alex walsh
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AGE: 22
HOMETOWN: MONTREAL, QUEBEC
MAJOR: MECHANICAL ENGINEERING
INTERNED AT: BOMBARDIER AEROSPACE
FAVOURITE
SUPERHERO: IRON MAN. “I LIKE WATCHING HIS DESIGN PROCESS. AND HE’S GOT LOTS OF COOL TOYS.”
Alex Walsh got a taste for high adrenaline while teaching gliding to air cadets — an appetite that came in handy during his internship at Bombardier Aerospace. Working in the company’s flight sciences department, located just down the street from Montreal’s international airport, Walsh helped adjust the simulated model of an airplane to match the airplane’s real-life behaviour. He’d input data relevant to a specific occurrence — such as the pilot input for the take-off of a CRJ1000 — and then study the simulated aircraft response.
“If the sim didn’t correspond to what a test plane actually did in that same situation, then we modified the computer model to get the same results,” Walsh explains. “It’s important that the computer model reflects real life as closely as possible for when pilots are training on simulators.”
The end of his summer internship didn’t mean the end of research for the fourth-year mechanical engineering student. In October, he traveled to Naples, Italy to present a paper at the International Astronautical Congress. (The Canadian Space Agency funded Walsh’s trip.) The paper was based on Walsh’s in-progress undergraduate thesis, supervised by assistant professor James Forbes, which explores a new control mechanism for flexible telescoping robotic arms. (The problem: the lighter and faster the robotic arm, the more it vibrates.)
Although both his internship and thesis research use the MATLAB programming language, Walsh says he got “completely different things”
out of the two experiences. “My thesis research is a lot of analytical thinking and working things out from scratch. For my internship, a lot more numbers were involved, and you had to program quite a bit to be able to handle them. It was really interesting to get experience with that other side — and to actually do the same kind of work as an actual engineer would do in a firm.”