THE EXPERIENCE
Protégé is a program that provides first-year students with the opportunity to do specialized research during their first summer in college – in my case, I studied non-linear analysis for combustion control.
Non-linear events like the behavior of fire are significantly difficult to investigate as the dynamics of the self-excited wave oscillations are very arbitrary and complex. Our work was based on the Lean Direct Injection (LDI) combustion method, an efficient and optimal system that has lower NOx emissions than traditional burners, but cannot yet be implemented because of its flame instability, which may cause malfunctioning or even explosions. We then conducted non-linear analysis to comprehend the nature of such system and the conditions at which any periodicity occurred to tackle and reduce the instability.
WHAT I LEARNED
Being part of Protégé as a first-time research student taught me the importance of diving into the unknown, especially after avoiding it for so long. Coding was an intimidating challenge as I entered college because I never knew it would be so relevant to aerospace engineers, and therefore never made it a priority in my academic experience. My role in the project started to slowly lean towards programming since a key tool for our research was cross and joint recurrence analysis, which used very specific types of graphs to process multiple data files at once, visually compare their relationship, and highlight their consistencies – essentially, it was crucial to expand the network of findings and had not yet been mastered in our lab. Not only was writing the code for such plots overwhelming, but I had to conduct deep studies on the theoretical background of non-linear analysis to be able to even understand what it entailed. In the end of the summer, after undergoing this journey, I noticed that, between my peers and supervisor, I was the only one surprised my work went so far as to contribute to our research and future analysis, and that spoke volumes about my relationship with coding.
HOW IT IMPACTED ME
A lot of aspects of my own personality and my learning process bloomed throughout those months. I was able to efficiently teach myself concepts that were beyond my knowledge as a freshman because of my focus, my objectivity, and especially, my interest in the subject. Taken’s theorem, the base of non-linear analysis, claims that there is some determinism in seemingly arbitrary phenomena like a burning flame, and that limited time signals of a series can provide information on the whole system and be used to project it onto higher dimensions accurately. I found myself more and more intrigued by it and that made my work much more meaningful to me. In such an impersonal industry centered around delivering results, I see that the best we can do as engineers is have passion for the goal, the process, and the impact as well.
Over a thousand lines of code helped me build the background and a standard script to be used for cross and joint recurrence analysis of all data files collected in our lab. I’m forever grateful for the opportunity to write a research paper on it and look forward to sharing its content alongside my supervisor in the near future to a wider community of scientists, bringing light to the relevance of such methods and hopefully reducing combustion instability in LDI systems.
Protégé is a program that provides first-year students with the opportunity to do specialized research during their first summer in college – in my case, I studied non-linear analysis for combustion control.
Non-linear events like the behavior of fire are significantly difficult to investigate as the dynamics of the self-excited wave oscillations are very arbitrary and complex. Our work was based on the Lean Direct Injection (LDI) combustion method, an efficient and optimal system that has lower NOx emissions than traditional burners, but cannot yet be implemented because of its flame instability, which may cause malfunctioning or even explosions. We then conducted non-linear analysis to comprehend the nature of such system and the conditions at which any periodicity occurred to tackle and reduce the instability.
WHAT I LEARNED
Being part of Protégé as a first-time research student taught me the importance of diving into the unknown, especially after avoiding it for so long. Coding was an intimidating challenge as I entered college because I never knew it would be so relevant to aerospace engineers, and therefore never made it a priority in my academic experience. My role in the project started to slowly lean towards programming since a key tool for our research was cross and joint recurrence analysis, which used very specific types of graphs to process multiple data files at once, visually compare their relationship, and highlight their consistencies – essentially, it was crucial to expand the network of findings and had not yet been mastered in our lab. Not only was writing the code for such plots overwhelming, but I had to conduct deep studies on the theoretical background of non-linear analysis to be able to even understand what it entailed. In the end of the summer, after undergoing this journey, I noticed that, between my peers and supervisor, I was the only one surprised my work went so far as to contribute to our research and future analysis, and that spoke volumes about my relationship with coding.
HOW IT IMPACTED ME
A lot of aspects of my own personality and my learning process bloomed throughout those months. I was able to efficiently teach myself concepts that were beyond my knowledge as a freshman because of my focus, my objectivity, and especially, my interest in the subject. Taken’s theorem, the base of non-linear analysis, claims that there is some determinism in seemingly arbitrary phenomena like a burning flame, and that limited time signals of a series can provide information on the whole system and be used to project it onto higher dimensions accurately. I found myself more and more intrigued by it and that made my work much more meaningful to me. In such an impersonal industry centered around delivering results, I see that the best we can do as engineers is have passion for the goal, the process, and the impact as well.
Over a thousand lines of code helped me build the background and a standard script to be used for cross and joint recurrence analysis of all data files collected in our lab. I’m forever grateful for the opportunity to write a research paper on it and look forward to sharing its content alongside my supervisor in the near future to a wider community of scientists, bringing light to the relevance of such methods and hopefully reducing combustion instability in LDI systems.