,” Robinson said. “It will be good working with a team of engineers because as an engineer, you typically work as part of a big team.”
Kvryan said the idea to join with college students on the concept of a new immersion tester came to him after working with different corrosion testing machines while in the aerospace industry—devices that always seemed to come up short of what he was seeking.
“Given my aerospace industry experience and how difficult it is to find a fully integrated and applicable testing apparatus is how the idea first came about,” Kvryan said. “The fact is many of these companies that manufacture testing apparatuses for corrosion build them with a broad use application. To be the most effective in combatting corrosion, you need to optimize the testing to fit your exact need. So, when I found out the Navy would be working with mechanical engineering students, I thought this project was the perfect fit, and we can do just that.”
The immersion tester has a platform that holds the items of interest the person wants to test. Periodically, the platform dunks itself into a liquid solution which is typically saltwater. After a period of time, the platform brings the items back up to the surface, and repeats the process. Kvryan mentioned he will be requesting additions to this machine to enhance its capabilities.
One of the challenges the UCSB team is facing is communication. With the current COVID-19 pandemic, the students could not meet in person and had to virtually kick off their projects.
“Communication is a little more difficult than usual since everything is online and we have a group of five students that we have to bring together,” said Kevin Qian, an engineering student with UCSB who is working with PHD on the corrosion testing capstone project.
The teams plan to wrap up the capstone projects by May or June. Kvryan said the success of these capstone projects could determine future projects for PHD, while the universities could help PHD recruit talent to join its workforce.
“I already have a couple of projects in mind, but depending on how successful these capstone projects are, we can even do more projects (in the future) and utilize the help,” Kvryan explained. “If we can get students from universities locally and around the country to help us, then we can focus on our day-to-day work, and they can get the experience that could help them land a job in the future, ideally with us here at PHD.”