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I am a creative and independent minded individual that can bring ideas to life. Throughout my entire life I have always had at least one project that I am currently working on. It has always been a foreign idea to me to seperate my occupational work from my personal projects. The only way to distinguish one research project as professional versus personal is in its funding source. My professional projects are currently funded by grants while my personal projects are self funded. Both areas are extremely rewarding to me and I will continue to pursue my ideas either professionally or personally. As for my research interests, most of my interests lie in the area of space travel, supersonic aircraft, rockets, jets, propulsion devices and control systems involving these devices. I am currently a doctoral candidate in the Mechanical Engineering Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder . My work is on numerically simulating detonation initiation on the microsecond timescale using our research group's Adaptive Wavelet-Collocation Method (AWCM). I have spent the last several years developing a hyperbolic solver that is compatible with the dynamically adaptive grid and stencils used by the AWCM. Now that the solver is complete, I have been performing one and two dimensional numerical simulations that describe the evolutionary processes that govern detonation initiation in a premixed reactive gas. My expertise lie in the area of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), numerical algorithm development for hyperbolic conservation laws and numerical simulation of highly compressible reacting flows. Although most of my professional work thus far has been in the area of numerical modeling, my main focus is on research and development of new propulsion devices. Numerical modeling provides a new and relatively inexpensive means of testing a theoretical device even before its conception. It is my hope that the combination of modern numerical methods within the context of research and development, I can be a part of developing the propulsion systems of the 21st century. On a more personal note, I have been married to my beautiful wife Laura for over two years. In my spare time I am an avid rock, ice and mountain climber. I have climbed many peaks in California and Colorado as well as a few in Washington and Canada. I enjoy working on personal projects such as my own Pulse Detonation Engine (PDE), hybrid rocket engines, potato launchers and model rockets. |
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Last Updated ( Friday, 07 September 2007 )
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