Ph.D. Mechanical Engineering · University of Washington
I design and run experiments that produce numbers you can defend — then I write them up so the people funding the work can act on them. My proving ground is high-voltage plasma: noisy signals, tiny forces, and no textbook to check against.
01 Overview
I design experimental systems end to end — the fixturing that holds the test article, the drive and diagnostics, the motion and acquisition that collect the data, and the analysis that turns it into a defensible result. When the instrument does not exist yet, I build it.
The other half of the job is saying what the data means. I spent nine months coordinating customer-sponsored R&D for aerospace and defence organisations — running weekly technical meetings, owning biweekly and monthly reports, and translating programme objectives into experiments, work assignments and deliverables.
My doctoral research at the University of Washington is on atmospheric-pressure surface dielectric barrier discharge actuators: devices that move air with no moving parts. It is a useful proving ground precisely because almost everything about the measurement is hostile — kilovolt drive noise, forces measured in micronewtons, and a discharge that changes inside a single cycle.
02 Selected work
Spectree Inc · contract mechanical engineer, for major aerospace and defence organisations.
A customer arrives with a programme objective, not a test plan. My job was the distance between the two: turning objectives into research plans, experiments, work assignments and a schedule of deliverables — then running the technical relationship week to week.
Alongside the coordination I did the technical work — high-voltage test-system development, actuator characterisation, instrumentation troubleshooting, data analysis and reduced-order modelling — and owned the biweekly and monthly reports that synthesised experimental data, modelling, literature, technical risks and recommendations.
The result I am most pleased with was not a headline number. A controlled comparison of Rogowski-coil and resistive-shunt current measurement on the same discharge surfaced major negative-cycle artefacts — the kind of systematic error that quietly biases an entire dataset if nobody thinks to check. That became a recommendation to change how discharge current was characterised.
03 Research
Surface DBD actuators are simple, non-mechanical, and nearly instantaneous. Making them predictable is the hard part.
i
How a surface discharge adds momentum to co-flow and counter-flow freestreams — boundary-layer thinning, separation onset, and the non-dimensional criteria that tell you when actuation will actually do something.
ii
Axisymmetric and annular DBD plasma synthetic jets: zero-net-mass-flux momentum injection from an exposed ring electrode, characterised electromechanically and by direct thrust measurement across geometry and drive conditions.
iii
Ignition, saturation, and electrical behaviour as functions of geometry, dielectric material, voltage, and frequency — assembled into engineering operating maps rather than one-off data points.
04 Practice
A plasma actuator result is only as good as the instrument that produced it. I design and operate the whole chain — high-voltage drive, diagnostics, motion, acquisition, and the analysis behind it — so that a measurement means the same thing next week as it did today.
That includes building the hardware when it does not exist yet: CNC positioning stages, moment-isolation fixtures, live thrust-and-drag balances, and airfoil test articles designed for repeatability and throughput rather than a single run.
05 Selected publications
2025
International Journal of Plasma Environmental Science and Technology · Vol. 19, e01011 · April 2025
First-author experimental study of an axisymmetric DBD plasma synthetic jet, including parametric electromechanical characterisation and direct thrust measurement.
2025
AIAA SciTech Forum 2025 · Oral presentation, published abstract
Parametric experimental investigation of axisymmetric DBD plasma synthetic-jet thrust across geometric and electrical operating conditions.
2024
Journal of Electrostatics · Vol. 129, 103918 · June 2024
Experimental characterisation of DBD momentum injection into co-flow and counter-flow boundary layers, including flow separation and a non-dimensional momentum criterion.
06 Contact
I am always glad to talk about plasma actuators, experimental test design, or high-voltage instrumentation — and I am interested in experimental R&D and advanced hardware roles as I finish the Ph.D. in 2027.
benprice@uw.edu
/in/price-ben ↗
GitHub
@benprice2310 ↗
Google Scholar
Publications ↗
ORCID
0000-0002-2335-6814 ↗
Based in
Seattle, Washington
Affiliation
UW Mechanical Engineering
Status
Ph.D. expected 2027