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sbarthelson
Stephen Barthelson has over thirty years of experience with mechanical and aerospace engineering. Following a masters degree in mechanical engineering from University of Virginia his non academic c...view moreStephen Barthelson has over thirty years of experience with mechanical and aerospace engineering. Following a masters degree in mechanical engineering from University of Virginia his non academic career began in 1979 at Pratt and Whitney as a performance engineer for large commercial turbofan engines, used on passenger jets. This work also involved stability and control, working mostly with rotating stalls on 747 engines. The job at Pratt and Whitney was followed by one as a performance engineer at Teledyne CAE, working with small cruise missile engines. This was followed by a return to graduate school, this time working on a doctorate at University of Toledo, which was achieved by 1988. His dissertation was partially funded by NASA Lewis, and involved turbulent flow modeling of incompressible flow using computational fluid dynamics. He then received experience with compressible flow modeling at Purdue University, where he completed post doctoral work as preparation for work on aerothermopressor research with a small Tucson based company that again was also partially funded by NASA Lewis. The intent of this research was to extend the operation of ramjets or scramjets to a lower flight number that would theoretically allow supersonic or hypersonic vehicles to takeoff without the assistance of rocket engines –or any engines involving turbomachinery for that matter. But following the collapse of the small Tucson based company the author spent several years modeling coal fired power plants, using numerical combustion codes developed at Brigham Young University, where he spent three years doing postdoctoral work. This was also followed by a brief stint in Louisiana, working with large bore piston engines used for natural gas compression. But by 1996 the author was working at NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility at Wallops Island, Virginia as a flight performance engineering contractor involving a dozen unmanned, sounding rocket launches. This position provided valuable aerodynamic experience to supplement his computational fluid dynamics background. There was also some experience with large, unmanned, high altitude balloons during his several years at Wallops. Following work at Wallops the author was employed as a Belcan contractor at GE Aircraft Engines in Evendale, Ohio doing 3-d numerical heat transfer studies of turbine engine blades and vanes. This experience was valuable in terms of understanding turbofan engine hot sections in much greater detail. But after other valuable engineering experience the author again became a NASA contractor –but this time for NASA Langley. While at Langley he has gained considerable experience here with systems heat transfer analysis of spacecraft here, but also with computational fluid dynamics modeling of aircraft –and also pickup trucks, in an aerodynamic drag reduction study. And recent work has involved aircraft engine modeling, and coke plant modeling.view less