The Arctic sea-ice cover is a critical component of the global climate system, but is logistically difficult and expensive to access. Working for Dr. Don Perovich, my graduate work is focused both on creating autonomous tools to measure the sea ice cover and interpreting the data they collect. Most recently I've been working on constructing the latest generation of Seasonal Ice Mass Balance Buoy (SIMB) -- a tool that we use to autonomously collect and process sea ice data in real time.

By freezing these buoys into ice floes around the Arctic, we directly measure how the ice changes through time and space. Critical information such as ice thickness, top and bottom melting, ice temperature profile, air temperature, ocean temperature, and barometric pressure are collected and transmitted by satellite every four hours. By coupling this information with large scale observational tools such as satellite imagery, we can not only observe the changes happening to the Arctic, but interpret them.

From an engineering standpoint, understanding climate change is critical from public health and infrastructure stand points, to name just two. Adaption plans rely on accurate prediction of climate conditions, which in turn require proper understanding of the physical processes driving the change. This work adds to the growing bank of knowledge needed to improve the models used to predict how our environment is changing so that we can try to move forward intelligently.

Every Year, the College of Engineering at Oregon State competes internationally in the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Design/Build/Fly contest. The competition, which is sponsored by Cessna and Raytheon, involves designing, bulding, and flying a remote controlled aircraft through a variety of "missions".

For my senior project, I was part of a three-person team responsible for the payload system of our plane. Our responsibility was ensuring the aircraft could accept and reject its payload, which varied from a 5 lb internally carried wooden block to several wiffle ball "bombs" that were dropped during the flight. Our system was designed to be manufactured almost entirely by 3D printing. Working closely with our in school machine shop, we had close control over our 3D printing process, fine-tuning the printer settings, materials, and design tolerances to achieve a highly functional design that would be extremely unpractical to build any other way.

Our team went on to win 11th in the world out of over 80 teams.

Leatherman is the world leading manufacturer of folding multi-purpose hand tools. Located in Portland, Oregon, Leatherman has developed a brand name synonymous with American-made quality and innovative design.

During my junior year of college I worked for Leatherman as a product design engineer with the Multiple Engineering Cooperative (MECOP) program at Oregon State. In this role I worked with a small but effective team of engineers that designed all of Leatherman's tools -- from the smallest Pocket tools to the larger and more well-known full size tools, such as Wave. Of the many amazing aspects of working for this team, the variance of everyday work stood out the most. Engineers in my role were involved in everything from design to manufacturing, testing, validation, packaging, etc. It was a fantastic first professional experience as a young engineer.

I had over 30 projects at Leatherman, from large to small. Most noteworthy is my development work on Leap, the first multi-tool ever designed specifically for kids. For Leap I helped develop a new style of saw, one that could be made cheaper than the standard production unit. I prototyped and tested several manufacturing procedures that created the saw teeth by stamping instead of grinding and machining. As a manufacturing process, stamping is significantly faster than grinding and machining and uses less raw material, resulting in a large cost saving per unit. I also helped revive a previously used but relatively unknown testing procedure (the original saw was designed and tested 25+ years ago) to ensure the newly developed saw worked as well as the current production saw. Unfortunately, my time ended at Leatherman before Leap went into full production, but I documented my work well so that it will continue to help Leatherman engineers down the road.

If you drive across the United States you are bound to run into wind turbines. These large rotating structures are being installed at record rates because of their ability to turn wind energy into electricity renewably. One characteristic of these turbines is there enormous size, which is required for them to generate any meaningful amount of electricity from air. The reason for this can be explained by the concept of energy density, which is just the amount of energy in a given flow of fluid. This "density" is quite low for air, but is quite high for water -- think about swimming in a pool of water versus a pool of air (this is a trick, you're already swimming in a pool of air!). My undergraduate work focused on optimizing a novel kind of turbine that exploits this property by extracting energy from water instead of air.

The term for this kind of energy generation is called Hydrokinetic Energy Harvesting, which is just a fancy way of saying that we are pulling energy (harvesting) out of moving (dynamic) water (hydro). One way of extracting energy from fluid is by using oscillating hydrofoils, which are essentially just wings that pitch and heave to extract energy from the water as it passes. It turns out this process can be optimized if the hydrofoils are allowed to flex passively, allowing them to conform the the flow, much like how a fish moves through water.

My work was centered on understanding and testing this passively-flexible phenomenon, with the goal of establishing criteria for optimized motion. For my first project, I designed and created a symmetrical passively flexible wing. The wing consisted of a 3D printed inner structure and Monocote outer wrapping, and was bonded to a half-inch titanium rod that was inserted into the device used to move the wing. The device, which we had to redesign from a previous test, was adapted to pitch and heave the wing at (up to) two-hertz frequency in a sinusoidal motion. The wing/device combo was mounted in the Oregon State Low-Speed Wind Tunnel for testing, and has been used continually by masters/PhD students of the EFMRL. Tests performed include smoke-visualization and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV), both of which allow flow field visualization to aid with parameter optimization.

For as long as I can remember, I've always yearned to be able to drive. From RC cars when I was a kid to ATV's when I was a teenager, driving and working on vehicles has forever been a passion of mine. When I bought my first car, a 1991 Volkswagen GTI with almost 250k miles one it that my dad and I trailered home from southern Oregon, I quickly learned how to be a driveway mechanic more than I ever thought I would. Among many things, the car barely started, wouldn't idle, had both engine oil and coolant idiot lights on at the same time, had an exhaust leak so bad it had to be driven with the windows down, had poorly reconstructed body work on both doors, and wouldn't go into reverse. It was however "clean", and in mostly original shape.

Over the course of three years, I sunk in countless hours and countless dollars restoring my GTI to its former glory. I love the art form of auto restoration, and I took it slightly further by adding certain touches to make it "OEM +". Exterior modifications include: complete exterior two-stage paint job, shaved fender banana lights and corner seams, Audi 4000 electric sunroof with tilt, mk III door handles, electric locks with keyless entry, full butyl matting for acoustics, full Kenwood/Sony sound system with subwoofer, fog lights, and single-round grill with paint matched eyebrow. Engine modifications include: high performance ECU chip, Techtonics high-lift camshaft, Techtonics downpipe, as well as all sensors, radiator, thermostat, hoses, etc. replaced.

For the three years I had it, this car was my pride and joy. I learned so much working it and the experience definitely made me a better engineer.

When most people think of chips, the big names like Intel, Samsung, and Texas Instruments come to mind. That's right, I'm talking about computer chips, and while these companies deserve a lot of credit for designing the processors and memory used in our computers, there is a host of other companies that work hard to invent the manufacturing processes needed to create them. Lam Research is one such company, and I had the opportunity to work there for my second MECOP internship.

Modern semiconductor manufacturing employs some of the most technologically advanced processes ever created by man. Billions of tiny transistors can now fit on less than one square inch of silicon, with transistor gates on the order of 14 nm now possible and 9 nm on the horizon. Lam Research works on the edge of science to create these chips which our computers, smartphones, and tablets rely on.

At Lam I was part of the Plasma Enhanced Chemical Vapor Deposition (PECVD) hardware group responsible for designing the machines used to lay atomic scale films on thin circular sheets of silicon called wafers. These wafers, which are about the size of a medium pizza, are turned into computer chips by adding and removing hundreds of different kinds of films. The film is deposited by ejecting a gas mixture above the wafer through a device called a showerhead. The thickness of these films is crucial to proper operation of the chips, and spectacular care is taken to ensure their uniformity. In contrast to Leatherman, my entire time at Lam was spent trying to create one thing: a showerhead that would disperse gas more uniformly.

In this effort I created a special kind of showerhead that could be modified on the machine in situ. While difficult to imagine out of context, this design allowed the rapid testing of different showerhead designs without having to replace the whole unit. With each showerhead costing around $50k, this design created potential for massive cost saving.