NRL Mechanical Engineer Saikat Dey Named AIAA Associate Fellow

WASHINGTON  –   U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) researcher Saikat Dey, Ph.D., named American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Associate Fellow for significant and lasting contributions to the aerospace profession during an awards ceremony held at the Hyatt Regency in Orlando, Fla., Jan. 10, 2024.

“Dr. Dey’s remarkable contributions to Defense computational mechanics and the aerospace field are one highlight in a remarkable career at NRL,” said NRL Acoustics Division (Acting) Superintendent Zachary Waters, Ph.D. “His strategic research not only fosters collaboration across the Naval Research Enterprise but also ignites innovation within the broader defense community. Dr. Dey’s impact is profound, shaping the future of how computational mechanics is leveraged with his groundbreaking achievements.”

AIAA Associate Fellows are individuals of distinction who have made notable and valuable contributions to the arts, sciences, or technology of aeronautics or astronautics.
 
“I am honored to be recognized as an AIAA Associate Fellow by my peers for my technical contributions,” said Dey, NRL Acoustics Division Theoretical and Numerical Techniques Section Head. “Computational mechanics is increasingly critical for design and performance evaluation of complex engineering systems ultimately providing our Navy assets significant and timely technical superiority.”

Each year, only one for every 150 voting members is selected and approved. The selection process is highly competitive, and only approximately 17% of the AIAA membership are associate fellows.

“Algorithms and numerical techniques developed as part of my research at NRL have been used to study the structural-acoustic response of underwater platforms and sonar systems for undersea-warfare applications,” Dey said. “Geometry modeling and discretization algorithms we have developed are being used to model complex flows around aircrafts, helicopters and submarines as well as the performance of RF antennas on various platforms.”

Dey is the original developer of hp- finite and infinite element solver Structural Acoustic Radiation and Scattering (STARS-3D), which has been extensively used for both interior and exterior structural-acoustics simulations of complex aerospace and underwater Navy applications. His development and application of these techniques, algorithms, and software have also been transitioned directly to the Navy Shipyards where they are in regular production use and impacting Department of Defense (DOD) programs of record.

The flagship numerical solver STARS-3D, installed on high-performance computers of DoD HPCMP, is used by a number of institutions throughout the Naval Research Enterprise.

As the project manager since its inception, Dey has provided technical excellence and judiciousness for the Foundational Technologies (FT) effort within the DOD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) and Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments (CREATE) program.

“Starting from scratch, CREATE-FT has produced Capstone, a software platform that provides the geometry, meshing, and analysis attribution capabilities to address a wide-range of DOD physics-based applications including aerodynamics of fixed and rotary-wing vehicles, hydrodynamics of surface and undersea vehicles, and electromagnetic analyses of air and sea systems,” said David McDaniel, Ph.D., U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Associate Director for CREATE for the DoD's HPCMP who nominated Dey as an AIAA Associate Fellow.

The HPCMP is managed by the Information Technology Lab of the U.S. Army's Engineer Research and Development Center. 

Capstone’s fully automated algorithms for generating and adapting anisotropic surface and volume meshes for complex geometries, including resolving complex flow-features such as viscous boundary-layers, is providing a critical foundational capability to thousands of scientists and engineers in the CREATE user base across industry, government, and academia. 

“The adoption and use of Capstone across the DOD acquisition enterprise demonstrates his technical vision, leadership and team-building skills in service of the broader aerospace community,” McDaniel said. “Dr. Dey continues to provide leadership and service to the AIAA and other technical societies. He has proven to be a consequential Senior Member of AIAA with his participation in panels related to CFD 2030 Vision, his role as Technical Discipline Chair for the Meshing Visualization and Computational Environments Technical Committee, workshops identifying technical roadblocks, and technical ideas to advance the state-of-the-art in geometry-based discretization and meshing techniques.”

The NRL Theoretical and Numerical Techniques Sections carries out a number of Science & Technology and applied efforts providing leadership for the DOD HPCMP’s CREATE-FT effort that develops Capstone geometry and meshing platforms.

“In the applied efforts, the mission includes developing algorithms and computational tools to enable physics-based analyses and digital engineering capabilities for major DOD systems,” Dey said. “Ongoing research is addressing robust prediction of structural-acoustic response of complex underwater structures in the presence of uncertainty and disorder as well as development of rapid digital surrogates for Navy assets derived from fusing sensor-based data with physics-based models.”


About the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory

NRL is a scientific and engineering command dedicated to research that drives innovative advances for the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps from the seafloor to space and in the information domain. NRL is located in Washington, D.C. with major field sites in Stennis Space Center, Mississippi; Key West, Florida; Monterey, California, and employs approximately 3,000 civilian scientists, engineers and support personnel.
 
For more information, contact NRL Corporate Communications at (202) 480-3746 or nrlpao@us.navy.mil.