Eric Inclan (Mechanical Engineering)
About DOE Fellow
Eric Inclan graduated from Florida International University with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2006. Upon graduation, he worked as a project manager for Florida Power & Light, where he was responsible for all of the new construction projects located within a highly populated region of Broward County (including the cities of Deerfield Beach, Coconut Creek, Parkland, Pompano Beach, Margate, and Lighthouse Point). He is currently completing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering, with a focus on fluid mechanics and non-linear problem solving (fuzzy logic, neural networks, and multi-objective optimization). He is a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Eric is currently a student assistant at Georgia Institute of Technology Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory.
DOE Related Projects
The US DOE Hanford Site in Washington State contains high-level waste (HLW) whose chemical composition is more complex and diverse than at any other site. Consequently, transfer pipelines can and have become completely obstructed by substances that possess a variety of properties (high radioactivity sludge and crystallized precipitates, among others) which make them very difficult to remove.
Over the past four year,s Florida International University’s Applied Research Center (ARC) has evaluated two technologies proposed for pipeline unplugging. Of the two technologies currently being investigated, Eric’s research will focus on the Asynchronous Pulsing Method (APM). Working under the supervision of Tomas Pribanic, Eric will assist in designing a device to clear transfer pipelines by modeling the device and fluid flow field surrounding it, and simulating its performance using CFD programs such as Fluent and Abaqus.