So, I Renewed this Domain Name....

I was getting "Hey Dude your domain names are expiring ASAP@!@!@!@!@!!!!" emails for the past couple months. Finally decided to renew them today and what do you know today is the day differentialpenguins.com expires.... nothing like the nick of time. 

Anyways, while I'm here might as well say some stuff. Yesterday I had my senior project presentation which went much better than I thought it might. For some reason I instantly became more comfortable presenting to a room full of people than when it was empty. Seriously, it's totally ass-backwards. Anyways, they always try to grill you with some tough questions at the end of the presentation and we were able to handle the questions really well which was great. It was good to see our hard work and all the time we spent preparing the presentation pay off. After it was all over, I basically deflated into a puddle of glory. 

Of course just like anything.... always more stuff on the horizon. Actually the Center for Undergraduate Research and Academic Showcase is alarmingly close. I'll be presenting a poster about my research with Professor Weise where we made a high power inverter for wave energy converter systems. I've gotta slam together a sweet poster for this coming Tuesday so I can show off the cool hardware we built. I've only got a couple of pictures of the stuff.... oh look here they are... 

Here's a picture of one of our extremely clean lab benches. That rig mounted to a bigass heatsink is the inverter I designed. It has a sweet film capacitor on it, which is a total nerdgasm. They're like the lowest effective series resistance capacitors (ESR) you can buy and that one in particular costs about $35 and it can't even store that much charge really. Capacitors with low ESR can respond quickly to transients which is important when you've got high currents and lots of switching going on. For the less electrically inclined, an inverter converts DC power to AC power. 

It's a bird, it's a plane, nawh it's just a bunch of sweet electrical stuff.

One of the awesome things about power electronics is that you get to build stuff that gets hot and on occasion even blows up. Also, with high power research you need a way to simulate large electrical loads. One way we can do this is using out awesome bank of ginormous wire wound resistors. We can dissipate a few kilowatts of power in this load which is pretty substantial.... also they get really freakin' hot. 

Wire wound resistor bank

Honestly wish I had more time to mess around with this stuff this semester but I actually have gotten a bunch of stuff built which is good. 

Anyways, now begins that awkward month long period between me and graduation. Time to hopefully tie up some loose ends, finish up strong and hopefully have some fun too. Heading to SNHU this friday to see my cousin get inducted into an honor's society for her program but don't tell anyone... it's supposed to be a surprise. 

Oh, and I've gotta get one of those cap and gown getups before they sell out too...