[Rhodes22-list] The Nerd May Survive Another Semester At College!

[Steve Alm]

Way to go Roger!

Not that you bare any resemblance to Rodney Dangerfield, (you DO get
respect) but your story of Dr. Shlien reminds me of a scene from his movie
Back to School, where Rodney trades barbs with the history teacher, played
by the late, great Sam Kinison.  8-)  If you haven't seen the movie, I think
you'd get a kick out of it.

Good luck on the exams,
Slim

On 4/25/04 2:18 PM, "Roger Pihlaja" <cen09402 at centurytel.net> wrote:

> Hi Everybody,
> 
> It's Roger.  I haven't been contributing much lately & I thought I just drop
> the list a line to let everyone know what's been going on in my life.  My last
> regular week of classes for the Winter Semester, 2004 at SVSU is over.  Dr.
> Schilling told me I have an A in ME497, Special Research Project.
> 
> Last Friday 04/23/2004, Kevin VanSickle, my partner in ME480, Senior Design 1;
> & I had a really big day.  Our final assignments for ME480 were due.  On
> Friday, we had to turn in 2 bound copies of the final report, the project
> notebook, give a poster presentation, and give an oral presentation.  All of
> that together was worth 50% of the grade in the class.  I had an A in ME480
> going into Friday & I think everything went pretty well that day; but, I won't
> really know for certain until the grades are posted.  Kevin & I had to be at
> SVSU by 8:00 AM on Friday dressed in suit & tie, have our poster set up by
> 9:00 AM, the press & other VIP's toured the displays from 9:00 AM - 10:00 AM,
> and the displays were open to the public from 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM.  From 12:00
> PM - 1:00 PM, we had a catered lunch.  From 1:00 PM - 4:00 PM, we had the oral
> presentations, which were also open to the public.  My group gave the 1st oral
> presentation at 1:00 PM.  The presentations had to be 30 minutes long, all the
> team members had to speak, the presentation had to be done electronically
> using MS Powerpoint, & there was a 5 minute Q&A period after each
> presentation.  Each person in the audience had a score sheet for each
> presentation.  Part of our grade was based upon how the nontechnical public
> scored our presentations.  As I said, I think Friday went pretty well & I
> should end up with an A in ME480; but, who knows?
> 
> There is a professor at SVSU, Dr. Shlien, that teaches ME356, Fluid Mechanics.
> Chemical engineers get lots of fluid mechanics in their undergraduate
> curriculum.  ME356 was one of the classes I was able to petition out of taking
> based upon my academic transcript from Michigan Tech University.  So, I've
> never had to take a class from Dr. Shlien.  But, Dr. Shlien has a reputation
> for being a really tough professor that likes to put down his students in
> public.  During my poster presentation in the morning, Dr. Shlien cornered me
> & asked me a question about how much force was going to generated against a
> particular structural panel by the airflow inside the machine.  I admitted I
> hadn't calculated that particular number; but, speculated that 50 cubic
> feet/min airflow at a few inches of water column pressure wasn't likely to
> generate very much force at that spot.  Dr. Shlien got this big smirk on his
> face & said, "If he was correct; then, our entire senior project design would
> have to reworked."  If he were correct, that would be true & I felt pretty bad
> about missing something so important.  I kept looking at our design &
> wondering what this PhD expert in fluid mechanics was seeing that I had
> missed.  Well, I tried to do the calculation in my head.  But, in the middle
> of the poster presentation, with dozens of people milling about & me trying to
> greet people & give my presentation, I just couldn't concentrate.  So, after
> the poster session was finished at noon, I went up to my office where it was
> quiet & I could concentrate.  I pulled out a pencil & paper, derived the
> defining equations from 1st principles, & worked out an upper limit for the
> force at only 0.018 lbs, which is negligible, just as I had suspected.  Then,
> I went & found Dr. Shlien in the lunch line & showed him the calculation.
> After looking at for a few minutes & asking me a few more questions, he agreed
> with my result.  He said, "I was lucky we were dealing with air flow & not
> water."  I just replied, "I have to admit I hadn't considered the issue
> because my 26 years of experience dealing with fluid flow gave me a pretty
> good engineering intuition re such things."  "We'd have done something
> different if the apparatus had been designed to handle water instead of air."
> Dr. Shlien then said, "It was too bad I showed him this because he wanted to
> ask the question during the Q&A session after our oral presentation."  I just
> shrugged my shoulders & said, "Oh well, I'm sure you will think of something
> else to ask us."  This exchange took place in the lunch line right in front of
> the entire senior engineering class.  Well, with this challenge, of course Dr.
> Shlien wasn't going to let it go at that!  So after our oral presentation, Dr.
> Shlien asked a question regarding how certain tuning parameters in the control
> system of our project were calculated.  As soon as I heard the question I
> replied, "I have some supplemental slides in another MS Powerpoint file that
> address that issue.  Would you like to see them?"  As soon as he said, "Yes",
> I thought to myself, "Excellent!  There won't be any more questions after
> this!"  It took a minute or so to pull up the supplemental slides off the hard
> disk on the PC driving the projector.  As soon as I started, Dr. Shlien knew
> he'd been had.  There were 6 slides that described a theoretical heat & mass
> transfer model.  We're talking heavy duty differential equations & calculus
> here!  Remember, I did my MS thesis on heat & mass transfer!  After the 2nd
> slide, Dr. Shlien interrupted me in mid sentence & said he didn't want to use
> up all the Q&A time.  I said, "OK"  "To make a long story short, we use this
> geometry, (flip to next slide) apply Fourier's Law of Heat Conduction & Fick's
> 1st Law of Diffusion to get these coupled simultaneous differential equations,
> (flip to next slide) here's the solution in equation form, (flip to next
> slide) here's the solution plotted graphically, (flip to next slide) from that
> we get a time constant for the system, (flip to last slide) & that's where
> these control system tuning parameters come from."  "Are there any other
> questions?"  That was the end of our Q&A time.  Kevin & I sat down, big smiles
> on our faces!
> 
> Dr. Shlien must have been somewhat pissed off, because he absolutely ripped up
> the next group's oral presentation!  The group had used a software package
> called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to calculate the airflow & pressure
> drop across a certain complex nozzle shape they had designed.  Dr. Shlien
> asked them to explain how the airflow could reach sonic velocity at a certain
> pressure drop.  What he was looking for was Bernoulli's equation.  Bernoulli's
> equation is one of the 1st fundamental equations you learn about in fluid
> mechanics, almost everything else in the field of fluid mechanics is derived
> from it.  It would have taken about a minute to explain the concept of
> critical sonic flow on the white board with a few well chosen equations.  But,
> the whole group got rattled & just stood there like frightened whitetail deer
> in Dr. Shlien's glaring headlights!  He made it sound like all they knew how
> to do was punch numbers into a commercially produced modeling package; but,
> had no idea of how it worked.  Hopefully, that's not actually the case.  I
> felt really sorry for them.
> 
> Of course, the 2 weeks leading up to Friday were pretty hectic!  Both Kevin &
> I put in some really long hours getting ready for Friday.  We were ready to go
> at 9:30 PM on Thursday, the night before.  Believe me, when I left SVSU on
> Thursday night, there were lots of groups still working on some facet of their
> projects.  I got a pretty decent night's sleep; but, I think many of the other
> groups pulled all nighters.  Oh well, they're young & strong - builds
> character!
> 
> After the presentations were over & we helped clean up the debris left behind
> after the posters & presentations, nearly all the groups went over to TGI
> Fridays by Fashion Square Mall in Saginaw, MI to celebrate.  I just had a beer
> with the other groups and left after about 45 minutes.  However, some of the
> groups must have turned it into a real pub crawl because there were lots of
> hung over senior engineering students in Pioneer Hall on Saturday!  I was kind
> of a celebrity at the party at TGI Fridays because I guess nobody has ever put
> it to Dr. Shlien in an oral presentation before.  It was done in a very public
> forum & the entire senior engineering class just loved it!  I feel a little
> bit sorry for my partner, Kevin, because he still has to take Dr. Shlien's
> Fluid Mechanics class.  That guy must be a real SOB in front of a class,
> especially if you haven't done your homework!  I thank God for delivering me
> from this man.  There were dozens of things he might have asked that I wasn't
> prepared for & instead he asked one of the few questions I was well prepared
> for.
> 
> On Saturday, I went into SVSU to meet with my group for ME451, Machine Design.
> Working together, we knocked off an entire design project report from start to
> finish in only 4 hours!  The project was to design a power screw actuator that
> had a 12 inch stroke & could move an 8000 lb load full stroke in 15 seconds or
> less.  This was our 4th design project as a team & we're functioning as a
> well-oiled machine.  I typed the entire report while Dan & Gary, my two
> partners, did the calculations.  Then, when they had finished the design
> calculations, we went back thru the report page by page & inserted the
> calculated values for the results in the appropriate spots.  The report was 9
> single spaced typed pages long in 12 Arial font.  The typing of the text
> wasn't bad; but, there were a lot of heavy duty math equations, which are very
> time consuming to create using the MS Equation editor.  The 4th design report
> is due on Tuesday at 10:30 AM when the final exam in ME451 begins.  My team
> has a 95% average on the 3 design reports we've submitted so far this
> semester.
> 
> I have two actual final exams this week.  The final exam in ME451, Machine
> Design, will be Tuesday, 04/27/2004, from 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM.  The final exam
> in ME380, Manufacturing Processes & Systems, will be Wednesday, 04/28/2004,
> from 10:30 AM - 12:20 PM.  Assuming my design team gets our average score of
> 95% on the 4th design project report, I will have a 90.5% average in ME451
> going into the final.  I have a 94.2% average in ME380 going into the final.
> So, A's or A-'s are possible in both classes,  depending upon how I do on the
> final exams.
> 
> Sunday & Monday, I will be finishing up my business plan & final oral
> presentation for MSTP531, Entrepreneurship Seminar.  On Wednesday, from 4:00
> PM - 5:50 PM, I have to give an oral presentation of my business plan.  This
> will be a formal affair; suit & tie, MS Powerpoint slides presented
> electronically, & turn in 2 bound copies of the business plan.  The oral
> presentation can only be 10 minutes long & will be scored by a panel of 3
> judges, each with experience in start-up businesses.  It's supposed to
> simulate the amount of time a busy venture capitalist might give you to
> convince them to invest in your business.  The oral presentation & written
> business plan are the only grades I will get in the class.  So, I have no
> average going into the final MSTP531 session on Wednesday!  Hey, no pressure.
> 
> On Thursday morning, I will bring Dynamic Equilibrium home from winter storage
> at the Midland County Fairgrounds.  I have no idea when the boat will go in
> the water.  My dock is still a wreck from the ice damage in March, 2004.  So,
> I have no place to tie up.
> 
> Thursday afternoon, I will drive up to Northern Michigan University in
> Marquette, MI to pick up my older son Daniel.  The plan is to stay in the dorm
> with Daniel on Thursday night, clean up his room, pack, and checkout on
> Friday.  I'm hoping to be back home by Friday evening.
> 
> So, by this time next week, for better or worse, Winter Semester, 2004 will be
> history.  Wish me luck!
> 
> Roger Pihlaja
> S/V Dynamic Equilibrium
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