MSE, MEng, head of space concepts at Metrea Aerospace and Kenyon alum Doni Moffa will visit campus to discuss his work in concept engineering.
"You learn a lot of physics at Kenyon. Then you graduate and discover that nobody hands you a problem set. They hand you a mission — track a wildfire from orbit, find a vessel lost at sea, detect a low-observable aircraft — and your job is to figure out what to model, what to build, and whether the physics even supports a solution.
"That's concept engineering: someone asks, "What if this existed?" You have to figure out if it's even possible, then use the physics, build the models, and analyze the data to prove (or disprove) the idea. Most of the work at Metrea Aerospace lives behind some classification boundary, so instead I'll show you the concept engineering process: the same physics, the same methods, just applied to something we can talk about openly.
"This talk revisits a project from my time at Kenyon, designing a better meat smoker, but this time using the tools I've picked up since: a multiphysics simulation coupling heat transfer, fluid flow, radiation, and smoke transport into a single computational model. It's a fun application of serious methods. We'll explore how computational models turn physical intuition into quantitative predictions, then turn an optimizer loose to search for the best design out of thousands of candidates. This is the same class of optimization I use professionally to design orbits, or find lost satellites.
"I'll also trace the path from Kenyon physics through an MSE and MEng in Aerospace Engineering to leading the Space Concepts Lab at Metrea, and why, at every step, the first principles instinct this department builds has been the differentiator.
"No prior experience required. Just a willingness to watch a computer draw weird shapes."
Join us on Friday, Apr. 17, for this exciting presentation from Moffa. Lunch will be available in Hayes 216 from 11:45 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., and the presentation will begin in Hayes 211/213 at 12:10 p.m. We hope to see you there!