Hello! My name is Nancy and I am a sophomore at Jones majoring in Mechanical Engineering. I am also currently pursuing minors in Engineering Design and Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, and a Certificate in French. Technically it is possible for me to finish all of the above in four years, but it does involve taking 17 credits for half of my semesters at Rice and 18 credits for the other half, so as of now it is unclear if all of this will come to fruition.
I spend most of my time at Rice working on Eclipse, the student rocketry team. This year I am the Recovery lead, which basically means that I’m supposed to make sure the parachutes deploy so that the rocket comes down slowly. Otherwise we’d just be building missiles. Below is a photograph from last spring of me and the previous Recovery lead with Noctua III, which flew to 10,000 feet a few minutes after this was taken.
Aside from Rice Eclipse, I am also involved with SEDS (Students for the Exploration and Development of Space), and the Sailing and Equestrian teams. I love the social environment that all of these clubs have to offer, and there’s nowhere else I’d rather spend my time!
One thing I’ve made that I’m proud of is the portable incubator prototype I built with my team at SEED this past summer. Our device incubates petrifilms, which hold water samples, to see if there is evidence of E. coli in the water. E. coli is a sign of fecal contamination, which is a major problem in many low-resource settings. Historically, in order to test water for contamination samples had to be taken within a 2-hour drive to a laboratory that has reliable access to a power grid so that the samples could immediately be incubated for 48 hours at body temperature. Our device relies on a rechargeable battery rather than grid power, so samples can be incubated for 48 hours on-site, which greatly expands the options in terms of where testing can take place. Even though this prototype is not finalized, I am still really proud of it because I think it has the potential to do a lot of good. Here are some pictures of it below:
In terms of what I most want to make, I must return to Eclipse. There is a side project that Eclipse started last semester called auto-recovery, which I think is really exciting. Essentially, the idea is to be able to control the location of the decent of the rocket, by using a GPS system to tell where it is and a microcontroller and servo attached to the parachute strings to steer the rocket towards a specific landing site. This is a big project and combines a lot of different areas of interest for me–– the mechanical/fluids proponent of the parachute as well as the more electrical side of programing and controlling the system. Auto-recovery would be a huge step forward for the club, both due to convenience (Noctua III landed 5km away from the launch site on the private property of a very unhappy rancher, so avoiding a repeat of that would be nice) and because it opens up a whole new realm of possibility in terms of future payloads.
Another important part of my time at Rice is being a lab assistant at the OEDK, and this is the primary reason why I would like to take this class. I have had a small amount of experience will pretty much every machine in the OEDK, but not nearly enough to feel confident with very many of them. In this class, I am most looking forward to gaining confidence in the many machines the OEDK has so that I can use them myself and most importantly help other OEDK users build anything they can dream up with the tools available.
