Aging aircraft lecture series
An India-USA Lecture series of 18 lectures on aging aircraft, organised by IISc, Indian National Institute of Engineering, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s National Aeronautical Laboratory, was held from 27 to 29 November 2019. The series was supported by IMechE, DRDO, India-USA Science and Technology Forum and ONR-Global USA.
The lectures were designed to provide regulatory authorities, fleet operators, military personal, designers, maintenance personal, insights into issues involved in aging aircraft and their impact on safety, economics of maintenance, repair and replacement.
The inauguration was by eminent heads of DRDO, DGCA and directors of the Lecture Series from India and the US. The speakers were from the US, Canada Italy, Japan and India. One hundred and sixty delegates attended.
The lecture series provided a specialised view on research in corrosion, fatigue, obsolescence management, life extensions, system upgrades and smart technologies
The three day seminar gave opportunities to network, with also a social evening.
The talks addressed:
- Sustenance of aircraft fleets though Aging Management by Air Marshal V Pande of the IAF.
- Building an Environmental History of US Naval Aircraft for monitoring and tracking environmental service life by William Nickerson, Office of Naval Research Global, Japan.
- Introduction to aging aircraft with research in fatigue damage, corrosion prevention, NDT, technological obsolescence, system upgradation and maintenance programs by Dr SG Sampath of the FAA, USA ( retired)
- Aspects of Airframe and Aero engine fatigue under extended service usage by Dr R Sundar of Bangalore Integrated System Solutions a business unit of the Illinois Tool Works USA
- Techniques of NDT for structural health monitoring for aerospace applications by Prof. Krishnan Balasubramaniam of IIT Madras
- Modes of deterioration of engine components , life extension strategies and advances technologies for life management repair by Dr Prakash Patnaik of NRC Canada
- Loading of helicopter components and fatigue loading environment by Mr Ugo Mariani of Leonardo Helicopters.
- Human factors in aircraft maintenance and inspection by Prof. Colin Drury of University of Buffalo USA
- Review and assessment of airframe repair schemes by Dr Jayant Kudva of NextGen Aeronautics Torrance USA
- Monitoring Aircraft load spectrums towards Integrated Structural Health Management by Dr Afzal Suleman of University of Victoria, Canada
- Electromagnetic Non-destructive evaluation of aging aircraft by Prof. Lalita Udpa of Michigan State University USA
- Digital Twin Technology for aircraft health and operations management under uncertainty by Prof. Sankaran Mahadevan of Vanderbilt University USA
- Opportunities of Technology insertion in Combat aircraft by Dr. K Vijayaraju of ADA,India
- Usage of smart technologies in corrosion monitoring like smart coatings, thin films, piezo sensors, guided waves and smart materials like magneto resistive and magneto-optical by Dr. Prakash Mangalgiri of IIT Kanpur
- Management of Aging Avionics and upgrade of an aircraft by Yogesh Kumar CSIR –NAL
- Aging aircraft electrical wiring management by HR Sudarshan Prasad of Centre of Excellence Aerospace and Defence India
- Structural Life Management in an aircraft by Dr. AR Upadhya , ex NAL Director , Jain University India
- Regulatory aspects of aging civil aircraft by Dr. Ramakant Singh DGCA India.
IMechE AeD India Centre Learned Society Event, 21 December 2019
The fourth learned society lecture series of IMechE’s Aerospace Division India Centre was held with the support of IISc’ s Aerospace Engineering Department and the Society for Shock Wave Research.
Dr Gopalakrishna Hedge delivered the Manoj Kumar Memorial Lecture "Photonics for Aerospace Research".
The talk gave an over view of photonics applications , variety of hypersonic flows , photonics and hypersonics , re-entry vehicles, optical flow visualization techniques , capturing images and hypersonic flow diagnostics and indigenous hand held wave front measuring cameras
The second lecture was by Dr Kota Harinarayana former Programme Director and Chief Designer of the Light Combat Aircraft (LCA) India’s successful 4.5 generation fighter.
He spoke about evolution of technology in aircraft from the 1st to the 5 th generation, core technologies in 5th generation aircraft, UCAWs and development of power plants.
The third speaker was Yogesh Kumar formerly Director LCA at HAL and now with CSIR NAL.
He gave a talk on technical and salient features of LCA-Tejas, the programme drivers, the challenges faced and concurrent development of infrastructure, technologies and support systems. The talk addressed in depth, aspects of management of a complex aircraft development program and its technologies.
There were about 90 delegates from industry, IISc and IMechE members. All the speakers having extensive experience in Aerospace design, production and the technologies, it provided the delegates an insight to trends in aircraft design and critical technologies.
IMechE AeD India Centre Learned Society Event 8 Feb 2020
The fifth learned society lecture series, on the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI), was held IMechE’s Aerospace Division India Centre was held with the support of IISc’s Aerospace Engineering Department and the Society for Shock Wave Research.
The first lecture was by Prof. Asim Tewari of IIT Mumbai.
Prof Tewari talk was on Artificial which is impacting all walks of human activity, from employment to social relations, from wars to healthcare, from security to privacy and personal freedom. He provided an overview of the advancements and future of AI and need for an international consensus policy on its development and use.
His talk covered cyber physical systems and data analytics, IOT devices and network architecture, video analytics, RF data analysis for border surveillance, deep learning algorithms for detecting cancer, third wave of AI, natural language processing, and artificial super intelligence.
The next talk was by Prof SN Omkar Chief Research Scientist at the IISc. He is the head of Computational Intelligence, the Unmanned Aerial vehicles and the Biomechanics laboratories at the IISc.
Prof Omkar spoke about variety and types of drones in diverse applications and role of AI in management of data collected by drones.
The third lecture was by Dr Suresh Sundaram an associate professor in Department of Aerospace Engineering, Indian Institute of Science. His current research interests include flight control, unmanned aerial vehicle design, machine learning, and optimization and computer vision.
The talk addressed cognitive team theoretic approach to handle the dynamic airspace management (CDAM) under sudden weather development.
First, CDAM determines optimal sector shape in 3-dimensions such that the air-traffic controller conflicting workloads are balanced and changes in sector shape over time horizon is marginal.
CDAM comprises of two major components namely, a cognitive engine and a metacognitive decision maker. The cognitive engine consists of an airspace sectorisation model and multi-objective optimization solver. The metacognitive decision maker utilises the Pareto optimal front obtained from the cognitive engine along ATC requirements and forecasted traffic pattern, It identifies the best solution that can be implemented and also develop a rule to decide when-to-do re-sectorisation.
The lecture addressed simultaneous dynamic airspace sectorisation and dynamic routing problem to handle the sudden changes in weather conditions.
The performance of CDAM was evaluated using traffic data over Singapore flight information region and provided suggestions for better sector shape and management.
The talk was technically intensive and rather interesting in content.
There were about 70 delegates from Industry, IISc and IMechE members.
The lecture series are providing a good exposure to IMechE members in diverse areas of aerospace design, engineering and technologies. The speakers are all experts in their fields with rich experience.