Eureka!

Today, I had by far, the most productive day at work that I've ever experienced! All of the work that I have been doing for the last 2 weeks finally came together to allow me to make ten pages worth of beautiful plots showing everything that happens in my combustor, from the velocity that the air is traveling at to the heat which is being produced by the combustion to the amount of pollution created by that ridiculous chemical reaction. Not only was I able to make these plots for one run of my code, I was also able to run another code that computes everything differently to check if I could get the same results. What I ended up with was a huge document full of amazing pictures that I would love to show on here (but I can't because they are highly proprietary...) My results showed me that the new code which I was working to validate performed even better than the old one and it was able to do so with less work from the user (by allowing unstructured grid generation for anyone that cares). Now that I have all of these pictures, I can present my work through a link call to the CFD group back in the U.S. How cool is that!? I'm going to be presenting what I have done over here in Germany back to my old boss and all of the people I worked with over in Indianapolis.

Tomorrow, I'm going to do something even more incredible. I'm going to automate the entire process of what I did (at least most of it anyway). I think this is the part that I like most about engineering. Not only can you set up a program to give you all of this incredibly detailed information that tells you everything that is going on in a very sophisticated combustor, you can also take this whole process and automate it so that no one will ever have to do it again. In essence, I am working to eliminate my own job! Everyone talks about how globalization and industrialization is taking away all of these jobs from the United States. I am actually working to industrialize the very work that I am doing. And this won't get me layed off. It will instead allow me to move on to bigger, more important challenges that need the attention of a human being. No computer could ever take over every job that needs to be done in our world. If it could, we'd all live pretty good lives doing nothing but sitting around and enjoying our time. Engineering allows one to continue to improve a process until it works seamlessly with no need for further improvement. This will slowly and surely change the way our world works and how people live. And I get to be a part of that...