Friday, August 21, 2020

Feeling Energized

Feeling Energized As the semester begins to wind down, it comes time to turn in projects, do those last minute problem sets, and perhaps design a wind turbine. This was my past week. So since early November, Ive had this design project for one of my classes, 2.005, where we had to design a floating buoy-like structure to support a 700,000 kilo tower and rotor combo. I started working on it Thanksgiving afternoon, and finished it this past Monday morning much to my delight. Originally, I kinda didnt take the design project seriously, and thought that itd be just plugging numbers into an equation, and then typing it out to make it look nice; however, it was far from that. I had to actually practice being an engineer, and needless to sasy the project wasnt all about typesetting some equations in Latex. 20 pages of chicken scratch later and a solid 1.5 weeks spent constantly thinking about the design, I managed to produce my final report where I derived equations about the natural oscillation, center of mass of the frustum, etc. I cant even begin to describe what joy it brought to me to be able to press print and be done with it, but the process from conception to design was one of the best parts. Now one thing MIT is known for is hands-on experience. I think this project is a great example of it. While I actually didnt build the wind turbine, I got a good idea of what it takes to bring engineering concepts to life. I got to revive my 733t programming skills to minimize a cost function of five variables, and also got to see what its like to watch the sun rise while youre still doing work (no all nighter still) While I didnt have the opportunity to build a wind turbine. Next week, Ill have the opportunity to check out the final presentations for 2.009 (Product Engineering Process) where students have designed and built banana harvesters and lentil sorters. Yes, it was in this class that they also built the death ray.

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