Professional Case Studies

Deep dives on production engineering work — workflows shipped, systems scaled, and problems solved on the job.

Icebox: Rewriting a Turbine OPC-UA -> MQTT Bridge in Rust

Tokio actors and typestate on an air-gapped edge box — 33× less CPU and ~7× less RAM than the Java original

August 17, 2026

A Rust rewrite of a 2018 Spring Boot adapter that moves turbine tags from OPC-UA to MQTT. Group-level Tokio actors, typestate, and a commit-by-commit load harness took a 2k-signal load from ~15% CPU / 310 MiB to 0.45% CPU / 46 MiB — about 33× less CPU and ~7× less RAM — on a box that has to run for years without someone walking up to it.

rustopc-uamqtttokiotypestateactorsedge

Optical Anti-Icing: CNN Ice Detection on Turbine Inlets

Two U-Nets on an inlet camera, a $77k ceiling on a 7F, and a program we killed

November 15, 2025

Cold-weather gas turbines already spend inlet bleed heat on a weather schedule to keep ice off the guide vanes. I inherited a lost-weights camera proof of concept, rebuilt the training stack, costed that heat on a real site, and recommended we not proceed. The program was killed.

cnnkerascomputer-visiononnxedgegas-turbine

Automating Combustion CFD for a Hydrogen-Capable 7F Retrofit

Prefect orchestration, Git provenance, and 10× throughput on Department of Energy–backed combustor analysis

March 28, 2025

A Prefect-orchestrated, Git-versioned pipeline that took combustor computational fluid dynamics (CFD) from a slow, contractor-gated process to a system the design team could run themselves — 10× throughput on a Department of Energy (DOE) grant aimed at an 80% hydrogen retrofit for a General Electric (GE) 7F turbine.

cfdprefectpythoncombustionworkflowhpc