Hey! so my name is Jess. I'm a mechanical engineering student, master student at
ETH Zurich and today I'm going to be filming the day a day in a life of a
mechanical engineer because looks like a lot of people are hungry to see it and
also today I get to do experiments. So usually I do a lot of simulations, which
you will see later. But today I get to do experiments to back up my simulations
which you will also see later if I get permission from my Prof. Also if you're
wondering no didn't go to the gym this morning because I was too tired
#engineeringlife lol. Okay maybe I'll explain my simulations a little bit
so I am like simulating a gas turbine or like a burner within a gas turbine and
it has two flames in it so I already simulated the burner like in using
Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) or Large Eddy Simulation (LES)
so now what I'm doing is I'm gonna be doing the experiments to sort of
verify my simulations so it makes sense you'll see. So now we are approaching ETH
That's the main building. That's my building. Main building is much more beautiful.
So here this is a giant engine we have. You can see, it's pretty dope
Pretty big. And so this is pretty much what I do. General Electric Swissair, cool
huh hand for scale
okay so I'm in my office and I'm gonna show you some of my simulation.
There we go. So this is the first flame. This is like the temperature of the flame
So the red part is the hot part. Here we have the oxygen and then here we have the fuel.
So obviously when the fuel burns there's no more fuel inside the flame.
So that's why it's white on the inside
Same with the oxygen. It's blue on the inside because there's no oxygen once it
burns. Because we're burning "fuel lean". And so this is my first flame and now
I'll show you my second flame. So now you can see my two flames so this is the flame I
just show you it's kind of going crazy here. Here I have extra air coming in and
here I have extra fuel coming in and because the flow is so hot there is the
second flame that's forming so you can see it's kind of like a dragon
And so it's pumping and this is an instability. So do you see that?
Yeah, so if you have, I guess, any more questions about this, you can just like
comment below. Yeah, pretty much that's my project and I think it's pretty cool.
I think we can duplicate it in experiments it would be way cooler so I'm gonna ask
my supervisor if I could do that. Yes, so stay tuned.
So this is my friend, Luigi, from Italy. Luigi, where are you from? What is your name?
It's Luigi. Like you told it. And ya, I'm from Italy.
From Italy!
I didn't do that.
Could you please stop the video? Or do you have to go through my whole life?
So, this is your mechanical engineering project.
Ya.
A grey screen.
Exactly
So here I'm inside the control room of our burner.
I should be looking at the camera
Here's my supervisor checking on the test rig.
I didn't want to use my own footage because I didn't want to get in trouble.
So this is the footage from my lab's website.
Pretty much I don't know what you want me to tell you. I just finished the
experiments. Now I'm extracting data. I'm gonna put into a presentation pretty fun
Life of an engineering student.
So this is the Messung von Verweilzeitspektren?
Clearly, you know exactly what that means
What is this thing called, a scrubber? When you try to like separate
NOx or CO2 from air or from exhaust gas. So pretty much I'm pretty sure like the
exhaust goes from the bottom up here. This material is some sort of absorbent
material that absorbs the NOx or the exhaust
the clean gas exits or something like that
actually I decided this is a good thing to explain so yeah pretty much this is
exactly what we're doing here we have our first-stage burner and this is the test rig
and here we have the second flame and so these two planes interact together and
they create like acoustic modes and so this is the test rig that I am
simulating right now. So I'm simulating it here you can see
that this is flame. So this is exactly what I'm simulating that
I showed earlier. Or this is another way to visualize the exact same simulation
yeah you can use high speed laser Diagnostics to view it in the experiment
so this is a simulation and this is what
you used to see the experiment so you'd pretty much seed the flow with some sort
of fluorescent material then you use the laser to make it fluoresce so make the
light, make like the whatever you see it with
fluoresce in a different color and then use high-speed camera to record and so
the application is for like these different gas turbine engines so you can
see here you have the first flame and the second flame. That's pretty much the
application of this burner. Yeah there we go again, one flame, second flame.
Well, there's three and two but you know what I mean
And this is the motivation behind it pretty much we were burning oil, gas and
coal and we're always going to keep burning them till we run out so and on
top of that wind and solar are very sporadic but this is the demand so this
is constant but renewables are not constant so we have to figure out a way
which is gas turbines and burning gas oil and coal and we have to use these
pretty much to make up for this demand, when we don't have renewables available
So that's the point of yeah so pretty much yeah that's why we
use gas turbines still and so what we're trying to do is just make this more
efficient so one way to make them more efficient is to use two flames but in
order to do that we have to investigate with two flames in the burner which is
what I'm doing That's it.
Yeah pretty much that's my life as a mechanical engineering student at ETH Zurich
that evening I didn't really do much I came home I ate a salad and then I
watched Parks and Recreation. Let me know below if you're a mechanical engineer
and if your student life is different chances are that if you're in your
bachelors it's way more packed than mine. Yeah and also like and subscribe
I just recently made friends with EverythingKay and she is in computer
science I believe at Waterloo which is not too far from where I live in Canada
and she has like a lifestyle youtube but she kind of wants to transition into a
computer science-y YouTube channel. So if that interests you at all then go
over there and show your support. I have her listed down as one of my featured
channels