SpearrinLab

Honored to be recognized by colleagues in the combustion community with the Tsuji award and thankful for their mentorship and collaboration!

Congrats to our undergraduate engineers in UCLA Rocket Project @RPatUCLA on designing and successfully hot-firing their first regeneratively cooled liquid oxygen - ethanol rocket engine with nearly 2,000 lb thrust! Sound on! @UCLAengineering @UCLAMechAeroEng

Lab dinner at C&Os with a few alums!

Congratulations to @UCLA @uofcalifornia Assoc. Profs. Elaheh Ahmadi of @ECE_UCLA and Mitchell Spearrin of @UCLAMechAeroEng on each receiving a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE). samueli.ucla.edu/elaheh-ahmadi-…

Congratulations to our lab member Alex Keller on receiving the Walter Lempert Best Student Paper from the AIAA SciTech Forum for his work on characterizing coaxial rocket injection using laser tomography! @aiaa @UCLAengineering @UCLAMechAeroEng

Annual lab BBQ, 2024. Kicking off the academic year by welcoming new lab members and bringing back some alums.

Lab graduates Isabelle and Kevin (now working for NASA) helped inspire some of the next generation of space engineers on a tour of @NASAJPL facilities, with rover demonstrations and a tour of the command center for deep space missions.

A third of our undergraduates are first-generation college students

Congrats to our PhD student Ariya Olaee on receiving the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) fellowship! samueli.ucla.edu/2-engineering-…

Congrats to Isabelle Sanders for earning the @UCLAengineering Outstanding PhD award in Aerospace Engineering for her contributions to improved understanding of hybrid combustion relevant to rockets and fires! She's joined @NASAJPL to continue her career in space technologies

Congratulations to Kevin Schwarm on completing his PhD in our lab @UCLAengineering. He made major contributions in the advancement of laser diagnostics for real-time analysis of polyfuel engines, wildfires, and even exhaled breath! He's now applying his expertise @NASAJPL

It was great to celebrate UCLA engineering commencement this weekend with Kevin and Isabelle, our lab's two most recent PhD graduates!

Congrats to our @UCLAengineering students @RPatUCLA on breaking their own record, launching their student-built liquid rocket to 24,111 ft in Mojave, with throttling and complete recovery. This marks 3 consecutive years launching over 20K ft with improved performance each year!

And here's a closer view of one of the tests with better audio...sound on (2/2)

Our undergraduate UCLA Rocket Project students @RPatUCLA set a new club record with 5 liquid rocket engine hot fires in 1 day at the Mojave test facility. Great work demonstrating throttle capability! @UCLAMechAeroEng @UCLAengineering (1/2)

Congrats to Kate Oberlander for winning best poster and runner-up best oral presentation at the @UCLAengineering summer undergraduate research symposium for her work in our lab on hybrid combustion and toxicant formation in fires involving fluorinated polymers @UCLAMechAeroEng

And here's a video of one of the fire experiments under WPI's enormous fume hood

Last week marked our first field test campaign examining structural fire emissions in collaboration with @WPI. Isabelle and Nick successfully deployed our laser-based sensors for measuring key toxicants associated with burning synthetic materials in a sub-scale compartment.

Lab night out, Go Dodgers!

Congrats to our most recent PhD graduate Christopher Jelloian! He pioneered our lab's research on radiative heat transfer during Mars entry and led a highly successful test series with NASA Ames. Congrats on the new job in @northropgrumman's Future Technical Leaders program!