It's been a long while since I last posted and many things have happened. Don't worry I promise not to bore you to death. Well that's a blatant lie, I will try my hardest to bore you.... Lately it seems my favourite topics of conversation revolve around jet engines, no pun intended.
Anyway I have managed to winkle some spare time into my incredibly busy life that the fourth year of an aerospace engineering degree demands. So what did I do with the few days I had off over Easter break? Did I watch TV? Go flying? Run about in the garden, splashing a water from a hose in slow motion like those sentimental flashbacks to childhood? Nope. I spent the time working on something. It is a philosophy that Aerospace Girlfriend doesn't understand, but I don't see it as work. In fact over the looooong summer months between each year at uni I start to go mad with the shear boredom. Usually by the end of the summer I have no money left to carry on with my projects, the weather is usually terrible and I resort to spending the evenings moaning about the lack of Dr Alice Roberts on television these days. Ah Dr Alice Roberts, now she does make me want to run around the garden with a hose.
So what have I been doing, well I have been building a jet engine data acquisition program which would let me control a jet engine through a computer and see the performance of the engine in real time. The problem is I have to couple many, many, many different sensors to the computer. This is the easy bit and I have been doing this for years using a DAQ, but now I want to build a neat virtual dashboard and have the on screen instruments display the data from the sensors using Labview. Sounds easy, but trying to use Labview is very much like trying to herd badgers into a laundry basket with a plastic spoon. I'm getting there though and will post details soon.
In other news I won the NorthWest Aeropace Alliance 'Sir Frank Whittle Award' in February with my work on the steady state and transient performance of micro-gas turbine engines. I have a problem accepting praise for my work, especially the project that won me the award and this annoys Aerospace Girlfriend. The project wasn't done to win awards, simply as a way of me getting to spend vast amounts of time working on something that I enjoy doing while getting some much needed uni credits out of it. Sir Frank Whittle is a personal hero of mine, and it was due to a documentary about his achievements, that sparked my interest in jet engines when I was a child. So winning an award set up in his honour, in the field of gas turbines was very cool.
I also won a £1000 as part of the award and it was only right to invest a small amount into buying a bunch of pressure transducers, thermocouples and other assorted goodies towards the jet engine testing bench. Here is the obligatory picture, I had drunk many glasses of champagne and wine by this point, combined with my unphotogenic 'bulb head', I have no idea how the photographer managed to get a half decent picture. My dad took some pictures, but the less said about those the better....
In other news I won the NorthWest Aeropace Alliance 'Sir Frank Whittle Award' in February with my work on the steady state and transient performance of micro-gas turbine engines. I have a problem accepting praise for my work, especially the project that won me the award and this annoys Aerospace Girlfriend. The project wasn't done to win awards, simply as a way of me getting to spend vast amounts of time working on something that I enjoy doing while getting some much needed uni credits out of it. Sir Frank Whittle is a personal hero of mine, and it was due to a documentary about his achievements, that sparked my interest in jet engines when I was a child. So winning an award set up in his honour, in the field of gas turbines was very cool.
I also won a £1000 as part of the award and it was only right to invest a small amount into buying a bunch of pressure transducers, thermocouples and other assorted goodies towards the jet engine testing bench. Here is the obligatory picture, I had drunk many glasses of champagne and wine by this point, combined with my unphotogenic 'bulb head', I have no idea how the photographer managed to get a half decent picture. My dad took some pictures, but the less said about those the better....
I will be graduating in a few short weeks and the thought of being released into the world as a real live boy engineer is quite scary. I will still be building mad contraptions in the garden shed, except this time I am a certified rocket scientist. Let's hope this means less failures and more success? Turbines spewing flames, running pulsejets late at night and small explosions as a rocket motor decides to commit suicide, these don't go down too well with the general public. I need to win the lottery then I can become a mad scientist, free to tinker at leisure, although that's as far as the dream goes. I haven't yet decided if I want to be a Doc Brown kind of mad scientist or a Professor Frink. Time will tell, but I think my future lies with Doc Brown, (again no pun intended)...
Now that I have mentioned Doc Brown, I think I should also mention his closest living parallel, Clifford Stoll. Watch this because if every child had the experience of having a teacher like him the world would be a far better place. I remember my science classes at school being dull and boring, well most of school for me was dull and boring. I remember having the fun of mathematics beaten out of me quite early on. and of course I couldn't be bothered to do any homework preferring to spend time reading books on geology, rockets and whatever else I could get my hands on.
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