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
What 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 ArticleThe Fault That Doesn't Trip: Ground Leakage Current in Accelerator and X-Ray Systems
Most electrical faults announce themselves. Ground leakage current doesn't — it degrades slowly in magnet power supplies, X-ray tubes, and beam current measurements alike, often masquerading as noise or drift long before it becomes an obvious fault.
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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