The second presentation of the i.d. Lab Maker Alumni Series was presented by Mr. C.J. Bell ’10 on January 17. The Maker Alumni Series is new this year, featuring recent alumni who pursue careers in design and engineering. These presentations happen once a term. Mr. Bell works as an engineer in the Ship Signatures Department at a company called Electric Boat in New London, Connecticut. In his presentation, entitled “Basic Signal Processing, Submarines, and LEDs: How They Come Together,” he discussed topics including Fourier analysis and sonar.
The faculty behind this series are Dr. Travis Feldman, Director of the i.d. Lab, and Dr. Katie Jewett, Director of Curricular Initiatives, with help from the Office of Alumni Relations. Dr. Jewett explained, “I realized after being at Choate for fifteen years that there are a lot of talented alumni out there that have intersections with the i.d. Lab.” Dr. Feldman added, “We wanted them to have things to talk about that wouldn’t be encountered in students’ normal classes.”
Mr. Bell was an active participant of the Choate community while attending the school. He played varsity squash and lacrosse and was in a variety of clubs. He attended George Washington University for undergraduate and graduate studies, majoring in Aerospace Engineering. Some classes that Mr. Bell took at Choate geared him towards his career in engineering. “The robotics class I took in my senior spring really set me on the path of coding, and I hadn’t done any coding before that class,” Mr. Bell said. He also remembered the unique ways of teaching waves in his freshman physics class with Mr. Doug Wolf. Mr. Bell enjoyed coming back to campus and witnessing the changes in campus buildings, including the new St. John Hall.
Currently, Mr. Bell is involved in the computer-based model validation of components of U.S. Navy nuclear submarines. “We predict what’s going to happen, and eventually we get test data to compare what we predicted to what’s out there,” he said.
The presentation Mr. Bell gave was a 90-minute summary of submarines, sonar, and Fourier Transformations. It included videos of wave files in which programs could detect frequencies played out loud. His presentation also had an optional project students who attended could complete on their own –– they could experiment with WAV files and code he made in GitHub.
Although the presentation included complicated mathematics, Mr. Bell explained every aspect of his presentation with detail. Students learned about different types of submarines and small-scale computational fluid dynamics of submarine defections. Mr. Bell also described the inner workings of a submarine, covering the importance of ballast tanks and compressed air.
Mr. Bell’s advice to aspiring engineers in the Choate community is to “come in the i.d. Lab and just mess around. If you have an idea, just show up and try it.”
