Staff CFD Modeling Engineer

Mainspring Energy•Menlo Park, CA

7d•$160,000 - $190,000•Hybrid

About The Position

Mainspring Energy manufactures and delivers fuel-flexible, low-emissions local power solutions that rapidly add new capacity and deliver reliable, affordable, and sustainable electric power. The company began commercial shipments of its Mainspring Linear Generators in 2020 and today has hundreds of megawatts in advanced development and field operations for leading Fortune 500 companies, data centers, and utilities. Mainspring also partners with global energy leaders including AEP, NextEra Energy Resources, Schneider Electric, and more. Do you have a favorite upwinding technique for hyperbolic PDEs? We have a high impact opportunity for a CFD Modeling Engineer to support the design, test, and manufacture of reliable and efficient linear generators at Mainspring Energy. On the system modeling and simulation team, you will have a central role in refining the way generators are designed through detailed fluid dynamic and thermochemical analysis, either for the direct assessment of proposed designs or to inform lower order models that describe system behavior. The ideal candidate can break down complex flow and multidimensional phenomena into fundamental behavior, enabling actionable feedback to improve our product.

Requirements

Graduate-level engineering degree (Mechanical, Aerospace, Electrical, Chemical, etc) with 10+ years experience in Computational Fluid Dynamics and its applied mathematical foundations.
2+ years experience with at least one commercial CFD package (Fluent, Star-CCM, Converge, etc) and one commercial CAD package (Solidworks, Catia, etc).
Experience generating and validating custom models of varying fidelity (0D through 3D) in at least one programming language, e.g. C/C++, Python, Julia, etc.

Responsibilities

Run commercial CFD software to analyze transient gas flow, chemical kinetics, and heat transfer.
Manage computational resources on local hardware and on the cloud (AWS / GCP).
Work with mechanical engineers to generate appropriate 3D models from CAD (Solidworks) suitable for mesh generation. Extract fluid volumes suitable for computational analysis. Generate, refine, and debug the mesh to achieve a stable and accurate simulation.
Select appropriate boundary conditions and domain models to describe the phenomena to be examined.
Shepard the solver through the computational process, managing and debugging crashes or other roadblocks on the path to a converged solution.
Analyze and distill the detailed 3D domain results to communicate with the simulation stakeholders. Generate images and videos that highlight key phenomena.
Understand and explain CFD principles to the team, knowing and communicating why different models or solver settings are applied within a given CFD package.
Generate test plans to validate observations gleaned from CFD simulations, or to get required boundary conditions needed to appropriately define a model. Oversee the execution of those plans on the generator with support from the test team.
Analyze test data to compare to the results of CFD and system simulations.
Generate lower order models for use in system-level simulations. Run system-level models to quantify the impact of design choices on generator performance.
Write code in C++ and python to automate CFD execution processes, improve system-level models, and couple lower order models to CFD boundary conditions while following software best practices and producing reliable, repeatable, and shareable code.
Participate in peer review of software written in support of modeling work throughout the team.
Generate written documentation of simulation results (presentations, reports, etc) for a variety of audiences at Mainspring.
Collaborating across technical domains, frequently integrating with executives and other leaders of software, mechanical design, and product development.