Photo By Monica Mccoy | Participants of this year’s Naval Engineering Education Consortium annual event...... read more read more
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.
For more information on NEEC, visit www.navsea.navy.mil/Home/WarfareCenters/Partnerships/NEEC/AboutNEEC.aspx.
| Date Taken: | 04.19.2016 |
| Date Posted: | 02.23.2017 13:42 |
| Story ID: | 224500 |
| Location: | WEST BETHESDA, MD, US |
| Web Views: | 88 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Students, engineers meet to discuss future of naval warfare, by Dustin Q. Diaz, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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