When you are 1 out of over 5000 students preparing for your final year project, it gets messy, or at least that’s what I feel.

I am completing my Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.) degree from the University of Mumbai in 2018. As a part of the curriculum, the university asks the students to come up with a project that explores new domains in the field of engineering. Being well-versed with the syllabus for the University, I embarked on a journey with my classmates to complete this project in November of 2016.

As I approach towards the last few months before I graduate, I wanted to share my experience with students who need some advice.

Background Story

Semester V introduced me to Heat Transfers, and like Fluid Dynamics in Semester IV, I fell in love with it. At around the same time, the new MacBook Pro was released by Apple. The cooling system of the new MacBook had piqued my interests. The compactness and effectiveness of the cooling system encouraged me to explore the area of cooling within compact spaces

As my professor, Mr. Bagal, started teaching the topic of convective heat transfers, I have the “Aha!” moment. Mr. Bagal said that in all general cases, turbulence increases the convective rate of heat transfer. Just a couple of hours before this lecture, I was reading about why golf balls have dimples. The answer:

Dimples on a golf ball create a thin turbulent boundary layer of air that clings to the ball’s surface. This allows the smoothly flowing air to follow the ball’s surface a little farther around the back side of the ball, thereby decreasing the size of the wake. Golf Ball Dimples

This gave the idea of employing dimples on thermal fins to improve the performance characteristics of the fin and thus the equipment being cooled as well. I bounced off ideas with Mr. Bagal, and finally landed on conducting my own research on fins with dimples.

Over the next week, I enlisted my classmates to help me figure out the various constraints that would exist in the project

The next 3 months were spent on literature review. We studied a large number of papers to be thorough with our work. After surveying the literature, we had to come up with a working experimental set-up from scratch. This was probably the most informative phase during the entire project. We had gone through dozens of designs on how to go about conducting the experiment. The knowledge gained through this process was something one can never get by sitting in a classroom

By the end of 2017, we was ready with experiments and simulations. The whole process took 10 weeks. This was just in time to submit my final report for my B.E. degree. I am confident about my research work, and department faculties have generally given positive reviews about the project.

I am participating in DJ Nirmiti, an inter-college project presentation competition, which will be the first time my project will be put under the scanner. The event is on Tuesday, 20th March, 2018. I am hoping to obtain great reviews from the judges, and hopefully finish in the top 3

In the meantime, I submitted the abstract of this research to the ASME’s IMECE 2018 conference at Pittsurgh, PA, in November. I hope to make a great showing there, making a good entry on the international level.

Take Aways and Advice

I have a lot of advice to give, but I will keep this short. My advice to anyone pursuing their B.E. degree, or working on research in general is:

  1. Build a strong team: I cannot stress on how important this point is. Pursuing research is like committing to a long relationship. You will have good days and bad days; it is those bad days when you will need your team members to be there in support.
  2. Pick a topic you love: Researching on something because your peer group is doing it will get you nowhere. In fact, you will start feeling suffocated after a few months. Save yourself from that and work on something you love.
  3. Plan in advance: Plan the entire research before you spend any money or time on the research. Having completed “Project Management” in my final semester, I know how scope creep or the general lack of a clear goal can wreak havoc on the research.
  4. Start early: I started in the fifth semester and I finished just in time. I had a tons of other commitments to fulfill, but for you, it might not be the same. In general, it is better to start early. In this way, you can make any changes if required, or have ample time to publish your research in a reputed journal.

I hope this will help someone down the line.