The biggest personal project that I ever did because of my stubbornness to not learn excel :)
Ok, so I was in the final year of my engineering(B.E Naval Architecture which means how to design ships and things that float) we had to do a major project. We had a section called specialization. Basically, we had to take a small part of our main project to do really extensive analysis and calculations which meant lots of excel work. At that time I was not a big fan of excel but now that I have a full-time job I appreciate excel a lot.
Clerical work was beneath young me so he decided to go for some type of practical experiment. He decided to find out the heave coefficient of a houseboat(Which was his major project) by doing scaled mode testing. In layman's terms when a wave hits a floating body, how much it goes up and down. If you are able to tune the hydrodynamic coefficients properly your boat will "jiggle-jiggle" less and you will have a great time.
Here comes the fun part my college did not have any model testing facility so young me decided to build a small wave tank. A wave tank is a laboratory setup for observing the behavior of surface waves. The typical wave tank is a box filled with liquid, usually water, leaving an open or air-filled space on top. At one end of the tank, an actuator generates waves; the other end usually has a wave-absorbing surface. A wave tank is a laboratory setup for observing the behavior of surface waves. The typical wave tank is a box filled with liquid, usually water, leaving an open or air-filled space on top. At one end of the tank, an actuator generates waves; the other end usually has a wave-absorbing surface. Usually, these tanks cost a lot of money so I tried to build a really cheap solution for students who want to use the tank for testing their projects. My college agreed to fund it but by the time they released the money my engineering was already over I had to stay behind extra two weeks to finish it. I ended up doing more work :).
This project is open source I have also documented steps on how to build your own. I hope this will help someone like me who does not have proper resource but still want to build cool stuff and if you watch the last video you might see young me explaining all the different parts of the tank and how to operate it.
Please watch this playlist to under the working of this project
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkSF2UxGuLxDMq_FgcGfPj-JN3YCdFIvS