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John D. Wright (Assoc)

Dr. Wright is the Group Leader of the Fluid Metrology Group in NIST's Sensor Science Division. He manages the group’s research and calibration work in the areas of gas and liquid flow, airspeed, liquid volume and liquid density. In 2020, he was selected to be a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for his contributions to flow metrology and leadership in the international flow community. Dr. Wright developed a Pressure-Volume-Temperature and time gas-flow standard that has an uncertainty of 0.025%, an accomplishment that earned him the US Department of Commerce Bronze Medal. In 2011, he earned the US Department of Commerce Silver Medal for helping to quantify the flow and uncertainty of the Deep Water Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Dr. Wright piloted the first international key comparison for low-pressure gas flow (completed in 2007) and served as the the Chairman of the Working Group for Fluid Flow (WGFF) from 2009 to 2018. The WGFF is a committee organized by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) to coordinate calibration measurement capabilities and comparisons for national metrology institutes. He has participated in more than 15 international or domestic comparisons between flow laboratories, piloted 4 of them, and advanced comparison methods [1, 2]. Before moving to NIST in 1995, Dr. Wright designed and constructed a volumetric water flow standard and he has two flow measurement patents from this period of his career.

Dr. John Wright's research interests are:

  • physical models for flow meters to improve their accuracy and to facilitate their operation beyond calibration conditions. He and collaborators have advanced the physical models of critical flow Venturi meters [3, 4, 5], laminar flow meters [6], turbine meters [7], and Coriolis meters [8].
  • building accurate primary flow standards so that the flow meter physical models can be explored experimentally and improved. Wright and collaborators have advanced the methods and uncertainty analysis for primary standards in gas flow [9], liquid flow [10, 11], volume [12, 13], and liquid density [14].

Publications

Non-nulling Protocols for Fast, Accurate, 3-D Velocity Measurements in Stacks

Author(s)
Iosif Isaakovich Shinder, Aaron Johnson, James Filla, Vladimir B. Khromchenko, Michael R. Moldover, Joey Boyd, John D. Wright, John R. Stoup
We present protocols for making fast, accurate, 3-D velocity measurements in the stacks of coal-fired power plants. The measurements are traceable to

Gas Flow Standards and Their Uncertainty

Author(s)
John D. Wright, Aaron Johnson, Michael R. Moldover, Shin-ichi Nakao
We review diverse types of gas flow standards that are used to calibrate other gas flow meters. For each type of standard, we describe the principles of its

Evaluating Inter-Laboratory Comparison Data

Author(s)
Enrico Frahm, John D. Wright
The primary purpose of inter-laboratory comparisons is to demonstrate that the uncertainty specifications of the calibration measurement capabilities of the

Disinfection of Respirators with Ultraviolet Radiation

Author(s)
Dianne L. Poster, Matthew Hardwick, C Cameron Miller, Michael A. Riley, W. W. Shanaka I. Rodrigo, Andras E. Vladar, John D. Wright, Christopher D. Zangmeister, Clarence Zarobila, Jeremy Starkweather, John Wynne, Jason Yilzarde
Data for interpreting virus inactivation on N95 face filtering respirators (FFRs) by ultraviolet (UV) radiation are important in developing UV strategies for
Created May 7, 2019, Updated June 3, 2023