Jake Zdrojewski
Participants
Summer Internships 2003 Main Page
This summer
I was fortunate enough to secure a summer internship at Apple Rubber
Products Inc., located in Lancaster, New York. I was assigned to the
quality control lab where I worked with a variety of equipment used to
ensure the products produced and distributed met customer specifications.
Some of the testing equipment included: a tensile tester, specific gravity machine, durometer, rheometer, and a Fourier transform infrared spectrometer. I later had to give a presentation to all of the engineers on operation of the FT-IR machine and possible future applications. Another aspect of my summer job was to determine contamination located in returned samples or products. This was accomplished by using the FT-IR and comparing its output to the library I had developed earlier of all the chemicals and products used in the plant. Toward the end of my time at Apple Rubber, I began to work more in the development of new polymers that were application specific. I worked on things from conductive silicone for use in electronics to a high-heat resistant silicone that used ceramic dust for heat transfer.
Overall my experiences this summer have cemented the fact that plastics and polymers is an area of chemical engineering that I enjoy, and I was able to put into application a number of ideas and principles that I had previously learned in class.