Kerry Dunfey
Senior Research Engineer
Education
B.E., Mechanical Engineering, Villanova University, May 2001
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Villanova University, December 2005
Experience
Ms. Dunfey joined MR&D as a summer intern in May of 2000. She became a full time Research Engineer in September 2001. She has been involved in a number of projects at MR&D involving a variety of analyses, including thermal, structural, thermal-structural, and dynamic. She has also used micromechanics codes for the calculation of fiber, matrix, and composite thermo-elastic properties. The primary emphasis of Ms. Dunfey’s work at MR&D has been the design, analysis, and test data correlation of high temperature composite materials for re-entry and hypersonic vehicle thermal protection systems.
Ms. Dunfey served as the Principal Investigator on the University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) Subcontract RSC040418 entitled “Hot Aeroshell to Cool Internal Structure Attachment Design” under the Falcon DARPA Materials Integrated Product Team (MIPT) effort. She is also the Principal Investigator on the Lockheed Martin Aeronautics Company PO XJ2515530 entitled “Falcon Program SiC/C Acreage TPS Panel Design/Development.” Both of these efforts involve designing an acreage thermal protection system (TPS) for potential adaptation on the enhanced common aero vehicle (ECAV) and the hypersonic cruise vehicle (HCV), which will consist of a refractory composite material as the hot aeroshell, joined to a much cooler internal structure by means of an attachment system.
Currently Ms. Dunfey is serving as Principal Investigator on the AFRL SBIR Phase I Program entitled “Development of Non-Parasitic Integrated Acreage TPS/Airframe Material,” Contract FA8650-06-M-5212. Under this effort, Ms. Dunfey is designing a non-parasitic hybrid truss core TPS assembly. She is responsible for thermal, structural, dynamic, and thermo-structural analyses of this concept and generating a design which results in all positive margins of safety. Ms. Dunfey is coordinating the fabrication of hybrid panels for material property testing and the fabrication, thermal and mechanical testing of the hybrid truss core manufacturing demonstration articles. Ms. Dunfey is also the Principal Investigator of the NASA Hypersonics Effort entitled “Design, Fabrication and Test of Load-Bearing TPS,” NASA Contract NND07AA13C.