Blog #1 -- Pre-Project -- May 8th, 2023

    Behind this project personally was a combined interest in my family legacy and engineering. My grandfather worked as a jet engine designer at General Electric for many decades, and since my childhood, I've always been fascinated by his work. As I grew up, that fascination coincided with my genuine curiosity in STEM subjects, particularly engineering. Taking classes like physics and chemistry has begun to satiate this curiosity, but in many ways, this project is an extension of my own curiosity. In this project, I hope to create a jet engine, but more broadly I hope to get a better understanding of the engineering process on a broader level. I want to be able to understand exactly what undertaking a big problem by breaking it down into smaller steps and troubleshooting them looks like.

    Essentially, I want to answer the question: How does one undertake a massively complex project by breaking it down into smaller problems and working through them? Building a jet engine (or part of one) is ultimately a vehicle for this discovery, but that being said, it's a pretty cool vehicle. Most of the building process will be completed at Case's Think[box], and prototyping and design will be done either at Hawken Upper School under Mr. DiGiorgio or at our own houses. Additional assembly, building, and testing will happen in Ben's garage. The goal for this first week is to make sure we have everything we need to build the full-sized model, as well as create a smaller prototyping model to troubleshoot glaring issues. Some current questions that have arisen within the past few weeks are:

Where should we source the centrifugal compressor from?

Where do we get the right type of sheet metal?

How do we bend the sheet metal to be shaped like the intake of a jet engine?

As more questions get answered, more seem to arise, but progress is gradually being made.

Comments

  1. LDerbyMay 11, 2023 at 8:52 AM

    This project sounds fascinating and very enterprising. I am excited to see your progress and how the final model turns out.

    ReplyDelete

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