Meet the Team
Who We Are
Jeff Hubbell
President
Structural Engineer
Jeff has over 40 years of civil and structural engineering experience in the US and overseas. He has designed and renovated structural building and material handling systems for industrial, manufacturing, and corporate clients.
Jeff has worked with the Boeing Company for over 29 years on projects at the Everett, Kent, Auburn, Frederickson, Renton, and Boeing Field sites in Washington; and for Boeing Charleston. He is very knowledgeable in the design and renovation of commercial and industrial facilities. He is very familiar designing systems to meet the requirements of critical 24/7 facilities including manufacturing production, airports, and maritime and offshore facilities. Jeff designed crane modifications of two existing container cranes for Massachusetts Port Authority which allowed the cranes to remain in service while being raised 6m.
Tom Hubbell
Vice President
Structural Engineer
Tom has over 34 years of structural engineering experience. Tom is experienced at design and implement engineering applications, from client interview (establish scope and interface requirements) to program layout and implementation, including debugging and testing.
He is proficient in multiple programming languages and he wrote a time history analysis program that allows engineers to effectively process results from time-history analyses. Tom's computer program was used extensively to design the strengthening of Boeing 747 manufacturing facility and minimize retrofit costs. Tom's program saved Boeing 65% of the estimated construction cost for a conventional upgrade.
Dianren (Mike) Zhang, PhD
Vice President
Mechanical Engineer
Mike has over 35 years of structural and mechanical engineering experience designing cranes and other structures. He has extensive experience with linear and non-linear structural analysis, design, and independent third party peer reviews. He has performed random quality assurance reviews and design, inspections during fabrication and commissioning, including daily on-site quality control inspections, and witness of user acceptance testing.
He has extensive experience with design and manufacture of various types of heavy industrial systems, such as material handling systems, aircraft hangar door systems, offshore oil platform systems, and shipyard shipbuilding systems. He has assisted many clients worldwide, including equipment manufacturers, with project startups, QA/QC audits, and site inspections. Mike has completed and assisted in numerous accident investigations, utilizing advanced structural and mechanical analysis software tools to help determine like causative scenarios.
Rich W. Phillips
Founder
Structural Engineer
Rich has over 44 years of experience in structural engineering for commercial, industrial and governmental clients. He has extensive experience with port related equipment such as container cranes, rubber-tired cranes, rail-mounted cranes, and other material handling equipment.
Rich was responsible for the development and programming of general purpose structural software used for the design of various types of cranes. He has worked with: Ports to purchase container cranes or other equipment; international crane manufacturers to design cranes and other port equipment; international crane manufacturers to modify port equipment. He has trained engineers at IMPSA's plant in Argentina, Hanjung's plant in Korea, and Shanghai Port Machinery Plant in China while designing container cranes to be built at various locations worldwide. Rich has been retained as a crane expert in the US and overseas.
Richard L. Phillips
Associate
Mechanical Engineer
Richard has over 12 years of experience performing peer reviews of Contractor's crane designs including some of the largest container cranes in the world. Richard has designed replacement trolley drives on a set of ship to shore cranes and developed an automated post processor for non-linear tie down analysis of ship to shore cranes under storm wind loads. Other notable work includes designing hoists and trolley travel, bridge travel and rotate drive systems for overhead stacker cranes for use in class 1 division 1 hazardous environments. He has also resolved fabrication issues, performed commissioning, authored an O&M manual, and trained maintenance staff.
Andrew Hanek
Associate
Civil Engineer
Andrew has over 9 years of design experience with container cranes and port handling equipment, overhead crane systems, software development, project management, and performing site inspections. His experience covers all phases of the project from purchase specifications to analysis to site inspections.
One of the key projects Andrew has worked on has been procurement of new STS cranes which involved preparing the purchase specification, peer review of the contractor’s design, and managing the third party site inspections. He is actively involved with software development and R&D of new programs. He has experience with long span truss systems for hangars and determining load paths for complex connection design.