Student Engineer in the Bearings Department

Sounds official right? That's because it is! About a month ago I got hired on at US Synthetic. This is the place that I worked at over the summer. US Synthetic is a company that mainly makes diamond bit cutters. Or in other words, they make synthetic diamonds to   put on oil drills to dig down into the Earth. Why diamonds? Because they are one of the hardest materials available.

During the summer I was a member of the press maintenance team. 

I worked on big presses like this:

To give you some perspective, this machine is probably 10 ft tall and weighs up to 80 tons. I would build, repair, and diagnose the presses. It was hard, laborious work, but I learned a lot and had fun.


I wanted to continue working there when school started, but they didn't have a part time position open in that area. So I stopped working and was just going to be a full time student. But a few weeks later, I heard about a job opening in the bearings department for a student engineer part time. I was super excited and applied for the job. After a few interviews, I was finally selected to be a part of the Bearings team!



I spend most of my time designing thrust/radial bearings for our customers. I found a site online that explains what we do.


"The company's bearing lineup includes radial bearings and thrust bearings, primarily for the oil and gas drilling industry. The bearings are designed for use in down hole motors, turbines, rotary steerable systems, drilling tools, heavy industrial equipment, and a variety of pump applications. Pump applications include extreme conditions transfer pumps, electric submersible pumps, stationary pumps, and injection pumps.


The bearing bodies themselves are machined from stainless steel. The antifriction surfaces placed into the bodies are polycrystalline diamond pads that have been built up on tungsten carbide substrates, then formed, precision machined, and placed with high precision.



The first picture is of thrust bearings. 

Other advantages of PCD bearings include their relatively small size for the load-carrying capacity, allowing tight packaging and exposure to extreme conditions. Also, because the bearings do not rely on rolling elements and have no moving parts, they have fewer failure modes and operational limitations."

In the picture just above, you see large and small diameter radial bearings.



It's been a lot of fun trying to solve problems as they come at work and I'm enjoying having a job with the word "engineer" in the position title.



Something interesting about US Synthetic is that they also have a factory on site called Suncrest Diamonds. They deal with REAL diamonds. Jewelry stores send them real diamonds, and have them change their color. So the factory makes pink, purple, yellow, and just about any color of diamond. They alter the color by adding nitrogen in between the carbon atoms of the diamond and heating it up in a press like the one shown above. Cool huh!?





Check out more at: http://www.suncrestdiamonds.com/







Information taken from : http://www.ebearing.com/news2009/060901.htm

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For those of you who don't read binary code, I made my first website!
This semester at BYU I am taking a class called Introduction to Scientific Computing and Computer-Aided Engineering (Me En 373). A mouthful.... I know.

 Today was our first lab day and we had to program a website in html code. I have never done anything like this, but I think it turned out well for an hour of work.


Check it out!  www.et.byu.edu/~dbeck8


I am very new to this, and still trying to figure things out. I haven't figured out how to change the background, and I really want to know how to make an icon appear with the title on the top tab of the page. Anyone know? I should probably just ask my computer genius brother Nate Beck.


For other cool geeky ideas, Check out Bettijo's amazing party ideas.

Robots!

This semester I had a great opportunity to work with Robots. ASME is an engineering club here at BYU and they sponsored an event with local elementary schools. For the last 8 weeks, I have gone to a local elementary school and mentored 6th graders. Our task was to build a robot that could pick up a colored ball, navigate through 3 walls(which changed order), and drop the ball in a small basket. We were using Lego's NXT Mindstorm (see http://mindstorms.lego.com/en-us/Default.aspx). The Robot was actually pretty cool. We built it in about 3 weeks and spent the other weeks trying to perfect the programming. Besides trying to keep 6th graders on task, the hardest part was calibrating the robot using an old Mac. The computers at the elementary school were pretty outdated, which made programming slow and frustrating. However, on the big day, we were quite successful.

There were 10 schools, and each school had 10 minutes to do as many runs through the course as they wanted. Points were awarded for every task accomplished. We got points for picking up the ball, staying in bounds, getting through walls, and reaching the drop destination.

Here is our first run: 

Another issue we had is that we built and practiced our robot on smooth tile, so the plywood was difficult for our robot. We had a few different programs, and were able to pick up the ball, navigate through the maze, and get to the final basket. Unfortunately, we neglected to take into consideration the height of the basket, and our claws weren't high enough to get over the lip of the basket. So our robot would just run into the side of it.

At the end of the day, the kids from Edgemont Elementary were tied for first! In order to decide who got the first prize picking of candy, a tough game of rock,paper, scissors ensued. We came out victorious! "WE'RE NUMBER ONE! WE'RE NUMBER ONE!"

It was a great experience!

I also Youtube NXT robots to see what people have applications people have thought of. Robots are now solving rubics cubes, playing connect 4, and even painting the Mona Lisa.

What ideas do you have for a robot?

Carbon Fibers

I am currently taking ME 250- Materials Science at BYU. We have been discussing the different types of polymers and their uses. Yesterday, our professor brought in some carbon fiber pipes and plates, and I was surprised at how strong these materials were. I was very impressed with their strength and wondered what engineers were applying this material to:

I checked out http://www.syntek-carbon.com/  

I thought it was interesting that they were using carbon fiber as a hockey stick. I played street hockey when I was a kid and know how to hit a puck. I also know that occasionally a hockey stick breaks. In this event, with a carbon fiber stick, that could be extremely dangerous. Swinging a sharp stick and having tiny fibers fly around upon rupture gives me the chills. However, the company wraps their hockey sticks with Kevlar. I think this is an ingenious idea. Kevlar doesn't tear or cut easily and is a great way to contain all of the shattered fibers.

Other applications I found were bicycles, mountain climbing gear, water rafting gear, or golf clubs. The basic idea is to have something really tough but light weight.

Another site had carbon fiber technology in a piano. Check it out! http://www.kawaius.com/main_links/acoustic_brochures/carbon_fiber.pdf