College Students Work On the Virtual Navy

Mechanical Engineering, Jul 2004 by Thilmany, Jean

IT HELPS TO KNOW SOMETHING the U.S. Navy wants to learn, especially if you're a college student looking for job experience.

Engineering students at Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., are using virtual reality to help the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Philadelphia redesign its ships' engine rooms for a plan that may replace diesel engines with fuel cells.

The center recently acquired a room-size virtual environment, called a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment, or CAVE. The system combines high-resolution, stereoscopic projection and three-dimensional computer graphics.

Rowan is the only university in its area that owns a compatible piece of equipment, a smaller version of the Navy's virtual-reality system. That device helped the university's engineering department land the Navy project, said Shreekanth Mandayam, a professor of electrical and computer engineering. Mechanical, electrical, and computer engineering students banded together on the project.

The project is part of the Navy's effort to improve stealth combat ships by making them quieter, designing them with a lower profile, and enabling them to operate with fewer people, Mandayam said.

"Our plan is essentially to put fuel cells in the engine room and model how it looks and how it performs," he added. "The plan for future ships is they'll have a distributed fuel cell system."

Rich Gianforcaro, a senior mechanical engineering major, said that Navy personnel gave the student team a 3-D model of a fuel cell with a message about what the engine room should look like. They asked for several possible design scenarios. Gianforcaro's team has gone to work on them.