Dear Reader,

I’ve decided to do a senior capstone project involving the material I’ve presented in the previous posts. Therefore, in the previous two weeks I’ve been working on writing up my honors thesis proposal for sphere packing.

My proposal can be found at the following link if you wish to see it:

Xiang Chen’s Honor Proposal

This week I will be exploring a more advanced tool called COMSOL to which I have been provided access courtesy of Dr. Marcelo Dias. Among many other features, this tool provides a very comprehensive set of capabilities for analyzing the stresses internal to an object subjected to forces. I will be figuring out how to load my sphere packing graphs into COMSOL and parsing the stress output from COMSOL.

Thanks for reading,

Xiang