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Internship is an out of world experience for UW-Stout students

Menomonie (WQOW) - An internship could help launch the careers of a pair UW-Stout students.  

They're in the engineering program at UW-Stout and went through an internship with NASA this summer.

Bryan Coddington and Casandra Baer spent 10 weeks in Cleveland at the Glenn Research Center.  The purpose of the internship was to research and experiment with bonding ceramics to metals.

"They expand at different rates when you heat them, so ceramic doesn't expand very much, the metal expands a lot, so when they cool down, the metal tends to pull away from the ceramic," says Bryan Coddington, a senior at UW-Stout. 

The research is being conducted for subsonic gas turbine engines used in helicopters.   Coddington worked on a fuel injector for the engine.

"All of my research involved with trying to reduce these residual stresses to make successful, strong, leak-tight bonds for a ceramic injector," says Coddington.

Casandra Baer worked on a turbine.

"Currently they have disks and there's a slot in the disk and you insert a single blade into that slot," says Casandra Baer, a senior at UW-Stout.  "The new ones, they're just making the whole blade out of the ceramic material so you don't have to worry about stuff breaking off and flying into the engine."

The hope is that this process will help reduce emissions by 70 percent and make the engine run more efficient.  Both students say it was great being part of such an elite program.

"I wasn't expecting to get selected and then I had the chance to work with some of the best minds in the world, its a pretty neat experience," says Coddington.

"I really wanted to work for NASA, that was my goal coming into college was to get some type of engineering degree so I could potentially work for NASA," says Baer.

Coddington says that NASA could have the technology in use in about 3 years.  Both students say they plan to apply again for a NASA internship and hope to turn it into a career.

This summer was also the 40th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, so Coddington and Baer were able to participate in a number of celebrations regarding that as well.