This past year has been a rollercoaster of successes and failures with respect to my research project. I spent months designing and building an apparatus on which I would perform experiments to obtain the coefficients of static and kinetic friction of the wood-on-wood contact of the larger shear wall. After obtaining the coefficient of friction through a series of experiments, digital image correlation, and MATLAB coding, we were ready to run the official test on the real shear wall in the High Bay of the Science and Engineering Hall. To our great dismay, the coefficient of friction was too large and did not yield the predicted results. We had to find a solution and researched various methods to fix this issue. Strangely enough, certain studies seemed to prove that applying melted beeswax onto the surface of the wood would help the situation, so I gave it a shot. In a not-so-shocking turn of events, the beeswax failed to improve our problem. This was unfortunately the worst moment to have another failure as the global pandemic of COVID-19 surged at this time.
Due to COVID-19 and GW sending all students home, the research project went on a little hiatus as is quite complicated to perform physical lab tests online. Simulations are great, but when it comes to testing the simulation in real life, Zoom simply won’t cut it. That being said, there is always online research that can be done, especially in figuring out a solution to the most recent problem. You can’t let failure bring you down or stop you from finding the solution to a problem. Trial and error can be tedious. Scientific trial and error is what research is all about. Test if a theory works in practice. If it works, great! And if it doesn’t, then find another solution to make it work.