Mechanical engineering usually deals with things that move. This includes automobiles and roller coasters, as well as manufacturing processes, such as fluids, heat, and fire.
It’s hard to do research without being curious. The desire to know “why?” is what really drives research forward and allows for new discoveries.
How do wildland fuels ignite, or start? How long do wildland fires burn? The goal of my research is to understand how wildland fire actually spreads. Surprisingly, we still don’t know the details.
Our goal is to understand wildland fire in a completely new way, so we design and build a lot of our own equipment. For example, we built an electric heater that heats air up to flame temperatures. This invention helps us understand the role of hot gases in the fire starting process.
What makes the study of wildland fire so exciting is its complexity. You have to know information from many topics, such as fluid dynamics, heat transfer, chemistry, plant biology, and physiology.
I was always curious about how things worked. It wasn’t until college that I realized mechanical engineering provided a physical understanding of the world that I’ve always wanted. It is such a broad field that I could really do anything with my career.
