Thursday, April 17, 2014

Challenging my Skills

This semester, I'm taking a "Failure Analysis" class. For the lab component of this class, we receive parts that have broken for a variety of reasons. Our task is to figure out why they broke; were they over-stressed? Was it fatigue? Were they exposed to acid? It varies from part to part.
At the beginning of the semester, many of these failures were beyond my skill to analyze - I didn't have the knowledge to draw good conclusions about how they had failed. Thanks to class (and practice), I've been able to improve my skills and make largely accurate diagnoses. 

On a different note, I've found two TED talks that I'd like to do for my final project (one or the other):
Problem: Asphalt Degrades Quickly. This guy has a solution.  (~6 min) This one relates pretty closely to my major.
Are either of these okay? Both? Let me know.

#playtpus

1 comment:

  1. That is interesting. I know a lot of labs focus on fixing things or creating things, but it's very interesting to have a lab focused on what went wrong. I wish they could have classes like this for PreVet majors to help us learn what not to do, and also what to do when something goes wrong.

    ReplyDelete