Dan Walsh.

Who am I?

Modern-Life Dan

I'm a physicist, scientist, software engineer, and creator who is passionate about understanding the world, creating mental and mathematical models, and building them into physical systems that affect reality.

Over the past decade, I went from being a consultant for Lineage Logistics in 2015 to being a cofounder and Founding Scientist at CrossnoKaye, leading the company's scientific efforts and research from its self-funded origins beyond series C funding. Ever since, I've been developing physical models of industrial processes, culminating in the ATLAS platform, a physics-based simulation and controls platform for heavy industry.

What does that look like in practice?

Consider an enormous, industrial refrigerated warehouse responsible for keeping thousands of tons of food fresh and safe for consumption. This takes genuinely immense amount of electrical power -- anywhere from hundreds of kilowatts to megawatts, amounting hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in energy costs for a single site. One project that I worked on was solving the problem of maximizing refrigeration system performance by optimizing discharge pressure. Discharge pressure is the highest pressure in a vapor compression refrigeration cycle; it's important because it's the point at which the refrigerant gets hot enough to be able to expel heat to the surroundings, but not so hot that the compressor has to do extra work to reject it. Make the pressure and temperature higher, and it's easier for the condenser fans to reject that heat -- they can expend less energy when the discharge pressure is higher -- but that higher pressure also makes the compressor have to work harder. As a result, there's a competing tradeoff: keep pressure low enough to allow for efficiency performance of the compressor, but high enough that the condenser fans don't have to expend extra energy blowing needlessly hard.

A monarch butterfly perched on my fingertip with its wings spread open, above a sunlit lawn
One of my new monarch butterflies, captured on my fingertip.
A deep blue glazed ceramic vessel on a studio workbench, its walls folded into a winding, maze-like curve that repeats around the rim A teal glazed stoneware mug of iced chocolate on a slatted wooden table, the glaze breaking from dark green to pale blue down its side
I recently discovered I enjoy ceramics, both traditional and 3D-printed. Here are two of my original pieces: a 3D-printed fractal vase and a hand-thrown traditional mug.

Projects

Things to play with.

Write-ups

Longer posts from Dan's Geometrical Curiosities.

Videos

Maths, physics, and making. The full channel is on YouTube.

Patents

Co-invented with the team at CrossnoKaye: Jesse Crossno, Bryan Kaye, and Thomas Foley, named on every one.

Resume

Download PDF Open in a new tab Patents

Contact

The best way to reach me is email.