Crazy week

Oh boy. Oh boy, oh boy. It's going to be a crazy week. Somehow they all are, aren't they?

Seriously, though, there are a lot of things coming up. This Friday is one of the major training days for ROTC and that means I go into overtime as S4, the supply officer. All of our 80+ freshmen and sophomore cadets need full equipment (kevlar helmet, ruck sack, load carrying vest, mock weapon, etc) and all of the evaluators need special equipment (mock AT-4s, mock claymore mines, radios, etc). But first I have to return the equipment we were using a week or so ago. Plus one of the officers has requested that I issue to all of the juniors all of the equipment that they'll need for the ROTC assessment camp (called LDAC) this summer which includes cold weather gear, wet weather gear, protective knee and elbow pads, protective eyewear, notepads, pens and pencils, and a few other things I can't remember right now. It's not going to be an easy feat and it's not going to be quick. I'll probably be down there in the ROTC office quite a bit this week.

And then on top of that we have a MAJOR clinic deadline for Monday morning in exactly one week. We are finally organizing a formal design review of two of our device's critical components (an air inlet and an analyzer) one of which I am heavily involved with and that means that a whole lot of work needs to get done from now until then.

The analyzer, you see, is an interesting piece of work. The basic idea (as I may have said before) is to shine a light on a filter and see how much light gets through. The less light that gets through, the more black carbon there is on the filter. Simple idea, right? Unfortunately, like most things, its simple to conceive and pretty difficult to actually complete.

You see, there are a couple of main concerns with the analyzer that could adversely affect its performance. The first is electronic noise and stability. Detecting the low concentrations of black carbon that we'd like to involves regulating an LED to +/- 2 nA!! Not to mention that our detector has to be low-noise enough to see these small signals. The second is in making sure the actual optics are doing what we'd like. We just found out that there is a difference in measurement technique if the incident light source is collimated or if it is diffuse; they will get you two different measurements for how much light is attenuated. The third is random artifacts that have to do with particle collection on a filter. Turns out you get all kinds of multiple scattering and things like humidity or particle morphology can affect your measurements. There are a lot of things to work out and its pretty important that we hit a home run at our design review in a week or so.

But like Raffi says, this is the interesting part; this is the actual engineering. Here's hoping we all can pull it through.