#meche

the coolest, hippest blog around :)

Manny's head looks like a goddam bottle... Now I can't unsee that for the rest of my life

It’s past time for a little blog update. Some of you might have seen that I’m doing an internship at NASA’s Glenn Research Center this semester! I didn’t really share what I was working on though, so here’s some of it!

This is the N3-X, it’s going to be a turboelectric commercial passenger plane! More info is on GRC’s website, highly recommend a read if you’re curious. There are some promotional videos there as well that I thought were neat.

Anyway, the whole turboelectric idea works like this. It uses superconducting electric motors (really cold electromagnetic systems that have perfect DC conductance) cooled by liquid hydrogen. The liquid hydrogen flows through the conductor system, cooling it, and then goes off to a generator to burn to help generate electricity for the motors to conduct. My main project is testing the superconducting material they want to use to make sure it’s not putting out too much heat in AC loss to negate it’s superconducting effects.

This whole thing has forced me to pick up so many new skills. I’m much better with Python data management and scripting now. Had to learn Python 2 for some of the legacy equipment in the lab, but I’ve been using python 3 for the rest. I’m writing serial drivers for lab equipment. I’m modeling two-phase fluid flow, which I haven’t done before. I also haven’t taken heat transfer or thermo ii, but I’ve definitely been doing a fair bit of the material in those classes.

I’ve also been working on a couple of side projects involving rocket fuel systems that I can’t talk about quite as much, but it’s been a lot of modeling fluid flow and heat transfer mechanisms,