This week is the last week of internship. There is pretty much very little to do as all my research findings have been submitted to my supervisor along with a MATLAB numerical simulator which I wrote. While on one hand, internship work has died down a lot, FLOAT activities have picked up pace as Rag Day looms closer. Anyway, the diagram below sort of sums up what I am doing during my internship.
It is about cooling a supercomputer or other microelectronic devices by installing a so-called heat sink and then passing fluid through it. The fluid will absorb the heat and evaporate taking away a good deal of heat, with pretty much the same cooling effect you get when you just step out of a pool with droplets of water still adhering to your skin. Of course there is something different with what we do in that we tinker with the chemical properties of the fluid so that it has better heat extracting performance and can have greater applications.
The 12 weeks have been spent reading up for better understanding of the fundamental processes, finding correlations for evaluating properties of the system and writing a MATLAB program which integrates the previous findings and to output a numerical simulation of what happens when you pass a certain fluid through the heatsink with a certain designs. There were dozens of graphs and charts which were generated and a lot of fine-tuning of the theoretical model which we came up with to better improve accuracy of result. The graph below looks not too bad eh?
On a different note, I was quite surprised when my supervisor approached me a few weeks ago asking for my NUS Mentor contact. I thought I gave a very bad performance during my internship. Turns out, she wanted to include my name as a co-author for a conference paper they are gonna write for this project. I was quite happy and did the usual thing of calling mum and telling her what happened (to sort of justify why I didn't go back home since Chinese New Year, I hope).
The funny part was my NUS Mentor will not be back from his vacation until after August and he did not reply to my supervisor's email regarding the matter. So, she went ahead to file my name in the publication with the admin people in IME. Hope there is no legal complication for that.
A little bit of web searching reveals that the conference is called "12th International Conference on Electronic Materials & Packaging 2010". It will be held on October 25-27th, 2010 at Orchard Hotel. I have never been to any academic conference before, let alone one at the international scale. I wonder whether I am invited to tag along with my supervisor as well. It is school day and I don't really wanna skip school if all they do is sit there and talk. Some numerical animation would be fun and yes, good food is a plus factor as well!!!!!
Two more days are left before I officially end my internship at IME. Apart from busying myself with admin clearance matter (so many forms to fill up), I try to reflect on my experience at IME. True, I did learn a lot about research methodologies in a hands-on manner, but the experience here sort of casts an impression of the research field in Singapore. I think that it is quite slack (maybe because as intern, I work with one project while my supervisor works with 4 or 5 in ago) and involves a lot of eye balling at the computer screen. I hunger for some experimental work, which is sadly beyond my training scope here because they don't have the equipments and my training period is simply too short.
Apart from the professional relations with both my supervisors, I don't feel a sense of attachment to the people and the place here. Maybe, IME is just not a place for me.
