HII Newport News Uses Digital Tech to Create Blueprints of Warships; Chris Miner Quoted

Engineers at Huntington Ingalls Industries’ Newport News Shipbuilding business have started using laser scanners and other digital technologies to develop blueprints of aircraft carriers, submarines and other vessels to speed up ship design, construction and maintenance work, Defense One reported Sunday.

Chris Miner, vice president of in-service carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding, said digital data will help the company achieve business transformation.

“We want to be able to leverage off all that data and use it,” Miner said. “There’s lots of things we can do with that [data].”

The company expects data from digital blueprints to help facilitate the fabrication of a ship’s steel components in the future using manufacturing robots.

“That’s the future,” Miner said. “No drawings. They get a tablet. They can visualize it. They can manipulate it, see what it looks like before they even build it.”