(September 16th-20th, 2013) I'm halfway tempted to turn the next few posts into a photoblog with just a few words scattered in for details. But not quite yet.
The Brake-Reuss beam...I try not to talk about work here too much, but above is a small glimpse of some of what I do. Why study that hunk of metal one might ask? Good question. The short answer is that we have no idea how joints behave (such as the one formed where the three bolts are located). They turn an otherwise linear system into a strongly nonlinear one that has physics that we don't fully understand. The Brake-Reuss beam is a relatively simple geometry that can be easily fabricated, yet it exhibits the strong nonlienarities that we try to study in order to have a better idea of how to design airplanes, cars, satellites, bridges, etc. Because of it's simplicity to fabricate, it's now being used by about a half dozen different institutions, with more to come soon. And the Reuss is for Herr Doktor (soon at least) Pascal Reuss, my host in Stuttgart.
Stuttgart
The weather was drab, dreary like a rainy winter...all the better to make measurements. Pascal was a good host...taking me to the occasional brauhaus to imbibe local heffewiezins. The university was great. Mark, a gentle giant of a man that presided over the machine shop, helped us fabricate the system that we wanted to study, and had the three separate components ready on sequential days...a process that in a more formal environment would have taken weeks that we didn't have.
The weather was drab, dreary like a rainy winter...all the better to make measurements. Pascal was a good host...taking me to the occasional brauhaus to imbibe local heffewiezins. The university was great. Mark, a gentle giant of a man that presided over the machine shop, helped us fabricate the system that we wanted to study, and had the three separate components ready on sequential days...a process that in a more formal environment would have taken weeks that we didn't have.
The Brake-Reuss beam...I try not to talk about work here too much, but above is a small glimpse of some of what I do. Why study that hunk of metal one might ask? Good question. The short answer is that we have no idea how joints behave (such as the one formed where the three bolts are located). They turn an otherwise linear system into a strongly nonlinear one that has physics that we don't fully understand. The Brake-Reuss beam is a relatively simple geometry that can be easily fabricated, yet it exhibits the strong nonlienarities that we try to study in order to have a better idea of how to design airplanes, cars, satellites, bridges, etc. Because of it's simplicity to fabricate, it's now being used by about a half dozen different institutions, with more to come soon. And the Reuss is for Herr Doktor (soon at least) Pascal Reuss, my host in Stuttgart.
I can't think of a more typical German meal than this leg of bore, potatoes, gravy, and heffewiezin (top corner).
Running in Stuttgart this time around was pleasant as I was
much closer to the parks. I typically headed down to the Neuer See for
a 6 mile loop around it...though the woods were lovely, dark, and deep,
I could never terry too long as I had beams to
shake and measurements to make...
No comments:
Post a Comment