Technology

Concerns about sustainability and combustion emissions associated with fossil fuels, combined with a volatile and uncertain market has heightened world interest in clean, renewable sources of energy. The technologies of Electric Jet, LLC continue to focus on the development of a hydrogen gas turbine that could be integrated with other clean renewable energy sources for a systemic approach to energy needs.

Resources

Conference Papers published by Electric Jet, LLC team members.

News

Electric Jet received their first approved patent for premixing injector for hydrogen gas turbines.

Virginia Tech Affiliates

Walter O’Brien - Acting CTO
Dr. Walter O'Brien is the J. Bernard Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Virginia Tech.  He was Head of the Mechanical Engineering Department from 1993 to 2004.  He currently teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in aerospace propulsion, gas turbines, and turbomachinery, and has expertise in specialized instrumentation techniques. He is presently conducting research on the use of hydrogen as a fuel in gas turbines, performance modeling of turbines at low Reynolds numbers, active flow control using ion plasma methods, and the design of serpentine inlets for use with embedded turbine engines.  His research programs are supported by NASA, the USAF, and the propulsion industry, His patented plasma torch-based combustion ignition techniques have demonstrated performance in M=2.4 flows, and have potential application in turbine engine augmentors. He has published over 120 journal articles, papers and reports in these and related fields. He has supervised the graduate work of more than one hundred M.S. and Ph.D. students. 
Dr. O'Brien is a Life Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Dr. Uri Vandsburger
Dr. Vandsburger has 26 years of experience in areas related to combustion, and 32 years of post graduation engineering experience.  He has been employed by Stanford University and Virginia Tech after receiving his Ph.D. in Europe prior to that time.  He has supervised projects in the areas of soot formation, pool and building fires, fluid flow instabilities, shear flows control, combustion instabilities, combustion control and spray dynamics and control.  His Ph.D. work was primarily in the area of solar energy.  In addition, he attempts to address the usage and development of measurement techniques, electro-optical and simpler diagnostics which are more applicable to real full scale equipment.  In 1996, while at Virginia Tech, he formed the Virginia Active Combustion Control Group (VACCG) to address the issues of combustion instabilities.  To address this multi-disciplinary topic, the group included experts in fluids/combustion, acoustics, dynamic systems and control.  The students were exposed to all areas, took classes and interfaced with all professors.  This yielded renaissance engineers, over 27 of them snatched up by the Gas Turbine industry.  To date the VACCG was funded by government agencies, e.g., DOE, NASA, ONR, industrial OEM and private investors.  The VACCG projects covered Reduced Order Model development, FRF measurement and actuator development.  To date he has graduated 9 Ph.D. students and 16 M.S. students.

Steve LePera
Steve LePera received his bachelors and masters degrees from Virginia Tech, and now works as a researcher in the Combustion Systems Dynamics Laboratory (CSDL).  In addition to being a lead researcher on several projects, his responsibilities include day to day management of the CSDL facility, oversight of design and operation of all the experiments that take place in the CSDL, and administration of the CSDL data acquisition, control, and computational computer systems.