First Week

Wow, a week went by quickly. Monday morning was hell with all the security, IT, and other boring presentations. Lunch in the cafeteria with my mentor, Stephanie, and a few other USRP interns and mentors was delightful. On the way to the office from lunch, we poked our head in a few labs. One of them was testing lunar rovers in a huge sandbox. That was pretty mind blowing and surreal. I also saw the supersonic wind tunnel that I'll be simulating on my computer. The rest of the afternoon consisted of getting the kinks worked out of my computer and reading a bit.

The rest of the week I continued to read, learn a few Unix comands (I'm working on a Linux machine), and a few other software programs I'll be using. Thursday we toured a robotics lab where they develop robots for bomb squads, haz mat, moon dust harvesting, etc. That was pretty cool. We also toured the graphics and visualization lab where they had some nice interactive 3D demonstrations.

I guess I should explain what I'm doing here. I'm doing computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for tests in a supersonic wind tunnel. CFD allows the engineer to get flow properties (velocity, density, momentum, etc.) by numerical simulations rather than having to actually test and collect data. My simulations are actually being done in parallel with wind tunnel tests. The computational and experimental results will be compared and analyzed.

This afternoon (friday) I completed my first simulation (of the empty wind tunnel running at Mach 2 (2 times the speed of sound(about 1500 mph))). It is currently running on my computer and should be completed when I come in on Monday!