Engineering Staff

Abed M. Khaskia, Ph.D.

Executive Vice President

An ANSYS Channel Partner from 1985 to 2015. A specialist in finite element analysis, particularly for multi-field applications and simulations. Provided consulting and training services for more than 30 years using ANSYS®, LS-DYNA® and other finite element and CAE programs. Prepared, managed and taught professional development courses for practicing engineers in the areas of structural, thermal and electronic cooling. Organized conferences on finite element applications in various fields for commercial and government customers in the Mid-Atlantic region.

Representative consulting projects:

1. “Finite element Analysis Comparison of Dental Implant Design”
2. “Metal forming using ANSYS® and LS-DYNA®“
3. “Induction heating using ANSYS® electromagnetic solvers”.
4. “Iterative Magnetic/Structural Simulation of a MEMS Micro-Shutter”
5. “Torque Calculations for a Magnetic Coupler using ANSYS”
6. “Magneto-static Force in a Specialty Transmission System”
7. “Simulation of underwater explosion using Autodyn®“
8. “Drop test analysis for electronic industry”
9. “Finite element model of a hyperelastic cup”
10. “Piezoelectric analysis of an ink jet printer head”
11. “Hyperelastic and viscoelastic modeling of rubber seals”

Jason D. Mareno, P.E.

Chief Consulting Engineer

Jason is a Licensed Professional Engineer with 20 years of experience. Having a background in product development as well as CAE, he has led product development teams from concept through commercialization for products with volumes of 20 million units and revenues in excess of $4 billion.

Jason has been on the Mallett team for 6 years and leads the Consulting group in Research Triangle Park. He is responsible for business development, staffing, and technical excellence/quality.

Jason is a specialist in structural mechanics, dynamics, and highly nonlinear problems involving contact, large deformations, plasticity and hyperelasticity. He is an expert in the mechanical design and analysis of consumer electronics, wireless electronics and associated enclosures.

Jason received his BSME from the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign and his MSME from North Carolina State University (FEA and structural dynamics emphasis).

He has nine U.S. patents issued and one currently pending.

Representative consulting projects:

1. Drop and Impact analysis of complete mobile telephones and smartphones. Highly detailed representation of glass touchscreens, LCD modules, circuit boards, etc. Extreme nonlinearities and high-speed dynamics involved.
2. Vibration analysis of retractable satellite boom exposed to intermittent thruster forces; results were implemented into an algorithm for precise, real-time positional corrections (military application).
3. Design optimization of a pump diaphragm for the chemical processing industry; resulted in a tenfold increase of mean time to failure from 100,000 to 1 million cycles.
4. Stress, fatigue, and crack propagation analysis of a vehicle axle for accident reconstruction and litigation.
5. Authored and taught various customized training courses. Example: 40-hour onsite course for a major semiconductor manufacturer seeking to perform uniquely non-linear thermal stress calculations.
6. Optimization of a hyperelastic needleless valve for the medical industry.

Michael P. Owen, Ph.D.

Principal Consulting Engineer

More than 20 years of CFD experience. He is experienced in the use of implicit and explicit industrial and custom CFD codes, custom FORTRAN CFD implementations, massively parallel CFD applications, explicit dynamics, low frequency electromagnetics, acoustics, and multi-field solutions such as fluid-structure interaction, aero-elastic flutter, conjugate heat transfer, etc. He has modeled challenging applications in diverse industries including aerospace, power generation (including conventional, nuclear, wind & solar), transportation, manufacturing, disaster forensics, etc. He has developed complex models of exotic applications such as gravure printing, dipping, drying, hydrogen diffusion and precipitation in metals, shock propagation in bubbly flows, hypersonic flows, chemically reacting flows, aerosol transport, etc. Michael received his Ph.D. in physics from North Carolina State University.

Representative consulting projects:

1. “Analysis of a Water Cooled Electric Motor”
2. “Conjugate Heat Transfer Analysis of a Forced Argon Heat Exchanger”
3. “Electromechanical Analysis of a Solenoid Operated Purge Valve”
4. “Fluid-Structure Interaction Analysis of a Ball Mill Journal Bearing”
5. “Analysis of Cooling in a Power Electronics Cabinet”
6. “Transient Analysis of a Pneumatic Nail Gun”
7. “Aerodynamic Analysis of a Solar Panel Array”

Daniel W. Kramer

Consulting Engineer

Daniel has a strong background in nonlinear, large-deformation dynamics and MEMS fabrication and design. He has experience with multi-physics dynamic modeling using finite element analysis and other numerical methods, and he is proficient in statistical modeling including stochastic systems and Monte Carlo analysis. Additionally, he is adept at scripting and simulating nonlinear and exotic custom materials. He received his BSME and MSME from the University of Illinois with a certificate in micro and nano systems engineering.

Representative technical work:

1. Pull-in dynamics of a MEMS cantilever under the effect of noise
2. Novel-geometry high-energy-density supercapacitor design
3. Evaluation of the effect of different geometries on the stiction of a fixed-fixed microscale beam
4.  Fatigue life prediction for a power plant stack subject to vortex shedding and aeroelastic flutter
5. Custom LS-DYNA hyperelastic material model implementation

Stephen R. Rugg

Technical Services Manager

Experienced in product design, analysis, and integration and test, Steve specializes in structural mechanics, dynamics, and multiphysics.