Ice climbing in the White Mountains.

Shortly after I arrived at Creare, an engineer approached me about a project he thought I would enjoy because of my interests in climbing and mountaineering. (In fact, New Hampshire and Vermont have some of the best ice climbing in the 48 states and serve as a great playground for mountaineering.) The project involved redesigning the descenders that are used to safely lower parachutists who have become caught in trees. I was happy to apply my climbing experience to this project, but realized that it would require a move into a new field for me – mechanical engineering.

I began undergraduate work in chemical engineering at Purdue University. Personal interest and curiosity led me to the Fluid Dynamic Research Group, and this extra-curricular work eventually led to my BS honors thesis topic in fluid dynamics, and also to a serendipitous discovery. Through my experimental findings and further computational work of the group, we were able to disprove a well-established paper in the field which asserted that water drop formation is purely chaotic in nature. My fascination with this work and desire to explore the engineering world on an even deeper level led to a move to MIT in September 1999 to begin my Ph.D.

Having dealt with Newtonian fluids, I was ready to approach non-Newtonian fluids and signed on to work on viscoelastic fluids with Prof. Robert Armstrong at MIT. While in Prof. Armstrong’s group, I worked to advance the modeling and simulation capabilities of the Viscoelastic Fluid Dynamics Research Group, and developed a 3-D finite element method to tackle the complex viscoelastic flow problems. At the same time, I began visiting the White Mountains of northern New Hampshire, backpacking and climbing.

My student co-operative experience with Mobil Chemical Company’s R&D group in Houston reinforced my desire to seek an R&D work environment once I finished my doctoral program. Creare’s focus on R&D, creativity, and technical challenges as well as its location nearer the White Mountains made it a natural next step.

The descender project was my first project at Creare and challenged me immediately to shift gears from chemical engineering challenges to mechanical issues. The project proved to be interesting and successful: we were able to substantially reduce the weight and the volume of those descenders while improving their performance. I was honored to work on a project dedicated to saving lives of our pilots in the Armed Forces.

In the next Creare project, I used my fluid dynamics background in an entirely new area. We developed heat exchangers for pre-heating electrolytes for missile batteries. Primarily these missiles lie dormant for decades on end, but if needed they must become operational within seconds. Under extremely tight constraints, we needed to develop a heat exchanger for an extremely cold environment that could handle a huge influx of heat into a somewhat unstable fluid. The end result was a workable and successful design.

Most recently I am working on a project applying a turbulent flow model to jet engine afterburners. In certain off-spec conditions, the afterburners operate in unanticipated ways. I am developing models to better predict the behavior.

It is very rewarding to work in a creative environment where I grapple with new and challenging technical problems on a daily basis, but also have the opportunity to turn to the physical and tactical challenge of climbing and mountaineering right in my own backyard.

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