Mechanical Failure in Superconducting Power Cables
Internship, VEIR Inc., Woburn, MA
From June until August of 2023 I worked as an engineering intern at VEIR, a company aiming to manufacture and install superconducting overhead power lines and their cooling systems. I worked with the HTS (high-temperature superconductivity) team on questions related to failure analysis and the mechanical-electronic response of the superconductor. It was a privilege to work on such an interesting engineering challenge with a high potential for impact alongside great people.
I worked on this project with my PI, professor Siu-Wai Chan and her master’s student Yanhe Li starting in the summer of 2022. I really enjoyed being able to perform materials research where I was given the opportunity to see the project through from synthesis to analysis. The electrical properties of cerium oxide are a much-researched and highly interesting topic, and I was excited to share my findings on those of nanoparticulate copper-doped ceria at Columbia’s Senior Design Expo in early May 2023.
Not having settled on a senior design project for my final year at Columbia, during the fall and into early spring I worked with Zhenghao Yang and Liying Tian in professor Yuan Yang’s electrochemistry-focused group on the introduction section of an upcoming paper on a type of sodium-sulfur-based flow battery. This introduction would focus on the cost-effectiveness of the chemistry and compare its future economic outlook with other types of long-duration storage. One relevant work of Robert Darling provided me with the fundamental equations needed for the analysis.