Month: December 2020

Week 45: Wrapping things up

It’s been a weird week. I finished soldering the penetrator, ran the continuity and insulation tests, and prepped it for installation. Then I spent some time cleaning up the ET shop and my work area. But all good things must come to an end; I spent 45 out of the 52 weeks this year with WHOI. This has been an incredible experience and I am grateful to both WHOI and MATE that I have had this opportunity despite the year that it has been. However it’s time to go home, for now. I’m going to spend a few weeks with my family and then I will be back in January but this time I will be hired by WHOI as an Engineering Assistant to help for the rest of the overhaul period!

Week 35 & 36: On The Walton Smith

We had another hurricane developing in the caribbean and it was projected to hit Miami. So we were preparing the ship to go up the river on Friday. On Friday morning we started up the engine and generators but we were not getting any power from them. We had to start troubleshooting the system to find the problem. After a few hours we narrowed it down to the exciter windings inside the generator. We checked everything else just to confirm we checked all the diodes in the rectifier and they all looked good. This took use most of the day so we were not going to be able to fix the generators in time to get shelter from the storm. So the next morning we had 2 tug boats come and tow us up the river to merrill stevens shipyard. We then did not have power close by so we needed to make a 200 foot shore power cord which took a few hours. Because the cord was so long we had to reduce the power to the ship so we would not overload the cord. We finished around 9pm. The next morning I got up and took apart both generators on my own. I removed exciter windings from both generators. The winding did look bad, they were burnt and had melted parts, which was a good sign for us that we found the problem. If this had been one generator it would have not been that strange but because it was both it was strange because they are on separate systems. A few weeks back lightning struck close by to where the ship was normally docked and it fried some of the dock lights. So it is possible lightning blew our generators. There was also a load test performed on the part of the grid our boat is normally plugged in. This could have also caused damage by overloading our system. We got two new exciter windings ordered. I checked the shore power cord pretty often to see how many amps we were drawing to make sure we would not get overloaded. There was a section of the cord where there were two parts plugged together where I could have access to the individual weirs. This was very good for testing. But as I was checking the weirs I discovered another major problem with the ship’s power. I found that we had a large amount of electricity flowing through the ground weir which should have no electricity going through it. I told Don the head engineer so we started to trace everything to figure out why electricity was going through the ground. It took a few days but with the help of a tech we found that the ship’s isolation transformer had been burnt out in the past and it was just bypassed and weird back together around it. With this being done the neutral was weird to the ground for some reason. In the meantime we got the new exciter windings. Don and I installed them together. We then fired up the gens and they both worked. But then one of our big breakers broke so we had to fix that. Then we had another issue that was preventing power getting to our system. It took use another day but we evenly found a problem with the electronics. Once the generators were up and running we got off shore power. We will not be able to use the shore power again till we fix the isolation transformer. The fact that the isolation transformer was not connected is another reason electricity got by to burn out the generators to start with. We then went back down the river to our normal dock on Saturday. 

Week 44: Soldering Penetrators

I’ve been busy this week trying to finish things up as much as possible. We were able to assemble one of the power bottles for pressure test. It took a couple of us to get it done. Usually it’s just two people pushing on each end, but even leaning my entire body weight on the end cap I could not get it into place. I’ve also started soldering the 66 pin penetrators. I haven’t finished one yet, but I understand why everyone says it’s a hateful task; the pins are small and close together and the stranded wire does not like to fit into the cups. Only 3 more to go after this one. I need to twist the wire first though so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to finish them all before I leave. Only one more week and then I’ll be back in California after 10 months away!

 

One side of an unsoldered penetrator.

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