Hi everyone! I’m Benjamin Carpenter, and this summer I am interning with OSU (Oklahoma State University) in their aerospace engineering department, or Oklahoma Aerospace Institute for Research and Education (OAIRE). I am here with another Pintern, Rider. This first week was pretty slow, but it was slow for important reasons. This week focused on instruction, as well as the planning phase for future projects that we will work on. Our first day included an in depth tour of the facility that we will be working in, as well as the campus’s engineering department. We also made a pit stop at the football stadium, which was pretty cool. That afternoon, we were introduced to our first project, NASA’s AEROKATS and ROVER Education Network (AREN). We are a part of a larger team of college interns. We will be using very large kites to transport technology a few hundred feet into the air to study weather and the atmosphere. This week we just planned the next 5 weeks of testing and research.
Separate from AREN, we learned about engineering compositing, the process by which you create specialized materials from the ground up for specific purposes. In our case, we created composites that were intended for testing. We test these composites so we know exactly how strong they are, as well as their flexibility. This data is then taken into consideration when designing new aircraft. We tested these composites in an Instron, a machine that can measure tensile and compression strength.
Overall, the week was fun, but a little slow. I am looking forward to next week when we are supposed to be doing more hands on projects.
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