- March 09, 2022
"While working at IHI, I noticed a very collaborative community. It seemed that everyone was well aware of what everyone else was working on, and that getting results was dependent on a team effort that required many different engineer’s skills. There was a very strong group dynamic where the focus was on the group accomplishing their goals together, rather than individuals focused primarily on furthering their own careers."
I worked in one of IHI’s research and development departments, the Advanced Applied Science Department in Yokohama. As IHI has accepted many interns from the MIT-Japan program over the last few years, I noticed that there was strong connection with MIT amongst the engineers from this department.
This project studied the optical properties of a relatively new nanomaterial, carbon nanowalls, for use in an ultrashort pulse laser. Carbon nanowalls are small and short pieces of graphite that stand vertically on a surface. This unique structure creates valuable optical properties that can shorten the pulse of the laser down to an order of valuable optical properties that can shorten the pulse of the laser down to an order of 10-15 s. However, fabrication of carbon nanowalls can be quite difficult. The purpose of this internship was to optimize various factors in the fabrication of carbon nanowalls so that they may demonstrate ideal optical properties for use in the laser. During this internship, I read several research papers to learn and expand on theknowledge we had about the subject. I had experience with carbon nanostructures from the undergraduate research I performed last summer, and I was able to use that experience when performing carbon nanowall fabrication and analysis. At the end of the internship, I used the skills I learned from my communication-intensive materials laboratory class to present the results of the project.
In the Advanced Applied Science Department, I worked on the development of the optical properties of a fairly new and largely unexamined material, for a new purpose: the development of ultrashort pulse lasers. The pulse of the lasers we worked on was not much longer than the shortest pulse ever created in a laser. The ultrashort pulse laser can have many potential applications, including spectroscopy, 3D optical memory, and Lasik eye surgery. As we explored a new material’s unexamined potential uses, I would categorize this project as innovation.