Computer Aided Design

After graduating from my Bachelor's program, and prior to embarking on graduate school, I made use of my mechanical engineering diploma working as an instrument design and assembly assistant at the University of Calgary. In this time, I mechanically and electrically redesigned the rocket Mini Plasma Imager (rMPI) developed by Dr. Johnathan K. Burchill (U. Calgary). This instrument is a spherical retarding potential analyzer with a sweeping dome potential, which allows the ion velocity distribution to be scanned with a one-dimensional ion CCD. My contributions includes of full redesign of the instrument housing, PCB mounting, and ion baffling, improving aparature accuracy, manufacturability, and decreasing overall power usage and weight. The rendering on the left is of the redesigned rMPI I created using SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Production, Testing and Integration

Additionally to mechanically designing with SOLIDWORKS, I worked hand-in-hand with the U. Calgary machine shop, something that greatly facillitated the production process. I also helped in the redesign of the two seven-layer controller PCBs, allowing for a stacked board design, and populated them using surface-mount soldering. During production, I performed CCD controller signal testing, vacuum plasma tests, and helped with vibration testing. At the time of writing, six of these instruments have flown successfully on two sounding rocket missions. At left is an rMPI mounted in the vacuum chamber ready for plasma testing.