Upstart Inc.

One project I was involved in included material science research to attach ceramic tubing to a metal cap with the use of brazing. I tested multiple brazing mixtures that consisted of various materials including silver, copper, titanium, as well as many others. These mixtures were heated to several temperatures to test which yielded the best results. The optimal temperature and brazing mixture found was then tested on the the cap and tube. I set up a shell heater fixture with a temperature controller programmed to ramp up the temperature at a designated rate.

The brazing mixture was finalized, and a fixture was designed and built to braze many tubes at a time through the use of multiple shell heaters. I personally set up, wired, and programmed five temperature controllers, each connected to a separate heater in the fixture. The controllers were arranged neatly in a housing to be mounted on metal brackets. The wiring included a solid-state relay to send voltage to the heaters if the temperature controller sent a signal voltage from its output. These controllers got their inputs from a k-type thermocouple wired to measure the temperature of the inside of each heater.

One of the major testing stands being built, at the time of my start, required that many different types of metals be exposed to a high temperature steam-oxygen environment. This testing would take place to figure out what types of metals were best suited for a new device that would be under constant use in this environment. I was tasked with helping set up the three of the four testing stands, wiring and programming the temperature controllers, and running the actual testing. The four chambers needed to be run at the same time, so I was also tasked with determining how to set up the timer relay. The timer relay was crucial to the testing, as there was not enough voltage to power all heaters simultaneously. The relay's use involved switching between testing stands, supplying voltage to each, to keep all four at their desired temperatures. Another important aspect in the system's wiring was establishing alarm settings on additional temperature controllers to implore safety shutoffs in case enclosures reached temperatures that were dangerously high. As there were many aspects to the setup and wiring, I also created wiring diagrams, and piping & instrumentation diagrams for the flow processes.

After corrosion testing many types of metals, it was important to test how the corrosion affected each metal's physical properties such as yield stress and Young's Modulus. As I had previous experience with Instron testing machines, I volunteered to determine how to prepare and run tests on the new Testometric Tensile Tester. From the data collected, we could see how a corrosion tested metal's physical limits differed from an untested sample.

The many tests being run also required data analysis and parsing scripts to track certain values, as well as quickly graph data of updated data logs. For these types of tasks, I utilized both Python and MATLAB depending on the function of the script and which project it was for. The scripts included the following:

1) Python script for calculating the total amount of time corrosion testing data reached above a specified temperature.

2. Python script that parses through cyclic testing of fuel cell data to calculate the number of cycles run, graph power and temperature data, as well as record key statistical values in separate excel file. 3) MATLAB script to plot and save dozens of graphs of fuel cell testing variables like device temperatures, voltage, current and time, and calculate number of cycles and power data

In addition to the main tasks I was involved in, much of my work required documenting the tests I completed and writing comprehensive procedures for them to enable others to replicate my testing in the future.