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Eric M. Flint, President
Jason E. Lindler, Senior Engineer

Eric M. Flint, President
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA

Mr. Eric Flint founded Mevicon Inc. in 2002 to focus on the development of commercial products derived from innovative technologies. Over the last 5 years period, he has personally been responsible for starting and growing research efforts in the area of Gossamer, Membrane and precision aperture structures to over $6 Million in contracted research and development funding. He has over 12 years of experience in industry with over 8 of it focused in the area of active control approaches for a wide variety of structures. He has led numerous successful government and private sector funded research and development efforts in the area of gossamer structure research, novel actuation approaches, multi-degree of freedom motion control systems, passive damping technology. Key historical and ongoing projects in this area include:

• Advancing fabrication and scaling up single surface off-axis solar concentrators
• Improving surface precision and scaling up of on axis single surface precision apertures
• Understanding and improving the dynamics of thin film solar cell based structures
• Dynamic tailoring of gossamer and membrane structural behavior
• Active MDOF alignment techniques for future IR wavelength apertures

His core technical expertise is in the area of thin film structure applications, advanced sensing methods, system level design, actuator design and selection, and structural dynamic test and characterization. He is an experienced project manager/team lead used to working with distributed teams (involving remote and local customers, internal staff, and contractors) with a broad range of skill sets in the areas relevant to the proposed research. He has contributed to numerous technical committees, and is currently a member of the AIAA Gossamer Spacecraft Project Committee. He was the technical chair of the 2003 Gossamer Spacecraft Forum held co-jointly with the Adaptive Structures Forum and AIAA SDM, and was the General Chair in 2004. He has worked internationally at the DLR in Germany. He is an author/co-author of numerous technical reports, nearly 40 conference papers, 3 journal articles, and 1 patent, and was a key contributor to the Membrane Optics Chapter of Gossamer Spacecraft Technology, Volume 2. He was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 1995 and the Abe Zarem Awards for Aerospace Excellence in 1996.

Jason E. Lindler, Senior Engineer
M.S., Mechanical Engineering, University of Maryland, College Park, MD

Mr. Jason Lindler joined Mevicon Inc. in 2003. His current focus is the demonstration of active control of membranes and thin shell structures and photogrammetric shape characterization. He is a mechanical engineer and worked previously in the smart material community for over 6 years with a particular focus on advancing electrorheological and magnetorheological device technology, particularly in the area of semi-active automotive suspensions and isolation systems. He has also developed, designed and tested numerous actuators and dampers utilizing smart materials such as piezoelectrics, magnetostrictives, and magnetorheological fluids. He was lead technical contributor on the multi-million dollar advanced hydraulic actuator development effort. He is the principal inventor of two patents utilizing piezoelectrics for design of compact actuators and high bandwidth valves. In addition to working with smart materials, he has design experience with most additional aspects of active control systems including and developing control code for direct implementation on microcontrollers and DSPs. In addition, he has programmed several design packages for the PC platform with C++ and the Java programming language. He is author on two patents and numerous conference papers and journal articles on the design of smart material actuators and dampers.