Story by Jacqueline Minerd of NASA’s Glenn Research Center
Emily Timko has the power to control the temperature, form wispy clouds, create ice crystals, and produce powerful gusts of wind. She has a lot in common with Queen Elsa from the movie “Frozen,” but she’s actually much cooler.
Timko is an icing cloud calibration engineer at NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Cleveland. She works with a team of 14 other engineers and technicians to produce clouds in Glenn’s Icing Research Tunnel (IRT).
This wind tunnel is used to simulate natural conditions that can cause ice to form on aircraft during flight and test the effects of these conditions on components such as wings, tails, and engine inlets.
(Photos by NASA/Bridget Caswell)
“What I do is calibrate the clouds we simulate in the IRT,” said Timko. “We can produce a light cloud or a heavy cloud so dense you can’t see the other side of the tunnel. We’re also able to vary the size of the cloud droplets from as small as 15 microns — smaller than the thickness of a hair — to about 300 microns.”
Since 1944, aircraft companies have come to the IRT to test flight components in a simulated flying environment before taking to the skies.
“The FAA has requirements for aircraft to be certified to fly in different atmospheric conditions,” said Timko. “We ensure that when companies come here and take their data, the cloud that they want is as close to nature as possible.”
Timko, who has been working in Glenn’s icing tunnel since 2017, is an internationally known cloud scientist. But she didn’t always dream of becoming an engineer.
“In second grade, we’d sit on the carpet, and we’d talk about what day of the week it was and the date,” said Timko. “I’d talk about the weather, and I always knew what it was supposed to be that day. My teacher always said I’d grow up to be the ‘weather girl,’ and it just clicked.”
Timko studied meteorology at California University of Pennsylvania (Now PennWest California). Upon finishing her degree, she interned as a meteorologist with WTAE-TV Pittsburgh Action News and as a severe weather forecaster with First Energy.
“It wasn’t stimulating enough. There just wasn’t enough science for me,” said Timko. “But through my college career, I did a lot of the same courses as engineers, like math, physics, heat transfer, and thermodynamics.”
Eventually, Timko went back to school for her mechanical engineering degree. The combination of her meteorology and engineering degrees gave Timko the exact background and skills needed to fill the role of an icing cloud calibration engineer.
“I use a lot of my meteorology degree for cloud physics, the behavior of water droplets, and cloud growth,” said Timko. “It’s helpful to understand the physics and heat transfer of the process of a supercooled droplet impinging on surfaces of an aircraft and the damage that it does.”
Over the years, Timko’s career has taken her far outside the walls of the wind tunnel. She’s traveled to Canada to complete studies with the National Research Council of Canada as well as Vienna to review a new capability at the Rail Tec Arsenal icing facility on behalf of the FAA.
Timko especially enjoys sharing her story and her knowledge with the younger generation. She loves to give tours of the IRT to Great Lakes Science Center’s Camp Curiosity campers.
“I would tell them, I’m like Elsa,” said Timko. “I can also make frozen particles and clouds. That helps get them excited about it.”