About
I design thermal systems for energy infrastructure, mostly the parts that have to keep working when nobody is looking at them.
Six years across aerospace test and energy. I like problems where the constraint is physical rather than negotiable, and I have a bias toward instrumenting things before arguing about them. Most of my work has been on equipment that was already running and could not stop.
Selected work
Condenser retrofit, Sabine Energy
Redesigned a cooling loop on a live 40-year-old plant without
taking it offline. Cut cooling load 18 percent.
Read the detail
Condenser retrofit, Sabine Energy
Redesigned a cooling loop on a live 40-year-old plant without taking it offline. Cut cooling load 18 percent.
- Problem
- The condenser loop was running 22 percent over its design duty and the plant could not be shut down for a rebuild. Original drawings from 1984 turned out not to match what was physically installed, so nobody actually knew the current configuration.
- Approach
- Walked the system and re-measured it, then rebuilt the thermal model from the real geometry rather than the drawings. Modelled four retrofit options in Fluent and staged the winning one across two scheduled maintenance windows so the plant never came down.
- Result
- 18 percent reduction in cooling load, roughly $1.4M a year in energy. Zero unplanned downtime during the swap. The corrected drawing set is now what the site works from.
- My part
- Lead engineer. Did the modelling and the outage sequencing, and handled the sign-off with the plant manager and the insurer.
Cryogenic test stand, Ridgeline Aero
Built instrumentation and safety interlocks for a liquid nitrogen
valve qualification rig. 400 cycles, no unplanned stops.
Read the detail
Cryogenic test stand, Ridgeline Aero
Built instrumentation and safety interlocks for a liquid nitrogen valve qualification rig. 400 cycles, no unplanned stops.
- Problem
- The previous rig aborted roughly one run in five, usually from sensor dropout at temperature. Each abort cost a day and a tank of nitrogen, and qualification was six weeks behind.
- Approach
- Traced the dropouts to thermal contraction on the sensor leads rather than the sensors themselves. Redesigned the harness routing, added redundant thermocouples on the critical paths, and rewrote the interlock logic so a single dropout degraded the run instead of killing it.
- Result
- 400 consecutive qualification cycles with no unplanned stop. Qualification finished two weeks ahead of the revised schedule.
- My part
- Sole engineer on the instrumentation and interlocks, working with one technician on the build.
Heat exchanger geometry study
A side project that became two patent applications. Fifteen fin
geometries tested under identical flow conditions.
Read the detail
Heat exchanger geometry study
A side project that became two patent applications. Fifteen fin geometries tested under identical flow conditions.
- Problem
- The standard fin configuration we specified by default performs poorly at low Reynolds numbers, which is exactly where a lot of our recovery equipment actually sits. Nobody had checked whether something better existed.
- Approach
- Built a parameterised CFD study covering fifteen geometries under matched boundary conditions, then validated the two best against a printed test section rather than trusting the simulation alone.
- Result
- Two geometries beat the standard by 9 and 14 percent in the low-Reynolds band. Both are patent pending, and one is specified on a current build.
- My part
- Ran it on my own initiative, then presented it to engineering leadership who funded the validation work.
Recommendation
Jane found a discrepancy in drawings the site had trusted for thirty years, and she found it by going and measuring rather than by arguing in a meeting. That is the whole of how she works. I would hire her again without a conversation.
Experience
Certifications
Tools
Open to thermal and test engineering roles in the Gulf Coast region.
jane@janeokafor.comLast updated 2 September 2026