Who I am
I’m an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Science in the William States Lee College of Engineering at UNC Charlotte. My work sits at the intersection of powder characterization and the mechanics of particulate materials: quantifying the size, shape, and surface morphology of a powder or media population, then connecting those distributions to how the material packs, flows, deforms, degrades, and transfers energy on impact.
I did my PhD in Materials Engineering at Purdue University, where I studied industrial shot peening — a process in which a surface is bombarded with steel or ceramic particles, producing a residual stress field that industry needs to predict and control.
Research
Core threads I’m building the group around:
- Powder and media characterization — dynamic image analysis, shape descriptors (aspect ratio, circularity, convexity, roundness, higher-order form factors), and joint size–shape distributions. Getting past D50 and toward descriptors that actually predict behavior.
- Shape effects on bulk mechanics — how particle morphology controls packing density, coordination number, shear strength, compaction response, and flowability in granular assemblies.
- Impact mechanics of non-spherical particles — energy transfer, contact area, and plastic work when the impactor isn’t a sphere; how a shape distribution propagates into a distribution of surface and subsurface outcomes.
- Media degradation and process feedback — how a media population evolves in service (breakage, rounding, size drift) and what that does to process consistency in peening and other particle-driven operations.
- Reduced-order and data-driven models — Eshelby/inclusion-style analytical formulations, spectral descriptions of heterogeneous stress fields, and ML surrogates trained on FEM/DEM ensembles, packaged so a process engineer can actually run them.
- Digital twins for particulate processes — flowsheet architectures linking media condition, kinematics, coverage, and material response so a production cell can be steered in real time.
Recurring themes: stochasticity as a first-class variable rather than noise, characterization that earns its keep by predicting something, and models that leave the notebook and reach the shop floor.
Group & openings
- PhD and MS students (ME, MSE, or adjacent)
- Undergraduate researchers at UNC Charlotte
- Industry partners with a powder or media problem
Email works best. Include what you’ve built or measured — that tells me more than a transcript does.
Dissertation
Spectral Characterization and Reduced-Order Modeling of Industrial Shot Peening (PDF)
Purdue University, 2025. Poisson impact modeling, spectral characterization of residual stress fields, DIA-based media characterization, and ML-enabled process flowsheets.
Contact / links
E-mail: lfeltner@charlotte.edu
Department: MEES @ UNC Charlotte
GitHub Pages: https://feltner515.github.io/homepage/