Articles
These articles explore engineering ideas that transfer across disciplines — from particle accelerators and medical devices to cloud infrastructure, software engineering, and industrial automation.
Peer-reviewed scientific publications can be found here: researchgate.net/profile/Rob-Rainer-3
From Simulation to Operations: A DCS Infrastructure for Fusion Digital Twins
A fusion digital twin becomes operational only when it shares the physical facility's equipment identity, timing, configuration, data quality, and authority boundaries. This article presents an EPICS-centered DCS reference architecture for connecting plant systems, deterministic controls, synchronized data, simulation, and model-informed operations.
Read ArticleEngineering the Job Search: Using AI to Rebuild After a Layoff
After an abrupt layoff, I approached rebuilding my career as an engineering problem: establishing the current state, defining constraints, building a feedback loop, and using AI as a cognitive engineering tool while retaining human authorship, judgment, and accountability.
Read ArticleFrom Sunlight to Turbines: Exploring Energy Generation with Nadiyah
A conversation with my 12-year-old daughter about windmills, water turbines, lightning, fission, fusion, and solar energy became a systems-level examination of where electricity comes from, how energy changes form, and why nearly every power plant is built around one of two conversion paths.
Read ArticleThe Branching Origins Hypothesis: A Young Scientist's Thought Experiment
This essay documents a series of discussions with my 10-year-old nephew, Liam Jones, who posed an original question about the origins of the universe. Rather than presenting a new cosmological theory, the paper captures the process of scientific inquiry: forming a hypothesis, comparing it with current physics, identifying its weaknesses, and exploring what evidence would be required to test it. The work was developed collaboratively using discussions with modern AI systems (ChatGPT and Claude) as educational tools.
Read ArticleThroughput Isn't One Problem: A Pareto-Limited View of Reconstruction Bottlenecks
Data reconstruction bottlenecks respond well to adding GPUs — but 2026's AI-driven memory shortage has made that fix unusually expensive, turning a technical optimization problem into a genuine Pareto-limited tradeoff between throughput and cost.
Read ArticleSelf-Tuning by Design: Building an Adaptive PID Simulator for Accelerator Timing Drift
A technical write-up on a personal project simulating adaptive PID control for accelerator timing drift — self-tuning gains, a decoupled beam-dump safety interlock, and why the safety logic never depends on the control loop it's protecting against.
Read ArticleWhat Particle Accelerators Can Teach Hospitals About Alarm Fatigue
Hospital alarm fatigue is a well-documented patient safety problem, and medical device interoperability standards are actively trying to solve it now. Accelerator control systems have used mature, severity-based alarm architectures to solve a strikingly similar problem for decades — and the two fields don't appear to be talking to each other.
Read ArticleWhat Particle Accelerators and Water Utilities Both Learned About Single Points of Failure
Municipal water utilities are actively moving away from single-server SCADA architectures toward virtualized, redundant infrastructure — independently arriving at the same architecture accelerator control systems adopted years earlier, for the same reason: neither can tolerate downtime.
Read ArticleFast Code Isn't Trustworthy Code: A Controls Engineer's Take on the AI Coding Debate
Some companies are mandating AI-generated code while research shows it produces meaningfully more defects than human-written code. Safety-critical engineering has always kept "fast" and "trustworthy" as separate questions — and that discipline is directly relevant to the current AI coding debate.
Read ArticleDetected, Not Diagnosed: Ground Leakage Current in Accelerator and X-Ray Systems
Modern insulation monitoring does detect ground faults in magnet power supplies and trips the system — but pinpointing which component is actually responsible is the hard part. In microfocus X-ray sources, it's worse: leakage current can degrade image quality with no fault signature at all.
Read ArticleMeasure, Compare, Correct: The Loop Behind Every Stable System
From body temperature regulation to household thermostats to particle beam orbit correction, nearly every stable system runs on the same three-step feedback loop — just at wildly different speeds and tolerances.
Read ArticleThe Great Virtualization Reshuffle: A View From Both Sides of the VMware-to-Proxmox Shift
Broadcom's VMware licensing overhaul triggered one of the biggest shifts in enterprise virtualization in decades. Having run production infrastructure on both VMware and Proxmox, the technical gap has narrowed far more than the pricing gap — and the real lesson is about vendor lock-in as a form of technical debt.
Read ArticleSmall Improvements, Big Machines: What Fifteen Years in Accelerator Controls Taught Me
A personal reflection on fifteen years at NSLS-II, what published research does and doesn't capture about the actual job, and the two co-authored papers that represent a narrow, unusually legible slice of a much larger body of work.
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