WSU student earns national engineering award

Jordan Raymond and three colleagues wear safety glasses and gloves while magnetizing liquid air.

Mechanical engineering student Jordan Raymond has received the Donna Jung Scholarship Award.

The prestigious graduate student scholarship aims to support students in the field of cryogenics, which is the study of materials at very cold temperatures. Raymond (BS Mechanical Engineering, ’19) received the award at the 2019 Cryogenic Engineering Conference and International Cryogenic Materials Conference in July. She was one of six WSU students who attended the conference.

Jordan Raymond stands next to a poster display titled Oxygen Separation in a Vortex Tube with Applied Magnetic Field.
Jordan Raymond’s work could have applications in the aerospace and medical industries.

Raymond, originally from Issaquah, Washington, works in WSU’s Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) lab. Working with Associate Professor Jake Leachman, she is studying the extraction of liquid oxygen from a gas mixture using a vortex tube with an induced magnetic field. The work could have applications in the aerospace and medical industries.

“It was an idea I started, wrote a paper and saw it from start to finish,” she said. “I think that’s what got me the scholarship.”

Working in one of only three cryogenic laboratories at a U.S. university has provided her with a unique opportunity in a new field of study, she said.

“WSU is the only one doing active hydrogen experiments,” she said. “It’s a very niche thing so no one knows about it, but everyone is interested in it. We are paving our own way with what we are doing.”

Raymond plans to pursue a Ph.D. and hopes to eventually work in the defense and space industries.