Jason Wilkes

Dr. Wilkes manages the Rotating Machinery Development Section at Southwest Research Institute. His section focuses on improving energy efficiency, reliability, and affordability through turbomachinery component design, analysis, and testing. These technologies employ a wide range of fluids, power cycles, and machinery configurations as required to convert heat into power, power into heat, or store energy for later disposal. Dr. Wilkes’ section has designed machinery and systems that utilize refrigerants, CO2, steam, air, hydrogen, and many other working fluids.

Dr. Wilkes’ research interests are in the areas of turbomachinery rotordynamics, instability, dry-friction whip and whirl, bearing testing and parameter identification, and the numerical prediction of bearing coefficients. He has experience in the design and operation of rotordynamic test rigs and in developing software to operate, record, and process the data. Since joining SwRI, Dr. Wilkes has been involved in several experimental and analytical projects. To assist in experimental projects, he has been responsible for designing and executing experiments to test the performance and mechanical integrity of multiple high-speed turbomachines. His part in designing the experiments has varied from constructing open- and closed-loop test facilities, instrumentation selection and calibration, programming test software in LabVIEW, component selection and design, rotordynamic analysis and design, and finite element analysis.

In 2015, Dr. Wilkes was awarded a project from the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to design, build, and test an ultra-high-efficiency, wide-range, integrally-geared compander for use in supercritical CO2 (sCO2) applications. Phase III was completed in 2021, where the CO2 turbine successfully ran at inlet temperatures of 720°C at approximately 270 bar. This project supports SwRI’s research expertise in the field of sCO2 power cycles, a field that the rotating machinery group at SwRI has been heavily pursuing over the past five years. In 2022, the Compander developed jointly with Hanwha Power Systems was named a R&D 100 winner.

Dr. Wilkes received his M.S. and Ph.D. while performing research at the Texas A&M University Turbomachinery Laboratory in College Station, Texas. For his Master’s degree, he helped design and construct a test rig that was used to excite multimode dry-friction whip and whirl. These tests were compared with nonlinear time-transient predictions from the University’s XLTRC2 rotordynamics code and showed good agreement. For his Doctorate, Dr. Wilkes studied pad motion in a tilting-pad journal bearing. Using strain gauges and proximity probes, several pad degrees of freedom were recorded while being excited by the rotor. These motions were used to determine transfer functions between rotor motion and pad motion, which were compared to theoretical predictions from a computer code that he developed.

PUBLICATIONS: Dr. Wilkes has 40 conference publications and 11 journal publications in various areas of turbomachinery design, component testing, and analysis, one of which received the best paper award from the International Gas Turbine Institute Structures and Dynamics Committee.

PROFESSIONAL CHRONOLOGY: Texas A&M University Turbomachinery Laboratory: graduate research assistant, 2005-11; Southwest Research Institute: 2011-[research engineer, 2011-15; senior research engineer, 2015-19; group leader, 2019-20; manager, 2020-2024; senior manager 2024-current].
MEMBERSHIPS: American Society of Mechanical Engineers