Day 12- Friday, May 24

Mr. Melzak was unable to find the problem in the program so I had to calibrate the amplifiers by hand. That just meant that I had to use a power source which I could manually change the voltage coming out of it. There was not much else for me to do other than calibrating the amps. I will be able to set up the system on Tuesday to test out the valve box, but I could not do anything until then.

Day 11- Thursday, May 23

Today I was going to calibrate the amplifiers in the valve box but there was a problem in the program that control the input to output voltage going through the amplifier. Mr. Melzak is going to work on it to see if he can fix the problem. Because of that I was not able to do anything with the valve box today. Hopefully tomorrow the problem will be fixed and I will be able to continue my work. I also got to sit in on a concept review meeting for the new TMS lab.  I don't remember what TMS stands for, but it had something to do with temperature. Basically the meeting was just about what  equipment they need, the cost of it, and what the configurations of the equipment would be in the lab. This also included how much it would cost to get the equipment setup in the lab. To buy the equipment and set it up will cost several hundred thousand dollars.

Day 10- Wednesday, May 22

I final finished assembling the valve box and we were able to test it out. It actually worked minus the sparking power switch due the wrong voltage bulb in the switch. Tomorrow I will start calibrating the amplifiers in the box as well as the sensors so we will hopefully be able to test out the whole system by Friday. Today I also got a tour of all the different labs at the facility. I won't go into detail about the labs because it is really technical and would be somewhat boring to explain in full. Basically each of the labs are used to simulate different conditions the the fuel injects might experience when in use on a plane. This allows for the engineers to test the limits of their products and to fix problems if it does not meet its requirements. This is used mainly by the research and design team to test out new products considering any products already in use on plane already went through these tests (hopefully). I also talked with an engineer who works on Computational Flow Dynamic (CFD). What he works on is really complicated and I only understood about a third of what he explained (he said most of what he does is connected with advanced physics I will most likely learn in college). Simply, his job is to calculate the flow pattern through the nozzles before they are actually produced based on 3D renderings. His job takes a huge amount of computing power, they actually have a tiny super compter to do some of the calculations.

Day 7- Friday, May 17

On Friday I was able to start assembling the valve box, which is not that exciting to describe. All I did was connected the parts together with wires and then solder them. We did manage to blow up the light bulb in the on/off switch some how when we tested to make sure my wiring was correct, so that was interesting. We had to order a new which should be there by Monday. The other part of my day was spent talking with an engineer in the material control lab and a program engineer. The material control lab is where all the pieces they make at Parker are analyzed on a microscopic level to make sure that there are no cracks in the pieces and that the different parts are attached together firmly. Basically the engineer in that lab cuts up the pieces, polished them, and then looks at them under a microscope. The lab has some really cool equipment like the electron microscope they use to check for really tiny cracks.  The other person I talked to was a program engineer. A program engineer is the head engineer of a contract that Parker has with another company to design a part. The program engineers job is to make sure that everything stays on track with designing and making the part. Using a football analogy, the project engineer would be the coach, coming up with the plays, making sure everyone works together, etc.

Day 5- Wednesday, May 15

Today I learned about Pro-E and how to use it from Jacob. Pro-E is a 3D modeling program used by engineers to design parts. They draw out the part they want made in Pro-E and Pro-E turns it into a drawing that has all the measurements need to make the piece. Then the drawing is given the to  the machinists who then actually make the part. Also the parts we needed for the valvue box came so I will start working on that tomorrow. Today I helped calibrate one of the power amplifiers that we will be using. Basically that means I made sure that what ever input voltage went into the amp was amplified by the right amount. The amplifier we are using amplifies the voltage by 40 so if we put in 1 volt, the amp should produce 40 volts. Calibrating just means that I went through and check to see if the amplifier produced the right input to output voltages. Tomorrow the focus will be on wire all the different parts of the valve box together and checking to see if it works.

Day 4- Tuesday, May 14

Today I shadowed Mike Teter. He is an engineer who works on the rapid response team.  The RR teams job is to get parts quickly for projects. If any engineer needs a part quickly for whatever reason they would go to the rapid response team. Right now Mr. Teter is working with the R and D team (research and development). They are working on a second generation nozzle, meaning it will not go into use for a long time, similar to the actuator my sponsor is working on. On Friday of last week, another high-school student (from Chagrin Falls) started at Parker as well, with a different mentor. We shadow people together now. Also on Friday I started assembling the valve box. This is the device that will control the actuators that Mr. Melzak is developing and enable us to test them. I was not able to do much because we where waiting for pieces to come in. Hopefully I will be able to do more on Wednesday or Thursday. I got to do one other thing on Friday, I got a detailed tour of the production floor. This is area about the size of a football field where all the machines for making the parts are kept. It is about a third of the facility, the other parts being offices, labs, and storage. The machines are high tech, most of them computer operated. This means they can produce extremely detailed parts can be made with reasonable accuracy.

Day 2- Thursday, May 9

On Thursday Mr. Melzak set up a conference call for me with a person on the Research and Design team for the actuator that Mr. Melzak was helping to design. Part of the team is based in South Carolina where there is another section of the Parker Aerospace division. He went over the design of the new actuator and how it works with me. An actuator is a type of motor that is used to control some mechanism. In this case, the actuator would be used to control the flow of fuel through the nozzle into the engine. The actuators would make sure the fuel was injected into the engine evenly, as described in my previous post. The designing of the this actuator is funded by the US. government for the use in  military planes in the future. It is a second generation technology meaning it is only at the start of the development process and will not be put into use for a while. This actuator does not actually have a specific plane that it will be used in yet. There are different steps in the implementation of new technology. There is technology that is used now which is changed slightly overtime to improve it. Then there is the technology that is about to go into use in the next 5 to 10 years. That technology is being tested and already has a specific application. The actuator Mr. Melzak is helping to design is the next step past that. It does not have a specific application yet, just a general idea of where it would be used. The actuator will probably not go into use for another 30 years at least, if not longer.