District Qualifiers!

This week for me was only a half week at NASA, because thurs and fri the tennis team had the sectional tournament, and charlie and I in doubles, and ryan smith and danny lubarsky in singles all qualified for districts! Seeding matches are to be played on sat and districts is next week to see who qualifies for states.

But at NASA I have started testing my rig in the vacuum chamber. Its a more crammed space, so its a lot tougher to figure out how to fit everything and it takes a lot longer to test everything because you have to test it at a series of different pressures (760 torr (atmospheric pressure), 700, 600, 500, 400, 300, 200), and at each one you have to wait for the temperature to level out or at least slow down. This is very important because density and viscosity of air plays a very important part in the cyclone equations, and they change for different pressures and temperatures and even a subtle difference if unaccounted for can throw off the analysis. However, pumping it down to the different pressures is actually quite a bit of fun, at least for me, because you have to flip a bunch of switches to get it going, but then judge when you need to turn it off and then go around as quickly as you can and turn them all off so that it lands on the pressure you want (like turn it off at 530 torr to hit 500). If you miss you can leak out some of the air to raise the pressure back up, but that's less fun. I am almost done testing the cyclones in series, but was delayed in the middle by questionable results.

On wednesday while taking data letting air back in to take data at the different pressures again, I noticed that the data was significantly lower than what it had been when I had pumped down. I then pumped down and let air back in taking data the entire time just to see what would happen, and it agreed with the pump up, but was all off from the first pump down. In chemistry or physics I would just wave this off and keep going, assuming I had done something wrong the first time, but I mentioned this to my mentor, and quickly realized that in a governmental agency or any scientific organization at this level, this was a bad idea. We spent the rest of the day taking data going down and up with different pressure transducers (what measure the data we take for the cyclones) and testing various other components that could be responsible and have to now compare the data when I get back on tuesday. We aren't sure what happened, but it could also explain my mentor's erroneous results during earlier testing, so we can't really go on until we figure this out so that we know what data we can trust for our conclusions, and what needs to be redone. We will see what happens.



My mentor using a friction cutter to cut a stainless steel pipe, he broke three blades in the process, but that just makes it more exciting. The pipe gets very, very hot, I learned that the hard way picking up a piece that fell. But the crazy sparks made up for it!

But as we prepared for the vacuum chamber, some things needed to be modified, so I got more experience in one area of NASA that I have come to love: machining. There is a small shop every 500 feet, no joke, and I can use whatever I want whenever I think I need. Granted I ask my mentor whenever I haven't used something before and he shows me, but the NASA motto really is that you learn most from hands on experiences, even if that means taking risks. Its really cool because I am learning a lot about actual engineering to balance the design, which is most of what we learn in school. And every time my mentor has a project that involves something he thinks contains a piece of information that could help me in college or at some point later, he gets me to help him. So now I feel extremely comfortable using a mill, drill press, table that has a giant spinning saw blade in the middle, friction cutters of all sizes, and other things I don't even know how to describe in words but which are just really cool. There are some big things which he said he would show me before I left and I am super excited for those. Its like a giant playground! One that can be deadly, but eh, that just makes it even more exhilarating! But I guess I will try not to hurt myself...