WVU/Birmingham Research Abroad Program

Final Countdown...

2009-07-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

Well its my last night here in Birmingham. Its been a fun trip and I think I've gotten a lot of work done as well as getting a lot of learning done. I had some fun along the way too. I met a lot of people here through roommates, work, and friends and they will all be missed. I had a pretty fun night last night at my friend Diana's housewarming party with almost all of the people I have met while I was here. We just hung out and played music with the projector in her living room and splattered glowstick fluid all over her house haha.

As I get ready for my trip tomorrow I have been thinking about how much I have been traveling in the past year: Last summer I drove from Morgantown to Houston, TX with the microgravity team;

then I did an internship at NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Chincoteague,VA until mid-December;

Went to Salt Lake City with some friends and family until Christmas;

Went to Vermont with the snowboard club for a week in January;

Took my first trip to Colorado with the WVU Snowboard Team during the first week of March;

Came back to Colorado for another competition week with my family in April;

Went to Vegas for the International Wear of Materials Conference with some people from the lab;

Took a few day trip for the Autonomous Flight Safety System (AFSS) Project with S.P.A.C.E.;

Flew to Vegas with Nick and his family for a quick vacation;

Flew from Vegas to Salt Lake City to meet my friend Zach and drove from SLC back home to WV;

Left for the Outer Banks with some friends a few days later;

Came home for a week and came straight to Birmingham. Its been one heck of a year! So thanks to everyone who came on these journeys with me or enabled me to do so in any way, it really has been unforgettable.

See you in Morgantown...

Last day at work

2009-07-17T09:58:00.000-07:00

We had a quite long day today, but got all of our samples done and all of the data transferred onto my laptop. It was sad saying goodbye's in the lab, but I am still happy to be headed home.

I did see a nice Arctic white R8 on the way home though....

2 minutes till midnight...

2009-07-16T15:59:00.000-07:00

Well it is just before midnight, the night before my last day at work here in Brum. We got the rest of our readings done today on the rheometer using the "Dynamic Strain Sweep" mode, which is awesome considering I had my doubts about if we would be able to get any results or not. It turns out that the viscosity* readings of G' and G'' do show some noticeable differences in the 3330 and 3340 samples.

Matt, Nick, and I got some "jacket potatoes" (baked potatoes) for a snack before doing cleanup duty at the Materials Engineering graduation banquet. We saw Dr. Kukureka there, who had just returned from China. He came up to the lab and talked with us for a while about what we had been doing in the lab. We called it a day, and made plans for tomorrow: try a Dynamic Frequency Sweep profile and secure all the data from the past month and put it on my laptop.

I actually have begun to understand a good bit more about the Rheometer from just working with it for the past two days. I originally thought that the vast amount of variables was a little overwhelming, but I have narrowed it down to Frequency, Strain %, and Temperature as the primary variables of interest. The Dynamic Strain Sweep profile keeps a constant temperature and constant frequency while going through a range of Strain %.

Anyways, i'm going to bed on time for once this trip.

Wednesday

2009-07-15T10:54:00.000-07:00

I woke up a bit late, but made it to work for quite possibly the most productive day yet. Matt, Nick, and I were making so much headway with the viscosity measurements on the Primacor that we just skipped lunch. Frank and I worked out the logistics of setting up the test, which basically means eliminating the many variables. We picked a temperature based on our findings from the DSC, picked a strain, picked a method (Dynamic Strain Sweep), and set off to cutting out samples that would fit the parallel plate rheometer's geometry perfectly. We didn't have a punch, so we used Birmingham's new prototyping machine to cut them out. Matt and Nick are the only people at Brum to have used it thus far, so it was lucky that they were there to help. Once we got the samples we did a few trial runs on the Primacor 3340 and ended up getting some valid data. We finished another 10 or so runs for the 3340, cleaned up the adhesive mess we had made and figured out how to export the data from the hard drive and into Excel. We will finish up the 3330 tomorrow.

That said I headed into town to try to find some snowboard wax based on the listings I found on the internet. I ended up being 0 for 3 and called it a day and got some dinner.

Nice Little Tuesday

2009-07-14T15:50:00.000-07:00

I got to work with Matt and Nick today and after a few minor hang-ups with the availability of the Instron we got some time secured to finish the tensile tests on the grain directional specimens.

This is generally what it looks like:

Not too exciting but oh well.

More importantly for the day we secured some time on the extreme cooled DSC so that I can run some tests on snowboard wax, as well as made a plan for figuring out the viscosity measurements from the rheometer. frank said he was pretty busy, but I guess I demonstrated enough dedication to figuring it out that he took a minute to discuss the test with me.

After work I met my mate Rob Bentley and he drove us up to Tamworth Snowdome for some indoor shred fun. It was only 17 pounds for 2 hours, which included a rental.

It was supposed to be freestyle night but I didn't see much freestyle going on. It was tiring but still a lot of fun just messing around on the snow.

It has been a long while since I went snowboarding without any rails or jumps, but it felt good. It made me reminisce on the old days when the whole crew was still in town:

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=539677769519

Unfortunately the snowboard shop was closed today and therefore I couldn't get any waxes. So i'll have to ask around for a place in Birmingham that might sell some.

I was pretty wiped out but I went into town anyway and got something to eat at Nando's, watched Sacha Baron Cohen's "Bruno" (which is "uncomfortably hilarious") had a pint at the Bristol Pear on the way home and am going to sleep!

OXEGEN!!

2009-07-13T13:51:00.000-07:00

I made it back to the apartment all in one piece thankfully and took a much needed nap after being awake some 30 hours. So I’ll start at the beginning on Friday.

Friday:

I stayed up late talking to an old friend on Skype, when I had meant to go to bed early in preparation for my trip. I called a cab that picked me up outside my apartment at 5:15am, and I knew I had started the trip off right when the cab turned out to be an A4 1.9 TDI. I got to the airport and everything on time and settled down for a nice traditional English breakfast (Sausage, Bacon, Eggs, Mushrooms, Tomatoes, and baked beans). I got on the plane and set off for Dublin.

<---First view of Ireland

Dublin City Center--->

I arrived in Dublin at around 9am and had a few hours to kill before I could catch my bus to Punchestown Racetrack in a town called Naas (pronounced ‘nase’). I didn’t really want to take a bus tour so I just walked around a bit. I saw the famous Post Office in downtown Dublin where there are still bullet holes from the “uprising” many years ago.

I found my bus eventually to see a line 5 blocks long to get on the buses, but thankfully it went very fast. In fact, almost everything about OXEGEN was organized extremely well, from the bus system to recycling and food.
It was cloudy but dry when I arrived, having just my backpack full of essentials, so I went to pick up my tent that I ordered online from a place called Banana Joe’s that brings camping packs to big events such as OXEGEN.

I just picked a random place to pitch my tent and it just so happened to be near a group of guys from all over Ireland that were on the same Rugby team. They were so nice and helped me pitch my tent. I took a nap and then headed over to the concert with them.

At first I was pretty disappointed with the bands playing because I didn’t really know any of them. I ended up seeing Ladyhawk, Mogwai,2 Many Dj’s, Fun Lovin’ Criminals (who had an amazing guitarist), The Script, some of Lilly Allen, some of Pendulum, Snow Patrol, and Blur. Mogwai was a bit strange but, actually put on a really good show. At Snow Patrol (who was also really good) I met a couple new ‘mates’ and ended up hanging out with them for the rest of the night. We watched Blur (who was by far the best of the day) and then they brought me back to their campsite and introduced me to all of their friends and offered me food and such. I ended up sitting around their camp and talking with them about differences between America and Ireland till about 4am. It was really interesting to hear that all of them at one point or another say how lucky I was to live in America. They said that they would love to have the chance to live in America sometime. They said that America sounded somewhat scary though with all of those crazy Americans having guns.

I went back to my tent to get some sleep before the music started at around 2pm. I found that my canopy was missing from my tent so I had to use a poncho I found as a makeshift canopy to keep water out. I was tired, so it was really easy to sleep despite the pounding techno coming from the 4 carnival areas and headphone party just over the hill.

Saturday:

Saturday had the most bands that I was really excited to see so I got to the stages as soon as I woke up. Unfortunately it began to pour down rain and didn’t let up. The temperature was around 55-65 degrees throughout the weekend but the rain made it a bit chilly. I went to the Saw Doctors show first with my neighbors. They are more of a traditional Irish rock band, but they were decent. I then headed over to see The Game. The Game was a bit out of place at OXEGEN but nonetheless I was excited to see him. I found that one of my mates, Ross was actually obsessed with American rap and was much more excited than I about seeing Game.

We headed over early and squeezed our way to the front in the pouring rain. The crowd was actually unbelievable (They actually boo-ed the band before The Game and started chanting “GAME” and also for some reason ‘Whoop-there-it-is” by Tag-Team haha) Once the crowd was about to explode, they announced that Game would not be playing. The result was absolute mayhem, pushing, shoving, throwing bottles on stage, throwing mud. It was absolutely ridiculous. Soaked and tired, I then headed over to the new bands tent to see Passion Pit, Hockey, and Little Boots all in a row.

<---Hockey - Skeleton Boy

Hockey and Passion Pit collab--->

Passion Pit had me worried that their live show would be terrible and that I would be the only person in there, when in fact, they were incredible and the entire tent was packed. The entire crowd chanted every song and was pumped that they were there. Hockey came on next, whom I had only heard one song, but they were arguably better than Passion Pit, lead by an energetic front man who looks like AJ Lawson. During their last song, Passion Pit, who was watching from side-stage, ran in and joined in with the piano, guitar, and drums and the result was absolutely spectacular. Little Boots had a tough act to follow and didn’t quite make the cut, so I left to get something to eat after seeing her hit “Earthquake”.

I ran by the Red Bull tent and saw Crystal Castles who had the tent packed and dancing, and played several songs that I knew. I then headed over to see TV on the Radio, one of the bands I was most excited to see.

They started off a little slow, but they ended up doing an amazing job with “Wolf like me” and “Staring at the Sun”. I caught the ends of The Mars Volta and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and then headed over to see headliners Bloc Party and Kings of Leon.
Bloc Party was absolutely amazing, and they may very well be my favorite band right now. They played Flux, Banquet, Signs, Helicopter and a bunch of other hits. The lead singer has so much charisma that made it easy for him to win over the 80,000+ in attendance. In fact the totals for attendance and camping were more than 130,000 people! Kings of Leon were good as well, although not exactly my type of music, but the rest of Ireland absolutely LOVES them.

Sunday:

I woke up Sunday and finished the rest of my book "Taken" and then set out to hear some more music.

<---Ross somehow lost his 'trousers' and convinced these girls to give him theirs

My debit card somehow got shut off throughout the weekend, so I only had 5 Euros left to make it back to Dublin. I finished off the rest of my clementines and tea biscuits and headed to see Calvin Harris, who was just as good the second time around. Lady Gaga was next, and was amazingly horrible.

<---apparently Ross liked Lady Gaga though Haha

She played only 5 songs during her 45 minute set, and kept wandering off stage to change her dresses. I left a little into Paolo Nutini and went to see Friendly Fires, whom I didn’t know much about but was pleasantly surprised by their funky bass riffs fused with horns. I then saw a bit of Katy Perry and the Ting Tings and then went to the dance arena where MSTRKRFT was playing.

Entering the dance arena was like entering a crypt filled with undulating sweaty zombies with no shirts and incessantly spraying water into the air amidst wavering glowsticks. A dense cloud from the fog machines hung low over the crowd and an utterly spectacular laser show pulsed with the thundering bass. I arrived for the last few songs from Bloody Beetroots, who were very good. MSTRKRFT came on seamlessly during a collaboration with the ‘beetroots. MSTRKRFT played the hit “Easy Love” and got the crowd moving and then did my personal favorite, a remix of Justice – D.A.N.C.E.

I then headed out to pack my backpack back at the campsite. I met up with the Irish boys, whom I forgot to mention all loved the song "Country Roads" and would sing it whenever they saw me, and said my goodbyes. The previous night a strong wind had torn through the campsite and destroyed much of the surrounding area, leaving a wasteland of trash and broken tents, chairs, and food.

<---devastation after the wind and rain

My tent held up, with a good bit of water inside which I mopped up with my shirt, but the Irish boys tent was completely destroyed, so I left them my tent and sleeping bag which they were very grateful for. My hoody was completely soaked and I was still wearing my jeans and New Balance “trainers” that were completely covered in mud. So I went back to get warm and see a bit of Felix Da Housecat before the headliners came on. The Killers were on the main stage, while Jane’s Addiction and NIN were on the O2 stage. I watched a few songs of the Killers and then debated whether I should watch NIN or just catch the bus back to Dublin. Thankfully I stayed, because NIN, whom I had never paid any attention to were best described by the movie Almost Famous as “Incendiary” . Trent Reznor was absolutely stunning and completely won over the crowd and eventually began sucking the crowd from the Killers. Before his final song “Hurt” (recently covered by Johnny Cash) he announced that this would be one of NIN’s very last shows as they are moving on with their lives.
Thoroughly satisfied I trudged through the mud and got on the bus to Dublin. I met a nice group of people in the back of the bus who turned out to be Radio personalities in Dublin. We talked for a long time about what I was doing over in Dublin, how crazy I was to come to OXEGEN without any “mates”, the origin of my name, and many other things. When I got off the bus, they said that they would give me a quick tour of Dublin. So after midnight they took me around and told me as much Irish history as they could remember about the surrounding buildings and breweries and such. We went by the famous “porterhouse” pub but it was closed. They were extremely nice and gave me a water-bottle and payed for a bus-ride back to the airport for me since my bank card kept getting denied and I only had British Pounds and American Dollars. I gave them 20 pounds but they refused and sent me on my way with some candy bars. So many thanks to Owen, Nick, and Jenna!
I got to the airport with 1 Euro left and read all of my birthday wishes on a computer I found and then waited around until the gate opened for my plane.

All in all, it was an amazing weekend that I’ll never forget. Thanks to my parents for funding the Ireland trip, thanks to Ross, Justin, Chris and all the other Ireland boys for a fun birthday, thanks to Darran for giving me the opportunity to be over on this side of the world, and thanks to Owen, Nick, and Jenna for getting me to the airport!

Some interesting stuff about OXEGEN:
OXEGEN is 100% carbon Neutral, OXEGEN recycles all waste and sends any abandoned camping supplies to OXFAM in Africa. Wellies for Welfare offers a free exchange of any shoes you have for a free pair of wellies (High boots that are waterproof and worn by all of Ireland apparently) and donates the shoes to children in need.
You can also trade old shirts for new ones made entirely of recycled materials for free as well. You can return any beverage cups from the event for recycling and receive a 3 Euro refund.

Exhaustion

2009-07-12T18:23:00.000-07:00

Well I made it back to Dublin alive.....barely. My bank card got shut-off sometime on Friday, so I've been living on granola bars, clementines, and the cash I had. Nonetheless the concert was absolutely amazing, I saw a huge number of bands, made a bunch of new friends, and got thoroughly pummeled by the nice Irish weather. I'll give a lot more detail about the concert and whatnot when I get home. I am currently typing this in the Dublin airport for the nice price of 6.90 Euros/hr but only have 1 Euro haha. I am completely wet, covered in mud, and haven't slept in more than a day, but thanks so much for the birthday wishes and I'll be in touch soon!

Thursday

2009-07-09T15:03:00.000-07:00

We couldn't finish the tensile tests today like I had hoped because the Instron machine was booked. We tried to run some of the snowboard samples on the Nano-indenter but had some technical difficulties with the equipment, which Frank jokingly attributed to my "American-ness". In reality, the machine just needs some maintenance because it has been running poorly for a few weeks now. I took some time to read excerpts from a textbook today on Rheology and Viscometers in hopes of gaining some insight on how to set up an experiment on the machine in the lab for the Primacor adhesive samples. After reviewing the lab manual and talking with Frank we plan to get a test going early next week.

I met with some of the technicians (Frank, Andy, Jeff, and Paul) at the Staff House after work and tried to learn the finer points of cricket. Cricket is extremely strange: The game lasts for 5 days (and can still result in a draw), they take breaks for lunch, afternoon lunch, and afternoon tea haha, and the score can easily run up into 600 or so runs per game. Not quite baseball but still has some similarities.

I went into town to pick up some supplies for tomorrow, i.e. enough food to live. I'm getting up at 5am to head to the airport and catch a flight to Dublin, Ireland at 7:55. I am then going to hopefully make friends and get a ride to Punchestown, Republic of Ireland....or more likely just take a bus. I have a tent and sleeping bag waiting there for me at the 2009 OXEGEN Festival. There are so many bands that I really want to see, so I am pretty pumped to go. But I should be getting to bed since I have to get up in 6 hours....and more importantly I just downloaded S. Darko and Pulp Fiction to watch so I better get to it.

I most likely won't have Internet for the weekend, because I am packing as light as possible: backpack, book, ipod, clementines, "tea biscuits", granola bars, and clothes. So wish me luck and I'll update as soon as I'm back.

Frank showed me this video today: check it out

Monday-Wed.

2009-07-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

After the concerts we needed to get back to work and get organized due to the fact that Nick would be leaving wednesday. We met up with Nick and Matt (the English students that are working with us) and got to work cutting the rest of the tensile strength test specimens out of the snowboard base material. I was worried that I wouldn't have enough to cut out samples with the grain aligned in 3 different directions, but it worked out in the end.

We went out with some friends on Tuesday night to a bowling alley a few blocks from our apartment (they call it a flat in the UK). The bowling alley was expensive, like everything, but once you sit down at your lane, it is full service with waiters and waitresses in suits, which is pretty funny. Afterwards we headed over to a local pub called the Pear to meet some friends from work. The Pear was probably the best place we've been so far, it has a much more laid back atmosphere and a much younger crowd than other places in the area.

Nick left early in the morning on wednesday to catch his 8:45am flight from Birmingham International. Frank was sad to see him go and it will definitely be a little different around work now that I am flying solo. Nick and Matt are there so its still a lot of fun and a really good learning experience. Being a Mechanical and Aerospace student at home, I am definitely a bit out of my element working in the Materials Engineering dept. but it makes it that much easier to learn. I still know very little about polymers or even materials in general, but compared to what I knew before I came I'm doing well.

I had originally planned on making it an early night, but went over to hang out with Rob, Diana, and some other dude I didn't know at their new apartment down the street.

Wireless festival 2009

2009-07-06T11:53:00.000-07:00

Nick and I took it easy on Saturday after having some people over on Friday and staying up to watch the sun rise for the third time of the trip. Back at home, watching the sun rise means that you are awake at about 6:30am....whereas because of England's northerly location, the sun sets at about 10:30pm and rises around 4:20am.

<---Sunrise at 4:15am

Not even sure what we were doing at 4:30am--->

Sunday we got up somewhat early and found a cheap train to London for the 2009 Wireless Festival in Hyde Park. We went to find our ultra cheap Hostel that Nick booked online and it turned out about how you would expect. Sufficient but uncomfortable; 6 beds in a room the size of my bedroom, sized for dwarfs, and slightly funky smelling.

<---Hostel, a lot like the movie

We got to the festival a little late after wandering through the wilderness of Hyde Park (which is right in the middle of London mind you!) and ended up missing Young Jeezy.

<---a pond in Hyde Park

This is in the middle of London--->

We got to see Ratatat first, which was strange but a pretty good show, and all the hits were played including my infamous ring tone :

Next we saw Calvin Harris, whom I just learned about while here in the UK. He plays poppy/techno beats but puts on a really awesome show:

We then went to see Kid Cudi, Tinchy Stryder, and Flo Ryda, who were all playing in another tent. We ended up missing Kid Cudi, saw a few songs of Tinchy Stryder that were pretty good (mainly a remix of Block Rockin' Beats by the Chemical Brothers), and then took a quick trip with some new friends to the Gaymer's cider Garden tent. We weren't expecting much, but our two canadian friends (who loved to break into singing Country Roads or Right Round) insisted that the tent was cool. It was actually a lot of fun, two 50+ year old women were DJing actual vinyl (You could actually pick a record out and bring it to the DJ to request a song) and playing all 80's and 90's dance hits. We went back for 2 or 3 songs of Flo Ryda and had enough.

<---Tinchy Stryder

We stopped over to see Q-Tip for a while, who was surprisingly awesome. We also saw Lady Sovereign, who was absolutely horrendous. We then finished up with Kanye. I hadn't seen Kanye West since he came to fall fest 5 or-so years ago, and to tell the truth I am not even a big Kanye fan. Nonetheless he proved himself a cut above the rest and put on one hell of a show:

<---Kanye

Another picture of Kanye--->

We walked home through London at around midnight and got back to our hostel to find that my bed squeaked every time I moved and that there was also another person sleeping in our room...creepy.

<----London at 10:30pm

Movies and such

2009-07-06T10:20:00.000-07:00

After our traveling all over England, Nick and I finished up the work week strongly and got finished cutting all of our samples and running them through the DSC and all of the Primacor through then Instron....not bad.

We have been mostly just hanging out: I finished "Angels and Demon's" which was an awesome book, not as good as Ender's Game though. We've seen 3 movies since we have been here, because that is about the cheapest thing you can do at 3.5 pounds, except for the bathroom which costs 0.30p to use!!!!!!!!!! We saw "The Hangover", "Public Enemies", and "Transformers 2". The Hangover was hilarious and definitely worth seeing, Public Enemies was O.K. but nothing special, and Transformers had tons of explosions and Camaros.

We found the Birmingham New Era flagship store like I said in another post I believe. I purchased a new hat for the quiver.....BUT, I went with the Pirates this time instead of the Yankees based solely on the fact that I have enough Yankee's hats and I might as well support the home team since I don't watch baseball.

Views of the UK in a nutshell

2009-07-02T07:14:00.000-07:00

We woke up wednesday at 8 so that Darran could bring us to London Heathrow Airport with him, where we could catch a train. We decided to take a little tour of London.

We got to Victoria Station in London to find a hot and sunny day. Nick had told me to make sure to bring a sweatshirt with me to England because it was fairly chilly and rainy while he was here last summer. On the contrary, we have had nice sunny and very hot days the whole time I have been here, and wednesday was probably the hottest.

Anyways we called our roommate Laura and she said that she and Tom, whom used to live up the street, were driving in Tom's car to Salisbury.

<-----Laura with her Chapel in Bath

<---Tom

We then scrapped the work day and ordered a train ticket from London to Salisbury. While waiting for the train we took a little walking tour of London and saw parliament, the London Bridge, the Eye of London, Picadilly Circus, and Big Ben. We also got yelled at for trying to take a picture of a fountain in a mall because it was private property.

We had a couple issues but eventually got to the right station and got on our train to Salisbury. The train ride was pretty sweet, through London and then into the western part of England, which is mostly fields and farms.

When we arrived in Salisbury, it was the middle of the day and sweltering. We found Laura and Tom and then went to the Salisbury Cathedral.

The cathedral is the highest cathedral spire in England as well as the home of the world's oldest working clock from 1386 AD.

After the cathedral we had a drink at a nice little expensive pub and then grabbed lunch to go. Tom then drove us to nearby Stonehenge. Getting there wasn't as easy as you would think, it being only 10 miles away. For some reason GPS's in the UK don't work as well as in the states (Tom's NAVMAN had already taken them 80 miles out of the way en route to Salisbury). I had to woo some English people with my best American tourist accent and ask for directions. On the way, we found some castle remains and walked right in to take some pictures, but then got yelled at again because as I've said, nothing is free in England haha.

<---the moat at the castle

We just decided to leave and get going to Stonehenge...

Stonehenge was extremely hot, but still pretty awesome to see. With your 6 pound admission, comes a little cellphone thing that gives information about Stonehenge.

<----Nick listening to the stupid phone thing

I started listening while taking a rest in the grass nearby and ended up falling asleep for a while. We walked around a bit more, ate our lunch, and then got back on the road.

It turned out that Laura's cousin lived in Bath, which is an older city and a really neat little town. We took a little detour through some awesome driving roads (I wish I had my car...) and arrived in Bath. We walked around bath for a while and then set off for home in Birmingham.

The drive back was really nice, getting to see lots of the English countryside. We got home around 10, exhausted. I ate my leftovers from that awesome Indian restaurant and got too blogging haha.

Mini Tour of Uni and Beyond

2009-07-01T15:17:00.000-07:00

We started off Tuesday by meeting Darran, Ever, and Stephen in the lab to discuss a plan for the work we will be doing. Two English students who are studying sports engineering will be working with us on our two projects: The adhesives and the tribology and characterization of Ultra-High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE) aka snowboard base material.

<---Clock tower at Uni. Perigrine Falcons live in the top and patrol the skies for pigeons.

Seal of the University of Birmingham--->

We then walked through campus and went to take a ride on the University of Birmingham's Hydrogen-Powered Canal Boat.

It is the first hydrogen powered canal boat ("Narrow Boat" in the UK). It uses a small electric engine as well so I guess technically speaking it would be hybrid of sorts. One of the main drawbacks of hydrogen is its safe storage...i.e. keeping high pressure vessels filled with pure hydrogen in a moving vehicle might cause some complaint from transportation authorities. The way this canal boat gets around this issue is to store the hydrogen in a metallic compound which is placed inside the individual hydrogen fuel cells.

<---Our tour guide holding an internal cell of a larger fuel cell

Metallic Compound for Hydrogen storage--->

This boat uses two fuel cells a 1kW and a 5kW, which are air-cooled and water-cooled respectively. The two cells work in tandem; the 1kW cell is endothermic and the 5kW cell is exothermic. Thus the heat produced by the larger cell can then be exchanged to the smaller and the excess to the water in the canal.

Some grafitti on the canal--->

We then set off in Darran's rental car (oddly enough a chevy made in korea) to Stratford-on-Avon.

<---Korean-made miniature Chevy Aveo

In case you were wondering, I was, the gears and pedals are all in the same orientation.

Stratford is a older town, fairly small, and happens to be the home of Billy Shakespeare. It was a pretty laid back town with many waterways and cafes. I tasted Dr. Barbero's Cornish Creme Tea which is apparently a cup of tea with two scones and some cornish creme. A scone in the UK is pronounce "scahn" and is way better than any scahn from Panera.

<---Bridge over Avon river

<---A cathedral in Stratford

We saw Shakespeare's "A Winter's Tale", which was a bit long (over 3 hours) and was very hard to understand at first, but your mind gets accustomed to the language quite quickly.

Covert ops inside the Shakespeare Theatre --->

We kept on driving to London Heathrow to stay in a hotel for the night, as Darran and Ever were both leaving for the states this morning. Our GPS wasn't working great and it took us a while but we made it.

I don't know if i've talked about this yet but EVERYTHING is more expensive here and hotels included. The hotel room had a queen bed and a single bed and was of similar quality to a Super 8 in the states, yet it cost 80 pounds per night which is roughly $150. Ouch. It had Wifi for the cheap price of 12 pounds and breakfast for 8. Went to sleep around 1:30am....with a big day ahead.

Work

2009-06-29T17:40:00.000-07:00

We got to work today and really got going on our project. Basically our purpose here is to learn and practice as much as we can about a few types of materials analysis, get some work done for the lab at home by processing some samples, and most importantly to make firmer contacts with the students and faculty here at Birmingham.

The samples we have with us are called Primacor (shown above), which is an adhesive based polymer in pellet form, and a sample of snowboard base material for my senior honors thesis. The snowboard base material is a Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene base which has been sintered and infused with trace amounts of Gallium.

Frank Biddlestone is a lab technician here at Birmingham and our day to day supervisor along with Dr. Stephen Kukureka. Frank is extremely knowledgable about every machine in the lab in both a mechanical sense as well as a theoretical sense, which is fairly uncommon these days. Frank helped us use a thermo-press to mold the Primacor pellets into 2mm thick sheets which will be much more useful for the rest of our testing.

With these sheets we can use various punches to make appropriate sized samples for better material characterization.

<---The punch used is the one shaped like a dumbell

Waiting for the press to cool-------->

The properties we are interested in and hope to characterize while here are tensile strength, thermomechanical properties, possibly some fatigue, and some basic understanding of structure. The first machine we used is called a DSC (Differential Scanning Calorimeter)

We were very productive, even though we took a long lunch break with Dr. Cairns (research advisor at WVU) and his daughter, Dr. Barbero (Chair of MAE at WVU), and Dr. Kukureka. Dr. Barbero treated us (Thanks again!) to an amazing dinner at Barajee, an Indian Restaurant near Birmingham City Center.

I have eaten a lot of Indian food, but this was by far the best I have ever had, and definitely the fanciest, papadam, chicken tikka, lamb tikka, shish kebab, chicken tikka biryani (my new favorite), nan, and "still" or sparkling imported water.

2009-06-29T16:03:00.000-07:00

This weekend Nick and I went to a local pub with our roommate and met some of her friends there. Most of them are in graduate school nearby and were all pretty fun people. We took it easy saturday and went into Birmingham City Center to look around and get some food. We ate at a place called Nando's, which can best be described as a South African Portuguese Chicken Restaurant specializing in Mozambican spices. It was pretty awesome and apparently there is now one in DC.

Some Chicken Tikka at a street stand=Delicious

Always wanted to see one of these

On Sunday we had originally planned on going to see Stonehenge but instead decided to plan that trip a little better and go back in Birmingham to explore around a little more. The international food festival going on was a pretty big deciding factor. We found a New Era flagship store in Birmingham (supposedly the largest in the world....but I disagree) which had some really sweet hats, but they definitely did NOT have my felt/neon green yankees hat, so I win.

Birmingham has some really awesome older architecture, most of which is juxtaposed with new modern buildings in the area.

The food here is amazing, there's Indian food everywhere and curry is officially the most popular dish in the country. I also got some awesome pesto cheese from the food market in town, it looks kinda sketchy but oh well.

Our Apartment

2009-06-28T10:14:00.000-07:00

Well we have a third roommate that lives with us. Her name is Laura and she has been living here since October. She is from Boulder, Colorado and is doing a Masters in Egyptology here at the University of Birmingham. I took some pictures of the inside of our house for you to see. Its actually decent sized with four bedrooms, a kitchen, 1 bathroom, internet, cable, and playstation.

Some of our surroundings

2009-06-26T10:47:00.000-07:00

Well, this is our humble abode on Tiverton road...it is actually pretty nice, with all the necessary amenities (PS2 and internet) and a location about 10 min. walk from the University.

This park is a few blocks from our house also, with a couple tennis courts, a "football pitch", and some basketball courts. The grafitti here is pretty spectacular as well.

<---This is the inside of the Goose at the O.V.T., which is at the end of our st.

This is the outside---->

Something that is pretty cool about the UK is that there is no smoking inside, which makes pubs much more pleasant than one would expect. In fact all packs of cigarettes ("fags" in the UK) have a giant warning that says either "SMOKING KILLS" or "SMOKING CAN BE VERY HARMFUL TO YOU AND THOSE AROUND YOU".

Anywho, I have some documents to read and a test to take for my summer class. I'll post some pictures and a little bit about what we're working on in the lab on Monday if possible.

What we've been doing for the past few days...

2009-06-26T10:11:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Birmingham after a long flight from Philly, didn't get much sleep on the plane and it was the beginning of our first day of work....

So we took the train to the University of Birmingham and set out to find Frank or Stephen in the Metallurgy and Materials Dept. After a while of searching we contacted Simon, our landlord and met him just outside campus. He gave us a quick tour of Selly Oak, the area of Birmingham in which we are living. Driving on the left side of the road is pretty terrifying to say the least.

Once we got to our house on Tiverton rd. we took a nap for a few hours and went to find some dinner. We chose a pub at the end of the street, which was named the "Goose at the O.V.T." Nearly every combination of meal that you can get comes with a pint of either cider or lager. Some interesting things to note:

baked potatoes are called jackets,

fries are called chips,

chips are called crisps.

Baked beans and coleslaw are served with almost everything.

Subway serves bowls of meatballs and they have a Chicken Tikka Masala Sub.

Every restaurant has several curries, including my favorite food of all time, Chicken Tikka.

2009-06-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

So, Nick and I are waiting in the Pittsburgh airport for our 3:20pm flight. We will fly to Philadelphia and then on to Birmingham. We will arrive around 6:30 in the morning on Wednesday, due to the 5 hour time difference. I have a feeling that we will be exhausted for our first day, but who knows. On top of that, we are still in a bit of limbo about whether or not we have a place to stay once we arrive....but I guess that is all part of the adventure.

I have been doing a lot of traveling lately as well as taking a ton of pictures (see left, its a picture from my apartment complex a couple days ago) and will hopefully be able to keep it up while I'm abroad.