Alex overlooking Yosemite Valley from a sunlit granite ledge

Hi, I'mAlex Nania

Stanford Mechanical Engineering

About Me

I'm a junior at Stanford University studying Mechanical Engineering. I was born and raised in St. Louis, MO, where I grew up watching the Cardinals play and playing baseball myself — that is, until I injured my shoulder. After that setback, I joined a wrestling team, where I learned to love the adrenaline rush of pushing my body to its limits.

I love adventure! I travel any chance I get: Amalfi, Athens, Rome, Berlin, Paris, Guatemala, Mexico, Australia, Singapore, Russia, you name it. Exploring and trying new things makes me feel alive.

nania@stanford.edu (636) 893-4001

Selected Work

Projects

01 / Thermal Systems

Electronics Liquid-Cooling Test Bench

150 W heat load / 85 C ceiling

I am designing and building a liquid-cooling test bench to characterize how coolant flow affects electronics cooling performance. A controllable 24 V heater applies loads up to 150 W through an aluminum heat spreader and liquid cold plate, while an Arduino-based system records temperatures, power, and flow rate.

Testing at 50, 100, and 150 W will map effective convective heat transfer and overall thermal resistance, benchmark the results against the Dittus-Boelter correlation, and identify the minimum flow needed to maintain acceptable component temperatures.

Finished 3D-printed ping pong ball launcher

Exploded assembly drawing of the ping pong ball launcher

02 / Product Design

Ping Pong Ball Cannon

Sketch / Prototype / CAD / PLA

I designed and built a spring-powered launcher with a 3D-printed barrel, funnel loading system, adjustable base, and extension-spring-driven slider. Hand sketches and a cardboard mock-up became an iterated CAD assembly focused on rigidity and repeatable shots.

Static analysis sized the holding weight and support reactions, driving a geometry change from a 36.6-degree guided roll to an 8.7-degree direct hit. The revised design raised the minimum required holding weight from 3.81 lb to 6.67 lb.

Front view of Alex's Scotch-yoke platform elevator

Rear view showing the Scotch-yoke mechanism and guide structure

03 / Mechanism Design

Scotch-Yoke Platform Elevator

2.5 lb lifted / 6 in travel

I built a hand-cranked lifting machine that converts rotation into vertical motion through a Scotch yoke. Cardboard, laser-cut acrylic, and 3D-printed PLA prototypes exposed friction and rigidity as the dominant design constraints.

The final version pairs a thicker printed base and guides with a friction-fit top support, offset weight carriage, ball bearings, and a bolted three-layer acrylic handle. It successfully lifts 2.5 lb through the full six-inch travel.

04 / Computational Engineering

Dynamic GPU Cooling Control

Direct-to-Chip Thermal Simulation

Developed a three-state lumped-capacitance thermal model under stochastic GPU loads with an 85 C junction constraint and cubic pump and fan power scaling. Predictive pump and fan co-control reduced modeled cooling energy about 44% against matched baselines, with flow-dependent cold-plate resistance and SVD-based identifiability analysis.

View on GitHub

Signal Coding

Image Compression + Digital Communication

Built a JPEG-style image codec from primitives using Huffman coding, 2-D DCT, quantization, and chroma subsampling, plus an acoustic modem with on-off keying, bandpass filtering, and Viterbi decoding. Performance came within 1% of the Shannon entropy bound and remained error-free to 700 bit/s.

View on GitHub