Kirk P. Norton

Kirk P. Norton has been a Staff Engineer at General Atomics since 1982.
He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1982.

At General Atomics, he has been involved in the design, assembly, startup, and operation of chemical process equipment. He was the lead engineer for the development of a solar powered reactor for the decomposition of sulfuric acid. His most recent experience has been focused on reactors for chemical vapor deposition on ceramic substrates. Among these is a continuous fiber coater and a low pressure chemical vapor infiltration reactor for the fabrication of ceramic-ceramic composites.

In addition to work in reactor design, he was the responsible engineer for the installation and start-up of an automated munitions inspection system at Yuma Proving Grounds. This involved robotic handling of live munitions and real-time collection of X-ray imaging. He has developed software that characterizes the behavior of particles in a fluidized bed under given conditions. This software also selects the amounts of different reactant gases for chemical vapor deposition of selected coatings.