Dr. Bruce Drolen – NESC Academy Biography

Dr. Bruce Drolen is a retired Boeing Senior Technical Fellow (STF) from Boeing Network and Space Systems in El Segundo, CA. Being recognized as a Boeing Senior Technical Fellow is the highest technical achievement possible in The Boeing Company with only about 0.1% of the engineering work force counted as STFs. In his 37.5 years of thermal management experience he has developed and/or modeled the radiative and thermophysical properties of real engineering materials, heat pipes, loop heat pipes, oscillating heat pipes, pumped fluid loops, and other heat transport devices under both typical and non-ideal operating conditions.  A significant professional accomplishment has been the application of loop heat pipes (LHPs) to our high power family of spacecraft to allow its heat rejection capability to increase 3-fold through the use of LHP-fed deployable radiators.  Boeing now has 335 LHPs and 108 deployable radiators on-orbit in operational systems on 36 different spacecraft.  

Dr. Drolen has more than sixty technical journal and conference papers, seven patents and numerous patent applications in process.  Outside of Boeing, he is an active member of AIAA, having served on the Thermophysics Technical Committee for several terms including as TC Chair.  It was recently announced that he is the 2017 AIAA Thermophysics Award recipient.  He has served as an Associate Editor of the ASME Journal of Heat Transfer and is currently serving as Associate Editor of the AIAA Journal of Thermophysics and Heat Transfer. 

Bio last updated March 29, 2017