My 9-5

I am doing my internship here at the Clausthal University of Technology, founded in 1781 as a miner's training school in this little mining town up in the mountains.  Today it is one of the more prestigious technical universities in the country, with departments such as Mechanical Engineering, Chemical Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Metalworking, and the institute that I work at, Polymers and Plastics Engineering.  Like a true German university, it does not have a "campus" in the American sense, but the university's lecture halls and laboratories are instead intermingled with the town (which in itself is not all that large, so it's never far to get to classes).  Fortunately, PuK (which stands for Polymerwerkstoffe und Kunststofftechnik, the German name of the institute where I work) is about a three-minute walk down a path from my dorm.  One side of the building houses the offices of the grad students, faculty, and supervising professor (in Germany Professor is a very high title, even more so than Doctor), while the other side is the laboratory/workshop, or Technikum.  There are easily a full score of grad students in the institute, several faculty, and a few technicians also, who work more in the Technikum and maintain the machines there.  It also seems that every grad student and faculty member has at least two interns - there have to be twenty of us at the institute, at least.  It makes coordination occasionally very interesting, as there are only a limited number of machines for compiling and testing samples, and everyone's projects progress at different rates.

The first day of my internship, Leif (my supervisor; I was supposed to have a grad-student advisor, but he finished his thesis and left the institute in mid-July, so I just report directly to Leif) took me around and introduced me to everyone, so I can recognize the people who work in the institute, but I am still only sure of a few names, and always afraid that I'm going to mix people up.  For the most part, the grad students and faculty speak fluent English, but since they found out that I had been studying German and can sometimes carry on a reasonably intelligent conversation, some of them prefer to speak with me in German.  At the very first, I preferred Leif to speak with me in German many times, too, because I wanted to practice, but now six weeks in I'm beginning to get tired of this foreign language thing and usually choose to speak English regardless.  The coworkers are ALWAYS helpful and very nice, though, and if I need help with something like learning how to work a machine, or fix it when it's not working correctly, or have a problem with my computer or anything, they're always more than happy to help.

I usually go in to the institute around 8:15, because that's about the time Leif gets there and I often like to check in with him before starting anything for the day.  However, if I've been given a specific task on my project to do and I know exactly what I need to do, I often like to come in earlier, even as early as 7:00, because I've more or less maintained this ridiculously early schedule (most days I get up at 5:00, or occasionally allow myself to sleep until 6:30) so it's not a stretch at all for me to come in so early.  This has led to the problem of me working ahead of schedule, which I think occasionally frustrates Leif because he expects me to spend several days working on something, but I come back only a couple of days later looking for something else to do.  Since I come in early I often leave early, as well, sometimes as early as 3:30 (although I'm technically supposed to stay until 5).  But if my work for the day is done, I'd much rather get back to my room where I can do as I please, or even take a bike ride if the weather is nice (which isn't often) than hang around the institute doing nothing productive.  I'm also given a one-hour lunch break, and most of the interns eat at the Mensa (dining hall), but I've never gone - since this fiasco with the money, I just can't justify going to a cafeteria and buying overpriced mystery meat when I can just make a sandwich or warm up some leftover pasta - which is what I normally do.  On the days when I bring a sandwich and an apple to work, I don't even go back to my room for lunch - just sit outside and eat my simple fare, which takes about twenty minutes, and then get back to work.

My project itself is titled "Investigating Ideal Maleic Anhydride-grafted Polypropylene (MAPP) - Natural Fiber Ratios in Various Polymer Systems."  It's a little bit of Mechanical Engineering, a lot of Materials Science, and a little bit of Chemistry (which I avoid like the plague, since I haven't taken chemistry since my junior year of high school :P).  Reinforcing plastics (polymers) with fibers isn't exactly a new technology, but there's still a lot of research in the area.  Polymers by themselves are rather soft and pliable, so adding fibers helps strengthen the material and make it more resistant to things like heat deformation or fatigue, as long as the bonds between the fibers and polymer are good.  Carbon fibers generally work the best, but they're awfully expensive.  Glass fibers are a good, cheaper alternative, but they're WAY heavier than carbon fibers - and in the applications where FRC (fiber-reinforced compounds) are used, like the automotive industry, more weight is generally a bad thing.  Natural fibers, such as flax, cotton, hemp, and jute, are a very attractive option because they're lighter than glass, cheaper than carbon, and (because they're natural) both abundant and recyclable.  But the particular problem with natural fibers is that they don't bond with the polymer very well, since the fibers are organic and very hydrophilic or polar (after all, the job of these molecules in nature is often to transport water) while the polymers are hydrophobic or nonpolar.  And that's the extent of my chemistry, but suffice it to say that by themselves, natural fibers and polymers don't like to mix. So if you make natural-fiber reinforced polymers and then put any sort of force on them, the fibers actually weaken the material because they get in the way of the polymer bonding to itself and just slip out of the surrounding polymer without putting up any resistance.  So the only option is to modify the fibers somehow, either physically or chemically.  That's where this other class of molecules comes in called compatibilizers.  The particular one that I am investigating is maleic anhydride-grafted polypropylene, or MAPP.  It basically is an acid connected to a polymer.  The acid bonds well with the fiber and wraps around it, and the polymer on the other side is much more agreeable to bonding with other polymers than the polar fibers.  However, MAPP is polypropylene, a very specific polymer.  And, surprisingly enough, most polymers don't mix very well with each other.  So while we know that putting fibers, MAPP, and polypropylene together works very well, we're less sure how well this would work if we used any other polymer.  So that's what I'm testing - whether MAPP improves bonding with these other polymers (specifically, polystyrene, polybutylene terephthalate, and polyamide 6.10, if you care) as well as it does with polypropylene.

Since I'm working so fast on my project, however, sometimes I find myself with nothing to do.  After begging Leif for some sort of useful work, and getting fed up with him dumping me off on other coworkers to "see how things worked" that were never going to be helpful to me, I thought of a plan.  Still mindful of my woefully reduced stipend, I asked Leif whether there was any work I could do for the institute, such as secretarial duties, which I could potentially be paid for.  He thought for a bit, then had an epiphany - since I am familiar with German (and more importantly, know how to properly use a dictionary), he suggested that I could help by translating some lectures that the professor at the institute had given from German into English.  Now, I envisioned receiving a transcript of a lecture, or perhaps a well-organized and detailed outline to transcribe.  What I received instead were several enormous Powerpoint presentations - three 70 slides long, and one whopping 230 slides in length.  This wasn't at all what I had expected, and while one might think that it would be easier to translate a Powerpoint than an essay, it requires a MUCH greater range of vocabulary.  Most of the key terms used in the presentations, though engineering concepts, were words that I would never run across in normal conversation, so of course I didn't recognize the German words.  However, armed with a physical copy of a Plastics Engineering German-English dictionary, and a couple reliable web dictionaries, I plunged into the work.  I soon found, however, that this task was going to be much more tedious than I first thought.  Changing bullet points and text boxes was easy enough, but since these were engineering lectures and not English presentations, they naturally included many graphs, diagrams and tables to illustrate the concepts.  Precious few of these graphics were created in Powerpoint with easy-to-edit text boxes; instead they were .jpg files of scanned textbooks and internet images.  Therefore all captions, labels, and other information, which was all in German, had to be painstakingly translated word by word through the use of individual text boxes which had to be created then formatted to fit within the image by size, font, color, and a white background to obscure the underlying German text.  And of course, my OCD would not let me simply keep these translated pieces at one font, but I wanted to try and make them fit with the rest of the image (particularly when there were other words in the image which were similar enough to English, lacking perhaps one silent 'e' or something, that I didn't bother to translate them).  Since I brought a part of this meticulousness on myself, perhaps I cannot complain, but it was powerfully tedious work.  However, I am now much more familiar with German engineering terms and understand natural fibers and polymers better now (which will help me with my understanding of my project), so it was far from a waste.  Not to mention I will be getting paid something above 7 Euros/hour for my labors, of which I have already logged 25 hours, so I really cannot complain - the sum will certainly help me buy groceries in my last couple of weeks here, and perhaps even an extra souvenir or two!

After I finish all of these subject-specific mini-posts about aspects of my life here in Clausthal, I'll go back to weekly summaries (which will be much shorter than they have been, as I've already explained to you broadly everything that I'm doing).  I'll tell you specifics about what work I've been doing on my project then - hopefully before I'm done with it!  Until then, keep smiling!