2011 - Present:
US Navy, NAVSEA, NSWC Indian Head
Component Technology Branch
2009 - 2011:
US Army, RDECOM, ARDEC
Fuze Divison, MEMS Team
Key Skills Learned/Utilized:
- MEMS general knowledge and PhD-level coursework
- Metal MEMS familiarity (X-Ray & UV Liga)
- 3-D CAD design of mechanical hardware; analysis and testing
- Finite Element Method Analysis
- Presentation experience at national industry conference
- General knowledge of military systems, weapons and explosives
- US Government Acquisition Training Program
As a mechanical engineer for the United States Department of Defense, I have had varied work experience since 2009, at several different research labs.
My responsibilities over this time have included novel concept brain-storming, hardware design, structural analysis, along with unit-level testing and integration. I worked in the area of MEMS technology, with applications to fuzing and safety devices. The fuze of a munition is its "brain," telling it when to be safe (aka inert, so if it is dropped it will not function), when to arm itself; once it is armed how it should function. One component of a fuze is the safety and arming device (S&A), which is a mechanism intended to keep the explosive train "out-of-line" normally (i.e. an inadvertent initiation of the primary charge would not set off the powerful secondary explosive), and mechanically align it when so desired.
What is MEMS? (wikipedia link)
Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems is a very new and exciting area of engineering research (born in the late 1980s). It consists of, in layman's terms, new manufacturing and design processes to make electro-mechanical systems smaller than ever thought possible. Some applications of MEMS technology include biomedical devices small enough to be implanted in the human eye, very tiny sensors packaged into laptops, and even robots the size of a fly or an ant. Below are some Google images of various MEMS applications out there today.
