_Dr. Michael Short
Reverse Engineer and Sysadmin, Ergopedia, 2005-Present
Teaching
I am currently teaching the Nuclear Systems Design Course (22.033) in MIT's Nuclear Science & Engineering department. This class takes all the single-subject courses learned so far, and teaches students how to integrate them into a fully functional and technically sound large-scale system.
This year's project is to design a nuclear reactor capable of generating another form of green power, either hydrogen (for fuel cells) or biofuels, in an energy-efficient and carbon capturing manner. It is an excellent integration of green electricity and green fuel production.
I have been teaching the engineering design process, trade-offs between design parameters, economics, and deadlines, and modeling & integration of multiple coupled, non-linear design elements.
In order to help illustrate difficult concepts (like metal fatigue & failure) to my students, I devised a cheese tasting class, where cheese were paired with their edible accoutrements as well as metal which behave in a similar fashion. The phenomena of metal fracture and cheese fracture are astonishingly similar, as can be seen in the photo above.
This year's project is to design a nuclear reactor capable of generating another form of green power, either hydrogen (for fuel cells) or biofuels, in an energy-efficient and carbon capturing manner. It is an excellent integration of green electricity and green fuel production.
I have been teaching the engineering design process, trade-offs between design parameters, economics, and deadlines, and modeling & integration of multiple coupled, non-linear design elements.
In order to help illustrate difficult concepts (like metal fatigue & failure) to my students, I devised a cheese tasting class, where cheese were paired with their edible accoutrements as well as metal which behave in a similar fashion. The phenomena of metal fracture and cheese fracture are astonishingly similar, as can be seen in the photo above.
Research
I study the behavior of metals in nuclear reactor and other energy production environments. My main interests are corrosion, fatigue, structural materials, radiation resistance, and new alloy development. I also work on simulating reactor accidents and figuring out how to prevent them.
For my PhD, I developed a metal composite capable of resisting liquid lead and lead-bismuth eutectic (LBE) corrosion in advanced nuclear reactors. LBE-cooled reactors have tons of inherent safety features, that make them more fault-tolerant and robust than light water reactors. For example, LBE doesn't boil until 1670C, so even during an accident, the coolant won't boil away. LBE also doesn't produce hydrogen upon high temperature interaction with reactor materials.
It is my hope that working on advances like these will make nuclear power a safer, more economical, and greener option for energy production in the very near future. My passion is working on research like this to improve reactors, and to make events like the Fukushima incident a thing of the past.
Elements!
I've got an element collection. I am collecting tangible samples of all the naturally occurring elements, plus any non-natural ones I can get my hands on. Currently I have 76 of the 88 naturally occuring elements. Shown here are a few of my favorite samples.