Leif Engstrom Email and Phone Number

I was interested in vortices to create energy and revitalize rivers by working within the center of the river to reduce erosion. Working from within the center of the stream has been done by a hydrologist engineer Otmar Grober. Grober used boulders in a hyperbolic funnel pattern to achieve this. Will Jefferies and I wanted to find a geometric shape that could be made to do the same thing. Allowing for a concrete object to be placed in a river and do the same thing and be quicker and easier to install.We started by finding professors to sign off on the project and then we found the funding which turned out to be from outside the college. We made connections like Christine Sindelar Head of Hydraulics Laboratory, BOKU Vienna. Dr. Sindeler was very helpful in guiding us in our method for collecting data on the fluid flow around our geometric shape and introducing us to the OpenPIV "Particle image velocimetry(PIV)" program. I did all of the programming to make a Python program called Open(PIV) efficient at handling multiple pictures and saving the output images. Another contact was Jorg Schauberger the son of Walter Schauberger whose math paper I got the egg equation. I used a mathematical formula that creates an egg curve and scaled and made it work in SOLIDWORKS. Jorg Schauberger gave us information that helped us design our final geometric shape. We used an egg curve because the water flows around an egg shape easily. This increased our chances of creating a shape that can influence a longitudinal vortex in a river.

The first summer I started working in the grinding room working on cast iron pieces. in about one month I was so efficient that my colleague and I got a new record of grinding done so that no one had to grind for about 6 months after. During this time, I learned enough SOLIDWORKS that when the Design engineer quit, I took his place, working on the Navajo Stove and working with prints for other stoves for the manufacturing department. I was also on the team designing the Navajo Stove, where I was instrumental in the design of 75% of the parts on the stove. I designed a revolutionary gravity-locking key mechanism. That allowed the bye-pass rod to be dropped into two slots which were then locked in place by two of my gravity-locking keys. This reduced manufacturing and assembly time. The second summer, I was in charge of reverse engineering the Mini Franklin Gas Stove so we could manufacture it on-site. I also increased productivity by organizing the working drawings so no one would end up trying to use an outdated working drawing and save me time trying to find the right one. We hired a fireplace ceramic company to make our ceramic design for the Mini Franklin gas burner and I was in charge of communication with this company.