This is what I do...

These are some old pictures of me, Brandon, at work (sort of). They are all staged, but they are fun things I get to do. First, I worked at Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Engines (East Hartford, CT) for an internship one summer. While I was there, I got to have my picture taken with two of my friends that were working with me in the inlet of a PW4000 turbofan aircraft engine. This is the engine that was designed and built for Boeing's new 777 jumbo jet. At the time, it was largest engine of its kind. The total inlet size is about 9 ft (3m)

The next series of pictures is in my lab. My desk would be behind the camera in the above shot. The furnaces were heated to 1072 C for an aging heat treatment of a single crystal, nickel base, superalloy. The work being done here is for someone else in the group. I just happened to be available at 10 pm when they needed to come out. The reason I am dressed up is because we were on our way to see a play directed by a good friend of ours.

It's hard to tell in this picture, but no I am not putting the hot metal into a paper box.

This is a good picture of the slabs cooling down. In the foreground, you can see all of the bars that have already been heat treated. For this project my friend Kevin and I heat treated around 60 bars and 8 slabs three times. The three different heat treatments each produced a very specific structure. It took us a couple of weeks and a lot of late nights starting or ending heat treatments.

Well, that's all I have for now. Maybe some day I can post pictures of what these metals look like under an electron microscope.