Projects
Test systems, instrumentation, and research programmes — from contract R&D for aerospace and defence organisations, down through the fixturing that holds a test article steady enough to measure, to the solvers underneath the simulations.
01 Contract R&D
Scope
Customers arrived with programme objectives rather than test plans, so much of the role was the distance between the two — turning objectives into research plans, experiments, work assignments and a schedule of deliverables, and holding the technical relationship week to week.
I led weekly technical meetings with customer engineering teams: presenting results, resolving open technical questions, and agreeing what happened next. I planned research, testing, modelling and analysis across a small team, delegated where it made sense, and integrated the individual pieces into project-level outcomes.
I owned the biweekly and monthly technical reports — the documents that synthesised experimental data, modelling results, literature, technical risks and recommendations into something a customer's engineering organisation could act on.
On the bench I contributed to high-voltage test-system development, plasma-actuator characterisation, instrumentation troubleshooting, data analysis and reduced-order modelling.
Measurement-method audit
A controlled comparison of Rogowski-coil and resistive-shunt current measurement on the same discharge identified significant negative-cycle artefacts — a systematic error that biases a dataset without being visible in it. The comparison was not part of the original scope; it came out of a number that looked slightly wrong. It resulted in a recommendation to change how discharge current was characterised.
02 Test systems
A modular NACA 0018 airfoil carrying an array of surface actuators, sized for a 3′ × 3′ wind-tunnel test section, with a force balance measuring lift, drag and pitching moment across an adjustable angle of attack.
I advised the senior team that designed and validated it: defining technical requirements, running design reviews across mechanical design, high-voltage integration, instrumentation and tunnel implementation, then guiding the testing, troubleshooting, data interpretation and final validation.
A first-generation platform for evaluating surface actuators on an aircraft geometry: a scaled model split at the vertical nose-to-tail plane so a larger wingspan would fit the available test section, with modular wing and tail mounting, a rigid structural body, and supporting structure for either in-tunnel or stand-alone use.
I contributed mechanical design, high-voltage system integration, CFD in Ansys Fluent, experimental planning and project coordination. Testing exposed the mechanical and measurement limits that set the requirements for the in-tunnel system built after it — which is arguably the more useful outcome.
03 Automation
Manual data collection is where experimental campaigns go to die: it is slow, it is where operator variance creeps in, and it is why interesting parameter sweeps do not get run.
I automated the experimental procedure end to end — multi-axis CNC motion control driving the probe, National Instruments acquisition capturing the channels, and processing that took raw records to results without hand editing. Collection and processing time dropped by roughly 63%, which mostly bought back the ability to run sweeps that had previously been unaffordable.
The same approach carried into doctoral work: CNC positioning stages, live thrust-and-drag measurement, moment-isolation hardware, and purpose-built test articles and mounts, all designed for repeatability and throughput rather than a single run.
NI DAQ, oscilloscope-based voltage and current diagnostics, intensified high-speed imaging, precision force measurement.
Multi-axis CNC positioning for velocity-profile traverses and repeatable actuator placement.
Python and MATLAB pipelines: signal processing, batch analysis of large experimental datasets, empirical model fitting.
Moment-isolation hardware, force balances, airfoil test articles and mounts designed in SolidWorks and machined in-house.
04 Computational
A simulation result is worth what its verification is worth. The through-line here is comparing against something that can contradict me — an analytical solution, a reference code, or a finer grid.
An OpenFOAM study built on the NASA Turbulence Modeling Resource, which publishes curated experimental data, nested grids at known refinement ratios, and reference solutions from CFL3D and FUN3D. Having reference solutions matters: comparing against them on the same grid and model distinguishes a modelling error from a setup error.
Stage one is the zero-pressure-gradient flat plate. Five grid levels at a refinement ratio of two, from 816 to 208,896 cells, run with Spalart–Allmaras and k–ω SST and walls resolved to y⁺ = 0.13 on the finest mesh. Skin friction agrees with CFL3D and FUN3D to within 0.4–0.9% on the fine grids, and with the Kármán–Schoenherr correlation to within 1.2% averaged across fourteen stations.
Grid convergence is reported as observed order of accuracy and Grid Convergence Index. Two of the Spalart–Allmaras triplets converge non-monotonically, so no order can be extracted from them; those rows are marked undefined rather than filled in.
Earlier Graduate coursework
Electrohydrodynamic flow is a multiphysics problem: an electric field ionises the air, the ions drift, and their momentum transfer to neutral gas drives a jet. Solving it means coupling Poisson's equation for the field to Navier–Stokes for the flow through a Coulombic body-force term.
I built that solver — separate Laplace and Poisson field solvers, a Navier–Stokes component, and the coupling between them — and checked the result against the published analytical point-to-ring corona model of Guan et al. (2018).
The point-to-ring geometry is not incidental. It is the electrode configuration behind the axisymmetric plasma synthetic jets I now characterise experimentally, so this was the same physics approached from the other side.
A projection-method incompressible Navier–Stokes solver written in Fortran 90, with Python implementations alongside it, plus a standalone Poisson solver and 2D orthogonal grid generation written in MATLAB.
I solved the rotating cylinder with my own projection-method code across five successive mesh refinements, and ran the same case in Ansys — comparing an implementation I understood line by line against a commercial code I did not.
Projection method for the incompressible equations, structured grids, successive mesh refinement.
2D orthogonal grid generation implemented directly rather than taken from a mesher.
Fortran 90 for the solver core, MATLAB and Python for meshing, prototyping and post-processing.
Own implementation run against Ansys on the same case, and against analytical solutions where they exist.
05 Breadth
Graduate courses taken deliberately outside my field, each ending in a written report and a talk.
2025ME 567
Molecular engineering · report and seminar presentation
2023ME 537
Mechanical engineering · report and presentation
Neither is my research area, which is why they are here.
06 Ongoing
The longest-running project on this page, and the one that taught me most of the rest of it: a multi-year experimental campaign characterising how actuator geometry, dielectric properties, voltage and frequency determine what a surface discharge does — assembled into operating maps rather than isolated data points.
Three publications and international conference presentations have come out of it so far, alongside mentoring undergraduate researchers and advising capstone teams. I also serve as the lab's Chemical Hygiene Officer, where a sustained push on procedure and documentation moved the EHS inspection score from 44 to 96.
07 Contact
Questions about any of this, or about the research behind it, are welcome.