Hayden Bland

Hayden is a PhD candidate in Nuclear Engineering, born and raised in North Carolina. After initially being rejected from the NCSU College of Engineering, he went on to earn his Bachelor’s and Master’s in Nuclear Engineering in 2022 and 2024, respectively. After careful consideration and analysis of the job market, he began pursuing his PhD. His research focus is on measuring the viscosity of molten salts through novel methods that have low uncertainty and high efficiency. This work is performed in a custom-made furnace with glass capillaries with sample volumes less than 1 milliliter, enabling high throughput capability and significantly reduced costs. The primary methodology uses dark field microscopy to image individual microspheres in a fluid, tracking their Brownian motion, and using Stokes-Einstein relation to obtain viscosity.