Want to be a Naval Architect?

An interesting article (By Rahat Bano) from Indian Newspaper 'Hindustan Times'

A conversation between a woman Indian naval officer and an ‘outsider’?
Outsider: So are you working or studying?
Officer: I’m working.
Outsider: Where?
Officer: I’m in the Navy?
Outsider: You mean like a civilian?
Officer: No, I’m an officer.
Outsider: Oh…but like a civilian?
Officer: No, I’m a commissioned officer in the Navy.
Outsider: Oh! So, you wear uniform?
Officer: Yes, I do.
Outsider: So, what do you do in the Navy?
Officer: I’m a naval architect.
Outsider: Oh…it’s a good choice, women have good decorative skills.
Decorative skills? The naval officer wondered “what to say” to that because she’s in one of the most demanding of professions, which involves designing and developing warships, submarines, hovercraft, hydrofoils and merchant ships. She’s a naval architect — a community that’s celebrating a big recent achievement as they’ve just rolled out India’s first indigenously-designed and manufactured stealth warship, INS Shivalik, from the public sector, 200-(odd)-year-old, Mazagon Docks Ltd in Mumbai.

These professionals are a few from among the countless who get to put sails to their childhood pastime of making and floating paper boats in rainwater puddles.
They design, develop and repair a range of watercraft, including merchant ships (tankers, cargo ships, bulk carriers, etc), warships, submarines, passenger ferries, cruise liners, hovercraft, boats, yachts, icebreakers, and other structures such as hydrofoils and oil drilling platforms. They essentially make small floating cities.

Says a faculty member at IIT Delhi, which runs a diploma programme in naval construction for the Indian Navy, “It’s a profession known to mankind by intuition as across the globe, civilisations have grown and prospered around water bodies. The negative side is only individual thinking, based on self-drawn constraints. In a particular location, growth remains limited like most other engineering jobs.”

Apart from the Indian Navy and government and private shipyards, naval architects have opportunity in self-employment. “The career of a naval architect has massive growth potential in entrepreneurship — ship repairs, boatbuilding, shipbuilding, harbours and docks, ship lifts, equipment for the ships, the list goes on,” says the faculty member. The recession in 2008 affected India’s shipbuilding industry, too, but the pall of gloom is lifting, he says.

However, India lacks graduate naval architects. Many drift towards greener pastures — either an MS abroad or an MBA. They get into management positions or fly to better-paying companies in China, Korea and Singapore, says Harish C Narula, chairman, Fibroplast Marine, Noida, which designs and manufactures commercial and defence boats for clients such as the Coast Guard, CRPF, and the Uttar Pradesh Police. “For the last two years, there has been no (graduate) naval architect (taking up a naval architecture job) in India.” So, Narula says he ends up hiring mechanical engineers and training them. The Indian Navy, too, takes in engineers from different branches, including civil, metallurgical, and mechatronics, who are then trained in naval construction.

Narula says the government should open more institutes giving diplomas in naval architecture/shipbuilding as well as BTech in this discipline, to meet market requirements.

The industry is revving up, with the public sector companies in the lead. India requires more vessels, especially for coastal security in view of increased terrorist threats.

What's it about?
Naval architects design, develop and repair watercraft, and other structures such as hydrofoils and oil drilling platforms. They design basic structure (hull geometry), make the final design and do stability calculations, among other activities. Their employers include four Ministry of Defence shipyards i.e. Mazagon Dock Ltd, GSL, GRSE and HSL and Ministry of Surface Transport’s CSL, Kochi, and many private shipyards, shipping companies and boat builders

Clock Work
In a drawing office, shipbuilding yard or ship repair yard:
8.30 am: Check reports from sites, identify bottlenecks, prepare the information matrix for the day and compare with the bigger picture of the job
9.30 am: Meet respective people to remove the difficulties relating to man, material, machinery or any other aspect like access to relevant part of the working space
11.30 am: In the drawing office or at production floor, check drawings, calculations carried out by subordinates; check the progress
1 pm: Lunch
2 pm: Check all the follow-ups
3 pm: Review the progress covering daily weekly and monthly status
4 pm: Assess achievements of the day reschedule the priorities based on the planned milestones
5.30 pm: Reports, briefs and plans of next day
At shipbuilding or ship repair yards: Status of urgent work, deputing workers on next shift as required, assessing safety and health issues
6.30 pm: Back home (Normal office routine)
During sea trials or harbour trials of vessels, round-the-clock work is required, for which deployment schedules are made on the basis of type of trials

The Payoff
. Rs 15,000 onwards a month for a diploma holder. Rs 25,000 onwards a month for a fresh engineer (four-year degree)
. Sky is the limit for an entrepreneur with training in the field

Skills
. Scientific temperament
. Creative and analytical aptitude
. Decision-making skills
. Leadership qualities — ability to manage manpower and material
. Ability to set priorities (to meet deadlines)

How do i get there?
Take up science (physics, chemistry and maths) at the plus-two level. Pursue a BTech degree in naval architecture and ocean engineering, offered at a few institutes in India, for which you need to clear a written entrance test. The Indian Navy takes in graduates in select branches of engineering, who are given post-graduate training at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. After the officers earn their diplomas in naval construction from IIT Delhi, the Navy sends them to the naval dockyards in Mumbai, Visakhapatnam, Cochin or Port Blair

Institutes & urls
. IIT Madras and Kharagpur
BTech in naval architecture and ocean engineering as well as a five-year dual BTech/MTech (naval architecture engineering and MTech in applied mechanics in
any of the listed specialisations)
http://jee.iitd.ac.in/availability.htm
. Cochin University of Science and Technology, BTech in naval architecture and shipbuilding
www.cusat.ac.in
. IIT Delhi (Diploma in naval construction, for Indian Navy officers)
www.iitd.ac.in
. Indian Maritime University, Chennai, diploma leading to BSc in shipbuilding and repair
www.imu.tn.nic.in

Pros & Cons
. Constructive work — the fruit of your labour is tangible
. Niche job
. You can design and build small boats (5 metres long) to ultra large crude carriers (400 metres) or floating cities
. Shipbuilding is a cyclic industry, which sees booms and dips by rotation
. Job options limited to some locations
. Opportunities to sail in different types of vessels, from luxury liners to cramped submarines Shipbuilding activity has taken a lead

Security threats and disaster mitigation create the need for more vessels, says a boat manufacturer

What’s the scope in this industry in India? What’s the manpower requirement?
In India, naval architects have been scarce. There were only two colleges teaching naval architecture — IIT Kharagpur and Madras. For the last two years, there has been no (graduate) naval architect (taking up a naval architecture job) in India. So, the real problem is, many good naval architects get into management positions or work in China, Korea and Singapore (because of higher salaries).That’s the supply side.

Government shipbuilding activity has taken a lead. After the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, there is a coastal security requirement. The government wants more ships and boats — for the navy, coast guard, and coastal police to patrol the country’s coastline.

Also, after the September 11 attacks on the US, a UN convention requires every country to patrol and protect sea lanes where ships are moving in its territorial waters. So, more fleets are required.

But due to the shortage of (graduate) naval architects, the Navy and the Indian Register of Shipping are being forced to take other graduates — civil engineers, chemical engineers and train them but they can’t have in-depth design capability.

The government needs to have more institutes of three-year diploma courses. At the same time, it needs to plan and increase seats in four- and five-year degree programmes in naval architecture.

I would like to add that all naval architecture institutes teach shipbuilding and ship design, not boats. Now boats are required in thousands for disaster mitigation, rescue operations during floods, fishing, patrolling.

So, where do you hire people from?
We take fresh graduates and train them on the job.

Harish C Narula, chairman, Fibroplast Marine Interviewed by Rahat Bano

Naval Construction in India - A History of Corp of Naval Constructors in India

Naval Construction in India
By Cdr K.K. Varma

While browsing the Web, I came across the pdf version of this coffee table book. At first glace, the book looks impressive with a lot of ‘rare to get’ photographs, but on closer perusal it is more of style and less of substance. The Corp of Constructors should have employed the services of a professional editor rather than depend on the writing skills of a Naval Officer.

The first few pages talk about the history of shipbuilding in India. The contents are interesting and informative if not a bit jingoistic. After all, the world has not heard of any remarkable shipbuilders / ships from Ancient India.

The book then goes on to detail the progress of Naval Construction from its inception stages during the post independence era to the present days. It had started as a purely Civilian Corp akin to the Royal Corp of Constructors, but then to make it attractive to draw better talent, the brainwave decision was taken to make it a part of Uniformed Services, which in hindsight comes out as a very bad decision.

The book then speaks of the ‘so called achievements’ of the Constructor corp which are laughable and pale into insignificance when compared to the actual achievements in the field of Naval Architecture, the World over. The Indian Naval Constructors talk highly of a variant of the Leander Class which they were able to design. I had mentioned this in my previous blog on “The Autobiography of an Indian Naval Architect” about this, wherein the author had found that large ships of Similar Geometry could have lesser power requirements than a Slightly smaller ship, because of the cancellation of opposing wave fields generated by the forward and aft parts of the ship. This the author had stated as his “Eureka” moment. The other achievements of the Corp of Constructors are not worth mentioning in this review. The last few pages list out a list of achievements of officers from the Constructor Corp in local sporting and literary events of their local colleges which are hardly of any interest to anyone outside of their fraternity.

To summarize, the book gives a good background history of Shipbuilding in India in the days of yore and also the beginnings of the Corp of Naval Construction as an offshoot of RCNC. But the rest of the book is pure jingoism and not worth a read.

This book might not be of much interest to the Indian Naval Architects, but since it is freely available for download from the Net , one can peruse it , if one has the time and bandwidth.

Aspiring Naval Architects from India can go through the book to find out the “Challenging Environment” that Indian Navy offers for them to hone their skill and then to take the call whether to join the Indian Navy or hone their Naval Architecture skills elsewhere.

You can read it here.

Autobiography of an Indian Naval Architect

Autobiography of an Indian Naval Architect

By Capt Mohan Ram (Indian Navy)

I came across this book, which was mailed to me by one of the readers of this blog site and I am not sure that the author has published it or not.

The book is an interesting read, though it doesn’t cover much that is relevant to the naval architecture field. The author Mohan Ram was an ex-captain in the Indian Navy and was one of the earliest officers to join the Corp of Naval Constructors of Indian Navy, which is an offshoot of Royal Corp of Naval Constructors (UK), after India got its independence. An alumnus of the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, the author served the Indian Navy for a span of twenty five years. During this brief span the author had the distinction of serving in various capacities in the Dockyards and the Naval Design organizations. Though the author claims, he is one of the foremost naval architects of India, I am pretty sure that not many in the Naval Architectural world would have heard of him. He has not published any papers or made any theoretical contribution in the field of Naval Architecture. But considering the primitive state of naval architecture in India during those days, it is possibly true that the author could have been India’s foremost Naval Architect.

Notwithstanding the above, the book is an interesting read, especially from the point of historical development of India’s indigenous capabilities in the designing of ships.

The primitive state of Indian Navy’s Naval Architectural capabilities is brought out in one of the eureka moments which the author had……….

“ On a wet Saturday afternoon I was doodling on a piece of paper at home and idly wondered “what would happen, if I powered the new ship with the same power plant- two turbines of fifteen thousand horsepower each, without any change. How much would the speed drop? Was there any chance of convincing the naval staff that a small sacrifice in top speed would make the ship more economical and easier to construct?” I did a quick back-of-the envelope calculation to estimate the speed loss. To my utter surprise, the answer came out that the ship did not lose speed at all. On the contrary it would go a full knot faster, at 29 knots which the naval staff wanted! I checked the numbers again and again and could not find any mistakes in the calculation. I tried other methods for estimating the power required and found that the answer came out the same. I was elated. Perhaps this was a brilliant solution for meeting the navy’s requirement without any additional investment, using equipment being manufactured in India. I was so excited about my discovery that I could hardly sleep the whole weekend.”

“I rushed to the office on Monday and announced my discovery. No one believed me at first. I was greeted with a stony silence and most of my colleagues, thought that I had gone out of my head. I could not blame them, as my findings were totally counter-intuitive.”

“Without sounding too technical, let me simply explain how this came about. Further analysis revealed that at lower speeds the resistance to ships’ motion was primarily due to friction, in which the larger ship with about 20% greater wetted surface area (area exposed to the water) was at a disadvantage. Above 22 knots, the resistance to motion from wave making due to the ship cleaving through the sea became much more prominent than friction. If the interference between the waves created by the bow (front) of the ship and the stern (rear) of the ship were positive, resulting in a crest at the rear end, resistance due to wave making would be lower. If the interference between the bow and stern wave systems resulted in a trough at the stern, the resistance due to wave making would be higher. The interference is a function of a factor called Froude number, which relates the square of the speed of the ship to the length of the ship. In the case of the Leander at 28 knots, the interference caused a trough at the stern increasing the wave making resistance. But in the new longer ship, the interference resulted in a crest. This resulted in a lower wave resistance in the bigger ship, which more than compensated the increased drag due to greater area. Overall this led to the bigger ship going faster. Once we had done this detailed analysis the picture became a lot clearer. We also found that the same principle was being adopted in ‘jumboizing’ super tankers to by adding a new mid section, making the ships longer to carry more crude without losing speed.”

The very fact, that the obvious result that larger ships (of similar Geometric proportions) could have lesser resistance compared to ships of smaller length, because of the cancellation of the wave fields (a fact taught in the basic courses of Resistance of Ships), was such a shocking eye-opener to the Stalwarts of Indian Naval Architecture Community speaks volumes of their technical ignorance of Basic Naval Architecture and goes on to show that Mohan Ram, when he claims himself to be one of the foremost Naval architects of India, could indeed be speaking the truth.

The second half of the book deals with the author’s life as a non-practicing naval architect in the Indian Industry. Interesting, but not relevant to Naval Architects. The author claims that he was responsible for the turnaround of some loss making companies and offers some management platitudes.

“I expect this story to be of interest to senior managers of organizations facing severe competition and loss of market share and running into decline and sickness. It should provide useful insights, as it spans my experience of working in all three sectors, government, PSUs and the private sector. It should also be useful to academic institutions and students of management, as the book brings live Indian cases to light. Management consultants might find some of the events and solutions relevant and interesting. Multinational corporations and foreign institutional investors may find the narrative useful in getting a clearer understanding of the Indian psyche and corporate scene, some of its unique problems and possible approaches to their solutions.”

Overall a good book, especially for those in India in the Naval Architectural profession.

The book is not openly available in the internet as of date. I had read it, courtesy, one of my blog readers who had emailed it to me. He is one the members of a yahoo group called “Constructor County” which is a group which caters to the Naval Architecture Fraternity of India (only??? I am not sure).

However surprisingly while browsing the net, I found it here.

The author would have possibly uploaded it.

Naval Architecture Cadre in Indian Navy

The Indian Navy offers job opportunities to outstanding Engineers for recruitment in Technical Branches (Naval Architecture Cadre) in its Engineering Branches.

Eligibility conditions: Unmarried male & female Indian citizens, aged between 19l/2 to 25 years.

Educational qualifications: BE/ B.Tech. degree from, a recognized university (or equivalent) with minimum 60% marks in aggregate. Calculation for aggregate percentage should be based on total marks obtained in all the semesters (including I 85 II semester) divided by total number of semesters in any of the following disciplines: (a) Navy Architecture (b) Mechanical © Civil (d) Metallurgy (e) Aeronautical.

Physical Standards: Minimum height - 157 cms for men and 152 cms for women with correlated weight. Eye Sight: 6/60, 6/60 correctable to 6/6, 6/12 with glasses. Colour/night blindness is a disqualification.

Selection Procedure: (a) Short-listed candidates are likely to be detailed for Service Selection Board (SSB) interviews at Bangalore, Bhopal or Coimbatore followed by a medical examination,

(b) The duration of SSB interview is 5 days. During their stay at the SSB, candidates are assessed in Psychological Tests, Individual Tasks, Group Tasks, Group Discussions and Interview. On the first day of the interview, candidates undergo an Intelligence Test and only
those who qualify this screening test, participate in subsequent tests.

Training: Successful candidates are enrolled as officers in the rank of Sub Lieutenant and undergo Naval Orientation Course at the Naval Academy, Goa, followed by professional training in other Naval Training Establishments/Ships. Full pay and allowances are admissible to officers whilst under training. They would be in probation for a period of two years, during which they are liable to be discharged. Only unmarried candidates are eligible for training.

Pay & Perks: On entry, total emoluments of about Rs. 13,000/- pm in the rank of Sub Lieutenant. Officers are entitled to 60 days annual leave and 20 days casual leave besides Leave Travel Concession, free medical services for self and family including dependent parents, Group Insurance of Rs. 7 lakhs, canteen facilities and other concession.

Short Service Commission is granted for a term of 10 years, extendable to 14 years, subject to service requirement and performance /willingness of the candidate. On completion of tenure of SSC, officers are released with gratuity as admissible under the rules.

How to Apply: Application Forms in accordance with the prescribed format and complete in all respect should reach Post Box No. 4, RK Puram (Main) New Delhi 110066 on or before the date as notified. Last Date: November.