Its been an action packed and very productive first day here at Clipper Wind. First I was given a tour of the plant, located in Cedar Rapids, where they manufacture and produce the wind turbines. (The towers and the blades are made elsewhere) When looking at the wind turbines in a field from a distance they look big, however I didn't realize how large they truly are until I was up close and personal with one today. They are massive! I even got to climb inside the hub and gearbox and check out the mechanics of these amazing things.
Along with the standard safety tours and training any new employee would experience, I was fortunate to get the opportunity to dive right into the good stuff and learn a little about their fault data analysis, which is the area I'll be working on. I got a glimpse of one of the programs they use, I believe called LabView, where they take various inputs from the turbines and anaylze the data. It's my first day and I've already seen various math concepts in use such as matrices, best fitting lines, sine and cosine functions, and lots of statistical analysis. I actually have a concrete example for when my Algebra 2 students ask me why we need to learn Inverse Matrices. I saw it in action today, and to think this is only the first!
I am pleasantly surprised how much I've learned in just one day. I'm also surprised that there is actually an industry that seems to use even more acronyms than in the educational field. Who knew?!
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