Work Begins:


Well, work more or less officially started for me on Monday. For those of you who don't know, I am doing a full time research internship of sorts at the Universität Stuttgart--more specifically in the Institut für Konstruktion und Fertigung in der Feinwerktechnik, an institution within the Mechanical Engineering Department. (Yes, the Germans love their long words!) I benefitted from an exiting grad student and inherited a nicely equipped, very spacious office... bigger in fact than most professor's offices I ever saw at UW.

My office

[Caution: Any non-technically oriented people may wish to skip this paragraph] The work I'm doing concerns ultrasonic (or piezoelectric) motors. Over the course of the summer, I will be designing, programming conrols, and integrating these motors into test beds. Basically the underlying priniple is to excite a piezo crystal at high frequency and strategically couple it to a rotor/slider by friction to cause a net motion. The resulting motor can be made much smaller than a conventional motor, and the most common application is in the auto-focusing lenses for high-end cameras. If for some reason this stuff snagged your interest, I'll pass you along to Wikipedia for ultrasonic motors and (more generally) piezo-electric motors.

Anyhow, the work is nice, the people are all great, and I am well equipped here, so there's not much to complain about. I get to work on many different aspects of the project, from designing and building a motor to writing the software to control it, which means I get a good perspective on things (and don't get bored!).

On a side note, there was an excellent sunset Tuesday night unlike any I've ever seen. Yes, those are thunderstorms!


Sunset from my balcony