02.28.06
Abstract
This journal is to be a collection of things that I’ve found interesting in my life as an engineer and a programmer. I’m not sure exactly what it will contain yet, so I’ll write a bit about myself, which should provide a general idea.
At the moment, I’m a graduate student in Stanford’s Mechanical Engineering department, doing a dissertation on computer simulations of fluid flows that involve free surfaces. Physically, that could mean anything from a falling drop of rain or an ocean wave (which have surfaces between the water and the air) to the spray coming out of a fuel injector in a jet engine (which has millions of surfaces between the fuel droplets and the air). The work that I’m doing is quite theoretical, which means that it applies in theory to all of those cases, and in practice I usually pick something to simulate that tests the part of the theory I want to test, but may or may not exactly match anything in real life. The theory that I’m developing unifies many other people’s methods to simulate flows of this sort, and leads to some new ones for things that otherwise couldn’t be simulated. I’m hoping that it will revolutionize the field, of course, but in order to do that I have to prove that it works and write some convincing papers about it.
Meanwhile, I’m working as a research assistant for Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project, where I’m working on writing thermodynamic models of energy systems. The overall objective of our research group (which is just a small portion of the overall project) is to develop simple models of various parts of the process by which resources (coal, oil, sunlight, biomass, and so forth) get converted into useful energy (electricity in powerlines, moving cars around, and so on), in ways that allow us to compare real-world systems to theoretically ideal ones, in order to see which parts of the system will be most beneficial to improve.
I also do computer programming beyond the Fortran, Matlab, and C++ codes that go into my research. For instance, my dissertation will be written in a variant of TeX, and I’ve done a fair bit of TeX programming as well as some work in the related graphical language, MetaPost – in particular, the MetaPlot package for creating publication-quality graphs.
There’s a lot more to my world than computers, however. One of the effects of all of my research work being simulations is that every so often I want to build something tangible – for instance, lately, I’ve been building cardstock models of desk designs, for a side desk to replace the boxes and boards that are forming an impromptu booktable next to my computer desk. At other times I’ve built a set of adjustable molding boxes for pouring silicone-rubber molds to make scale model car bodies, replacement parts for the window motor in my car, and some laser-cut plexiglas cutouts of patterns based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs for glass blocks – which I’m still not sure what I’ll do with, but they were fun to make.
So, that’s probably enough for an initial entry.