Unmanned Systems Technology 036

19 end of the day, sometimes it would take all week, and sometimes a teacher would step in if a child was heading in the wrong direction or at too slow a pace. Whichever, it meant we all got very early introductions to independent thinking, creative problem- solving, time management, project breakdowns and so on.” The parallels between this style of education and the research projects he would undertake as an adult are not lost on him. He has always dealt with open questions through comprehensive scientific investigations, taking iterative steps towards solutions. University of Queensland His experiences on the farm and at Chapman primed Cathcart in middle childhood to start learning about automotive engines and ancillary systems, and by his late teens he was often being asked by friends and family to fix their cars, and sometimes to try modifying and upgrading them. In secondary school he studied topics such as mathematics, chemistry and physics, spurred on by his love of “making things that move”, as he puts it. “Mechanical engineering had appealed to me since late primary school, so I knew I wanted to follow a technical career path.” In 1986 he enrolled at the University of Queensland (UQ), studying engineering, design, physics and fluid mechanics, and was soon drawn to the aspects of those relating to real-world applications, especially automotive design, his original intended career path after university. “One of the fantastic things about UQ was that it was a world leader in engineering, especially in hypersonic fluid dynamics,” he says. “A lecturer there pioneered the development and installation of one of the world’s first hypersonic wind tunnels for research and testing, before going on to build an even larger facility at CalTech.” He first started a Master’s degree (initially unsure if university was the path for him) but quickly took to academic life and soon switched to a PhD. Evolution of Orbital After completing his PhD, Cathcart worked at UQ as a senior researcher, his biggest project in that role requiring combustion modelling for a scramjet engine. “That was a fascinating system,” he says. “The engine operated on a hydrogen-air mixture that was ignited by the shockwaves occurring in the internal engine structure from supersonic air velocities. It was like a jet turbine but without the compressor stages before the combustion chamber and turbines after.” His work on that soon attracted the attention of Orbital Corporation, which was interested in leading-edge numerical simulation and participating in projects developing what would later become the code for many simulation software products commercially available now. “Early on in my career at Orbital, I worked to ensure their simulations accurately matched the outputs of their engines and experiments,” he says “It’s easy to develop models in isolation, but to correlate them with real engines and then use those models to develop and improve that engine, that was the ability they wanted me to unlock.” That gave him a lot of freedom in which to operate, test and instrument engines to gather results, then using those results to refine the accuracy of his models’ predictions, and vice versa. Geoff Cathcart | In conversation Unmanned Systems Technology | February/March 2021 During Cathcart’s (right) tenure at Orbital the company has worked closely with several major automotive OEMs and has become a major player in UAV engines