Week 3

Hello again dear readers!

It has been a few weeks since my last blog post, and I am happy to say that for the first time in the history of my Senior Project, the updates are almost completely positive. I have been working diligently on my new project (read my last blog post if you don’t remember in what ways my current project is “new”) and there has been only one minor setback that is not related to science or engineering or anything to do with the project itself. 

In order to work collaboratively on the design of the chip with other members of the team, I needed a COMSOL license. COMSOL licenses are paid software and thus need to be assigned to a specific user’s email account. Usually, the Naval Postgraduate School only gives out these licenses to nps.edu emails, but because of new policies from the federal government, the process for assigning federal emails to interns and staff was more complicated than it used to be. The solution to this problem was quite simple, since the license could just be assigned to my personal email, but this was out of the norm and thus caused a slight delay in the process of receiving my COMSOL license.

Aside from this short holdup, the majority of my project has, for the first time, been fairly smooth sailing. In fact, the project has been going so well that Dr. Grbovic and Dr. Fabio decided that I could probably expand the scope of my project by a little bit and still finish in time for the Senior Project presentations. A functioning acoustic sensor of this type, regardless of the wavelength it is designed to operate at, has three components: a detector of cosine-like directionality, a detector of sine-like directionality, and an Omni. The math of how these three components interact to unambiguously determine the DOA (Direction of Arrival) is quite interesting but I will explain that more thoroughly another time. As I stated in my last blog post, my original goal for this project involved designing only the cosine aligned detector, which represented only one half of the chip. However, now my goal now has expanded to include designing both sides of the chip, the sine-like and cosine-like detectors (or “rocker” and “bender” as these components have been nicknamed by Dr. Grbovic). The Omni is by far the easiest part of the MEMS chip to design and it does not affect the simulations in any way, so my step of the modeling and design process mostly ignores it. 

The highlight of my research so far has been getting to go into the lab to meet the other people working on the design of this MEMS device. It has been not only an incredibly fun experience, but also an incredibly educational experience as well. Touring the lab and listening to the professors discuss the science behind the project has easily taught me more about how to approach the design of the chip than all the papers I read combined. Considering that just a month ago I thought I would not get a single chance to actually go in-person into the lab over the course of my Senior Project journey, I feel so blessed to have these opportunities.

Thank You for reading my blog post! I am so glad to finally have my research moving along smoothly and for my project to be showing real progress, and I am equally happy to get to share this victory with all of you, supporting my work and rooting for me!