Wednesday, December 05, 2007

no title


Hi everybody!




17 comments:

JonF said...

Hello, Doctor Nick! Congraduations.

Cabeza said...

Hi Doctor Nick!

John: Minus one.

morgan said...

Congratulations!

Good job on the dissertation defense. And also good job handling those jerk professors in the crowd.

jenn w said...

Yeah Nick!
Mom told me you're all done. Congratulations!

Nick said...

Yeah, they were getting pretty uppity. For those that couldn't make it due to inclement weather interfering with your scheduled flights, there were about 4 professors that showed up (besides the 5 on my committee), who started to heckle me. Not really, they were just interupting the talk when the polite thing to do is to save the questions for the end. One in particular wasn't really satisfied with the answers I was giving and kept hounding me. These 4 professors are also having a little hissy fit with my professor over some other issues, so I think they just thought they could show up to one of his student's defense's and make him look bad by asking lots of questions and tripping him (in this case, me) up.

So in the only other dissertation defense I saw in our department a few months ago- no other professors showed up, there were no questions, and during the private session where your committee grills you, he only spent about 10-15 minutes. My private grilling was 45 minutes. Ugh.

Warren said...

Good work. Hopefully one day soon in a year or two I will join you.

Jared, minus one for Jo"h"n.

The Shark said...

Warren, minus one for not knowing the topic of your dissertation yet.

Nick, way to go!!!

Cabeza said...

Aw, shoot. I can't believe I inserted an "h" in "Jon." I'll give myself an additional minus-two because I really ought to know better.

Dang--and I thought I'd come out ahead on this one.

Oh, and just so you know, Nick, I'm planning on plagiarizing your dissertation when I do my own for my American studies Ph.D.

Cabeza said...

Oh, by the way--can you write up a little blog post describing what your dissertation is about? Written for us laypeople, of course.

Warren said...

I hope you passed this part of the questioning

Julie C said...

WAHOO! WAY TO GO! At least it's all over before your vacation, right? And now you can, well, what do you do next anyways?

Nick said...

Heres the abstract:

Acoustic heat engines show much promise for converting waste heat to electricity. Since most applications require high power levels, high frequency thermoacoustic engines can reach such performance by operating with a pressurized working gas. Results on a 3 kHz prime mover, consisting of a quarter-wave resonator and a random stack material between two heat exchangers, show that the sound intensity from such a device is raised substantially as the working gas is pressurized. At pressures up to approximately ten atmospheres, the increase in sound intensity is approximately linear to the increase in pressure, and thus is an effective way to increase the power output of thermoacoustic engines. Since the heat input was not changed during the experiments, the increases in acoustic power translate directly to increases in engine efficiency which is calculated as the output acoustic power divided by the input heat power. In most experiments run in this study, the engine efficiency increased by a factor of at least 4 as the pressure was increased from 2 atmospheres up to about 8 atmospheres. Further increases in pressure lead to sound intensity saturation and eventual attenuation of sound intensity. This is most likely due to a combination of several factors including the shrinking thermal penetration depth, and the fact that the losses increase faster with pressure in a random stack material than in traditional parallel plates. Pressurization also leads to a lower ΔT for onset of oscillations in the range of 10 atmospheres of mean pressure, potentially opening up even more heat sources that can power a thermoacoustic engine and greatly increase the number of applications of acoustic engines to a variety of real world settings, providing a key source of renewable energy for the future.

Anonymous said...

Congratulations, Dr. Nick!

Am I in the lead?

apyknowzitall said...

Awww.... I love your vent and massive congrats!!!!

Muriel said...

So does this mean I can call you Dr. Nick, Nick, Nick-at-Nite?

Congratulations! It's good to have a doctor in the family.

jenn w said...

Dr. Nick,Nick,Nick-at-Nite! yes!Good call Muriel.

apyknowzitall said...

Jen you stole my chicken!!!!