Day 6, 10/23/13

:           This day had me coming to work on 8:30 like usual and then working on my AutoCAD and what not as I waited for my mentors to come to work. Around 9 o'clock, Ko Hung Chan got to work at which point he assigned me some work. He had me do some hatch patterns on an AutoCAD in order to calculate the areas of a renovation that is going to happen. What? Maybe that might need some explanation.We will start at the beginning. A hatch pattern is useful for figuring out the dimensions of an object that standard formulas aren't useful for. For example, a formula will help you with a square but not that much with an irregular polygon. And while you could split up the shape into regular shapes, that is a lot more difficult that the hatch method. Hatch patterns also has the added benefits of nicely organizing and color-coding different sections of a drawing. The drawing of question was of a renovation where the owner wanted to renovate a shopping center. This is important because there are regulations for every town, of how different spaces should be allocated when doing things like that. Like you need to have 20% of the land covered by green stuff, or 40% of the land covered by crosswalks or parking space. That is were the hatch comes in. It will give you the area of the sketch and then you just do percent. I worked on this for a majority of the morning. The funny thing is that after my lunch, Ko walked up to me and said that he has to change the drawing because the client wanted to change some stuff. But, hey that is the trade. You do what the client wants. That is the trade. After that, I went to Mr. Raina to get more work to do. He told me that he wanted to make a database of pipe sizes. Why? Well, lets say that you have a work site, but it is under sea level. How do you get waste from the lower part of the ground to the higher ground. The answer is that you use a pumping station. A pumping station is usually made up of a pump and some pipe to transport the waste. The trouble comes when one has to decide what pipes to use. This task is two fold. The first one is that you have to pick the size of the pipe you want. If one thinks of the formula pressure=force divided by area you can figure out why. When water moves through a pipe, there is actually friction. Not against the water but against the sides of the pipe. So, the larger the pipe, the more force you need. The second thing that one has to decide is what types of pipes on uses. There are three types of pipe materials.These materials are PVC, ductile iron and polyethylene. The differences between these is mostly what you would expect. Two of them are a type of plastic pipe, the iron piping needs a membrane on the inside in order to protect against corrosion, and different pipes can take different amount of pressure. So, I had to make an excel making a table cataloging the inner diameter, outer diameter and thickness of each pipe in order to assist my boss. I also had to make 2 for each since people use both metric and US imperial in the US. Something interesting I learned here is the decision that was made regarding the sizes. The sizes between metric and and US imperial do not actually match up. The reason being is that if you take almost any US size and try to turn it in metric, you get all sort of fractions and decimals. Engineers decided that instead of doing that, they would just arbitrarily choose whole numbers in metric that are similar to the US size. By the way, the data was received online from various websites and databases. Making the tables pretty much took the rest of my day. That was my adventure at my internship for the 23rd of October. Thanks for reading.