1423 Powhatan St., Suite 1
Alexandria, Virginia 22314
Phone (703) 836-6727
Fax (703) 836-7491
Email: asnehq@navalengineers.org

 

ASNE is the leading professional engineering society for engineers, scientists and allied professionals who conceive, design, develop, test, construct, outfit, operate and maintain complex naval and maritime ships, submarines and aircraft and their associated systems and subsystems.  ASNE also serves the educators who train the professionals, researchers who develop related technology, and students who are preparing for the profession.  Society activities provide support for the U.S. Navy; U.S. Coast Guard; U.S. Marine Corps; U.S. Merchant Marine and U.S. Army.

ASNE is the seventh oldest technical society in the United States.  It was founded in 1888 by a group of naval engineering pioneers, most of them officers of the U.S. Navy's Engineering Corps, who sought a unified approach to their profession in order to make the most of new advances in technology. The purposes of ASNE are:           

  • to advance the knowledge and practice of naval engineering in public and private applications and operations,
  • to enhance the professionalism and well-being of members, and
  • to promote naval engineering as a career field.

For 125 years, the Society’s objectives have been strengthened and preserved to meet the changing needs of a time-honored profession. Today ASNE conducts a variety of technical meetings and symposia, publishes the highly regarded Naval Engineers Journal and a number of other technical proceedings and publications, and fosters professional development and technical information exchange through technical committees, local section activities and cooperative efforts with government organizations and other professional societies.

The Society's annual meeting, ASNE Day, is typically held in February of each year in the Washington, DC, area. The meeting features major addresses by high level industry and government leaders and panel discussions by leading members of the profession.  It also includes presentation and discussion of technical papers on a variety of timely naval engineering topics, presentation of the Society's prestigious annual awards and a large exposition with government and industry exhibits covering the full spectrum of naval engineering technology. ASNE Day is highlighted by the Society’s annual Honors Gala, attended by hundreds of executives and senior managers from both government and industry.

Our website is designed to not only serve our members, but also to support scholars, students and others interested in the varied field of naval engineering.  We welcome your suggestions on ways we can improve your experience. 

Dr. Jeffrey E. Beach

Award: Harold E. Saunders Award
Year: 2018
 Recipient: Dr. Jeffrey E. Beach

Reason: For his significant contributions to naval engineering and his enduring legacy impacting structures, processes and people as set forth in the following.

CITATION:

Over the past 50 years, Dr. Jeffrey E. Beach has been a groundbreaking researcher, an innovative design engineer, an outstanding educator, a visionary leader of 3,000 highly competent, highly motivated engineers and scientists, and a highly respected trailblazer throughout our naval engineering community. He has led several major advancements in ship structures that are revolutionizing ship structural design. His most recent 2017 publication in the Naval Engineers Journal, “Reducing Total Ownership Cost: Designing Robust Ship Structures,” presents a clear roadmap for dramatically improving the design of robust ship structures, thus enabling the Navy to avoid billions of dollars of unnecessary acquisition, maintenance and modernization costs and significantly increasing the number of days that ships with robust structures are available to the fleet.

Dr. Beach is a recognized expert in Structures, Ship Systems, and Systems Engineering. He helped pioneer the development and application of reliability-based design methods in the Navy beginning with the establishment of fatigue design criteria and methods for naval ships. Furthermore, he developed methods and procedures utilized in assessing and solving fleet structural integrity problems. These methods, based on life cycle tests of ship components and large models constructed from a complete range of alloys, provided the Navy the ability to predict quantified failure probabilities in ships’ structures for the first time. The benefits from these methods took the form of millions of dollars saved in ship overhaul and repair while ensuring the structural integrity of our Navy ships. These methods eventually contributed to the basis for structural design in the Naval Vessel Rules, which was used to design and certify the new U.S. Coast Guard Offshore Patrol Cutter.

Based on Dr. Beach’s pioneering research work on Reliability-Based Structural Design in the 1980’s and 1990’s, his long-term vision of integrating more physics-based modeling with the Navy’s ship synthesis model, ASSET (Advanced Ship and Submarine Evaluation Tool), and the Navy’s ship design analysis product model, LEAPS (Leading Edge Architecture for Prototyping Systems), is now under development at Carderock under the DoD High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) CREATE (Computational Research and Engineering Acquisition Tools and Environments)-Ships Project. This is a fitting capstone to an amazing career as a naval engineer whose reputation in naval engineering spans a long career of notable achievement and influence.