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Dr. Bryden is an associate professor of Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University and a research associate of the Virtual Reality Applications Center. Dr. Bryden's teaching interests include cooperative learning, undergraduate research as a teaching tool, design engineering within the thermal-fluids systems curriculum, and teaching engineering in a studio environment. Dr. Bryden currently teaches a wide range of thermal systems courses including ME 444 Power Plant Engineering and ME 446 Power Plant Design. He is actively engaged in undergraduate research and currently has 4 undergraduate research assistants. Dr. Bryden's primary research interests are in the areas of thermal systems virtual engineering, numerical modeling of biomass combustion, and the development and improvement of biomass cookstoves for the poor. Virtual engineering requires the integration of virtual reality, high performance computing, and new computational algorithms to solve complex, tightly coupled engineering and decision analysis problems. The engineering problems he is currently pursuing include the development of virtual pilot plants for the power generation and chemical processing industries and human-in-the-loop solutions for optimization and control, thermal system design, and maintenance. The goal of this research is to develop detailed simulations of industrial products and decision-making processes. These simulations will be presented within a virtual environment which will become the focus point of all information available at all stages of the decision making process. This requires that several technologies including computational modeling, systems analysis, real time analysis, and virtual reality be coupled together to create comprehensive simulations that can be accessed by multiple users in real time. Dr. Bryden came to ISU from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1998, where he completed his Ph.D. in numerical modeling of biomass combustion systems. Prior to this, he worked 14 years in a wide range of engineering positions at Westinghouse Electric Corporation within the Naval Reactors Program. This included 8 years in power plant operations and testing and 6 years in engineering support. More than 10 of these years were spent in engineering management. In his last position as the Manager of Radiological Controls Engineering at the Naval Reactors Facility in Idaho Falls, Idaho, he was responsible for all radiological controls engineering for three naval nuclear prototype plants and a navy nuclear fuel handling facility. Because of this “hands-on?engineering experience, Dr. Bryden has unique insight into the practical application of simulation and modeling to real engineering problems. Dr. Bryden is the recipient of several awards and fellowships, including the Power Engineering Education Fellowship. |