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Brent Cullimore

I don’t mean “blood and guts” metaphorically. But I don’t mean it literally either. Best to call it analytic “blood and guts.” Plus, we’ll skip the guts for now, so you can relax.

And as you’ll see, I could have called this post “City…

Heat Pipes: aka Magic Pipes

Jane Baumann

In my previous blog on thermosiphons, I introduced a multipart blog on two-phase heat transport devices. With this blog, I would like to introduce you to heat pipes (sometimes…

Tim Panczak

I pulled into the parking lot of a small print shop in an industrial-looking area in Dublin, Ireland. I looked back at the one lane bridge I had just crossed. It was an ordinary looking bridge spanning a small canal and a rail line. I walked to the bridge,…

Brent Cullimore

It might be apparent by now that I get bothered by silly or strange things. But what’s the point of even having a pet peeve if you can’t enjoy it?

Thermally stratified tanks bother me.  Fill a tank partially full of cryogenic liquid, leave…

Jane Baumann

My husband and I have been lucky to have two wonderful human children, one who is a mechanical engineer living and working in California and the other is in her last year of college (opting not to be an engineer). My husband is Jim Harris, a mechanism…

Doug Bell

If, like me, you are a fan of the sitcom The Big Bang Theory, you may have heard the Spherical Chicken joke in the episode “The Cooper-Hofstadter Polarization:”

There's this farmer, and he has these chickens,…

Brent Cullimore

The field of positive psychology is devoted to making so-called “normal people” happier. A key observation is that people tend to be happiest when they are in a state called…

Doug Bell

My career as a thermal engineer started with balloons.

Not the ones you see at birthday parties or even the big colorful ones full of hot air, but scientific research balloons: 400-foot diameter bags of helium carrying thousands of pounds of…

Brent Cullimore

I like coffee, and when I need it, I need it now.

I have an electric pot that is powerful enough to dim the lights a little when I turn it on. I imagine Homer Simpson snoring with his feet resting on the control panel. When I turn on…

Brent Cullimore

Being perturbed isn’t much fun if you are a human.

But models love getting perturbed. We don’t perturb them enough, in fact.

OK, perturb has negative connotations. And perturber just sounds wrong in so many ways!