Burnin'

"How do you burn, when you don't know how to burn?"

I've forgotten the number of times the professor has told me this, but the outcome of asking a (more or less) fundamental question like this, he tells me, is this: (Taken today, at the workshop)

That's how it starts. You should see where it goes from there, though:

That is what it looks like. You're probably thinking that's the ceramic glowing red hot.
It's not:

The reddish tinge at the boundary in the above picture- now that's thermal radiation from the ceramic/surrounding steel. The interior is a mystery for now.

Notice, among other things, that the background seems progressively darker in the above photos. (Check the first one again.) That happened because I was trying to get the best out of my low dynamic range camera- and had to change the settings for each shot to keep the burner region from appearing saturated. In short, that thing is bright. It hurts to look at it.

But what is it?


It gets hotter/better.


And better!


And that's not even at full power.
At full power, the photographs I took were ruined and failed to capture the high dynamic range.

Again, what is it?

That's a story for another time. (If, that is, the reader is even marginally interested in knowing about critical Peclet numbers and volumetric combustion)

For now, though, feast your eyes on this: (A small layman-ish explanation included.)

Document 1 on porous burners

Document 2 on porous burners

Work, or something like it

So, what do I do at Promeos?

There are several things I do here that I'm not allowed to be doing, such as blogging, but officially, I work all day on a nice little problem.

First, a little something about the place. Promeos is a company that designs and manufactures porous combustion burners. These creatures are industrial burners that burn fuel inside the pores of a ceramic material. This leads to, among other things, spectacular lighting and fireworks displays every time one of these things is booted. (Will add photo soon)
It has a single office with about twenty five employees, and about sixty fiv- because I find these details as inconsequential as you(I) do, I will skip them.

An interesting tidbit of information, though. The first floor is occupied entirely by the accountants, salesmen and distribution managers. This is what their offices look like:


Ledgers and stationary abound. (Unfortunately, this (the corner) is where I sit nowadays, :( )

The ground floor is taken by the engineers and the workshop people. 'Hands on' is quite an understatement when it comes to describing their approach- these guys are real engineers, ask very relevant questions, and are always trying to find better ways to build stuff. This is what their offices look like. (This one is Mr. Dietmar Tanke's):





























































W00t!

All the accountants run Windows XP, all the engineers run (Take a look at the above photos) SUSE (Linux).

Now, here's what I do: Paper makers need giant rollers to roll paper on and across. In fact, just about any process that creates sheet like materials needs rollers. With paper, its a bit more complicated because you want to heat freshly coated paper as it rolls across, that is, you need a heated roller.

Right now, they have a ridiculous way of doing this. They fill their roller/drum with oil at high pressure, heat it, and then run the paper across. The rollers are about a metre in diameter, and a metre and a half in length. A little calculation shows that they need about three hundred kilograms of oil to fill the drum. Heating three hundred kilograms of pressurized oil to two hundred degrees celcius is a nightmare- it takes three hours to start up the machine!

Enter Promeos. Get rid of the oil, place a porous burner along the length of the cylinder, and run the flue (exhaust) around the perimeter of the cylinder, all the while moving the paper in the opposite direction. Tada.

Well, not yet. They don't know how the fluid flows (all resident engineers are chemists/metallurgists and the like, people with an elementary idea of fluid motion), especially when the paper is running in the opposite direction. That's for me to find out.

My problem, thus, is merely a computation of heat transfer, but depending on how the flow is driven and several other parameters, the heat transferred, the temperatures, mass flow rates and pressure gradients vary by upto three orders of magnitude! Its a strongly entwined problem that requires a considerable amount of intuitive guessing at the start- and I've just started.
The good part, though, is that my work does not end when the heat transfer has been worked out- if that is indeed possible. I have to make the roller!
If things work out reasonably, I will have engaged myself in heat transfer computation, metallurgy, anemometry, elementary chemistry, electronics, hydraulics, materials science, and associated activities that are too numerous to list out. (Real engineering?)

This is what work looked like last Sunday:

This is what work looked like today:

My concerns appear to have grown more realistic in the past week. (No double integrals over non-dimensionalized quantities anymore! The boundary conditions in the real problem are completely unknown, rendering brute force solving useless)

This is what I hope work looks like a month from now:


Fingers crossed.

(UPDATE: I got my first paycheck today. It's the single largest sum of money I've ever handled, and I'm thinking: "I get paid for this ?!")

Food Update I

A considerable chunk of my evening yesterday (24th May, 07) was spent in cooking a delicacy known as Kartoffelspinatcurry.
This is what it looks like:


That was the best meal I've had in Germany until now.

If you still haven't caught the pun, split the name of the dish appropriately and translate the words to English. :)

The Mundane Monday

On Monday, the 21st of May, 07, I reported in for work at my actual company, Promeos. (Details of what transpired in the previous week will be added later.)

The company, however, had no idea who I was, or what I was supposed to be doing there. This was a precursor of what was to follow that day. I sat in the visitor's lounge for about two hours staring at out of date coffee table books while they sorted out the matter, when the CEO dropped by, introduced himself, talked for two minutes, shook my hand, and walked away. (No one, including me, had any idea what I was supposed to do now.) I wandered around for a bit until I found my desk, (which was one floor and eight rooms away) and realized I had been allotted a temporary desk in the accounting section. I sat opposite the resident accountant, who let loose a barrage of German as soon as he saw me. This, I found later, included a greeting, an inquiry, some advice on sitting in push-back chairs, and a comment on how juicy polish apples are.

And that was it.

Neither of us spoke during the next two hours; he was hammering away at his keyboard, and I was busy (i)whining to myself about not being given a computer and (ii)contemplating calling Prof. Durst and explaining that I might have walked into the wrong building that morning.

No such luck.

Boredom has a nasty way of seeking you out even in the most interesting places, and this was not one of them to begin with. In an hour, I had finished playing with the magnets on the wall, the sketch pens on the table, and staring at the pictures in the German text on steel manufacturing that I found lying on my table.

To sum up, I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, no lunch to eat, nobody to talk to, and not surprisingly, I was feeling a tad bit unhappy about the entire situation. (I learned later that I was supposed to be given material to read on porous combustion, but they forgot to.)

And then I saw it.

I present to you, the lost relic that countless men (might) have searched for in vain, the proof for the existance of an improbability field (Of the Douglas Adams' kind), and most importantly, the icebreaker of that forgettable Monday, a map in ultra high-res glory:

I was about as perplexed as I will ever be when I saw this hanging off the wall, framed and (apparently) well preserved.

Why is this perplexing?

(i) It's a map of British India.

(ii) It's in German.

(iii) It's hanging off the wall of a German company that designs burners.

(iv) It is dated 1855.

'Ceilon!', I cried. (That was marked on the map.)

Mr. Schmidt at his desk looked up and said (in the tone of one correcting an errant child):

'Sri Lanka!'

This was followed by a conversation that is absurd on so many levels, I am yet to comprehend how it could have taken place.

Starting from the beginning:

Me: Ceilon!

Mr.S: Sri Lanka!

Me: Now.

Mr.S: Ten Yearz.

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Srilanka, Ten Yearz.

Me: Oh, no, no. Thirty.

Mr.S: Wikipedia!

Me: Yes!

(Mr.S hammers away some more on his keyboard.)

Mr.S: 1972!

Me: 35 years!

Mr.S: Nein.

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Tomorrow!

Me: Eh?

Mr.S: Tomorrow, Ceilon, Sri lanka!

Me: Oh!

Mr.S:34 Yearz, 11 monat, 30 tage, ya?

Me: Ah, okay.

Mr. Markus Shmidt is Polish, speaks Polish and German (no English, duh), loves (juicy) Polish apples and reclining chairs. Apparently. This is him, and the orange chair is where I spent one of the most boring days of my life. (The laptops were not there that day.)

I spent the rest of the day staring at the map, then went home.

Here are a few more shots of the bizarre oddity. If my camera was capable of capturing at high enough resoutions, Maissur, Birma and other comic respellings would be in the offing for the patient viewer.

Things got better, though. Now the whole incident seems amusing.

Another oddity in the same office:

I wonder what this is about.

Mr.S teaches me German, and I try to teach him English.
Mr. Schmidt and I are good friends now.

Kitchen (Mis)adventures

One can only live for so long on bread, milk and cereal. On the 19th of May, '07, I decide to try my luck with cooking staple food.

Cooking is a fairly non-trivial exercise. I was aware of this for quite some time now, but I appear to have underestimated the extent of non-triviality grossly.

I gather the pressure cooker, rice (I paid an outrageous amount to get my hands on this), and water on the heating pad and stare hopefully for ten minutes. This is what it looked like when I opened it up:
(It is a good thing the photograph came out blurred, for horrors such as these are not meant to be seen in stark clarity)
Rice:

So do I give up? No, I don't. Fortunately, I had the foresight to cook little when trying for the first time, so I munch down the half baked monstrosity you see above, and try again: (This time, I pray.)

Rice, redux:
There. Improving already. This lot is slightly better cooked, and is almost edible. I munch this down and decided to call it a night.

A couple of days (and about three tries and three hundred more grams of inedible rice) later, I manage to catch hold of the resident rice experts. Under their watchful eye and helpful guidance, I manage to create something that is actually edible, and tasty enough for my mentors to dig in.

To summarize, here is food done wrong: (First day)

(The eggs are not for me. That creature is the result of the enterprise of an amateur whose skills were lower than mine.)

And here is food done right:
Awesome. (Don't miss the reflection of me, the camera, my mentors and the surroundings on the ladle kept atop the yoghurt box.)

Since that fateful day, my mentors and I have struck a deal: We cook for all of us. No points for guessing in whose favour that turns out.

Cooking gets repititive after you get it right- the fun's not there anymore if you're not experimenting, which explains why I still consume bread, cereal, milk and the like through most of the day. One well cooked meal a day is enough, I reckon. (For now)

The food issue has barely had its surface scratched; the bread story, yoghurt story, Vegetable story, juice story and vegetarianism stories are for later, as is the treasure hunt I engaged myself in in the supermarket while looking for cheese.
(In my defence, butter was called butter, how was I to know that cheese was called käse? Tut tut...)

I wrap up this post with snaps of me cooking. (Don't laugh, unless you've BTDT.)



Aw, what the heck, ROFL if you wish.

Konigssee!

Thursday is a holiday. No one seems to know why, but apparently, the 17th of May is of religious importance here.
I've agreed to go on a trip to a nearby lake (with my intern mates and a couple of other hostel mates) on this day, so I get ready by 6 am.

Its raining, and freezing. Some summer, this.

'Nearby', I realize, is misleading. It takes about eight hours to get there by train- but those were very eventful hours.
Train travel is completely hassle free. To get to any station you want to, enter the destination names in a ticketing machine at the railway station, and it prints out the entire itinerary, including train codes, times and platform numbers, and the smallest possible wait times between two connections. Of course, it also issues tickets. I realize that I overpaid on the first trip here. For €5, you get an all day pass valid on most trains in Germany- I traveled about 700 km on that pass!

The trip to Konigssee, I realize, involves four train changes, each with gaps of about five minutes. Amazing. I spend a few minutes contemplating on the genius of the graph theorist who programmed the machine to optimize travel time for the passenger.
This is the first of several things I noticed that involved considerable ingenuity to set up. One of the others, was the dustbin design.
Nah, I'm not talking about fancy lid opening devices with automated crushers, et al, although those exist, too. The dustbin on the train, I realize, is a can fixed to a wall that rotates outwards, and is stable in two positions, fully open and fully closed. How is that? The center of mass of the can is located a critical location with respect to the pivot, and filling the can makes no difference to the action of the dustbin, even though it moves with added mass at the bottom.
Amazing! (Will add photo later)

Three out of five people in our group form a noisy bunch, and wild swearing ensues as we almost miss one of the connecting trains. Most unpleasant business.
To complicate matters, both my fellow interns are heavy smokers, and don't seem to mind the fact that a box of cigarettes costs €4. They waste no time at all at stations, and puff away to glory- which, of course, means that I spend most of the time on the other end of the platform.
In addition, its raining, and I don't have an umbrella.
Fortunately, all this unpleasantness fades when I get to Konigssee.

Several connecting rides later, we get there, and I realize I'm at the Austrian border!
I'm also at the Alps foothills, but I reckon it feels cold enough already. ('Pleasant weather, expected to get warmer', remember?)

Here's what the lake at Konigssee looks like:









The Alps, and the way to the alps:




A few unexpected encounters:


The rain forced me to buy an (expensive!) umbrella:


Two hours later, it was time to head back. The return journey took nine hours, four train changes, and we made it back to Erlangen by 2 am! The temperature registered five degrees then, but at least it wasn't raining anymore. ('Pleasant weather...')

More shots, taken from the railway stations on the way, and in trains. One of the snaps has the well designed dustbin I mentioned earlier.

Train station on the way back. Pronounce that:




Self Portrait: Took this to see how my arm narrows down with distance. This was supposed to help me draw with perspective. Jacket ruined the entire business.


Notice the über dustbin in the center.
At Nuremberg railway station, 1 am. This is what happens to people who have traveled for sixteen hours in eight trains in one day, especially when they need to wait thirty minutes for the last one:



I sign off with a few random pics:

Railway station cafe: (very inviting!)


Make your own coffee:


Typical German Railway station (I've seen about twelve now):



This is Second Class!

A couple of pictures of me (I am very vain, eh?)
Were taken early in the morning, hence the un-tired expressions on my face.



Concluding note: It seems ironic that some one like me, who does not enjoy sight-seeing one bit, finds himself at one of the most picturesque places on the planet. (Perhaps it is wiser to say that I enjoy several things more than I enjoy touring.) The journey was a bore, the lake was cold and wet, as were my shoes at the end of the day (eww....). The ingenious dustbin and the ticketing machine more than made up for it, though.