Beam Team PhD candidate David Grimmer participated in a summer internship at NASA Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, in the High Temperature and Smart Alloys branch of the Materials and Structures division. His internship supported the Hybrid Electric Aircraft Propulsion project, a NASA vision to improve future aircraft performance through the smart use of new gas/electrical hybrid systems.

David’s focus was on the development of lighter, cheaper and more efficient soft magnetic materials for tomorrow’s aircraft. He specifically worked on a homogenization scheme for nanocomposite amorphous soft magnetic materials. This work is closely related to his research at Colorado School of Mines on the continuum thermodynamic modeling of nanocomposite amorphous soft magnetic materials. David’s internship provided a fresh perspective on the practical side of materials science and engineering: no one else in his group at Glenn was a theoretician, so David learned a number of lessons regarding the experimental aspects of materials design and engineering.