Pictures of your work?

[Skidmark]

My job is boring... I maintain the CMDB for an ITAR account.

[Mark04]

You might work with my neighbor Justin. Think theres two companies at Dfw that do this.

I do work with Justin. There are actually several sim shops in the area. DFW has more simulators than anywhere else in the world.

[Stephen]

ifail panorama

[GrayStangGT]

Oilfield division of FedEx

[SouthernSVT]

[GeorgeG.]

Exchange administrator here. It runs pretty well so I get to telnet into Cisco gear every chance I get and do what I can in there.

[Chas_svo]

I sit at a desk, and write technical design documents, make visio drawings, and review/approve the work of the rest of my team.

I know that icon. Damn you!

I do work with Justin. There are actually several sim shops in the area. DFW has more simulators than anywhere else in the world.

Second place go to Tulsa? I think there are/were 3 there. I have a couple of friends at 2 of them.

[BERNIE MOSFET]

My office now is boring, but I was working out of a hangar for about 3 years prior.
Since it's "pictures of my work", here's what I've done over the last two years:

This project took about 2 years. The short of it was we had to prove a concept for retrofitting old UH-1H's, increasing payload and flight envelope. Started out theoretical; my boss handed me a contour sheet and a husk he found at a boneyard and told me to build a finite element model with it.




I ended up getting my hands on paper and electronic copies of 204 and 205 drawings; some 212 stuff too.



A brief word on finite element models for those who don't know: it's essentially taking an object that is continuous in nature, and breaking it up into small, discrete pieces that each are easier to work with rather than the whole. It's the same concept of video games and animations rendering 3D objects with polygons. The more polygons, the more definition you have and the smoother and more natural something becomes. Also, the more processing power required to work with all the extra polygons.

It's hard to get a sense of the detail from these images, but anyone with any CAD under their belt should appreciate them anyway.

Here's the mostly complete solid model I built in Pro/E


Here's the contour where the solid model is compressed to surfaces


Here's the resultant mesh. It's pretty solid blue because the mesh was so fine.


Here's a panel. Some of the mesh looks messy because it isn't flat - there's brackets coming off the back of it. This is also not very well refined. White lines correspond to the yellow contour lines above, and the computer fills in with the blue lines. The lines all form the boundaries to the polygon elements, and not the elements themselves.


This is one of the images that came from the model after it was exported to ANSYS, I think it gives a little better feel for the model:

[BERNIE MOSFET]

Once we got all the modeling done and a pile of paperwork sorted, then it came time to flight testing.

We attached strain gages and accelerometers all over:


Routed all the wiring to a flight test instrumentation setup:


One of the tests we did was a tortion stability where we anchor the helicopter and the pilot pulls up and down on the collective or pushes the pedals back and forth to induce vibration. In this picture the linkage connects from the liftbeam through the opening in the platform to a hardpoint - rated at something like 20 tons.


This was one of the results of that test. The black line is the pilot input and and the colored lines are strain readings. We were mostly interested in the structural damping. I made thousands of these plots over about 7 months. Fucking boring.




That test was also interesting because you can get something called ground resonance when you anchor a helicopter to the ground like that. This video is a good example of what can happen when the a/c gets into ground resonance:

[Roscoe]

Holy shit, Drew. Cool stuff.

[46Tbird]

Oh yeah? I know some Fortran.

[bird_dog0347]

I know that icon. Damn you!

I think that might have been confusing, I don't work *for* F5, but I am a Sr. Data Network Security Engineer who spends 99% of my time working on F5 boxes/designs/standards/LTM/GTM stuff. Basically I'm a computer nerd for those of you who have no idea what all that crap means.

[bird_dog0347]

Failcopter!

[Chas_svo]

Drew, that video was cool.

Bird dog, sorry for assuming, but it looks like you worked for a company that is supposed to be helping us, but instead is causing me untold grief. F'ng VPNs...

Carry on.

[CRASH]

I'm just a lowly pinstriper and drive all over the place so my view is never the same.