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#IP 936 30 Aug - 5 Sep 2010

NAL bids adieu to Ms Rama Mahadev

Ms Rama Mahadev, Sr CoA and one of the senior most officers in Administration in NAL / CSIR superannuated on 31 August 2010 after serving CSIR / GoI for about 38 years. Ms Rama Mahadev born and brought up in Delhi, did her MA graduate from Delhi University. She started her career in the Ministry of Health, Govt. of India and later joined CSIR – NML, Jamshedpur in December, 1975 and served NML as Section Officer and Administrative Officer and later transferred to CLRI, Chennai in the same capacity. She was promoted as CoA and posted to CSIR Madras Complex and again moved to CLRI, Chennai. Later, She was promoted as Sr CoA and served CLRI, Chennai and NEERI, Nagpur before being posted to NAL in the same capacity in August, 2005. Smt Rama Mahadev was work oriented, principled and practical person by nature. She balanced her personal and official life successfully and encouraged everybody especially women employees to do so as both are equally important. She laid lot of emphasis on maintaining ecological balance and her pet projects were Rain Water Harvesting, Vermi-composting etc., in NAL.

On the eve of her retirement, we wish her good health and all happiness in the years to come.
Vimala Srinivasan

#IP 935 23 - 29 Aug 2010

Inauguration of PGRPE Course on “Engineering of Flight Vehicles”

CSIR has started Post-Graduate Research Program in Engineering (PGRPE) since last year to recruit bright talents having Bachelor’s degree in Engineering for its various engineering laboratories. Under this program this year, a course on ‘Engineering of Flight Vehicles’ was initiated by National Aerospace Laboratories and 12 students were selected as per prescribed procedure. The inaugural function to induct the new students was held on 10th August 2010. Dr. Gautam Biswas, Director, Central Mechanical Engineering Research Institute (CMERI) Durgapur and Chairman, PGRPE Committee was the Chief Guest.

Dr. Sajeer Ahmed, the Course Co-ordinator welcomed the Chief Guest, new students and the audience. He thanked Dr. Biswas for accepting the invitation at such short notice and introduced the chief guest to the audience. He further informed the details of course and its importance to the laboratory. He stated that the course was conducted by five divisions of laboratory namely Flight Mechanics and Control Division (FMCD), Centre for Civil Aircraft Design and Development (C-CADD), Experimental Aerodynamics Division (EAD), Computational and Theoretical Fluid Dynamics Division (CTFD), Propulsion Division (PRD); and as on that date six students had joined and the remaining six students were expected to join by the end of the week.

Dr. Biswas in his address briefed the gathering about the PGRPE courses conducted last year with 54 students. This year 11 courses were offered with 110 students. He emphasized the need for inclusion of Mathematics as a subject to form a comprehensive course. He also mentioned that people trained at CSIR were valued Engineers outside, and briefed the students that the courses they had entered related to the future of Indian Aviation. He also brought out the importance of PGRPE course stating that the manpower trained can be deployed directly to the application and explained about the importance of NAL. In the national context, NAL had designed, fabricated various aircrafts and flight tested them. He also lauded the role of NAL in meteorological computing and its contribution in strategic sector. He called NAL as ‘pride of the Nation’. He also mentioned that development of a Regional Transport Aircraft (RTA) for which a one year feasibility and definition study has been approved with National Aerospace Laboratories as the lead organization lead to prosperity and enhancement of livelihood. Every technology involved under RTA could be taken up as network project.

Dr A R Upadhya, Director in his remarks mentioned that he was happy that Dr. Gautam Biswas accepted the invitation to be the chief guest. He said that Dr Biswas had been very instrumental in the design and implementation of this PGRPE programme and had put in great efforts to make it so successful. He was an young dynamic leader to lead the CSIR program. He thanked Dr. Biswas for his kind words about NAL. He welcomed the six students who had joined and explained about PGRPE courses being run at NAL. He recalled, that in the previous year NAL had joined with SERC Chennai, in conducting a course on ‘Engineering of structures’ and nine students were attending the course at NAL. He mentioned that ‘Engineering of Flight Vehicles’ had a wider scope and required fundamental knowledge of all aeronautics disciplines. Compared to any other organization, CSIR was a technology institution leading to scientific innovations and publications, R&D, and product design and development. CSIR-NAL was like a microform of CSIR. He said that the present students of PGRPE had a lot to contribute to drive the basic engine and senior leaders can provide the support.

He wished the students good luck in the course and thanked NAL colleagues, involved in the programme for making PGRPE a success.

Dr M N Sathyanarayana, Joint Head, KTMD and Student Advisor delivered the vote of thanks.

The beginning of PGRPE course marked another major milestone in the history of NAL by bringing academics as another activity in addition to research, design and development for building talents for future aerospace activity of the country.

Dr. Sajeer Ahmed

#IP 934 16 - 22 Aug 2010

Library day celebrations at CMTI, Bangalore

Library day was organized at Central Manufacturing Technology Institute, Bangalore on 09th August 2010 to commemorate 118th Birth anniversary of Dr. S R Ranganathan.

Dr. (Mrs.) Poornima Narayna, Head, ICAST, NAL was invited as the Chief Guest for the function. The event was graced by Dr. Satyan, Director, CMTI, Dr. (Mrs) Poornima Narayana, Dr. Ravindra, Joint Director, CMTI, and Dr. Shahikumar, Joint Director, CMTI. Program started with an invocation song invoking the blessings of Goddess Saraswathi, the Goddess of knowledge. Mr. Rajagopal, scientist in charge, CMTI Library welcomed the gathering and introduced the chief guest of the day. The introductory speech was delivered by Dr.Shahikumar who spoke about the significance of the day’s program and the contributions of Dr. S R Rangnathan’s to Library and Information science profession. Dr. Ravindra, Joint director, CMTI, narrated the historical development of Technical Information Center at CMTI since its inception. He mentioned that CMTI- TIC with its rich knowledge base is one of the state of the art library in the field of Manufacturing Technology. Dr. Satyan, Director CMTI, addressed the gathered audience by advising them to satisfy their knowledge (reading) hunger by utilizing available resources at CMTI-TIC.

The invited lecture by Chief guest, Dr. (Mrs) Poornima Narayana, was on “Information needs @ R&D setup: role of information professionals”. Her talk highlighted the changing role of Information professionals with the advent of ICT and its application in Library and information profession. The ever growing needs of the user community has revealed that the future Library and Information professional’s role will be multifaceted and one has to acquire necessary knowledge and skill to meet increasing user demand and to deliver efficient information services at the right time. She presented case study of NAL-ICAST, wherein the center is catering to the Indian aerospace community in general and NAL scientist in particular efficiently by reaching out to them through exhaustive collection in both print and e-versions and value added web based services like creation of databases, news clipping services, Digital Institutional repository for preserving the archive of the knowledge output of the Institution. While appreciating the excellent and unique resources held at NAL and the web based value added services being imparted, Director CMTI expressed the possibility for extended cooperation with NAL in resource sharing and establishing web based information services in the present e-scenario. Mr. Sathyan, Director CMTI felicitated the chief guest during the valedictory function.

Ms Saraswathi, Head TIC-CMTI proposed vote of thanks.

Shivaram BS

#IP 933 9 - 15 Aug 2010

Seminar by Dr Govindaraj, CALSPAN, USA

Dr. Govindaraj, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, CALSPAN, USA visited NTAF on 6 Aug 2010 and presented an overview of wind tunnel testing capabilities and flight research operations at CALSPAN, Buffalo, NY, USA. The information on wind tunnel testing capabilities was of special interest to NTAF because of the large number of tests carried out on Tejas models in CALSPAN by ADA. It was a revelation to many listeners that the company has well established itself in the area of flight research, since most of the audience associated CALSPAN with wind tunnel testing only. Dr. Govindarajan showed many examples of evaluation of aircraft handling qualities and flight control system using In-Flight Simulators (IFS, which helped the development of military specifications for handling qualities of piloted aircraft), Specialized airborne training using IFS (manned aircraft handling qualities, flight test techniques and advanced maneuver and upset recovery training), Airborne system testing and research support (UAV surrogate and integrated sensor and instrumentation systems) and Flight control system design and analysis (handling quality research). The IFS are equipped with variable stability systems with programmable fly-by-wire, designed, fabricated, installed, tested and operationalized since 1946. This also permits a choice of aircraft for advanced maneuver and upset recovery training. In response to a query, Dr. Govindarajan mentioned that commercial pilots could be trained to respond to sudden of altitude (recall the recent gulf airlines flight, which suddenly lost nearly 15,000 ft altitude near Trivandrum) using the IFS. It was interesting to note that the first batch of pilots of Tejas were also trained using the IFS in CALSPAN.

Dr. Govindaraj was extremely pleased to visit the NAL 1.2m wind tunnel and see the special test techniques and test equipment developed, such as the Multi-booster separation trajectory test technique, PC based controller, data acquisition and processing system for measurement of pitch damping derivatives using forced oscillation technique, Multi-channel high-speed data acquisition and processing system for unsteady pressures, etc.

G K Suryanarayana

#IP 932 2 - 8 Aug 2010

Seminar on “Matlab – Flight Controls and Safety Critical Applications”

A Seminar on “Matlab – Flight Controls and Safety Critical Applications” was organized on 5 August 2010. The seminar was organized in the S. R. Valluri Auditorium. This Seminar was organized to get familiarity with the recent developments in the Model based design concepts in flight control and safety critical applications. Since, Matlab has been used extensively by the control system engineers and in its recent releases it has encompassed the tool boxes which enable the users to follow model based design, Mr. Shyam Chetty, Head, FMCD took the initiative to arrange the seminar in NAL which was very well attended.

In his opening remarks, Mr. Shyam Chetty, informed the audience that, NAL is one of the early users of the Matlab in India. He has also told about the steady growth of the Matlab, which started with the 5-inch Floppy versions and now it has moved on to Gigabit versions. He has also emphasized the importance of having the simulation, control design and code generation on a single platform, which enables the users to save time and track the workflow systematically.

The Seminar consisted of 4 presentations from the Mathworks, US and India. Dr. Jon Friedman, Marketing Manager, Aerospace & Defense and Automotive Industries, MathWorks, Inc made the initial presentation. In his lecture, he has emphasized the advantage of using Matlab and Simulink for model based design of systems. He also clearly brought out the types of systems that need to be modeled in Matlab and the systems that need not be modeled in the Matlab. Mr. Friedman elaborated ten best practices evolved out of industry experience in the application of Matlab/Simulink for safety critical system development.

The second lecture was on “Accelerating Flight Vehicle Design with Matlab and Simulink” by Mr. Chirag Patel, Application Engineer, MathWorks India Pvt. Ltd. In this lecture, he explained about the iterative control system design process by taking an example. The step-by-step iterative design process consisting of importing the aerodynamic data created using third party software, creating the simulation model, analyzing the model for adequate performance and then finally designing the control system using the new PID tuning algorithms. The Simulink response optimization was covered very well in this lecture.

The third lecture was on “Flight Actuation System Simulation with Physical Components” by Mr. R Vijayalayan, Applications Engineer, MathWorks India Pvt. Ltd. The lecture covered the method of integrating multiple engineering domains for taking up trade off studies for different types of actuators using Matlab & Simulink environment. The usage of physical network approach in the newly added toolboxes namely, SimMechanics, SimElectronics, SimHydraulics and SimScape was explained to model the different types of actuators.

Finally, a lecture on “Model-Based Design Workflow for DO-178B Flight Applications Using Tool Qualification kits” was delivered by Mr. Shobhit Shanker, Applications Engineer, MathWorks India Pvt. Ltd. The lecture emphasized on verification and validation of each step in the traditional DO-178B workflow using Matlab & Simulink tools. The lecture covered the validation of the high level requirements by linking them to the Simulink model. He also showed the tracking of requirements from requirement document to source code level. Usage of Simulink Design verifier, Model Coverage tool, System Test and Poly-Space toolboxes for certifiable code generation was explained in detail.

The participants and speakers appreciated excellent arrangements for the Workshop organized by Mrs. Gomathy Sankaran and her team from KTMD Division, NAL.

P V S Murthy