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Carl Leonard Goodzeit

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Carl Leonard Goodzeit, 88, of DeSoto, Texas, passed away on January 25, 2017. Carl was a very important contributor to the design of superconducting magnets for both Brookhaven National Laboratory and the Superconducting Super Collider.

February 21, 2017 (PO54). Carl was born on March 19, 1928, to Morris and Ruth Goodzeit in Newark, New Jersey. He was valedictorian of the Millburn High School class of 1946 and went on to earn a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rutgers University in 1950, and an M.S. in Engineering Mechanics from Brown University in 1955.

His first position was as a senior research engineer at General Motors in Detroit. He joined Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York as a Senior Engineer in the Physics Department (1959-1982) and then Magnet Division (1982-1989). From 1990-1994, he was a Senior Engineer and Group Leader for the Magnet Division of the Superconducting Super Collider Lab in Texas. Most recently he has worked as an engineering consultant in Texas. He holds several patents, and in November 2016, he delivered a paper on a dual armature design for advanced electric motor technology at the Electric and Hybrid Aerospace Technology Symposium in Cologne, Germany.

Carl loved tennis, cooking, sailing, cats, the Bahamas, and spending time with his family. He is survived by his wife of nearly 55 years, Connie Goodzeit, and his four children, Neil, Alison, James, and Carolyn, his five grandchildren, Elliot, Emma, Olivia, Michael, and Victoria. Carl was one of a kind, and his family adored him for his humor, intelligence, and his unique personality.

At Brookhaven, Carl worked on the design, construction, and operation of Bubble Chambers when these devices were a principal tool for detecting elementary particles in the physics research being done at the Brookhaven accelerators. This work was mechanically challenging because these detectors used liquid hydrogen, magnetic fields, and forceful pressure pulses to reveal tracks in the chamber. Liquid hydrogen is a very volatile and flammable substance so safety was a foremost consideration. In 1982, be began work on superconducting magnets and made numerous valuable contributions to the development of these difficult magnets for the CBA, SSC, and RHIC Colliders. His focus was always on ways to contain the large forces in these magnets, forces that act to break the magnet apart. To that end, he perfected a collar design for the SSC that would have been used for industrial production of those magnets had the project continued. The unique design of the RHIC magnet collaring system, using the magnet’s steel yoke as a collar while still respecting its needed magnetic properties, was largely his invention and has served well in that machine for the many years is has been in operation. To achieve the necessary understanding of the mechanics at work, and to guide the collar development, he developed a strain gauge measuring system that allowed unambiguous analysis of the forces at work in the magnet.

Carl joined the SSC laboratory in 1990 and became the reference engineer for all the newly hired and not very experienced people in the magnet development group. He organized a Technology Transfer Program for the companies selected for dipole industrialization. He was fundamental in transferring to them the accumulated knowledge, but also in warning them about possible design misinterpretations and possible problems in going too far in industrial assembly lines without considering the intrinsic specificity of superconductor magnets. He participated in the task force in charge of the revision of the SSC dipole design when its aperture was increased from 40 to 50 mm. His remarks and suggestions were extremely pertinent, permitting a rapid convergence for the launch of the prototyping program based on FNAL and BNL proposals. In the meantime, he collaborated on the design of a fifteen-meter long superconducting quadruple for the interaction regions, the first magnet to be ever designed and built wholly by the SSC laboratory. His contribution was paramount in defining a novel and innovative mechanical structure fulfilling robustness, manufacturing simplicity and costs. Two two-meter-long models were built and demonstrated the soundness of the design, reaching short sample limits in very few quenches, well above operating current and with no retraining. After more than two decades of oblivion, this structure is again strongly being reconsidered for new generation quadrupoles.

After the SSC project was canceled, Carl continued technical work as a consultant. From 1994 through 1998 he was a co-developer of a CD-ROM tutorial ‘Superconducting Accelerator Magnets’ that was funded by a US Dept of Energy SBIR award to MJB Consulting (later MJB Plus) in DeSoto, TX. When that project was completed, he was a consultant on several magnet development projects for the Advanced Magnet Lab, Florida. In January 2001, he presented “An Introduction to Mechanical Design and Construction Methods, a segment of the Superconducting Accelerator Magnets course at the US Particle Accelerator School at Rice University. He then spent several years developing his concept for a dual armature topology to almost double the specific power of a radial field electrical machine. From 2010-2013 he collaborated with Florida Institute of Technology on an NSF funded project for the design, construction, and testing of a dual armature prototype generator. His final interests were related to application of the dual armature electric machine topology for aircraft propulsion.

Technical content for BNL by Erich Willen (BNL/retired), SSC by Giancarlo Spigo (now at CERN), consulting projects by Millicent (Penny) Ball (consulting colleague). 

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