Week three has just finished and time really seems to be flying by. It seems to fly by also every day- as  the time strikes 5pm I tend to be surprised that the its  time to knock off from work. I think that shows how rewarding in general the work has been and for me week three was an illustration of that.

This week we tackled assembling a filament extruder. This machine produces the filament, basically extruded plastic,  that is used by 3-d printers to print models. The novel aspect of this particular machine is that aside from working with pellets, it can produce filament from recycled plastic bottles.

I was partnered up with James, my fellow Malawi intern, so we were on our own. I believe we made a great team as James is focused on electrical engineering and I on mechanical engineering. I knew the “where” and ” how” of the nuts and bolts whereas James deciphered the circuit diagrams.

So, assembly did not take very long and surprisingly there was not any need for special calibration. It felt like mini achievement by the Malawi students when we turned on the machine and the machine started working well.

We also had a great opportunity to be given a design worksh0p during the week where we learnt about how the subject of engineering design is taught at Rice University. The subject content is not all that different from that of the University of Malawi’s. It was a very profitable session.

Indeed each session has been quite profitable: at the end of every single day I feel like I havc gained something new. I really hope that come the end of the summer, I have the same feeling about the projects we produce for Malawi.

I believe I will be diving into the biomedical projects next week so its now time to start really applying myself to generating ideas. Time to think of solutions.

So, tiwonana  ( which means  “see you”)

 

 me and our filament extruder.