Vikram Singh

Structural design engineer with more than eight years across aerospace and automotive body structures. Most of my career has gone into designing and modifying structures that were already being built, so the design solution had to hold up structurally and also work for the industrial system, improving cost, rate and quality. At Aerotrope I take aircraft and wind-energy structures from concept through CAD, hand calculations and FEA to a substantiated design.

Before that I spent five years at Honda and Maruti Suzuki designing body-in-white structures around real formability, joining and tooling limits, leading small teams while doing it. My MSc from Cranfield, where I won the Newell Prize, covered airframe design against CS-23 airworthiness requirements and composite structures in NASTRAN and PATRAN. I hold two patents.

I also build engineering software that has taken analysis setup from days down to minutes.

Design and Development Engineer - Aerotrope Ltd - Brighton, UK

(2022-04)

• Designed the internal steel structure for the three 3D-printed bronze flagpoles at JPMorgan Chase's new headquarters, 270 Park Avenue, New York. The tallest pole is 51 feet.
• Sized that structure for wind-class loads with the flags flying, designed the bolted flange joint at the base, and substantiated it with static, modal, fatigue and buckling analysis in ANSYS Workbench, including the effect of a large service cut-out.
• Sized the fin and all-moving tailplane for Kitemill's 100 kW airborne wind-energy aircraft so it could hold a vertical loop and reach a 30-year fatigue life.
• Designed the tower and checked flange-bolt fatigue for the SenseWind self-installing wind turbine, setting ultimate and fatigue strength from bending theory and stress-concentration factors.
• Act as the technical focal point on client projects, turning open technical issues and design investigations into well-defined technical solutions, and reporting the reasoning to stakeholders who are not structures engineers.
• Backed every project with ANSYS FEA to confirm the hand calculations and find stress hot-spots before anything was built.

Deputy Manager, Body-in-White (roof systems) - Maruti Suzuki India Ltd - Gurugram, India

(2019-05 - 2021-03)

• Led a team of five to design Suzuki India's first sunroof, launched on the Vitara Brezza in 2022. The company had never built one, so setting the design method and mentoring the team through it was as much of the job as the design itself.
• The tricky part was an assembly where nine pins had to seat into nine holes at once. I solved it with GD&T stack-up analysis and kinematic studies in CATIA and Siemens NX so the parts integrated reliably on the line.
• Designed a 50 kg loading roof-rail reinforcement that the company patented. I ran the stress, dent and weld-spot analysis, and reused parts from the standard roof so the modification did not need new tooling.
• Picked up Siemens NX and NASTRAN in a month with no formal training, then delivered 17 production drawings for the first 50 Vitara Brezza models.

Executive, Body-in-White - Honda Cars India Ltd - Greater Noida, India

(2016-07 - 2019-05)

• Led and mentored two engineers on the full body-in-white roof structure for the Thailand model in CATIA V5, designed around real formability and joining limits so it could be built at rate.
• Replaced an imported noise-cancellation seal with a locally designed part that met the same requirement and saved around ₹15M.
• Designed a pedestrian-safety bumper beam to meet the applicable impact requirement.

MSc - Aerospace Vehicle Design - Cranfield University (2021-09 - 2022-09)

BEng - Manufacturing Process and Automation - NSIT, Delhi University (2012-09 - 2016-06)