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Saturday 6 April 2013

The Last Day of Class


Hey guys,
                Currently, I am the musolla, waiting for the Asr and after this we gonna have the MSA event. Today is the final day of the class before the final exam. After the Juma'ah prayer, Gindo and I met Nasir Zulkaply, the fellow mechanical graduate who is currently working as the mechanical engineer around this Vancouver area. After that, I rushed to the UBC and we were having the meeting wuth our TA, Jing Qi and he explained to us a little bit about the final report. Yeah, I needed to complete my part on the shape factor and the hybrid calculation. After having the meeting, I rushed to the Kaiser building to complete my heat transfer assignment which is due today. I managed to complete those assignments right before 4pm just before the office was closed.



                     This semester is quite different from the last semester as the last semester just focused more on the theory part where I needed to master the foundation on the material science, thermodynamics and solid mechanics. However, this semester is a semester where I need to apply those theory in the practical mode where I need to apply those solid mechanics theory in the design project, the thermodynamics concept in the pyrometallurgy labs and calculus calculation in the statistic class. When we talk about the design project, I needed to play my key role towards the shape factor calculation where I needed to find the optimum shape factor that could fit our design criteria.

                 I also needed to research on the composite materials which were the best among all where they satisfied both constraints in our material charts. I got the good news where Daniel teammate had managed to get the progress report 4 which achievement of A- and that has astounded me. Therefore, I needed to quickly complete my parts in the final reports,  maybe tonight while I still have the free time as next week I have to final exams to go through. I have exams on the statistics and materials design next week and yeah I need to perform the best for both papers.

                     This semester was more tedious than before, where I had the design project, 3 labs every week and those assignments that kept me busy throughout semester. Regarding the labs, we had conducted two metallurgy labs where we solidified the iron, steel and copper through aluminothermic reduction process and those labs took about 3 hours to complete everything and yeah Estelle was my teammate. The labs seem interesting where we lighted up the iron mixture and the solidification occured within a few seconds. Yeah, currently I know on how to make up the fireworks by just using the KCl and Aluminum. While every two weeks I had the testing labs where we conducted a test on metals, polymers, composite, ceramics and others.
                     I still remembered on how we conducted the Charpy's test and using the short gun to distinguish between  the brittle fracture and ductile fracture. Some materials exhibited both properties like the polymer where they undergo the ductile-brittle transition phenomena in which each property depends on the surrounding temperature. Tensile testing? It was the best testing I ever had as I needed to set up the materials on the tension mode of failure. Then we collected the data from the computer and analysed its tensile strength, yield strength, failure strength and calculate the Young modulus. A little bit interesting over this stuff. I still remembered when the TA conducted the hot-cold working process where they softened and hardened both samples to obtain its final properties and textures.



                      Lets talk about the pyrometallurgy. The goal of learning this course was iron-making, steel-making and the copper-making. I needed to go through the material balance, heat balance, metallurgical reactions like reduction, roasting, oxidation,oxygen dissolution, decarburization, smelting, refining and the Boundouard reaction. While, we need to get familiar with the roaster, iron blast furnace, basic oxygen furnace, laddle metallurgical furnace, sand casting and even the electroplate platform. While the heat transfer was my favorite subject as I had the awesome TA, Faisal who is from Jordan, a clique who is doing Phd in materials engineering.

That's my second semester of the second year UBC