Projects Page & Things I Like

I’ll be updating this page with different projects that I’ve been working on. Maybe I’ll add some pictures, some links, some interesting things. I’m not sure quite yet how to separate the academic projects and the non-academic ones, but for the mean time, enjoy these things here.

Scaled Mock fUsion Reactor Facility (SMURF)

This was my McGill University capstone design project for the academic year 2019-2020. Our team was tasked with designing and building a scaled fusion reactor facility to investigate the torque scaling and flow characteristics within a small gap for a Taylor-Couette chamber with interchangeable internal geometries under the direction of Prof. Jovan Nedic. Tasks included researching literature on current Taylor-Couette apparatuses including cavitation and thermal effects, designing a clear and water-tight facility that can accept different internal meshes, sizing and lifing machine elements, as well as manufacturing and assembling the SMURF.

A Short Project on an Important Topic, Indeed

It was a sweltering summer day, and I was researching finite element methods, particularly in the context of human biomechanics, when I came across a issue I had never really looked into before. It’s easy to miss, especially if you aren’t affected by it, but I found that breast pain is a major topic of research around the world. The research is extensive, and for several days, I devoted myself to learning as much as I possibly could about an issue that affects an incredibly significant percentage of the world’s population. I discovered that many techniques I had learned in my mechanics classes were applied in this field, and armed with this newfound knowledge, I set about doing a proper write-up of what I had learned. This paper is the result of those efforts. Please enjoy!

Simplified CFD Analysis of an Aneurysm at the Iliac Bifurcation

This project involved the use of ANSYS Fluent to model and analyze the pressure, velocity, and wall shear stress of viscous blood flow in and around the iliac bifurcation and abdominal aorta. Our group compared results from Fluent to results from medical journals that analyzed the effect of aneurysms on this region of the body. We incoporated heat transfer and pulsatile blood flow into the boundary conditions of the transient simulation to effectively model the mechanisms of actual blood flow. You can see a sample of the animations created here.

A Literature Review on the Biomechanical Mechanisms of Octopus Suckers

This project was for a graduate class at McGill where my group perfromed research on, and wrote a literature review on the biomechanics of octopus suckers. Through it, I learned a great deal about the mechanobiology and microstructure of the different sections of an octopus sucker, their applications as bioactuators in soft robotics, the material properties of octopus suckers and tentacles, and that current sucker implementation stils falls far short of natural behavior. It’s an eye-opening topic, and one that I think you’ll quite enjoy.

Trivia

Check out some quizbowl-adjacent salad trivia that I’ve written.