I created this presentation as an overview of the current state of the US nonstrategic nuclear weapons arsenal. I also discuss some other details regarding nuclear weapons acquisitions and project management and nuclear weapons design/physics. These discussions are included to give more context and support understanding the main content, but certainly are not in-depth. I hope to write more presentations about nuclear weapons policy, physics, and the future of the US nuclear security enterprise. I will be recording a video presentation of these slides and that will be provided here once it is ready.
I gave this presentation at the Iowa State Junior Analysis Seminar for mathematics grad students. It pulls from what I learned as part of the Iowa State Mathematical Research Teams (ISMaRT) project I did, but it is a separate project. There were other presentations for ISMaRT that were for faculty and post-docs, but these slides were my way of diving into the more rigorous foundations of the Euler-Lagrange equation and practicing my math communication. I recorded the presentation and it can be found at this YouTube video.
I will return to this area to post more about the drone-based leaf collection my team and I created for the ISU mechanical engineering capstone course. I'll simply include a picture of my team with the product for now (faces obscured because I haven't been given permission by those in the picture to use their image).
For my technical communications course, we were assigned a project where we were supposed to create a user manual for anything of our choosing, but written so that anyone could follow along. At the time I was working on one of my antennas (I was trying to more precisely tune it to the right frequency) and I chose to create a manual for one of the tools I was using, the NanoVNA. This is a miniaturized vector network analyzer. The tool provides an electrical network with some input electrical stimulus and measures how it responds to this signal. The way the network responds to the stimulus signal can tell us a lot about the electrical properties of the network. I wrote this manual so that anyone, regardless of technical background, could follow along and take the measurements necessary to tune a half-wave dipole antenna.