Wings and Things

A quick update for the night - I was right, we will be building carbon fiber wings this week.  They will be of a prescribed design though, so it's more about getting experience with the materials.  The carbon fiber we were supposed to use might not be here, so we might be borrowing some of Red Bull's material, since they are only about 8 miles from the school.

I again tried to get the 630ish bus, and again it did not show up.  I double checked the timetable tonight too, and it still shows a bus around that time.  I'm going to ask the driver tomorrow morning and hopefully figure out what the problem is.  There is also supposedly an 850 bus, but I'm scared to wait for that one.

Either way, should be a fun week, almost 3 full days will be in the lab working with carbon fiber.

Sunday @ Brands Hatch

As I mentioned yesterday, a group of about 10 of us made the almost 2 hour drive down to the Brands Hatch circuit for the Formula Ford Festival.

17-10-10 Brands Hatch

The drive was actually very enjoyable, the weather was good and there was some nice countryside scenery.  Brands is unique in that the circuit is just a little bit over a mile long, leading to lap times well under a minute for most cars.  The benefit to the short circuit is that you can see nearly every single turn from the grandstand.  A hairpin called Druids is obstructed by trees.  The cars were very evenly matched all day, making for some very exciting racing.  There were also quite a few accidents, including some big pile-ups and a car that got airborne for what seemed like an eternity.  He apparently forgot to brake, ran up onto the back of the car in front, got launched into the air, and when he came down in the gravel he started doing flips, then bounced up off of the tire wall for another pirouette until finally landing almost upside down.  Amazingly though he was out of the car and walking in less than 5 minutes. 

The pile-ups were related to cars who had left oil on the track at Paddock Bend - a tricky downhill right hander.  I guess the drivers were ignoring the debris flags!  One race was red flagged (stopped and resumed) after a car slid down the hill and impacted another car that was already stuck in the gravel with the driver still in it.  A note that some of you will understand - the corner workers were doing "hot-pulls" (recovering cars from the gravel while other cars were still racing) all day at Paddock bend.  What I'm used to at VIR is nothing like it was yesterday.  Corner workers were out attending to the cars in very very vulnerable situations.  It was an interesting contrast to the approaches I'm used to seeing both at VIR and other races on TV.

Damon Hill, 1996 F1 World Champion and president of the BRDC was there with his son who was racing in the Formula Ford Duratec Championship.  We did get a group picture with him after a classmate approached him and told him who we were - and he knew about the program.  I don't have the picture yet though, it was taken with one of our classmates DSLR.

This week is the module about composites, and from the schedule it looks like we will be having a lot of hands-on time.  We will learn how to actually manufacture a composite (presumably carbon fiber) structure.  It should be fun and more enjoyable than just a full week of lectures.

  

Workouts

Workouts have been hard to come by, about the only time I have to fit one in is on the weekends.  I did finally take the bus to the nearest Tesco Extra (Super Wal-Mart basically) and picked up a set of dumbbells.  Wish they were heavier, and I might go buy some add on plates at some point, but they are better than nothing.  Heck they were a workout just carrying them back from the bus station!  The Tesco was crazy busy.  I did buy a couple of food items for lunches next week too.

Tomorrow a group of us are going to Brands Hatch for the Formula Ford Festival. Hopefully we'll get some good weather!  Tonight I think I might actually be able to watch the ALCS game online, since it starts at 4ET.

Oh, and there is a Krispy Kreme in the mall here, and they had them in the Tesco too.  But they were £ 1.20 for just one original glazed!  I abstained, but I'm sure I'll get a few at some point.

I spent most of the morning studying info from the week.  I'll study some more this afternoon while watching football too.  I haven't been able to find a stream for the NCSU game yet though.  Stay tuned for pictures from Brands Hatch tomorrow!

Don't we all love computers?

So today we found out that the ANSYS model we built is not going to work for the optimization program that we learned about this morning.  It needs to be the current version of ModeFrontier, which for some reason isn't installed on the university computers yet.  Why, I don't know.  Luckily another team member had built the model in Abaqus mainly to verify that we had ANSYS configured correctly.  However, we cannot get the Abaqus input to work in the optimization program.  It cannot find the command .exe to get the program running.

ModeFrontier is a neat concept.  In the simplest terms, you can give it a range of inputs and outputs, and it will run as many different combinations as you tell it to.  That way you can find the optimum combination of inputs to meet the output conditions that you specify.  Audi supposedly gained 2.3 seconds of lap time around LeMans on the R8 with the program.  No details on the specifics of what they wound up changing though.

On a completely unrelated note - washing your hands here is a pain.  They have separate faucets for hot and cold, and the hot is definitely not turned down any.  Makes it very hard to properly wash your hands....cough cough  head cold  cough cough.  Don't really understand why mixing faucets aren't more common - even in new buildings I haven't seen many of them.

Engine Design

Today was all about the considerations in actual engine design.  It was all very detailed and interesting.  There is almost always no one right answer.  The most exciting part was that both lecturers brought in pieces of old F1 engines, and one cylinder head of an IndyCar too.  The pistons and crankshafts are so much more complex than a standard road car, obviously, but it was eye opening to feel how light an F1 piston is.

We did get out at 4:00 today instead of 5:20, so that was nice.  The time was spent on making sure our ANSYS model was ready to use for tomorrow's class sessions.

I did have a slight panic session this morning, I couldn't find my bus pass.  Wound up just paying the fare for today, and luckily when I got home I did find my pass.  I had pulled it out with the empty box of cold medicine and put it in the trash in my room.  That was a relief, as it's not exactly a cheap pass!

Also, I'm still waiting on the bank to get my account opened.  They certainly are no BB&T...I've been told to come back twice now just to get my basic account information.  That isn't even getting my cards either, those get mailed to me.  So I've been promised that it will be open tomorrow, we will see I suppose.

Head colds make lectures fun

Well I've had a small head cold the last couple of days.  It makes a long day of lectures feel even longer unfortunately.  Today we continued metal properties and behavior discussions.  Elastic behavior, plastic deformation, that kind of stuff.  In the afternoon, the lecture was on friction and wear and lubrication.  This was pretty interesting, since I don't think I've ever had a specific class or anything on wear, or anything this detailed on lubrication.  We went into the different modes of friction, which simplified are varying levels of metal to metal contact.  For example, engine components wear the most during startup because the lubrication is not thick enough to keep the surface irregularities from contacting each other.  This is because the components are acting in the boundary lubrication mode.  You want to be in hydrodynamic lubrication, as that means the oil film is thick enough to prevent surface contact.

I stayed on campus working with our second group project.  We are modeling a seat support bracket in ANSYS to analyze the structure and try to optimize it.  Dinner was a frozen chicken biryani meal, that only cost 1&pound and was actually very good!

Off to bed for me, wish me luck getting rid of the head cold please...

Real Class

No more easy intro week stuff, we're getting down to business.  First module (class) is Metallic Structures for Motorsport.  Today we talked about basic structural analysis - yes I need to brush up on my statics and dynamics :)  Also went over the effects of various heat treating methods and varying steel compositions.  The afternoon lecture was on material coatings which is now starting to become known as "Surface Engineering".

The bus ride back home was particularly crowded today and not comfortable.  I'll make due with it, but it sure would be nice if you could at least make some of the time useful for reading or something.  It's just too cramped to do anything worthwhile.

Cooked a burger for dinner, with some sauteed peppers and tomato slices on the side.  It was pretty good I think, I put some mixed herbs in the burger that really helped the flavor.

Wish the Braves game was an afternoon game though, then I might be able to catch a little of it.  The 6:30am wake up call isn't very helpful when first pitch is 12:30am.  I'm gonna finish up some laundry, and study a bit of the material from today while watching yesterday's F1 race (even though I know who won).