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Local NAVAIR Lakehurst engineer wins prestigious award

  • Published
  • By Elyse Fetherman
  • NAWCAD Lakehurst Public Affairs Office
JOINT BASE MCGUIRE-DIX-LAKEHURST, N.J. --  Naval Air Systems Command Lakehurst engineer, John Altobelli, is a winner of the prestigious Dr. Delores M. Etter Top Scientists and Engineers of the Year Award, which he received during a ceremony on June 6 at the Pentagon.

Altobelli is the Aircraft Launch and Recovery Equipment Service Life Management Program catapult design team lead and was honored for his work in developing a method to determine service life for ALRE components with complex loading scenarios.

The method is mostly an algorithm and "organized different processes and theories for fatigue into a way that hadn't been done before," Altobelli explained.

In 2013, his work was compiled into a paper, "Fatigue Life Calculation with Loads Varying in Magnitude and Direction," that was presented at the Society of Automotive Engineers' World Congress.

Altobelli's method was integrated into a fatigue calculation tool, providing the added functionality to predict service life for components with complex loading scenarios.

"Safety, reliability, availability and cost are really key to what service life management is about. For us, to predict a good service life we consider all of this with safety being paramount," said Altobelli.

Altobelli received his Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from The College of New Jersey in 2008 and his Master of Science in mechanical engineering for North Carolina State University in 2013.

He presently resides in Toms River, NJ.