Bryan Palaszewski

Bryan Palaszewski has worked at the NASA Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field since 1989 and is currently directing research on high performance propellants. The current focus of his research is in nanoparticle metal additives for gelled liquid fuels, and solid hydrogen for atomic propellants. The nanoparticle metal additives were investigated for many applications, and combustion testing with a pulse detonation engine proved very successful. The freezing experiments with solid hydrogen are related to the potential of atomic rocket propellants, storing atomic species (boron, carbon, or hydrogen) in frozen cryogenic materials. He recently led the Fire Prevention - Accident Mitigation aspects of the NASA /FAA Aviation Safety Program, investigating ways of making aircraft and their fuels safer. In 1996, he led the NASA Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) special topic for commercializing safer, denser propellants. In 1995, he led a team to plan the testing of a 1500 pound thrust Oxygen/Hydrogen windowed rocket engine with laser-based measurements of injector and combustor mixing. From 1989 to 1994, he developed many diverse systems analyses of space vehicles using metallized gelled propellants, and performed combustion testing of Oxygen/RP-1/Aluminum with subscale 25 to 50 pound thrust rocket hardware. Gelled cryogenic propellants, including gelled hydrogen, were also formulated in cooperative work with industry. For six years, he led many studies of advanced space systems for orbital and interplanetary travel at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, CA. These included space station resupply tankers, nuclear powered radar satellites, nuclear reactor shield design, thermochemical heat pipes, space vehicle tankage design and fracture mechanics. He also conducted explosion overpressure safety analyses for the Galileo spacecraft, and preliminary design of many spacecraft propulsion systems for human and robotic missions to nearly every target in the solar system. He was also the lead propulsion subsystem engineer on the Ocean Topography Experiment (TOPEX) for three years, as well as being involved other flight projects such as the Galileo Mission to Jupiter and the Cassini Mission to Saturn. He holds a Master of Science Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Bachelors Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the City College of New York. His Masters thesis dealt with low Reynolds Number flow in the human eye and its linkage to glaucoma. He grew up in Brooklyn, NY, and loves every aspect of New York. He has received the AIAA Sustained Service Award in 2004, and was chair of the AIAA Nuclear and Future Flight Propulsion Technical committee for 3 years. He was also part of the Propellants and Combustion Technical Committee and has held many local AIAA chapter leadership positions. He was the chair of the first AIAA High School Chapter ever established and this leadership position was with the Brooklyn Technical High School. He has led the development of national AIAA professional development courses for 8 years, as part of the Nuclear and Future Flight Technical Committee.