Your working on SimHydraulics! Oh wait, Just Kidding...

Thursday Professor Durfee returned to the University of Minnesota from vacation. We had a wonderful talk about my project, and we seemed to have settled on a topic. I would be responsible for modeling the refined AFO hydraulic circuit in SimHydraulics, a branch of Simulink in Matlab. The current generation of the AFO circuit is functional, but too heavy due to excess pipe fittings and an unnecessarily large cylinder. He explained the my goal would be to gain expertise in SimHydraulics and develop this model. Energized, I set out to master SimHydraulics through various tutorials and by reconstructing the existing models for the Generation 1 AFO circuit.

This is one of the sample circuits that you can find in the SimHydraulics tutorials. It's pretty simple, but it still took me a good hour to figure out how to put it together. 

I was modeling away happily, when Professor Durfee walked into the lab. He then informed me that I would be doing little to no modeling for the rest of the summer. Instead I would be responsible for machining a newly designed miniature cylinder, and running tests on the new hydraulic circuit to verify the theoretical values for circuit power and efficiency that one of Professor Durfee's grad students, Jicheng, has calculated. Honestly, I'm thrilled that I get to do some hands on machining and experiments instead of sitting in front of the computer all day! I've got to keep reading up on basic hydraulics for the next week, but soon Jicheng should be done designing the new cylinder and I can get started!