Today I went on a tour of where I worked. Somehow it seems like this maybe should have happened earlier, but better late than never? Turns out, there are a lot of cool projects going on. If you can find them.
We started in a lab that's not really attached to the rest of the offices/space since the projects there are larger. (ie flight simulators- it's also a hexapod! :D well, it's kind of cheating, it has an extra piston in the center for support..so heptapod) In the same lab ,only reachable by this odd second level-balcony that runs around the edge of the room, we visited an elephant's trunk. Not actually, but it looked and moved just like one. A bit uncanny really.
Because the lab wasn't far enough away from the main part of the institute we went even further to visit a free-ish standing shell. It's apparently thinner than the equivalent of an eggshell scaled to that size. Pretty crazy. Instead of being cemented into the ground, three of the four corners are movable by pistons so it can counteract vibrations or uneven load. It also works well as a whisper chamber. (Stand in one corner, and the people kitty-corner can hear you really well)
We finished off the tour in the same room that I work in all the time. Go figure. The large contraption that I had kind of been wondering about (as in what is it? does it work? can I play with it?) turned out to be a model of a crane. It's being used for research with oscillation dampening, but for the demonstration we basically had fun with pendulums and finding resonant frequencies. Who knew there were so many cool projects hidden in all of the rooms? Makes you want to go explore.
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