The worst safety event we’ve had in the HYPER Center occurred back on a sunny morning in August of 2016 when a bird flew into a substation and knocked out power to campus. Normally this wouldn’t have been an issue but on this particular morning we were prepared to do a liquid hydrogen test and had one of our experiments full. When the power shutoff, so did our cryocooler allowing heat to reach liquid and boil, rapidly pressurizing our storage … Cold Facts — The Magazine of the Cryogenic Society of America ..read more

I extracted the smoking flower and slammed it against the table — shattering it into bits. The audience (20 or so elementary school kids amassed in the Uniontown library) ooohed. About 15 seconds later is when the real magical happened — the anthers (the parts of the flower that make pollen) lying on the table began to jump, like jumping beans, around the shattered remnants. I could tell that the anthers were snap-through buckling due to thermal expansion, and the geometry was allowing some of them to spring off the table. It was transformational and the audience couldn’t get enough of it. I h ..read more

The School of Mechanical … in the world. Why the change? New HYPER faculty and staff. has joined HYPER as a faculty affiliate. Konstantin’s expertise is fluid-surface phenomena that he investigates using experimental, reduced order modeling, and computational fluid dynamics techniques. Two-phase hydrogen is notoriously difficult. Konstantin has previous experience with cryogenics having completed a post-doc at Los Alamos on thermoacoustic cryocooler systems ..read more

There might not be a more simple, yet important word in the English dictionary. You’re likely benefiting from kits of various forms right now and unaware ..read more

Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) CEO Dave Whitehead interviewed me for their SEL Drive podcast series on energy and the electric grid. You can listen to the interview using one of the following links/services: Cool Fuel: A Future for Green Hydrogen in the Pacific Northwest (selinc.com ..read more

So when I tell the lab that we need more workspaces, I’m not telling them to build a workbench, testbench, designbench, or studybench. I’m telling them “build to ..read more

The WSU Media team recently became the first outside group allowed to shoot onsite in Blue Origin’s 20 year history. HYPER alumni had a few important things to say. Check out this video on why are alumni chose to study the coolest fuel in the universe (hydrogen) and why you should too ..read more

Flash back for a moment to that time in college when the professor had a typo on the assignment that caused you to lose a night in frustration. Anger, fatigue, and disrespect come to mind as you stormed to class the next day, handed in the assignment, and pointed out the mistake, now corrected. The professor, unmoved by the display, proceeds to pull up the original research publication on which the assignment was based, where the same error appears, an error, sans erratum, that … Cold Facts, the magazine of the Cryogenic Society of America ..read more

WSU may be the best developmental engineering program in the Western US. Nowhere else will you find a more rural Research 1 class institution that is typically viewed as the #2 school in the state. These two defining traits are directly aligned with our to bridge the technoeconomic urban versus rural divide. Where some schools just process through people who were already performers, WSU must reap the seeds we sow. Said simply, we’re going to do our best to develop you into your best. Since we’re the only liquid hydrogen research focused lab in US academia, everyone coming in the door ..read more

A key difference between science and engineering is practice ..read more