Prof. C. P. Vendhan formally retired as an Emeritus Professor from the Ocean Engineering Department, IIT Madras in May 2015 after about 35 years of distinguished service. His journey in the field of Ocean Engineering Science and Technology commenced in December 1979 briefly as a Research Associate, and then as a faculty member in September 1980, both at the Ocean Engineering Centre, subsequently known as the Ocean Engineering Department (OED), IIT Madras. He had his engineering education at the College of Engineering, Guindy, Chennai, where he completed B.E. (Civil Engg.) in 1968 and M.Sc. (Structural Engg.) in 1970. Then he obtained his PhD (Civil Engg.) in September 1975 from IIT Kanpur. Immediately after that, he joined the Civil Engineering Department, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, Mass., USA, as a Post-doctoral Research Associate and worked from 1975 to 1979. He then returned to India and joined IIT Madras in December 1979. During his career at IIT Madras, he also served as Head of the department during 1997-2000 and immediately thereafter, as Chairman, Estates, and Works for two years.
The OED at IITM has been started in the late 1970s, with its main objectives set as developing postgraduate education in the field of Ocean Engineering and Technology, manpower training for Indian industries, undertaking research and collaborating with Indian offshore industries. Prof. Vendhan has contributed quite significantly to fulfil each and every one of these. He, with his basic strength in structural mechanics and engineering, developed postgraduate courses in Offshore Structural Dynamics and Wave-Structure Interaction, both of which he taught for over 2 decades. He mainly focused on postgraduate education in Ocean Engineering and Technology and trained a generation of students including 12 PhD scholars.
Prof. Vendhan developed many large-scale generic, versatile numerical models to tackle a variety of complex problems in Ocean Engineering. Notable among them are models for predicting the stochastic vibration and fatigue of offshore structures, nonlinear analysis of a variety of floating systems especially for deepwater applications, and hydrodynamic analysis of large volume floating structures.
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The Ocean Engineering Department proposes to create a Chair Professorship in the name of Prof. C. P. Vendhan, as an expression of our gratitude to a great and dedicated teacher who actively contributed to the development of the Ocean Engineering Department and IIT Madras during its formative years, and to honour his significant contributions to the field of ocean engineering in India. The Chair Professorship will enable the Department to identify and nominate academically high performing faculty of Ocean Engineering. The target corpus aspired for making this Chair is around Rs. 1 Crore. We invite Alumni of the Ocean Engineering Department of IIT Madras to contribute to this initiative.
