Dheerajkumar R Narang is a seasoned corrosion, reliability, and process safety engineering specialist. He is presently employed with the integrated asset management department and digital manufacturing services unit of L&T Technology Services Limited. DheerajKumar is also a PhD Student at the Information Systems Engineering & Management Department of Harrisburg University of Science & Technology, Pennsylvania, USA.
Dheerajkumar earned the Discipline Star badge from NPTEL in the computer science and engineering domain. His professional and research interests are critical infrastructure reliability, corrosion science, intelligent asset management, e-governance, and industry 4.0 solutions in process plant industries such as oil and gas, petrochemical, fertilizer, power generation, and green energy.
Motivation for Taking NPTEL Courses
Dheerajkumar’s inclination towards multidiscipline process safety and asset management research motivated him to take up NPTEL courses in the computer science domain. Being a corrosion & mechanical reliability engineer, he routinely felt unable to engage in detailed scientific discussions around system design, implementation, and computing-related aspects of a research project. Being an enthusiast for new technology and innovation, he began looking for ways to quench his academic thirst by adding a new dimension of computer science knowledge to enhance his multidiscipline research competence.
Benefits of NPTEL Courses
Dheerajkumar discovered the NPTEL while exploring MOOC (massive open online course). Coming from a middle-class background, Dheerajkumar vividly remembers graduating from a high school with a science stream and learning about IITs and NITs for the first time during the first semester of his undergraduate degree. First-generation engineering graduates often miss a few opportunities for academic and professional excellence, and he was no exception.
NPTEL provided him with technology infrastructure and enabled him to gain computer science domain knowledge through a similar educational experience as IIT students 10 years later. It was a refreshing and enriching learning experience. To his logistic advantage, the proctored NPTEL exam center was located at iON Digital Zone in Powai, very close to L&T’s Powai campus, Mumbai, where he worked.
Current Research on E-Governance for Process Safety
Dheerajkumar studied a total of 9 courses in computer science and engineering domain with NPTEL. These courses are Operating Systems, Algorithms and Analysis, Computer Architecture and Organization, Advanced Computer Architecture, Programming, Data Structures and Algorithms Using Python, Data Science for Engineers, Database Management System, Computer Networks & Internet Protocols, Cloud Computing. These courses helped him gain the requisite academic knowledge for admission into a Ph.D. program in Information Systems Engineering & Management at Harrisburg University of Science & Technology in the USA. Dheerajkumar is researching and developing a web-based digital solution for process safety management compliance for the global process plant industries such as refining, petrochemical, and green energy.
Another tangible benefit of the knowledge gained through these nine NPTEL courses was that it enhanced Dheerajkumar’s core competence to work on system design, implementation, and computing-centric research and engineering projects professionally.
Eventually, NPTEL courses made Dheerajkumar a well-rounded R&D professional equipped to lead multidiscipline research and engineering projects on a global scale.
Dheerajkumar completed a research study on the issues related to the non-digital methods of process safety management, recent PSM rulemaking initiatives by the US federal agency OSHA, and the regulatory and economic impact of all these issues on process plant facilities in the United States. An international journal is reviewing the technical paper related to this study. He is also investigating the feasibility of developing an engineering PSM framework suitable for process plants in India. Dheerajkumar is also developing a multi-enterprise architecture for the web-based e-governance solution for compliance with process safety management.
The following are the specific areas where knowledge gained from NPTEL courses is helping Dheerajkumar in the e-governance solution research:
- Deployment Strategy – Cloud computing, Computer Networks, and Internet Protocols
- Solution Architecture – Computer Architecture, Operating Systems, Database Management System, Algorithms and Analysis
- Design of Logic Layer(s) – Programming and Data Structures, Data Science for Engineers