Navy Lab Professionals Honored with Awards

Dr. William K. Blake, a U.S. Navy expert in hydroacoustics, recently received the Gold Medal Award from the American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) at the ASNE Day 2003 conference. The medal honors a significant contribution in a particular area during the past five years. He works in the Signatures Directorate of the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division and directs the Office of Naval Research and Naval Sea Systems Command hydroacoustic programs here. The American Society of Naval Engineers (ASNE) recently presented its annual “Jimmie” Hamilton Award to structural naval architect Dr. David P. Kihl at the ASNE Day 2003 conference. The award honors the best original technical paper in ASNE's Naval Engineers Journal during the year. Dr. Kihl was one of four authors of a paper: "Reliability-Based Design Guidelines for Fatigue of Ship Structures". It appeared in a special issue on reliability-based structural design criteria for naval ships. He works in the Survivability, Structures and Materials Directorate of the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division here. He is one of seven division employees to win this award since its inception in 1967. Dr. Kihl's paper promotes the development of reliability-based methods for determining the fatigue life of structural details associated with conventional displacement type surface monohull ships. The methods are based on structural reliability theory and can be applied either in direct reliability-based design or in a load and resistance factor design (LRFD) format. He has been involved in numerous surface ship structural integrity projects, structural evaluations, model tests and full scale trials, and has authored many technical reports and publications dealing with life prediction and failure criteria of surface ship structures.