Week 10: Heat Conduction And Editing

Hi, everyone!

 Welcome to my last blog post!

 First, I would like to say a big thank-you to Dr. Löhner, his graduate student Facundo, and all the other people I met at George Mason. Thank you for making sure I had an excellent internship experience! All of you taught and supported me in some way. I am especially grateful to Dr. Löhner for his generosity in taking on an intern and giving me his time. 

This was my last week at my internship! I learned a lot, and I am sorry to leave. As a final project, I coded a heat conduction problem in 2D. I calculated the temperature across the 2D grid at each timestep while a heat source moves in time across the x-axis. I then had my code write the results to a file, which I opened with ParaView to show an animation of the temperatures (included below). Coding the heat conduction solver was in no way the hardest part of this project. Most of my time was spent trying to perfect the syntax so that ParaView would open the file. I tried for at least two hours, double-checking numbers, fixing whitespace, counting lines, trying different numbers … in the end, I restarted the ParaView app, and that solved the problem. I had made some syntax mistakes in the beginning, but for most of the time I spent double-checking that file, it was correct, and it was my computer, not my code, that was the source of the problem. That was a learning experience that taught me, again, how much of the work in programing is debugging and fixing minute particulars in order to try to find the source of the problem. But I eventually solved it, and the end result was rewarding, after all that work I put into it. 

As for my independent research, the final presentation is less than a week away! I am editing my paper, moving toward a final draft. I am extensively using the comment feature in Microsoft Word (over 40 comments right now in a 17-page paper) because that helps me get my thoughts out without disrupting the flow of writing in the actual paper. I would like to thank Mr. B, my advisor, for his comments and feedback. A perspective from someone who has not spent ten weeks studying riparian buffers was extremely helpful. l am also preparing my presentation, where I will share my experiences and findings at the Senior Project Showcase.

The whole senior project has been a great experience for me, and I can hardly believe it’s almost over. Daria 

This is the heat conduction animation I mentioned:

 Screen Recording 2023-05-19 at 15.14.06