I was lucky to have the opportunity to study abroad in South Korea for my Fall 2022 and Spring 2023 semesters, and even luckier to have met Professor Seung Jin Song that Fall semester. Fluid mechanics had not struck me as an interesting discipline in mechanical engineering, but Professor Song's enthusiasm for the field, especially in his research in turbomachinery, was contagious. Inspired, I went up to him one day after class and asked if he had any openings in his lab. Guess where I found myself the following week?

Professor Song's lab, the Seoul National University Turbomachinery Lab, had partnered with South Korean rocket startup Perigee, and I was tasked with evaluating/optimizing the impeller/inducer design for their liquid oxygen (LO) pump. First, I was introduced to TurboGrid on the ANSYS Workbench software, where I set meshing parameters and generated a mesh.

I checked the sharp corners/edges of each part to make sure the mesh was fine enough to get a good analysis of the flow there and sent the mesh to ANSYS CFX.

Once I set the CFX settings and ran it, I analyzed the results using CFD-Post and checked the pressure differences in front of and behind the blades.

Presenting the results to my mentors, I was later given a new design that I was tasked with meshing using ICEM CFD.

I was also fortunate enough to have the opportunity to attend the 2nd Launch Technology Seminar [발사체 기술 세미나 2차] in Daejun, South Korea, where I learned a lot more about what goes into launching a rocket into space and the current technologies being developed for that goal.

The summer of 2023 I worked in Dr. Chen Li's Terradynamics Lab under PhD student Eugene Lin. One of the projects in a lab focusing in bio-inspired robotics to study animal behavior, the vibration-sensing spider robot aimed to imitate how spiders felt vibrations from their web through organic sensors at the joints in their legs. A strange behavior was observed in some spiders where they changed the posture of their legs, supposedly influencing how they sense the vibrations. In order to study this further, a robophysical model was made.

My job for this project was to design legs that act somewhere between a mechanical template and a mechanical anchor for those of an orbweaver spider. This means that it should mimic the behavior of the organism to an extent, but should be simplified and constrained to isolate features for analysis. This allowed me to narrow down my goals to designing a leg that had two degrees of freedom and were directionally-dependent in stiffness.

Given an initial design made by a previous intern, I corrected some dimensions and tolerances for easy assembly.

I 3D printed this design and quickly brainstormed some ideas that would allow for directional stiffness. Throughout the next few iterations, I added features that would allow implementation of springs, heatshrink, and rubber bands, in addition to a string that would pull/extend the leg. Each week I would give a presentation to my lab colleagues and to Dr. Li to collect feedback and ideas.

For new parts I would submit a purchase request and for each iteration I would have a SOLIDWORKS part to show my mentor.