A.E.M.S. An acronym. An all too familiar sight in the world of engineering. If I had a dime for every time I’ve seen a new acronym…well, you know how the rest goes. But this acronym is a special one, because it abbreviates my research project, and it stands for:
Ambient
Energy
Monitoring
Station
Now yes, as you can see I am a humble man, but enough about me, let’s get serious. The reason I’m doing this project is because alternative energy is an important, necessary, and hot topic of the near future. The future is now really. Write that down.
I want to give a shout out to the man responsible for enabling this project; Dr. Matthew J. Traum, Assistant Professor in the UNT MEE program, and virtual rockstar in the College of Engineering. I approached him in the spring semester of 2008 during the annual Career Fair held at Discovery Park, you guessed it, once every year. (I know about 99.9% of you can make that connection, but we can’t neglect that special .1%.) After speaking with the Graduate Programs at UNT’s booth (don’t quote me on that booth name), I learned that undergraduate research is a great resume builder, as well as a way to better ensure acceptance into a graduate program. Upon gaining this knowledge, I approached Dr. Traum and expressed my new found interest in Undergraduate research, specifically in the topic of wind power generation, one of the more interesting forms of alternative energy in my opinion.
He told me that some grant money was available to build a weather station, and I asked if I would like to take roughly 20 grand, which comes with leadership of an undergraduate research team, and the keys to a brand new 2009 Cadillac Escalade. Okay the very last part is a lie, but it’s okay to dream.
Regardless of the last part being a farce, I was already interested enough by the first two offers. With this grant money, over the summer of 2008 I ordered all the parts and built a fully functioning weather station (see below), capable of providing useful wind data.
My goal is to now monitor several ambient environment conditions such as air temp, solar radiation, wind speed and direction, etc. Officially, the plan is to present this topic at a conference in the near future. Ultimately by monitoring wind conditions over the next couple of years, we can convince the university to install wind turbines at the Discovery Park campus. Several other conditions may be monitored in the meantime for other possible areas of energy generation.
So now that you have brute forced it through my story of how the A.E.M.S. came to be, I can tell you what the ‘fuel’ is. Recently, the Mechanical and Energy Engineering department received a grant from UNT to support undergraduate researchers. Obviously this makes me giddy, because there is now potential for me, as well as other undergraduate researchers, to get paid for their work. Now as much as I enjoy the research without being paid, the fact remains, time is money, and rent is always due.
Above all, things are definitely looking up for the College of Engineering, as opportunities such as this continue to sprout up at an alarming rate. So to all you high school students out there, while I can’t ensure that opportunities like this will happen for you, one thing I can promise is that by attending the College of Engineering at UNT, you are putting yourself in an environment to succeed, and maybe one day you too can participate in a project that will uncover some cutting edge technology. Like I said earlier, it’s okay to dream.
