In the coming years, naval architects will rely on University of Rhode Island engineering alumni like Maggie Craig (’13) to ensure they deliver the most efficient, fastest and reliable ships to the U.S. Navy.
Craig is on a team at ocean technology firm Navatek that is reinventing the ship design process by developing powerful modeling software. The Hawaii-based company opened its first East Coast office in Rhode Island in 2013 in large part to tap the expertise of the College of Engineering and its graduates. In less than six months, the company has hired eight engineering alumni – almost half its local staff – and four engineering interns to aid in the development of the software and the science behind it.
“The URI alumni and interns are hard workers; they are self-motivated and they’ve learned to work in teams,” Navatek Chief Scientist David Kring says.
As a team, the alumni focus on hydrodynamics, a branch of science that studies fluids in motion, such as ocean waves. While they may look simple, ocean waves are actually extremely complicated. Rogue waves and tsunamis can disrupt otherwise perfect modeling techniques. Yet, waves play a huge role in the stability and efficiency of ships.
Craig says the work is exciting, tangible and directly connected to her URI education.
“I think the biggest realization coming here is that I learned all these subjects and now they’re all wrapped up into this one big project,” Craig says.
Designing the software requires drawing on topics from structural engineering to calculus to computer programming languages C++, Fortran and Python. When the Navatek engineers need help, they call URI ocean engineering Professors Stephan Grilli and Jason Dahl.
In 2013, the professors and company collaborated to win research funding from the Office of Naval Research to refine the software. It was one of the first examples of a partnership born from a memorandum of understanding encouraging research collaboration between the University and Navatek.
“This work is stimulating because it is rewarding and useful,” Grilli says. “Just as important, we directly benefit from the industry’s experience in identifying and prioritizing the key and important problems to work on. And finally, our students have immediate job opportunities.”
Navatek was the biggest single employer of Class of 2013 engineering graduates, and operates one of the most robust paid internship programs for ocean engineers.
Navatek Lead Scientist Neal Fine says hosting interns allows the company to evaluate and train prospective employees while encouraging research in the ocean engineering field. That’s important for a company operating in a niche field dependent on well-trained engineers.
“As an industry we have a big problem losing students to other fields,” Fine says.
To fight that, the company is developing a ship design competition for high school students and has sponsored the College of Engineering’s Autonomous Surface Vehicle Team that designs and races a self-driven boat. Navatek engineers advised the team on its design and its Hawaii-based shipyard modeled some of the components.
Regardless of how the team fares in competition, Navatek executives say they hope the experience excites students about ocean engineering and its ability to parlay into other research areas.
At Navatek, the company is using lessons from the field to improve the efficiency of wind turbines and also to develop a method to use low-temperature plasma reactions to create fuel from carbon dioxide.
All that work required more lab space and in early 2014 the company moved a few hundred feet into a new 20,000-square-foot office complete with a low-speed wind tunnel.
As the company spends money to expand, forges more connections to URI and talks about hiring more engineers, URI President David M. Dooley says it shows the impact of collaboration with industry.
“In just a short time our partnership with Navatek has created jobs, kept talent in Rhode Island and offered real-world educational experiences for our students,” Dooley says. “It’s a fitting example of the power of a university and a private company working hand-in-hand.”