George A. Rinard Papers

Dr. George Rinard received his B.S. in Electrical Engineering and his M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Missouri in 1959 and 1961, respectively. During his Ph.D. program at the University of Missouri, Dr. Rinardattended a summer student program at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, MD. There he worked on methods of producing uniform magnetic fields. He also invented and received a patent for a Tumbler System to Provide Random Motion. Nasa uses this system to demagnetize compnents for spacecraft in all three coordinate directions.

After graduation in 1965, Dr. Rinard became an Assistant Professor in the Electrical Engineering Department at the University of Denver. He taught courses and advised graduates in Electromagnetic Field Theory Antennas, Microwave Theory, and Electronic Filters. He also had a joint appointment as a Research Engineer in the Denver Research Institute (DRI) doing antenna research for the U.S. Navy. He gained tenure and served as Acting Department Chairman from June 1969 until Spetember 1972. He was Department Chairman again from September 1974 until June 1975.

When the Engineering College closed in 1975, Dr. Rinard became a full-time Senior Research Engineer in DRI. In addition to his research program in magnetic fields, he took over a research project to develop aids for individuals with disabilities. The object of the project was to develop a system to control a wheelchair using only the eyes. It became obvious that this required video tracking of eye movement, however, small video detectors were not available at that time. He and his team learned that certain computer memory chips were sensitive to light and could be fashioned into a crude video detector. The chips were only available as a packaged device, so they disassembled the package and mounted the chip in a small video camera, which they made, on an eyeglasses frame. This required developing techniques that proved important for future projects. The team successfully controlled a wheelchair using only eye movement; there still exists a video tape of a technician, Owen Barnes, demonstrating it.

When the team demonstrated the device to personnel at Craig Rehabilitation Hospital in Denver, hospital staff were impressed. However, they indicated that a means of communicating proved a more pressing need for severely handicapped individuals than mobility. This became the object of future work, and the team developed a communicator using the eye position detector they created for the wheelchair project. Dr. Rinard and his team worked with an individual who had a brain stem injury and was on a ventilator. Despite serious eye movement problems, he became very adept at working the communicator. After operating it for over a year, he used it to ask his family to remove life support, which they did. This came as a shock, until realizing that it was the team’s intention to help the man communicate, not to tell him what to say.

The experience working with bare chips led to the development of complicated circuits by interconnecting many chips on the same substrate and enclosing the entire circuit in a package with leads. Dr. Rinard lead a team that used this technique to build a miniature Vital Signs Monitor for NASA. It was the only vital signs instrumentation that was used by John Young and Robert Crippen on the maiden flight of Space Shuttle “Columbia” (STS-1) April 12 - 14 1981.

A chance proposal Dr. Rinard submitted to the EPA in response to a solicitation in the Commerce Business Daily led to a large multi-year program on Electrostatic Precipitator (ESP) Research. ESPs were the primary means used to remove fly ash from the stacks of coal-fired electric power plants. Dr. Rinard lead his team to develop new technology to improve the performance of ESPs by building small scale Electrostatic Precipitators and testing them in the labs of DRI and the EPA, Research Triangle Park, NC. They went on to test this technology on a large, pilot-scale ESP, built and operated by DRI on an exhaust gas stream at the Valmont Electric Power Station, Boulder CO. ESP research was a large program, incorporating over 20 engineers and technicians.

Dr. Rinard met Dr. Gareth Eaton in the late eighties. Dr. Eaton and his wife Dr. Sandra Eaton manage the Facility for Electron Paramagnetic Resonance (EPR) Spectroscopy in the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry at the University of Denver. EPR requires uniform magnetic fields and RF resonators, both of which are specialties of Dr. Rinard. To provide Dr. Eaton with a uniform magnetic gradient to do imaging, Drs. Rinard and Donald Rugg designed a system of coils and teamed with Richard Quine, who constructed the system. This started a symbiotic relationship between Dr. Rinard, Richard Quine and Drs. Eaton, which has endured for over 30 years; Dr. Rinard enjoyed working with students again.

During this period, in addition to designing and constructing Spectroscopic components and systems, the team developed and patented a new type of resonator and a completely new type of EPR Spectrometer using rapid scanning of the magnetic field. Rapid Scan EPR has proven very successful and was commercialized by a major manufacturer of EPR spectrometers, Bruker Corporation, Billerica, MA.

Dr. Rinard is grateful to the University of Denver for the opportunities it has provided and the ability to have three separate careers in one.

Dr. Rinard retired from the University of Denver in June 2024 after 59 years.