Following a bit of work done during the Christmas break, I have returned to work for Sriram now as a part time researcher. The first couple of weeks were quiet because I had passed off my bridge model to Asim for his thesis. Though offering to help him, Asim couldn't pass much off to me, though I got the occasional code modification to my short span bridge. Though I was not able to attend his thesis presentation due to GNCTR, I heard it went smoothly. A few days later, Sriram, Scott, Asim and I celebrated his finishing of his masters at the Grad House. It seems like he won't be around much longer, which is sad and also means I need to figure out what he did on the long span bridge if Sriram ever needs modifications done during the term.
Last week I got an awesome surprised. Sriram called me to his office and as I was walking down the hall I was smelling chip board (which was nice). I get to his office and it's from from having a 10"x36"x10" ish box on the floor. Inside was a very shiny, 80 lb viscous damper that he just got delivered. This damper was not the kind found in the industry because it had a modification on top that allowed for an adjustable orifice. Taking a step back, a viscous damper is basically a piston with two oil chambers. As the piston moves in either direction, the oil gets pushed or sucked into the other chamber through an orifice. Since the oil is thick and the orifice is small, this creates a lot of friction and thus resists the speed of the displacement (doesn't restrict the displacement so much). The adjustable knob added for Sriram's purposes then permits the damper to have a different damping coefficient where normally this is taken as a constant value for dampers installed on bridges and buildings. Eventually, the hope is to have the damper attached to sensors to collect real-time data and build/program it so that the orifice is controlled by actuators to adjust the damping coefficient based on the recently attained loads. The damper itself can function up to 7000 lbs, a relatively small damper when considering large bridges and skyscrapers where you'd need many of these (at about $3000-$5000 a piece).
Turns out that this will be my toy for this URA term, which is just all too awesome! With Richard's help in the structures lab, I'll be building the mounting for the damper, creating and running the tests, and managing the data collected for the tests to hopefully have something meaningful by the end of the term. The hope is to get up to 2 Hz on the load cell, which from my conversations with Richard, should be doable. The biggest hold up right now is actually getting time to use the load cell since there are many projects on the go. This week, I had been calling around to machining companies looking for a pre-made rod clevis that would attach the damper to the load cell. The clevis itself is like a fork with holes drilled through the sides of the forks to allow a rod to be put throughout he clevis and the hole on the end of the damper. Though because of some sizing issues, it looks like a custom piece would be the best option from the UW Machine Shop.
Anyways, I'm really excited about this since I haven't done as much lab work (well moreso now after GNCTR), but paired with the programming I did last term, it feels well-rounded.
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