2016 marks Barber-Nichols’ 50th anniversary and the company pulled out all the stops on May 20th to celebrate! The event included live music, food and refreshments, talks by company founders Bob Barber and Ken Nichols, and the world recording setting steam-powered car built by the company in 1985 made a one-day appearance for the event.…

The Authentic Business Relationship Cultivated Between Barber-Nichols Inc. and Newport News Shipbuilding Pays Dividends with Lower Cost, Improved Schedule, and Superior Quality In 2014 Huntington Ingalls Industries / Newport News Shipbuilding (NNS) awarded Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) a multi-year contract to produce MK21 Air Turbine Pump Assemblies for the U.S. Navy’s Virginia-Class Submarine Program. The contract…

Jun 2016 Barber-Nichols is honored to have been selected as a 2016 Colorado Companies to Watch winner! This program was created by the Edward Lowe Foundation in partnership with the Colorado Office of Economic Development and International Trade (OEDIT) to honor Colorado companies that are developing valuable products and services, creating jobs, enriching communities, generating new…

In 2004 the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Nuclear Energy and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) theorized that replacing a traditional steam Rankine cycle in a power plant with a supercritical carbon dioxide (CO2) Brayton cycle would be 7% – 12% more efficient and allow power plants to deliver more electricity from…

Direct Metal Laser Sintering – the process whereby successive layers of metal powder are fused together to form an object – is a subset of Additive Manufacturing techniques gaining favor in the rocket engine development community because of its ability to quickly and cost-effectively produce complex components.  However, due to current part size “printing” limitations…

Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) has been awarded a five-year contract potentially valued at $42.9 Million with options for the manufacture of MK 48 Heavyweight Torpedo alternators and regulators. BNI’s employees and management are proud that the U.S. Navy is confident that we can successfully deliver this mission-critical hardware and the award of this multi-year contract allows…

Aug 2015 Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) would like to congratulate Makai Ocean Engineering on the dedication of their 100 kW Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) power plant and we are proud to support you in this achievement. On August 21st the plant came online, generates enough power for 100 homes, and is the first closed-cycle OTEC power plant delivering…

Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) is pleased to be awarded a NASA Phase I Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) award for Enabling Pump Technologies for Deep-Throttle Ascent/Descent Rocket Engine Operation. BNI’s proposal was in response to the NASA Glenn Research Center’s interest in developing an engine for future exploration of Mars that uses in situ produced propellants…

Barber-Nichols Inc. (BNI) is pleased to be exhibiting in booth 308 at the 2015 Cryogenic Engineering Conference & International Cryogenic Materials Conference (CEC/ICMC) in Tucson, AZ. The conference opens on Sunday June 28th and goes through Thursday July 2nd. Additionally, Chris Rista, P.E. will be presenting a paper entitled Engineering, Manufacture and Preliminary Testing of the ITER Toroidal…

NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC) recently partnered with Barber-Nichols to demonstrate a pump technology capable of deep throttling performance in lower thrust class liquid rocket engine propellant applications. Many, if not most, propellant pumps utilize full emission pump configurations as this technology provides the highest hydraulic efficiency at the design duty point, which applies…