DEVELOPMENT OF PROFESSIONAL SKILLS OF MARINE ENGINEERING GRADUATES BY USING COMPUTER-AIDED DESIGN

"We must do more to ensure that young people in particular have digital skills which they need for their future. Opening up education is about opening minds to new ways of learning, so that our young people have a better chance of finding a job, to be more creative, more innovative and to have entrepreneurial skills" said Androulla Vassiliou, European Commissioner for Education, Culture, Multilingualism and Youth, on September 25, 2013. Engineering design is based on three coordinates (quality, cost, delivery time) expressing, ultimately, the essential requirements for a rapid processing capacity and interaction which are facilitated by computers. Computer Aided Design (CAD), Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) and Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) are common technologies and without their use the ambitions set out above remain utopian. Computer aided design is interactivity, modelling, scientific visualization, which get the picture and provide study models of various processes or phenomena inaccessible to direct observation. Engineering design belongs to fundamental engineering knowledge and use of CAD-CAM-CAE techniques with the concept of Finite Element Analysis (FEA) provides the designer a complete freedom of imagination, of products' representation regardless their complexity. It appears, therefore, the opportunity to apply analytical methods that provide information on product behaviour in different operating conditions, enabling anticipation and correction of errors that can occur in the production process. The designer is thus able to propose solutions to improve the technology of the production process and optimization of functional parameters of the product. This paper aims at highlighting the manner the curriculum of bachelor degree specialization "Marine Equipment and Systems" from "Ovidius" University of Constanta integrates in his content, for all years of study, the fundamental and specialized disciplines designed to develop the skills and to deliver the professional competence on using CAD-CAM-CAE techniques. It will present an analysis of curriculum content also from the perspective of compliance with the mandatory norms and performance indicators that Romanian Agency for Quality Assurance in Higher Education requires by imposing specific standards. Successful students' projects, best practice examples of collaborations with the economic environment in this direction will be presented and opinions of employers on skills, competencies and performance of graduates who were employed and integrated in engineering design activities will be expressed.