Papers by Matthew Dudik
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Nuclear Reprocessing
After a summer internship in the nuclear industry, I decided to take a class in nuclear engineering. I've rapidly become a fan of nuclear as a clean and safe method of power generation, but was became interested in whether it was sustainable. I worked with a group of 3 other students and reviewed the literature on whether nuclear reprocessing is, in fact sustainable. The short story is that it isn't. Nuclear reprocessing only increases the power output per ton of uranium mined by about 30% and is exceptionally risky. It also does not actually reduce the quantity of radioactive waste generated. For more information, please take a look at the paper. |
Rocket Thrust Measurement
In my Mechanical Measurements class at the University of Pittsburgh, I was tasked with designing and testing a force transducer to measure the thrust of an Estes Rocket engine. The transducer was a single beam style load cell that used a straightforward beam-in-bending design. I built the load cell along with the filtering circuit and the amplifying circuit from scratch, as is detailed in the paper. If I had the project to do over, I may have designed the load cell as a double bending beam because as it was, the transducer was very sensitive to the distance between the support and the center of thrust of the rocket. Feel free to read more about it here. |