Any Colour You Like

Unfortunately you don’t get a mortar board at Bristol, but it was great to finally get to prance around in the Bristol colours.

Outside Wills Memorial Building

I have such epic back and neck ache from leaning over a desk and writing with pencil and paper. I know computers are bad on your eyes and there are plenty of ways of getting RSI from them but I had no idea the old fashioned way of working was so painful. At least with computers your head is up and your back is straight.

Physical pain coulpled with mental strain and the fact I have postponed all exercise except for 1 hr per week mean revision is really taking it out of me. I don’t know if I can handle another 20 and a half days of this!

It is pretty dire when I have so little clue what an entire module is about that I have to resort to wikipedia to get an overview. It turns out, 20 lectures in, that my course on non linear behaviour of materials is actually an obscure treatment of solid mechanics. It would have been nice if he had bothered to tell us.

It is still terrifying though. Our lecturer is so much of a mathematician and so little of an engineer that even with liberal applications of wikipedia knowledge I am still struggling to link his maths back to anything tangible. Two weeks to go till exam and I will either get it by then and get 60% or not get it and get 0%. Not 30%, not 15% but zero. And the only book he sites is some dodgy russian maths book that doesn’t exist in the library.

I just can’t wait to finish. I can’t wait to go kitesurfing. And I won’t even complain that we don’t get motar-boards at graduation in Bristol if I make it through…

Two days from now I will get to switch from learning Spanish in order to blag 20 easy credit points to learning Spanish to say useful thing like ‘dos cevezas gracias’ in fabulous sunny countries. I had forgotten the school day tribulation of conjugating verbs and force learning conceited, supposedly professional sounding sentences for letter writing such as:

‘le agradecería que tuviese la amabilidad de informarme de…’

– litteraly ‘I would be ingratiated if you would show me the magnanimity to inform me about’. Apparently they genuinely do spurt such tripe in the average letter to their local job agency and newspaper. And haven’t they heard of email, where a simple ‘cheers for your help’ would do fine?

For some reason Wills Memorial is green tonight

Today has been amazing so far. I have:

- Handed in my design project, 30% of this years worry is now out of my hands! And I was a whole week early
- Filed away all of the diagrams, papers, journals, calculations, notes etc about my project that have been cluttering my desk
-  Given all of the books back to the library
- Paid my £1.60 fine for the late ones!
- Written a facebook status about it to annoy everyone else in my year

The relief is immense. I have worked so hard on this and made so little progress for so long. Remind me never to do anything chemical engineering related ever again. And best of all I think I did a really good job of it in then end. Even if university don’t think it is very ‘academic’, I am pretty sure that my industrial sponsor will be pleasantly surprised.

Roll on fifth year project!

=)

P.S. Hello to everyone I have been ignoring for the last six months whilst working it x

I have never liked exams, never been good at them and never have any idea whether I did well or not until the results come. So I tried really hard this year to choose relevant, non-wimpy units that have a high proportion of coursework assessment. However… as Anders Arnberg eloquently puts it, I have really shot myself in the foot this term.

Before easter I have to design a elevated tramway in composite materials, design a high level wind-turbine system with a detailed glass fibre blade layup and design,  write a realistic mathematical model for the relative energy usage of hybrid and electric cars vs petrol cars, mathematically model the AP-X natural gas liquefaction process and do preliminary sizing for gas turbine drivers and compressor geometry, and asses the potential for integrating the value ratio into a triple bottom line sustainability assessment of the big five british supermarkets.

Basically, if any of you feel that you are experts in any of these areas and have a few spare brain cycles in an average evening then you are welcome to borrow a project for a bit =)

I have now finally finished my intensive module on wind-power (except the stack of coursework I have to do for it obviously). It was all very stimulating and worthy of debate. It is even potentially an area I would like to work with in the future. But probably the most interesting part of the week was the biological issues surrounding wind turbines that cropped up from time to time:

(1) After only 9 months of operation, the efficiency and electricity output of wind turbines will have reduced by 45% due to the number of bugs that have stuck to the blades (nasty way to die in my opinion). The goo and carcasses mess with the aerodynamics.

(2) The resistance of the blades to bird-strike is tested by firing a 7kg frozen turkey at them at a speed of 20m/s.

(3) Wind turbines are designed to conduct electricity and pass it on to the ground so that they can survive being struck by lighting. Unfortunately this has the offshoot of electrocuting lots of cows that like to stand around under the turbines. Farmers then get very annoyed at this.

So there you have it – think twice before voting ‘yes’!