A Quick Update

After three and a half weeks in the Philippines, a routine has been established.

My typical day consists of waking up and grabbing a quick breakfast before boarding our van for the job site.  We spend nine hours on the job site before we board the van again to head back home.  During the nights, I will usually try to get a quick work out in or grab dinner with Justin or the other B&V personnel at our apartment.  Then it's eight hours of sleep before it is all repeated again.  

It is a nice routine, but doesn't allow for too much exciting, blog-able material.

To prove to you all that I am actually doing work and not just enjoying an extended vacation, I will share with you my current task that my supervisor assigned to me.

The Therma South project is currently in what is deemed the "civil" stage.  This consists of clearing and backfilling the land, as well as constructing the foundations to support the power plant structures and equipment.  This is perfect, because it is everything that I have studied in school thus far!

However, the specific point of the project can be tricky, and here is why: as the construction crews finish up the civil works of the project in the next couple of months, the equipment that will rest on the finished foundations won't arrive for half a year at the earliest.  However, there is a critical interface between the equipment and its foundation known as an "embedment".  Embedments are part of the foundations that most times must be cast in the concrete when it is poured.  As well, these embedments are usually supplied by the vendor of the equipment.  The tricky part: the vendor has a delivery scheduled for their equipment, but they must also be cognizant of the delivery of the embedments when the foundations are being constructed (six months beforehand).  As the field engineering intern, it is my job to organize relevant information about the embedments in a usable fashion.

My supervisor has set me on a mission to create packets of drawings for each area of the power plant.  These drawings include the B&V building drawings as well as the vendor drawings for all of the pieces of equipment in that particular area.  Some areas have 30+ pieces of equipment.  On top of compiling all of these drawings, I also have to go through them and highlight the embedments required for the equipment.  Once I have tracked all of the embedments, I have to make a list of them and their corresponding equipment as well as determine when they are set to leave port from the origin country (we have equipment coming from places as close as Indonesia and China and as far as Austria and Atlanta).  Each packet is essentially a comprehensive embedment package for each area, and I am the one who gets to organize them.

I had never looked at construction drawings more than a handful of times before this summer.  This task definitely would have been daunting earlier in the summer, but now I am more familiar drawings and how they function after spending my first three weeks perusing them.  It is still a large amount of information that I will have to sift through, but it is manageable.  As well, this project allows me to see every aspect of the power plant in detail and get an intricate understanding of each of its buildings.

To all of you non-engineers out there, I am sorry about this blog post.  It is full of technical activities.

To all of you engineers out there, I am sorry about this blog post.  It has way more words (and less pictures) than I promised I would do.

In closing, I want to leave you with a relevant song for my trip.  It is 2,000 Miles by D-WHY.  The theme of this song is about being away from home, but also enjoying the experience and growing from it tremendously.  D-WHY talks about what it feels like to be "2,000 miles from home" (more like 8,344 miles for me).

Enjoy!