EWI hires new personnel

EWI has hired five new employees: Dr. Evgueni Todorov as a senior NDE engineer; Dr. Brian Lu as a senior microjoining engineer; Vikram Thyagarajan as an applications engineer in engineering and nondestructive evaluation; Brian Girvin as an applications engineer in resistance and solid-state welding; and Leah Kohr as a proposal coordinator in the technical division.

Todorov has 18 years' academic and industrial experience in nondestructive testing and electronic measurement instrumentation. He specializes in eddy current (EC) testing and other NDE methods. He currently is Level 3 in EC and Ultrasonics. His main focus is research and development of advanced and specialized NDE methods and techniques for a variety of applications. His responsibilities also include optimization of existing and novel techniques through modeling and simulation.

Before joining EWI, Todorov was an NDT engineer and engineering NDT focal at Bombardier Aerospace, Toronto. Previously he was an electronics engineer and part-time assistant professor of electronics engineering at the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. While there he taught the basics of electrical engineering and instrumentation for second- and third-year students and eddy current testing for Level 2 NDT technicians. He has published 14 papers on NDT and has two patents pending. He is a member of the American and Canadian Societies of Nondestructive Testing.

Lu is involved in the brazing and soldering of some difficult-to-join materials, such as tungsten carbides, silicon carbides, titanium, aluminum, and superalloys. He also is involved in developing microwelding technologies for repairing difficult-to-weld materials, such as superalloys. Working with colleagues at EWI, Lu is developing weldability testing technologies to evaluate cracking susceptibility of various materials.

Lu has more than 18 years' experience in materials joining and related technologies, including brazing and soldering, plasma transferred arc welding, and thermal spray. Before joining EWI, he was technical manager at Stellite Coatings, where his activities included developing powder alloys and processes for applications involving wear, erosion, corrosion, and oxidation. He also was the leader of materials engineering with Alfa Laval Inc., where he was responsible for materials and process development and centrifuge and heat exchanger specification. Some of his achievements include development of a proprietary vacuum brazing process for joining tungsten carbides to stainless steels and cobalt alloys; a hard-surfacing technology for making large-scale, heavy-duty welds for severe abrasion resistance; development of nickel-based composite alloys for hard facing; and a laser alloying technique for aluminum alloys.

Thyagarajan has experience in NDT, finite element analysis (FEA), and structural health monitoring. He is involved with projects related to phased array ultrasonics. He also is involved with digital radiography, acoustic microscopy, and conventional ultrasonic testing methods. He has worked on dynamic, modal, and stress analysis to structures using FEA codes in C and using the software Ansys, ABAQUS, and Hypermesh.

Before joining EWI, Thyagarajan was involved with a variety of NDT methods, including Lamb wave methods for defect analysis of thin plates, conventional ultrasonics, thermography, and vibration-based damage detection methods. His responsibilities included development of innovative methods for application of ultrasonics to thin plates, the subject of his thesis. The project was part of the aging-aircraft project funded by the U.S. Air Force.

Girvin has more than 10 years' experience as a welding engineer and eight years' experience with solid-sate electronics and instrumentation. He currently is responsible for manageing research and development projects involved with solid-state welding processes. His area of expertise includes joining metals by projection, friction, flash, resistance-butt, capacitive discharge, and drawn-arc welding processes. He also has a strong background with DOE methodologies and uses these techniques for both developing and optimizing welding parameters. Girvin's work has focused on optimizing welding parameters for joining coated and uncoated mild steels, HS steels, stainless steels, as well as aluminum and copper alloys.

Girvin recently returned to EWI from GKN Automotive Inc., where he spent two years as a process specialist and one year as the plant metallurgist. His primary duties included optimizing aluminum-to-steel friction welds for prop-shaft applications; identifying best-practice welding technologies for driveline components; and refining induction heat-treating processes.

Kohr has 19 years' experience in project management and process re-engineering. She has managed commercial and government technical projects for AT&T, Boeing, Cardinal Health, and Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies. Her expertise includes project management of medium to large projects, quality management and engineering, and technical training, development, and delivery.

Before joining EWI, Kohr was a project manager and quality engineer with Bell Laboratories/Lucent Technologies, where her activities included marketing support, technical proposal writing, project management and quality engineering for information systems software development, and systems integration.