Meet Dr. Michael Kinzel

Disclaimer: At the time of the interview, Dr. Kinzel was an Associate Professor in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Central Florida, so this interview largely reflects his experiences in that role.

What sparked your interest in STEM?

I just had a strong interest in how things worked as a child. I was always the kid breaking everything and trying to put it back together. Maybe I was pulling it apart and trying to put back together too. I think that, along with a basic interest in science and math and physics, leads to a STEM career. But, engineering specifically was what pointed me in that direction.

How did your experiences in college and grad school shape your career?

I started at a smaller university, Northern Arizona University. It was in my hometown. Going to school in your hometown can be a little bit different: maybe a little more interaction with family, more interaction with old friends, and these sorts of things. I look back, and I probably did too much work outside of engineering, but I still focused on the classroom. I finally started getting into research in my final year at the university, which really helped me link into internships. I went to work for a wind turbine company, which helped get me into my graduate school at Penn State University.

Graduate schools for most STEM fields including engineering tend to pay for your schooling. So, you’re getting paid to do research projects there. I started focusing on helicopters and novel helicopter design concepts for my master’s degree. Then, I moved onto super cavitating torpedoes for my PhD. These are novel, very fast torpedoes that go underwater. About halfway through my PhD, I started working full time at the laboratory as well as continuing my PhD. I think that all of these things really helped me in my career now.

I feel strongly about thesis options. Now, a lot of universities are dropping thesis options, and I feel like developing a thesis really helps you formulate novel ideas, discuss them, and present them. That whole presentation aspect of it really helps you pull your ideas together so that they’re cohesive. That specific tribute is very important to a STEM career: how do you pull together all kinds of complex information and present it to somebody in a way that helps us push the state of the art?

What is computational fluid dynamics (CFD)?

My specialty is something called computational fluid dynamics. Basically, we try to reproduce very complicated flows—anything that you can envision that has flows. We specifically look at complicated aerodynamics using these computational fluid dynamics methods.

The big idea is that we could reproduce something with a higher level of confidence than with testing. If you want to understand the safety of an airplane, you definitely need to test it and test its underlying aerodynamics to develop confidence in it. We’re using computers and very detailed models of aircraft, for example, to develop more confidence in its performance. In the end, it saves time and money.

Can you talk about NASA’s Dragonfly Mission and your role within the project?

We’re working on what's called the Dragonfly mission. It’s the first lander that is flying completely. Obviously, Mars Ingenuity is a flying aircraft on Mars, but it had a base lander that’s still a rover. This one’s completely flying, so that’s the unique aspect of it. The goal of the mission is to understand Saturn’s moon Titan, and specifically understand how this body behaves. But, we’re trying to find if there’s primitive forms of life as well.

You could think of this thing as a flying experimental box. It’s a mobile lab, right? It has all these little devices to measure all kinds of aspects of Titan. Our goal is to focus specifically on the aerodynamics: we aim to understand how we can extend the range and make sure the flight handling is well behaved in this unique environment. This is where the computational fluid dynamic becomes more important. It’s very tough to test these conditions and with our Earth-based facilities because Mars has different gases with different densities, different gravities, etc. So, it does truly provide a scenario where using these computational methods has very high value. Again, our role is to understand the aerodynamics of the Dragonfly to help improve its flight range and basically understand how this aircraft will behave when it flies on Titan.

Given the diverse applications of your work—from marine vehicles to wind turbines and aircrafts—which do you enjoy working on the most?

To be honest with you, that is one of the fun things about my job. I don’t have to focus on one specific topic all the time. If you ask me which application is my favorite, it’s probably the one that I haven't been involved in for awhile.

I do like jumping between different concepts. I think it can be a weakness because we aren’t really focused on a problem, so you miss some of the details that are very important. But the other part is, if you’re mixing in between different areas, you could find technologies in one area and apply them into another area. A lot of technologies become focused on very specific areas, and they don't look outside the box.

Could you describe a typical day in your life?

On teaching days, I’m pretty much focused throughout the morning until I teach. I’m preparing my lecture and making sure I have everything in mind for the students. Once I get done with the teaching, I answer a whole bunch of emails, and then I start trying to work with students on helping them out with research.

On non-teaching days, I organize meetings for the grad students in our group. I work on getting students to present their data properly and also give them technical feedback on what they need to do in the next week or or until the next time we meet. After that, it’s lots of email. I think actually all our jobs have lots of emails these days…

Was there anything that surprised you about being a professor?

One of the things that maybe was a good surprise was how engaged students are. Again, part of a professor’s role is teaching. We have on the larger size of classes here at University of Central Florida. So, it brings together a lot of different opinions. I think the surprise was how engaged students are, even more so today than when I was a student. A lot of the technology associated with information has opened up students’ minds into high level stuff that I would have never thought of as a student. That was probably one of the bigger surprises, and at least the bigger happier surprises I had.

What resources would you recommend to students interested in learning more about computational fluid dynamics or aerospace engineering in general?

YouTube is great. You can always Google how computational fluid dynamics works, and you get pretty great resources there.

The other thing is things change so quickly. If I were to suggest anything, I would dig into how the Artemis mission that NASA is doing is evolving. There’s a lot of interesting stuff on what it’s aiming to do that I think is well beyond this SLS rocket. It really leads a path to how a lot of space or aerospace driven careers might look like in the next 20 to 30 years.

What future advancements do you hope to see in the field?

In computational fluid dynamics, one of the underlying issues that we have is we rely on the behavior of really high frequency flows. We model that so that we don’t have to spend a lot of time on computers. But in the future, as things like quantum computing are coming out, we might be able to directly simulate that in very fast time periods. These computational based models may be more integrated into the design than ever before and have a lot more reliability.

In terms of things like space, I hope to see how things evolve in the whole idea of colonizing the moon. Are we able to create things there and bring them back to Earth? That is another front that’s, to me, very exciting, and it might be game changing to how we do things here.

Learn More:

• Dr. Kinzel’s (former) Lab at UCF: https://mae.ucf.edu/CFAL/
• NASA Dragonfly Mission: https://science.nasa.gov/mission/dragonfly/, https://dragonfly.jhuapl.edu/
• Artemis Mission: https://www.nasa.gov/humans-in-space/artemis/