Undergraduate Journey [VIII]: My Thesis (final) (updated_2) (v.6)
B.Sc Mechanical Engineering ITB: A review of my 8th semester
Though as a final year student comes a certain “swagger” with being the oldest amongst the cohorts, I’ve reached the point where every time I go to campus, seeing the younger lively students annoys me 🥲 (I just miss the earlier days of university). Luckily, I only have to go to campus and deal with this 2x a week this semester hehe. Also happy to share that I received a perfect grade in all the classes except one, being that of the cursed class written in the next paragraph.
Classes taken:
Risk Based Inspection ; Industrial Internship ; Bachelor Thesis I ; Comprehensive Examination ; Engineering Product Prototyping ; Sustainability Aspects in Mechanical Engineering
As I have mentioned before, what is ITB without misery, pain, and this time we welcome a new emotion — fear. Introducing the Comprehensive Examination, a combination of ALL the Mechanical Engineering fundamentals we’ve learnt in the past 4 years of study, including the modules of (i) General Engineering (ii) Machine Design (iii) Manufacturing (iv) Energy and (v) Materials, totaling up to 3 hours for 60 MCQ. Honestly the biggest pat on my back for passing this first time, since most students pass on their second try in each semester.
Highlight #1: The Undergraduate Thesis
The signifying magnum opus, a collection of four years of study, and the defining result that is one’s bachelor thesis. After absorbing all knowledge from my beloved professors, I finally started writing my thesis under the guidance of Professor Kariem, as part of the Mechanical Design laboratory.
Thesis Title:
Optimizing the Maintenance Strategy of Rotating Equipment Within a Mining Facility Using Reliability Centered Maintenance — Reengineered (RCM-R)
When deciding in what I wanted to write about, a niche that I always found interest in and confidence working on was that of maintenance, over the other sub-disciplines of mechatronics, biomechanics, or God forbid, energy. What I love about this area is how flexible it is. As long as there are machines, there is a need for maintenance, no matter the industry.
From this, the next step was of course to scope down the industry. I was sure that I wanted to choose an industry in energy. Though my family comes from a background of oil & gas (along with my previous internship), I decided to explore something new by taking on the mining industry instead. This is because I want to experience different industries so that I can be sure that I want to work there upon graduation.
To give a brief summary, I used the maintenance strategy of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), which optimizes the maintenance tasks and scheduling, along with balancing the types of Predictive (PdM), Preventive (PM), and Reactive (RM) Maintenance. The data used for this paper includes failure data history of Time-Between-Failures (TBF), Time-To-Repair (TTR), work order descriptions, and many more. From this, the outcome includes increasing its Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability (RAM) values, resulting in an increased performance and production.
Highlight #2: Freeport Mining Internship
As I took an industrial based bachelor thesis, I needed industrial data. This time around, I was accepted as a Maintenance Intern at PT Freeport, with a core focus towards RCM and Condition Based Monitoring. I was ecstatic when I got the email that I was selected as ~80 out of 8,540 other candidates, and would like to thank HMM for the networking that helped during the application. What differentiated this internship from my previous two would be the support the company provides — from paying for our plane tickets all the way to Papua, to barrack accommodations, to 3x all you can eat a day (we’re talking lamb chop, shrimp, pizza, ice cream, and more), to a paycheck double the expected average on top of that!
PT Freeport Indonesia is a mineral mining company affiliate of Freeport-McMoRan (FCX) and MIND ID Indonesia’s Mining Industry. PTFI has one of the largest mines in Indonesia that produces concentrates containing copper, gold and silver. They market concentrates all over the world, and mainly to domestic copper smelter such as the newly built facility in Gresik. They operate in the remote highlands of the Sudirman Mountain Range in Mimika Regency, Papua Province, Indonesia.
The highlight of this internship had to be the CBM Vibration site visits, in which we went underground to see the machines that extracted and transported the various valuable minerals of copper and gold. I’ve never felt cooler than when I was walking around with the respirator mask and the complete mining fit hahahah. From this experience, I’d like to thank Pak Wisnu for the mentorship of his 20+ experience in RCM, Pak Ari for the supervision and collection of data, along with the RCM team of Pak Mirza, Pak Devry, Pak Kreshna and many more for bringing me onto to the field and teaching me the various methods of CBM.
Highlight #3: Engineering Capstone Project
As part of the continuation class of Engineering Product Prototyping, Adji and I brought our previous design of a Dual Axis Solar Panel Frame from paper to life this semester, as shown in the poster below. It’s always nice for engineers to apply theory to practice which is what we did, from learning to buy material to assembling the products and coding.
Our product has the objective of allowing solar panels to rotate so that it can follow the angle of the sun in the sky — for both the daily East to West movement, and the monthly North to South movement. This allows the solar panel to increase its efficiency by a total of +35%, thus allowing the user to gain more energy to use.
From this, we made two products: a motorized proof of concept that automatically moves the frame following the angle of the sun, and a manual prototype that has the users rotating the frame by hand every 2 hours for daily movement and every month for seasonal. The core benefit of the manual prototype is that key issue with current 2-DOF frames are that the +35% energy gained from following the sun is wasted to power the movement from electrical components (e.g. motors, sensors etc.), which is why we designed the manual to take hold of every percent increase.
As such, the main customer base for our manual product is meant for those in areas that have a lack of access to electricity such as the villages and highlands of Indonesia. The +35% increase in energy can be significant for the disadvantaged locals, which may allow them an extra hour of light bulb usage or couple minutes for boiling water. As an add-on, we included the motorized POC just to give an example of the current practice and norm for solar panel frame tracking (and make use of our coding classes hehe).
