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DAVID W. ALMGREN |
David Almgren, specialist in thermodynamic design
David Wright Almgren, a retired naval officer and a thermodynamics engineer who worked on the Mars probe with NASA, died at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington on Sept. 28 after complications from heart surgery. The Concord resident was 73.
Dr. Almgren was born in Washington, D.C., and graduated from Princeton High School in New Jersey in 1953. He received a degree in basic engineering in 1957 from Princeton University. The same year, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy.
In 1958, he married Esther Davis, whom he had met in 1955 on Martha’s Vineyard, and the two moved to Newport, R.I., where he joined the Destroyer Force US Atlantic Fleet on board the USS Hazelwood. During his time there, he was promoted to lieutenant and became chief engineering officer before he was relieved of active duty in 1960.
Dr. Almgren joined the Naval Reserve after he and his wife moved to Brookline in 1960. He enrolled at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he received a master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1961, the degree of mechanical engineer in 1964, and a doctorate in the field of heat transfer in 1966.
Dr. Almgren then joined Arthur D. Little Inc. in Cambridge as an engineering consultant specializing in thermal design. While at the management consulting firm, he worked on projects involving thermal temperatures in space, including atomic clocks used in satellites, and a blood storage experiment in conjunction with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that flew on the space shuttle Columbia.
Dr. Almgren left Arthur D. Little in 1987 to form his own engineering consulting firm, Q-Metrics Inc. in Bedford, on Hanscom Air Force Base. In the 2000s, he was a contractor to Lockheed Martin in conjunction with MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory, where he worked on the Mars probe.
Dr. Almgren was a scuba diver and a member of the New England Aquarium, and would often go on fish collecting trips for the aquarium to such tropical places as the Philippines, the Bahamas, and Fiji. He was a member of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Society of Sigma Xi, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Winchester Indoor Lawn Tennis Club, and Woburn Racquet Club.
Besides his wife, he leaves his sons, Matthew of Columbia, S.C., and Daniel of Nashua, and a sister, Linda Kime of Cambridge.
A reception will be held today in First Parish in Concord at 2 p.m.
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