providing the highest quality in wind energy instrument calibration.
RACHAEL COQUILLA
Associate Engineer
Email: rvcoquilla@otechwind.com
Education:
B.S. Aerospace Engineering (1996)
San Jose State University
M.S. Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering (2004)
University of California, Davis
Biography:
Rachael Coquilla began as a consultant with Otech Engineering in 2005 at the time that the first wind tunnel arrived. Rachael came highly recommended due to her lengthy history with wind tunnels all around the bay area. Rachael later agreed to the position of Project and Quality Manager for Otech Engineering and has now been with the company for two years.
Rachael’s experience with wind tunnels was initially prompted when she was seeking out a research internship in her senior year at San Jose State University. All of the projects Rachael was involved with at SJSU were focused on aerodynamics and wind tunnels.
She accepted the temporary internship position at the Martian Surface Wind Tunnel (MARSWIT) located at NASA Ames Research Center. Rachael was selected for the position due to the hands on practical and technical experience she gained as a precision welder with HTB Inc. and Orbitek Engineering, as well as the knowledge of test quality control and documentation she gained as an aircraft technician with the United States Marine Corps.
Rachael’s work at NASA continued beyond the scope of a temporary position when she was asked to run the lab and work with Dr. Bruce White of UCDavis. This led to an invitation by Dr. White to serve as his research assistant at the University of California Davis. Her work involved updating the universities wind tunnels and programming the wind tunnels for a variety of experiments by the graduate students at UCD. She assisted the students in their thesis work by setting up the tunnels for their individual experiments. Rachael developed code using LabVIEW for both the NASA and UCDavis wind tunnels. The code is still in use today.
As a graduate student Dr. White gave her a project he had contracted at the NASA Martian Surface Wind Tunnel. This project specifically worked with threshold in an unstable Martian surface environment.
Rachael’s wind tunnel experience is inclusive of aerodynamic tunnels, boundary layer tunnels, environmental tunnels and sand saltation tunnels. Throughout her research career, Rachael has participated in wind tunnel studies of flow over low speed airfoils, dust suspension, unstable surface layer simulation, boundary layer turbulence measurements, pedestrian level winds over urban areas, gas dispersion from laboratory exhaust stacks, and flow over complex terrain.
Rachael received her M.S, in Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering from the University of California, Davis in 2004 and her B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from San Jose University. Rachael’s research knowledge as an investigator for the California Wind Energy Collaborative (CWEC); and Tunnel Laboratories brings a wealth of experience to Otech Engineering.
Like the founder of Otech Engineering, Inc., Rachael has an engineering component to her family heritage. Her father is a civil and structural engineer. His career originated in Philippines where he told Rachael, when she was five years old, that she would one day be an engineer. Rachael has been training ever since that time. Coincidentally, her father worked for NASA as a project engineer for the facilities department.