Officially, the title of my Masters' thesis was "Design and Evaluation of Biomass Utilization Systems" (MIT DSpace). In practice, it was a crash course in machine design with Prof. Alex Slocum involving:
• Doing structural calculations like stress, deflection, and stiffness until they were permanently etched into my brain
• Designing with the FRDPARRC methodology (see "design methodology")
• Designing, machining, and testing electric and hydraulic motor systems with various drive mechanisms (direct drive, chain drive)
• Precision machine design principles for proper constraint, preload, and error budgets
• Learning to engineer on a farm: welding structures quickly, PVC floatation, making things work with what you have
• Getting over "analysis paralysis": do the analysis (it is engineering after all) but then go build it!
A subset of my work was published in Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews:
Peng, Valerie and Slocum, Alexander. 2020. "Endemic Water and Storm Trash to energy via in-situ processing." Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 134. (link)
Before the "final" field design, I first designed and built a small prototype using geared rollers, an eccentric bearing, and a small DC motor. From this I learned that displacement preload was tough when processing highly variable feedstock like biomass, as things would get clogged easily.
