Electrical Engineering · UT Knoxville

Neyland
Peterson

I am a first-year electrical engineering student in the Chancellor’s Honors and Cook Grand Challenge programs at the University of Tennessee, a Rocky Top Scholar, and a graduate of McCallie School. I enjoy hands on electrical engineering projects to help me further develop my understanding of what I have learned in classes.

See my work Get in touch

McDonald, Tennessee

Experience

05 / 2026 – Present

CAD Technician Intern

Mesa Associates, Inc. · Chattanooga, TN

As a CAD technician intern I edit and revise engineering drawings in AutoCAD, working from engineer markups and design changes to keep every deliverable aligned with TVA standards. This internship is where most of my CAD experience comes from, working in AutoCAD nearly every day. I go on-site for plant walkdowns to document existing conditions and verify equipment locations, and I build and maintain cable and conduit schedules so routing and sizing match the overall electrical design. Unfortunately, I cannot share too many details or all of my projects here due to TVA confidentiality.

Fish-Safe Cooling Water Intake Screens

One project I have worked on is redesigning cooling water intake screens to meet the EPA’s 316(b) guidelines, which require large water-withdrawing facilities to use the best available technology so that fish are not pinned against or pulled through the screens. The design is a traveling rotating screen: instead of holding fish against a fixed mesh, the screen slowly rotates, lifts any fish that reach it, and carries them up and around so they can be returned safely downstream. On the older screens smaller fish were still getting caught, so the engineers ran the intake-flow and screen-velocity calculations, and my job was to iterate the designs in CAD as changes came through and keep the drawing sets and documentation organized.

Current plant, in construction

Traveling water screen, shop demonstration

Traveling water screen elevation drawing, left side and front elevations — Screen elevation drawing

Conduit block diagram for the intake screen system — Conduit block diagram

Reference plant, already built

Intake structure with traveling water screens and circulation water pumps, annotated during a plant walkdown — Traveling water screens & circulation pumps

Interior of the intake structure showing the screens and flow to the powerhouse — Inside the intake structure

These photos are from a plant that was built a while back, shown here as a reference for what the finished system looks like.

Student Space Technology Association

The Student Space Technology Association (SSTA) at UT Knoxville is a student-run organization where undergraduates work on real aerospace projects across areas like rockets, propulsion, and small spacecraft. I was accepted this fall and joined the nanosatellite sub-team.

The nanosatellite

Our team is designing a 12U nanosatellite that we hope to submit to NASA as a secondary payload on Artemis V. The mission studies plume-surface interaction, which is how a lander’s engine exhaust disturbs the lunar surface during descent and landing. Understanding that interaction matters for protecting hardware and planning safe landing sites on the Moon.

I will most likely be on the electrical team, working on the satellite’s power and electronics. This is a brand new project that is just getting started, so more details will come as we work through what is a long design and build process.

Render of a 12U nanosatellite with deployed solar panels in front of the Moon — Concept render of the 12U nanosatellite

Selected Work

A few hands-on projects I have taken on to put what I am learning into practice, and the ones I am most proud of.

Prototype Rocket Design

Me and my team designed a rocket intended to pass Mach 1. I was responsible for the avionics, programming the accelerometer and altimeter to compare real flight data against simulation, and ensuring reliable recovery. We also 3D printed the nose cone and the motor chassis. OpenRocket put the G80 configuration at 453 m/s with an apogee near 984 m. We chose not to launch because the high-thrust motor paired with an airframe that was not strong enough made flight unsafe, which looking back was definitely the correct decision considering we were using three G-size motors on plastic bottles. I hope to launch something more regulated in the future.

453 m/s simulated (G80T-10) · ~984 m simulated apogee

Accelerometer code testing

Finished rocket with clear payload bay and fins

Nose cone and payload section of the rocket

Rear of the rocket showing fins and motor mount

High-Performance 3D-Printed I-Beams

I designed and compared many I-beams, optimizing the cross-section for strength-to-weight rather than raw strength. I generated and simulated the versions in Fusion 360, which is where I picked up the basics of Fusion and CAD, and I experimented with AI-optimized I-beam designs alongside my own. Across three rounds of print-and-break testing I adjusted the web height, flange width, web thickness, and fillet radius, logged mass and failure load for each beam, and let the results guide the next design. The best beam reached 29.5 N/g.

To predict how a cross-section would perform before printing, we used a strength-to-weight calculator in Excel. It estimates the moment of inertia, weight, and strength-to-weight of the beam from its dimensions using a 3-point-bend model. It is a theoretical model, so it reads higher than the printed beams, which fail early at layer lines.

29.5 N/g best, tested · 2,441 N peak load · 3 test rounds

Download the calculator (Excel)

I-beam modeled in Fusion 360, isometric view — Modeled in Fusion 360

3-point bend test

Printed red I-beam labeled P1 on a workbench — Printed beam, P1

Two printed red I-beams labeled P3 — Failure: the top flange broke off

Yellow printed I-beam bent and cracked after load testing — Tested to failure

Rocket-Engine Vibration Analysis

This was a guided project built around accelerometer data from a set of static rocket-engine tests. I worked through a Python notebook to analyze it, aiming to understand the concepts at a high level rather than the deeper math behind them.

Two ideas stuck with me. A power spectral density breaks a vibration signal into the range of frequencies it contains and shows how much energy sits at each one, which makes it easy to compare how violent different tests were. A spectrogram adds time back in, so you can watch the frequencies change from moment to moment and see events like ignition happen instead of averaging them away. I also picked up the basics of Butterworth filtering, which cleans up low-frequency drift and noise so the real vibration is readable.

Power spectral density comparison of the four rocket-engine tests with gRMS in the legend — Power spectral density of all four tests, with gRMS in the legend

Low-Cost Wind Tunnel

My partner and I built a low-cost wind tunnel because our school did not have one. It uses a variable-speed duct fan, a 3D-printed honeycomb straightener and mesh screen to condition the flow, a clear acrylic test section, and fog delivered through straws to make streamlines visible. We designed it so students could observe how their own parts interact with moving air and measure drag with a load cell rather than estimate it. We finished most of the project before we graduated.

Early attempt to pass fog through the tunnel

3D-printed honeycomb straightener and mesh screen

Inside the test section with the stand and straws

Test object on the stand inside the tunnel

Hand-drawn wind tunnel layout and wiring diagram

Laser Audio Link

This was my first independent project, and I built it to see how sound could travel on a beam of light. I modulated a laser with an audio signal so the brightness of the beam rose and fell with the music, aimed it across the room at a photodiode, and let the photodiode turn those changes in light back into an electrical signal.

That recovered signal was weak, so I ran it through an amplifier before driving a speaker with it. Getting clean playback came down to aligning the beam on the photodiode and keeping noise down, and the project gave me a hands-on introduction to modulation, analog signals, and how optical communication works.