Michelle Spanjaards

Novembers 1^st 2015 till January 14^th 2016

Last winter I spent four months in Vienna for my internship. Here I studied the damage behavior of short fiber reinforced polypropylene, which involved performing static and dynamic tensile tests on polypropylene specimens reinforced with short fibers with different orientations. During the tensile tests the acoustic emission of the material was measured. The goal was to find out how the orientation of the fibers influenced the damage behavior of reinforced polypropylene by analyzing the measured acoustic emission.  However, it was a great challenge to visualize the obtained data in the frequency spectrum. The data sets contained millions of hits, which then had to be transformed  from the time domain into the frequency domain. This meant that aside from performing the experiments I spent most of my time writing a script to perform the transformation and visualize the measured results using Matlab.

During my time in Vienna I also joined ESN Wien. This is the Erasmus Student Network in Vienna. This was the quickest way to get to know  people, because they organize a lot of activities for international students.  We went to Bratislava to go sightseeing , joined international diners,  went to a real opera in the famous opera building of Vienna and had a lot of great parties. We even went skiing for a weekend!  All in all I  met a lot of great people and learned about the Austrian culture while doing an interesting internship at the university. It were a great couple of months!