Munich Week 2 + Olympiapark and Koenigsplatz

This week at work I worked a little bit with the acoustic testing with my mentor Jann, but I’ve transitioned into working more with my other mentor Fritz.  We’re doing Quasi-Static Photogramatry which is a method of design evaluation involving taking pictures with at high definition camera of points all around the car.  When you take pictures of these points from multiple angles, the computer program can recreate the geometry of the car.  Once you apply forces to the car, these points are displaced and you can analyze and measure the shifts in the car’s structure.  So far we’ve been doing this with torsions, where on one side of the car, the wheels are raised and the other side is lowered.  This simulates a situation where a car is parked on a curb with one side up on the higher side and the other in the street.  This happens quite a lot in Germany.  In fact I’ve seen many cases where the street parking was designed that way where the parking space is only about half the width of the car, so that the other half is up on the sidewalk.  I’m enjoying this a lot.  It’s pretty fun taking pictures all day.  Soon I’m going to learn how to analyze the results, but right now I’m basically collecting data for the computer program.  Next week is going to be really exciting because Monday I get to go to a test track where we are going to pull the car at about 40km/hr over a steel block (basically like a speed bump) and through a deep gap (basically like a ditch).  We’re going to take pictures of the before and after to analyze the effects.

On Wednesday, me and the other co-ops got to go to a driving simulation.  It was a half car perched on hydraulic pistons that controlled the movement.  It looked just like something you would see at an amusement park.  There was a huge screen a road displayed and we got to each go in and drive it.  It was amazing because the inside of the car was a real interior and all the buttons worked including the air conditioning and when I got to drive, it felt completely real.  The guy controlling the simulation could add bumps in the road and going over those bumps felt real.  The coolest thing is that they have modeled several BMW cars plus several competitors’ cars like Mercedes, Porsche, Audis, and even some American made.  They were able to switch the models seamlessly while I was driving, simulating each driving experience and asking my opinions on which ones had better drivability than others.  It was really amazing.

On Thursday, we got a Rolls Royce Ghost in the lab to run some acoustic testing on.  The car is worth $300,000!  As soon as it rolled in everybody flocked to it and the entire department spent easily an hour and a half oogling over it, playing with all the widgets, and having lots of laughs.  It was a really fancy car and was good fun to test out.  Here's what it looks like:

On Friday, I got to ride to Regensburg with my boss’s boss Helmut Schneeweiss to check out the production plant they have there.  He unfortunately was there doing some managerial stuff and spent the whole time discussing stuff with his colleagues, but we walked through a lot of the plant and I got to see all the robot arms doing spot welds and carrying car parts.  It’s really freaky looking down a long aisle of these robot arms all swinging around.  It looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. 

No, not that kind of robot arm!

This weekend I went to Olympia park where the 1972 Summer Olympics were held and did a tour of the inside of Olympia Stadium.  The tour was great but it was a little disappointing because the field was all dirt and they were working on it with construction equipment getting it set up for some kind of auto event.  Normally they let the tour groups play soccer on the field at the end, but instead we got to play on the practice field which was still cool.  After that I walked around the park and found some stone tiles that have famous people’s hand prints in them.  One in particular that stood out for me was an Aerosmith one because Janie likes them a lot.  After that I went up the Olympia tower, which is the largest lookout of Munich.  It was really high up and on a clear day, you’re supposed to be able to see the Alps.  I saw some shadows in the distance that I think were the Alps, but I couldn’t see them real well.  It was a great view to see the enormousness of Munich, but it was too high to really appreciate much of the details.  But I did get an excellent view of the BMW 4 cylinder headquarters and the BMW Museum.

For sure the largest Fussball table I've ever seen

Janie, this one's for you!

Sunday I went to Königsplatz, and on the way passed a high-end car repair place and was looking across the street at the sweet cars they had in their parking lot when I ran directly into a pole!  There was a really old guy who passed by me when this happened and I warned him to watch out for that pole and he laughed really hard.  Sadly that’s the second bout I’ve had with a pole since I’ve been here.  When we first got to Bonn the second week in Germany, I was walking next to Justin looking to the side when this bar came up out of the ground and bent around and back into the ground again.  Well it was perfectly crotch height and I walked directly into it.  It hurt … a lot.

Anyway, Königsplatz is an impressive square containing three buildings in Greek or Roman type architecture.  It contains the Glyptothek which is a museum that holds a collection of ancient Greek and Roman sculptures, the Propyläen which is an enormous gate, and the Staatliche Antikensammlungen which contains a collection of the state of Bavaria’s antiques from Greek and Roman art.  All three are beautiful buildings.  The most interesting thing is that the Königsplatz was used during the Third Reich during Hitler’s rise to power for the Nazi party’s mass rallies.

There's more than one reason this is an amusing picture

After that I went grocery shopping and cooked my first ever German meal: Bratwurst and sauerkraut.  It was delicious!