Kathleen O’Neil, 2014, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Kathleen O’Neil ’14

The overall goal of my internship was to make progress on a project that was already underway. The project focused on a wind turbine which can be easily deployed from a standard shipping container. While a lot of the designs and plans had already been made, the focus of my summer internship was to create a prototype, which required choosing a different model for the turbine, for the tower system, and designing a box to act as the shipping container. One of the main things I worked on was a model and structural analysis of a telescoping tower we are considering using in a prototype. I felt like I was lacking a lot of background knowledge during my internship, so I learned a lot about structural analysis, wind turbines, and more specifically a program called SAP, which will be relevant to my MAE major. I also was able to get a good sense of how research projects work, in terms of finding solutions to problems, and finding better ­solutions when these fail to solve the problems, and how all of these iterations relate to the project as a whole. This project was not as straight forward as I originally thought.