View of downtown Salt Lake City and the university, from the surrounding hills.
I started my internship this week in Salt Lake City, at the University of Utah. I am working under Dr. Brian McPherson, who leads the CO2 group in carbon sequestration research.
On Sunday, I drove up to Salt Lake City and checked in to my dorm at the University of Utah. I was quite amazed at the 90+ temperatures of the Salt Lake area. On Monday I biked down to the at the Civil and Materials Engineering building, where I met Dr. McPherson. I was introduced to my coworkers in the CO2 group, who all showed a genuine excitement to be working with Lexie and me. During our lunch, I became aware of their incredible expanse of knowledge as they discussed everything from biology to modeling, and how it relates back to carbon sequestration and climate change in general.
After this, I went to the administrative office to do my paperwork and was able to see the labs where the group was doing different experiments on the way. When I came back we had a group meeting where we decided on the goals of our internship and the projects Lexie and I would have the opportunity to work on. The next day Lexie and I began researching solutions for a wireless sensor network. The task was to design a network of sensors not reliant on existing wifi or other communication networks. The idea is to have a home base with a computer that shows the data from each of the sensors, and this data would be relayed back to the home base through each sensor. Similar solutions already exist in the shipping industry, which uses RF to track packages.
A breadboard connected to the Arduino board
The next couple of days we started experimenting with Arduino boards and learning how they work. They are boards with 8-bit microcontrollers that plug into your laptop. We uploaded some simple code on to them and got a feel for using them and added a temperature sensor. The plan is to buy shields for Arduino boards. The shields will add wireless capability to the boards allowing them to create a Zigbee network. This network will reduce data collection time and provide real-time data. We also got on the roof of the Student Union where data was being collected on the CO2 leaving the vents on that roof. The collection of that data allows the CO2 group to become familiar with detecting a leak in a carbon sequestration well.
Outside of the office, I have been going on great runs in the hill surrounding the university and exploring the area. I look forward to the next week of my internship.
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