Mechanical Engineer - Career Advice

[marone]

Hello guys! I have been looking for a place to get career advice/insight for a while, and I am very glad I stumbled upon this forum.

I am a Mechanical Engineer working for one of the top construction companies by market capital in a developing country. I have 1.5 years of experience in this field. Since my department is relatively new, I had to work in several loosely related areas. One of these areas was process piping. We were tasked with designing the fuel supply piping for 4 turbine generator units. And I was tasked with simulating the process.

I ended up using Simulink (MATLAB) for the task as I was already familiar with it. I simulated the process using a tank, a few pipes, a centrifugal pump, a flow control valve (I used a poppet valve with a proportional feedback control loop to control the opening of the valve), a few filters (I used hydraulic resistances to simulate filters). Then the lines would branch off into 4 lines, each line connected to one of the turbine units and a back pressure regulating valve connected to the return line. For the back pressure regulating valve I used a pilot-operated check valve and connected the outlet to the pilot terminal so that only the inlet pressure would affect the operation of the valve. As for the turbine generator units, I spent of few hours studying the supplier’s P&ID and the components’ datasheets (of course not everything was straight forward and I had to use my imagination in a lot of things) and ended up reducing the system to a fixed-displacement pump with a pressure relief valve, a filter, a three way control valve with a return line to the inlet of the turbine unit, and an orifice to simulate the spray nozzles. The datasheet of the three way control valve said that its function was to control the flow rate from the inlet to the outlet while maintaining a constant pressure difference between them and directing any additional flow to the return terminal. I ended up simulating this using a puppet valve and a cartridge valve to control the pressure difference.

Of course this is a very simplified model and it is only useful in simulating the steady state process, but that’s the best I could do since I didn’t have the dynamic characteristics of most of the components.

Anyway, this is the kind of stuff I have always been fascinated with, whether it being the inner workings of hydraulic / pneumatic valves (especially servovalves) or how these valves could be integrated into a system (basically things you'd stumble upon in a control engineering textbook). I would like to know what kind of a career I need to pursue in order to work in this field and what companies and industries I need to look into. There is also the issue of how to apply for a job in a different country (the economic conditions in my country are in a steady decline).

I hope my post wasn't too long, and I am looking forward to hearing your feedback and recommendations. Thanks!

 

[SlideRuleEra]

Look into working for a large, infrastructure company such as:

Bechtel

Fluor

Parsons

http://www.SlideRuleEra.net

http://www.VacuumTubeEra.net

 

[rotw]

...or a company specialized in process controls or even a valve manufacturer.
One other example could be a manufacturer of variable speed gearbox which involves a lot of systems engineering and hydraulics.
Not sure they all simulate big systems dynamics but I see some overlap with your description.

 

[marone]

SlideRuleEra, thank you very much for your suggestions, I have checked these companies and they have some very interesting positions. I think I'll be contacting them very soon.

rotw, thanks to you to, these seem like very interesting fields! Do you know what kind of position do I need to be looking for? For example a position like control engineer seems to always refer to a field in electrical engineering. Is there an equivalent term for mechanical engineers?