WEST BETHESDA, Md. –
Engineering students and
their professors from universities nationwide discussed the future of naval
warfare with engineers at Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division,
April 19.
The Naval Engineering Education Consortium's annual event gave students from 23
universities the forum to present projects that address real-world Navy
problems, as well as talk about how and why to join the Naval Sea Systems
Command workforce.
NEEC is a NAVSEA-directed program carried out at all 10 NAVSEA warfare center
divisions to cultivate a world-class naval engineering workforce through
student participation in project-based research at colleges and universities.
Keynote speaker Vice Adm. David C. Johnson, principal military deputy to the
Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Research, Development and Acquisition,
discussed NAVSEA's work and why the students should want to be a part of it.
"We offer work which you'll get nowhere else -- challenging work and
responsibility well ahead of your peers in industry," Johnson said.
"The Navy offers great opportunities to further your education and be
right in the mix of technology and development, seeing where it's going and
what our nation needs. You can work with stuff like railguns, lasers, hypersonics,
missiles, unmanned and autonomous vehicles, sonar, radar, electromagnetics,
optics, aircraft, ship and submarine design, just to name a few.
"And this work: it matters. There is a Sailor or a Marine out there who
will use or is using the technology that you developed keeping our nation
secure. We do live in an uncertain world and naval engineers are responsible
for engineering the armament of the current and future force. There really is
no more important work," Johnson said.
The students in attendance, who are pursuing engineering degrees from
participating institutions like Virginia Tech, University of Maryland and Old
Dominion University, presented projects they worked on in teams that also
included their professors and technical mentors from the warfare centers. This
is in line with one of NEEC's primary objectives of acquiring academic research
results and products to resolve naval technology challenges.
"We are building a computational model to characterize an advanced
material, trying to quantify how the different inputs to the manufacturing
parameters affect your final material properties," said Elijah Stevens, a
graduate student leading a team at University of Tennessee-Knoxville presenting
the "integrated simulation and testing for the qualification of composite
parts fabricated through additive manufacturing" project, which relates to
the 3-D printing work done at Carderock and other Warfare Centers.
"Additive manufacturing systems are extremely sensitive and the way the
Navy chooses advanced materials requires a lot of testing. That could be very
expensive to explore all the different permutations you could go through, but
if you have a good model, you can use it to narrow down all your good
candidates and do your expensive mechanical testing on likely systems that
would work the best."
Other projects presented included dynamic biometric sonar, pollution control
and other areas where the Navy has a problem to address or areas to improve.
Stevens said his academic adviser put together a proposal for NEEC that he
decided to get involved with due to his interest in AM.
"It's probably one of the coolest technologies out there right now,"
Stevens said. "There's so much that's not understood and it's so
interesting. I find that challenge to be a draw. If we can solve these
challenges, it'll be really useful to the Navy."
Another of NEEC's objectives is to hire college graduates with naval
engineering research and development experience. A human resources specialist
explained the federal hiring process and a panel of engineers answered
questions from the students about their experiences joining and working for
NAVSEA. Being involved in NEEC lets students get that experience before
actually becoming an employee, according to NAVSEA Chief Technology Officer
Kirk Jenne, who organized the conference.
"Think about it as a continuum of people throughout their careers,"
Jenne said. "You have fresh talent in the workforce now who will develop
throughout their careers and then become more mature and senior in an
organization. Eventually they will retire. What we're doing with NEEC is
reaching outside of the organization at the far left time scale of this
continuum to prime universities to help us train the best students and bring
them into our workforce. This initiative is critical to sustaining an
innovative and technology-savvy workforce for national security."
The third objective of NEEC is to develop and continue exceptional working
relationships among naval engineering colleges, universities, professors and
academics. Pierre Valdez, a graduate student at University of
Tennessee-Knoxville, who presented the project "design and implementation
of communications-constrained path planning algorithm for unmanned vehicles
operating in littoral environments," said NEEC has done that for him,
partly through his experiences working as an intern at Panama City Division
through the Naval Research Enterprise Intern Program. He said he keeps in
regular contact with his mentor, who gave him the idea for his thesis for his
doctorate.
"The Navy has a lot of cool stuff going on that I want to be involved
with," Valdez said. "I love autonomous and unmanned vehicles; I love
working on them, and I can see how they can be a solution to many of the
problems the Navy is facing. I like the Navy's approach to research and I think
I will work for the Navy in the future."
After their presentations, students learned more about Carderock Division's
technical capabilities by touring some of its facilities, including the David
Taylor Model Basin, the Maneuvering and Seakeeping Basin and the Structures and
Survivability Lab.
Other speakers at the meeting included Don McCormack, executive director of the
Naval Surface and Undersea Warfare Centers; Rear Adm. Lorin Selby, commander, Naval
Surface Warfare Center; Hardus Odendaal, a professor at Virginia Tech; and Jack
Templeton, chief technology officer at Carderock.