TATA Power

I guess I'm strangely lucky this week...although the pile of work has reached the neck, I'm spending some time here. Today we had an industrial visit to a TATA Power generating plant and boy!!! was it great! this one was better than our last visit, which was to the nuclear reactor at Tarapur. So..her goes..

It wasn't difficult getting there; a simple bus ride from the college to Chembur and then another one to Mahol. Mahol happens to be a truly vast industrial area...en route to the plant we saw many other industries, most of them being petroleum refineries. We were guided around the plant by a pretty nice guy (Mr.N) who had a sound knowledge of power systems; after all, he had spent ten years there! The plant has been in the power scenario of Mumbai for over 60 years and has been a pioneer in a number of advances in the generation and transmission sector; they were the first to have a 500 MW plant in the country, that too, with an efficiency of about 38.5%(thermal). They're having one of the most efficient thermal plants in the country, a 120 MW with an efficiency of 50%. They've also been the first to have three-phase four conductor transmission towers..and they're still going on pretty well.

We began with a presentation about the plant; that's from where I got all the above mentioned stuff. This was followed by a trip to the photo gallery where the entire history of the plant was put in pictures, right from the first newspaper article about the TATAs entering into the power sector to the installation pictures of the turbine and generator room and all. Mr.N took turns explaining the models of the plants to batches of students. The best part came when we were taken to the actual control rooms. The real-time monitoring of the plant by SCADA systems was great, so was a screen showing the boiler internals. Most of the controls were almost parallel to what we saw at Tarapur; screens showing the temperature at various points of the boiler, the monitoring of the transformers, cables and what not!

Something that I can only describe as 'better than the best' was peeping inside the boiler to get a glimpse of the actual heart of the reactor-a huge sun-like ball of fire (this is were tis IV took the lead over the previous one). The small window we peeped through looked like Balrog's(from Lord Of the Rings) mouth; I later came to know that was at 1200 C!!. The plant has to maintain a negative pressure within the boiler; this basically means having a low pressure within the boiler so that the hot gases remain concentrated within a region. The water is circulated in helical pipes around the boiler so that a uniform heating is provided to the water within. The turbine section in itself was a marvel. This was the second turbine I've seen in my life; I don't have a clear picture of the first one I saw at Kadambarai a long time back.

The rest of the plant wasn't much exciting and the visit ended quickly. I think we missed some parts owing to some maintenance work. But the fascination of seeing equations come to reality, the glowing ball of fire, and many other things we saw aren't images that would get erased. Thank God that this company comes to our college; even if I were offered the job of a cleaner, I'd consider it...

Pheezix

Well..I've been lucky this week...for I've been able to spare a sum total of 45 minutes for blogging!!! Never mind my schedule, this post is dedicated to one of my teachers who takes pheezix(physics) for us...at the very beginning, this post is not to libel her in any way, but just make some harmless little fun of her, something, which I believe every student has done in his/her life at least once...

Delores Umbridge (name changed for obvious reasons) happened to enter our institute early this year; so she has already taught us something. This is to say that we aren't absolutely new to her or to her teaching methodologies. When she was teaching us the principles of Digital Logic, last semester, we all had the impression of her being a woman who was an exponent in singing lullabies...for she did get the entire class(of 74 students) to sleep on almost all her lectures. But, that was just a part of what she had in store for us..

This time, she entered the scene with physics in her hands and believe me...so far, hell has broken loose quite a number of times...how? check this out...(this might be a little dirty, but it's reality)

Did you know that shit can have charge? that it can be a very good conductor and have the corresponding electric field and potential?? By the way, we must've been the first to calculate the electric field due to infinite shit..(if you haven't realized, she was referring to 'sheet' and not shit like how it sounds..)

Further, we were told that the distance of a point from the origin can also be negative..

Did you know that the dot product of two vectors can give us a vector as well?

Formulae, which took decades to shape up by brilliant minds, are of your making in this class; depending on your aesthetic sense, you can create as many formulae as you want....I guess, everyone from Newton's time must have turned in his grave a good number of times!!!

The other day, she says to the four of us,"come to me with notebook and pain"!! Once again, if you haven't got what it means, she was referring to a pen....All the garbage of the same kind has been flooding our classroom ever since her session began.
But, on a serious note, D does take efforts, and that too, sincerely at that. She does a good amount of study for the class and, to be honest, she doesn't always spew crap..only once in every three lectures. The problem is, despite her commendable efforts, she fails to get the message across the students' brains; astonishingly, she does so in an effort to explain each word...

Now, with the semester fast moving to its end, I wonder what more is coming along the way........some thing like relativistic shit??..

Coolie..

blogging is pretty difficult these days...going by the way our beloved college's piling the work on us. Anyways..I did get some time to see one of the very good 'comedies' of the 1980s..Coolie. Yeah..you guessed it right, the Big B starer. May be director Manmohan Desai did plan a serious venture, but me and my family here found it pretty funny to see out of the world things happen. For example:

A falcon (Big B's pet) always enters the scene from god knows where to come and spoil the villain's plans. The poor fellow has no choice but to look around helplessly(despite having all weapons to take care of that damned bird) till it comes and does good with his eyes!!!(boy what an eye popper!!!!) My apologies on not posting any pictures here..will try for them in the next post...

The characters in the movie are all related to one another through some means...like some orphan child happens to be one principal character's son and so on..you know..the stereotypical Bollywood stuff..funny enough..

This happens to be one of those movies where the show the incredible punctuality of the reel cops!! and the fools, they arrive in time only to arrest the only hot chick in the movie!!! how dumb!!!

We return to our friend, The Falcon here who truly has a great life span, does every thing that a man can do...like pick up a gun, almost talk to Big B..spot the baddie all alone and pluck out his eyes, get out of a closed car on its own..and what not!!! it was a treat to watch such marvels!!! Now, I'm considering getting one myself...may be it'll help me finish my assignments off!!!!!

Besides the comic part of the movie...it had a strong sense of Communism and a strongly echoing message of communal harmony throughout...I guess some of those Left parties might've considered putting the falcon as their party mascot or something...dunno why the didn't do it...

At the end of the movie..Big B gets shot thrice in his chest from a revolver at point blank range and still the Godly Docs at Bollywood manage to save him..sounds some what parallel to a few of those Tamil movies where the lead hero can die only if he chooses to!!!! For example..in the recent movie Sivaji, Rajnikanth gets a decent shock from a 440 V supply, he's given a few shock pulses into his heart after a few hours and he zooms back to life with that heavily accented "cool" on his lips!!

At the end of the day...no matter how much unexpected be a movie's outcome...as long as its from bollywood...it still provides entertainment in some form...be it a serious story with comic outcomes or cheap comedies or those in which only the feminine element is worth watching..