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Japanese automaker, Nissan, has joined the fight to be the King of the Storage Throne. They have announced their new xStorage system which would be taking the recycled batteries from their Leaf electric vehicles and then repurposing it. The battery would be able to act as an energy source for a house, taking it off the grid, and also perform tasks like charging electric vehicles due to the 12 Nissan Leaf battery modules inside the body. For now, Nissan says the xStorage unit will only be available in the UK and sell for £3,200 (US$4,600). They join a list of growing competitors who would like to sell you their lithium-ion batteries for households, like Tesla. 

That's not all Nissan is doing. They will be the first major contributor to the vehicle-to-grid system, kicking off in the United Kingdom. Gareth Dunsmore, Electric Vehicles Director for Nissan Europe at the announcement event said: "Nissan has announced today something that is going to help revolutionise the car industry but the energy industry as well. We've launched the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) system with our partner ENEL. That will allow us to put in place a system to take energy out of your car and put it back into your home and put it back into the grid as well." He also says that customers will receive money of up to £600 a year in subsidies from their power provider. "The Nissan Leaf has energy to deliver up to two days of full energy to a house. If you put in everyone in the UK driving an electric car, essentially we could start turning off an entire coal-burning fuel station." 

It has been said that the V2G initiative of which Nissan will be the first in the UK to contribute to, could save the country £2.4 billion in electricity costs by 2030. They have named these right-here-right-now energy endeavours the 'Nissan Futures' series. 

Paul Willcox, Chairman of Nissan Europe said: "The creation of the 'Nissan Futures' series was born out of Nissan's deep desire to create a safer and more sustainable future for everyone. It's no longer enough for automakers to work in a silo. The challenges of tomorrow require solutions that transcend single industries or companies. That's why we're partnering with like-minded businesses from other sectors to deliver new solutions that support a more sustainable future." He also confidently said that in the next 10 years, the world will see more change in the industry than the past 100. "We are entering the decade of disruption and it's an opportunity for Nissan and the world around us to behave and act differently." 

Now that the United States is a liquefied natural gas exporter, they no longer need to import as much gas. The U.S. joins immediate neighbor, Canada, in exporting a good amount of gas, so much so, that the two countries could be influencing the price of gas very soon. 

The Canadian National Energy Board have estimated that natural gas exports will shrink in numbers over the next 30 years due to the exports that the U.S. is now making. 

Net imports of natural gas from Canada have been falling for years. Rising shale gas production in the United States, especially in the Northeast, is key among several factors affecting this trend. 

- EIA Independent Statistics & Analysis for U.S. Energy Information Administration

The United States has indicated that they would be building 15 LNG plants across the country that would be solidifying them as a huge player in the game for LNG exports and presiding over what the price should be. 

Elsewhere, Chile will be sending liquefied natural gas Argentina's way this week. Trade relations between the two countries have recently "warmed", according to Reuters. Argentina and Chile haven't exchanged gas in 16 years since exports were cut off in 2000. An industry insider said that Chile could be exporting up to  1.5 billion cubic meters of gas at $6.90 per million British thermal units. 

Further afield, the liquefied natural gas industry is ignoring the traditional Asian markets that have supplied LNG to them before and are now looking for new, more expanding LNG markets, according to The Wall Street Journal. An employee involved with the International Group of Liquefied Natural Gas Importers, Vincent Demoury spoke to WSJ. He says that LNG exports have jumped up by 2.5% in 2015. Due to Asia's declining interest in LNG, Demoury says Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan have grabbed hold of 72% of the market share that Asia is leaving behind. 

Source: BOEREPORT

Google has released a preview of what they have been busy with in the world of virtual reality. The video shows two artists using a virtual landscape as their canvas and create with the brush that equips them with the tools to create artworks. 

On the website TiltBrush, there are more detailed views of what the software actually looks like the inside of the VR goggles. There are dynamic brushes that can paint a plethora of weird and wonderful looking things in the virtual world. Saving of snapshots looks fairly simple so that you can show a 2D representation of what you have been painting but can always launch back into the 3D world of your paintings. You can literally walk around your painting. 

The TiltBrush is already conditioned to work with the HTC Vive and its controllers. You can read the set-up guide of how to use the HTC Vive to utilize Google TiltBrush with this handy pdf.  

Another prerequisite is that Steam is required, so it seems that is the official app store they are launching the app to right now. The app is an impressive look into how software engineers will factor into the future of developing apps for virtual reality purposes. 

Robots may be working amongst you in your office very soon. Maybe that's why you have time to read this article right now, because some automated process is already happening, doing some aspects of your job for you. Physical robots that assist with everyday tasks will also see the light of day. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. The one thing that these robots currently lack is hand dexterity. They cannot grip well and it is hard for them to utilize their hands like a normal human could. Some biomedical robots used for surgery can reach into the human body with an unparalleled dexterity, however, robots with actual hands modeled after human hands are a bit clunkier. 

Therefore, a team of computer science and engineering researchers at the University of Washington went to work to attempt to build a robot hand that has dexterity and which can store and learn from the mistakes it makes if it does happen to drop something.

Talking to Design Engineering, Vikash Kumar, a UW doctoral student in computer science and engineering said: "Hand manipulation is one of the hardest problems that roboticists have to solve. A lot of robots today have pretty capable arms but the hand is as simple as a suction cup or maybe a claw or a gripper."

The lab in charge of studying the human hand and how to design it into a robotic hand model is the University of Washington Movement Control Laboratory. The engineers developed several algorithms that enabled the computer to send complex hand movements to the hand itself. The results are staggering, as shown in the video below. 

The team then uses sensors and motion captures so that they can extract data from their research and learn from it in their future endeavours in attempting to improve the dexterity of robot hands modeled after human hands. The robot hand has five fingers and looks to be able to understand how humans grip onto objects. 

"Usually, people look at a motion and try to determine what exactly needs to happen -- the pinky needs to move that way, so we'll put some rules in and try it and if something doesn't work, oh the middle finger moved too much and the pen titled, so we'll try another rule," says lead author and lab director Emo Todorov. "It's almost like making an animated film -- it looks real but there was an army of animators tweaking it. What we are using is a universal approach that enables the robot to learn from its own movements and requires no tweaking from us." 

Kumar explains how the robot learns from its actions to ensure that it grips objects in the correct way. He says: "It's like sitting through lessons, going home and doing your homework to understand things better and then coming back to school a little more intelligent the next day." The computer uses the motion capture cameras and the algorithms and refines the process based on what the algorithms command it not to do. 

University of Washington

Hannover Messe 2016 is the biggest conference where industry heads come together to chat about where the world is going in the context of the world renowned fourth revolution, known as Industrie 4.0. Now that the conference is over, the immediate outlines of what the world should be expecting can now be summarized and contemplated. This year both Barack Obama and Angela Merkel attended the conference. 

Obama spoke about the fully 3D printed electric car that the United States was showing off at the conference, joking that he would give it a test drive. He also pitched the United States as a world-class country where the companies attending should consider "setting up shop" in. "It's even easier for companies like yours to come and build in America," the President said. He underlined the fact that the United States and the European Union already have the largest trade and investment relationship in the world. Obama pointed out the numbers that this partnership has led to:

• 3 billion dollars of goods and services every single day
• Investment of $4 trillion in each other's economies
• 13 million jobs 

Obama also ended his speech off by saying the TTIP (Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership) policies that they are infusing into global law would assist a free and open internet. This would help the world of the Internet of Things, industrial automation and more. 

Professor Thomas Bauernhansl, the Head of Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation told SAP TV: "What we see at the moment is that we try to connect all resources in production and that will offer us a completely new world for optimisation of the whole manufacturing processes."

Siemens was particularly instrumental in the topic of Industrie 4.0, who had one of the biggest stands at the conference this year. 

Current CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, also had a keynote at the show and gave his impressions on what the future of Industrie 4.0 will be. He said: "The very thing that you produce, the very thing that you manufacture, for the first time, is connected with all of the web of activity around it. It's not just the connection with everything, it is the ability to reason about that activity, that data that's being generated continuously."

A plethora of other companies showed off their robotics solutions for the impending revolution of automated factories that are connected to the internet. The fact that Merkel and Obama both attended the conference shows that Hannover Messe is now the most important showcase of industrial automation in the world today and will continue to grow into the conference that leads the conversation in what is next in that industry. 

Good news out of MIT this week. They are actively trying to get rid of our wrinkled skin. 

Daniel Anderson, associate professor at MIT said: "The goal was to really create something that was totally invisible, breathable, could coat the skin, protect it, perhaps deliver drugs to it and also perhaps even make it look better." 

Robert Langer, a chemical engineer, and professor at MIT, involved with the project, said: "What we've been able to do is create a cream, basically, that you could put on the skin and then once it's on the skin it can actually form, essentially, a second skin. And it's transparent, it's essentially invisible, it's not messy at all and has good mechanical strength." 

Langer says the technology works in two stages: There is an invisible cream that a test subject can apply to their skin involving a polymer that binds the cream to the skin. The second step is applying a catalyst that causes a reaction on the skin. "You could use it in various different areas. One set of things might be in cosmetics where you use it to tighten skin on different parts of the body, another could be for therapeutics where you use it as a whole new plastic ointment that could be used to deliver drugs to the skin to treat different skin diseases," Langer said. 

The second skin research has been a ten-year project that was conducted by scientists at MIT, Massachusetts General Hospital, Living Proof and Olivo Labs. 

You can purchase and read the research conducted that has been published in the Nature journal. 

Electric vehicles. A word that is forever in our collective vocabulary in the world because of the need to cut down fossil fuels in the world today. We've reported on Tesla's recent intentions to produce half a million of their Model 3s by the end of 2018, Toyota investigating what could be powering vehicles in the future and almost every automaker out there trying to move their operations to cleaner processes after being named and shamed in emission scandals. 

Cars are being powered by the kind of lithium-ion technology you'd find in energy storage units that are now making their way into houses. However, carmakers are reaching the conclusion that EV (Electric vehicle) batteries can be reused AFTER they've been utilized inside a car. There is a point that EVs come to when the battery no longer functions as it should, under guidelines that would render an EV operational. However, it is said that even after it is has served its purpose, it still has 70% of its energy storage that can still be utilized. This is allegedly surprising the industry due to recently thinking that the batteries wouldn't have much use after used in vehicles. 

Navigant Research recently observed that a 2012 Chevrolet Volt had driven up to 300,000 miles without any "battery degradation" issues. 

The idea is that once the battery has been used in the EV and decommissioned for use in a car, it can be added to a solar PV system and power a house. Essentially, making second-hand car batteries reusable and expanding a growing trend of grid peak time shaving. 

The batteries inside electric vehicles have also been suggested as a possible energy source for the grid whilst they are parked in an area, which would assist utilities at alleviating some of the strain on the grid. Now with the reusability factor of these batteries, the possibilities of how many hours kilowatt-hours could be generated is staggering. 

Pablo Valencia, GM's senior manager for Battery Life Cycle Management said: "Even after the battery has reached the end of its useful life in a Chevrolet Volt, up to 80 percent of its storage capacity remains. 

The technology will no doubt grow and grow as more electric vehicles are sold and the battery technology is further developed to see how EVs batteries could be repurposed after the use in cars. This is not new information, the feasibility of reuse has been spoken about since 2014. In ScienceDirect in a journal entitled Environmental feasibility of re-use of electric vehicle batteries the researchers wrote: "The magnitude of CO₂ mitigation associated with battery re-use is similar to that of switching from using a conventional vehicle to an electric vehicle, meaning the greenhouse gas benefits of vehicle electrification could be doubled by extending the life of EV batteries, and better using off-peak low-cost clean electricity." 

Where in the world are the engineering mentors? Experts are saying that engineering mentorship is something that could lead to more competent engineering workforce in every industry. Not only is mentorship being encouraged at the college level but also at the working level. It is seemingly never too late to teach an old dog new tricks. 

An impressive feat of instilling an attitude of mentorship occurs at Penn State University. At the Penn State Mechanical Engineering Society (PSMES) the alumni of the society have been forming mentorship programs for the last eight years. The Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering oversees this project and can see 39 alumni mentors to 54 students. 

Brandon Angle, a mechanical engineering junior in the PSMES program told the Penn State website: "My mentor and I often communicate right before a big event and he'll give me the confidence I need. It helps to have the guidance from someone who's been there and who went through all the experiences that I'm going to go through and just knowing that if I take his advice it's probably going to lead me somewhere where I want to be." 

An alumnus involved with the project, Robert Swope, who has his qualification in mechanical engineering, said: "Almost all of the students I've mentored have not really focused on what they want to do. They have a vague idea of their goals, but they can't verbalize what their career would be." 

Mentoring, of course, is not limited to the college set-up but can also be practiced within a company. The Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institue of Technology, Steve Mackay, talks of 'mentoring vigorously'. He says the process can be done by: "Taking your young engineers, the new guys, the new chums on the block who have joined the company, and give them some support. In the old days, we had lovely two, three three-year training programs for engineers, of course, most of those are gone. So, it's up to us."

"Helping a poor young graduate who's probably come from a very high theoretical background, done some exotic mathematics at a university for three or four years and finds the workplace completely different. So, the trick is, to come along and give them a helping hand and get them to work productively as engineers as soon as possible," Mackay said, in the tenth episode of his YouTube series, the Engineering News Network. He also gives a checklist of mentoring guidelines that can be handed down to a young engineer so that they can learn the ropes: 

• Give them some worthwhile projects to do 
• Give them a vision
• Give them ongoing support
• Help them with troubleshooting
• Give them some basic skills: project management, communications skills
• Try and get them to do a lot of hands hands-on projects 

Elsewhere in the world, Bosch is setting up 75 "vocational training opportunities" where students will interact with professionals, mentors and higher-ups in subjects like mechatronics and industrial mechanics. The new 75 positions exclusive to Italy and Spain join the handful of other projects they run in Germany. The company is certain their mentoring and setting up of apprenticeships will deal with societal issues like youth unemployment and build a good wave of competent engineers in countries that would be improved by the assistance of engineers. 

We have all sat through yet another interminable boring PowerPoint presentation often riddled with poor use of graphics. As engineering professionals we tend to stick to the technical side and most of us avoid presentations like the plague. However here are some really great tips I have picked up  (or stolen?) on how to use graphics (or visuals) in your next engineering presentation– well, with some panache.

Dear Colleagues

We have all sat through yet another interminable boring PowerPoint presentation often riddled with poor use of graphics. As engineering professionals we tend to stick to the technical side and most of us avoid presentations like the plague. However here are some really great tips I have picked up  (or stolen?) on how to use graphics (or visuals) in your next engineering presentation– well, with some panache.

There is no doubt that graphics are vital in a good presentation and can gain a lot of attention from technical personnel who immediately sit up when a piping diagram or a pump or circuit schematic appears on a slide. But I get quite despondent when I see graphics used wastefully and poorly. And to add insult to injury, probably one of the killers these days is the use of enormous deluges of videos (which often are poorly explained and have very little relation to the actual presentation). Another trick is to make extensive use of sound and animated graphics. Which while initially entertaining end up confusing (and ultimately boring) everyone.

There is (unfortunately!) no replacement as yet (by machine or software) for a well researched, rehearsed and dynamic presentation by you. But there are no points about graphics which can assist you in your next presentation.

The keys to use of good graphics are:

• Use them sparingly
• Make them big so that they can be clearly seen
• Make them simple so that they can be understood (even by an orang utan!)
• Avoid garish colors that can’t be seen at the back of the room
• Make them memorable, so that people will remember them long after your presentation has been concluded.
• Engineering professionals tend to prefer useful schematics rather than cute pictures of industrial plant and equipment

So why use graphics in your presentations?

• You simply can’t present slide after slide of text – too boring – so they can be a useful divider of text and refresher
• Explain difficult concepts where text is not up to the task
• Graphics are great for getting across symbolic points you want to be remembered
• They provide a useful prompt or prop for you to talk around when discussing some concept
• If used appropriately, they show your audience that you have gone to some trouble to create a really professional presentation to benefit them (rather than a bunch of text-ridden slides)

Cut out the clutter (and noise)
Many graphics have an enormous amount of clutter in them. One needs to apply the so called “three second rule”. If your audience can’t read and understand the graphic in this time; you need to simplify it further. Otherwise they are distracted from what you are telling them as they try and unravel the mysteries of your graphic.

Ways of reducing clutter include:

• Remove unnecessary detail such as grids, numbers and other irrelevant details
• Focus only on including that you are discussing (this may mean eliminating the remainder of the graphic).
• Get rid of any numerical details and use a bar or line graph to get the point across
• Don’t use legends with graphs – label directly on the lines in the graph to minimize your audience flipping back and forth to the legend.

Give your bulleted sequences the bullet
An audience can be exhausted by the endless bulleted lists on slide after slide of PowerPoint. So be innovative here and use a graphic to replace the bullets. For example, a star with the individual bulleted items at each point of the star often looks far more appealing than plain text.

Symbols and more symbols
A great list of symbols as a replacement for using text to make your message (of clichés) more memorable could include a graphic of:

• An electrical plug and socket for “plugged into a concept or thought”
• An engineer swinging a bat for “taking a swing at corruption/poor practices…”
• A rocket with the concept written on it for “taking off like a rocket”
• A blindfolded person about to step down a manhole with no cover for “blind to danger or safety issues”
• Kids building blocks for “the basic building blocks in creating some new concept”

And at the end of the day; ensure that an incredible graphic doesn’t take your audience away from you and distract them totally from your message.

Thanks to Peter and Cheryl Reimold for some good ideas in writing this piece.

Always remember Alfred Montapert’s comment about the end game of visualization – you still need to do something :  “To accomplish great things we must first dream, then visualize, then plan... believe... act”!

Yours in engineering learning

Steve

Mackay’s Musings – 10th May’16 #599
780, 293 readers – www.eit.edu.au/cms/news/blog-steve-mackay

The next innovations and solutions to the United Kingdom and perhaps even the world's problems could be coming out of Cambridge University thanks to one man, Sir James Dyson. He has provided funds that will see the opening of the Dyson Centre for Engineering Design at Cambridge University. The Dyson company just recently released their brand new design for the re-engineered hair dryer, that might be taking the world by storm quite soon. Now with this announcement, the new engineering center, Dyson might be releasing all kinds of weird and wonderful engineered products.

"It's economic suicide that we're not creating more engineers. They create the technologies that Britain can export, generating wealth for the nation. But we're facing a chronic shortage of them," said Dyson. The Royal Academy of Engineering - in 2015 already - spoke of a shortage of engineers in the UK, estimating that they would be short on engineers if they didn't produce more than a million in five years. This year, however, Britain faces a possible exit from the European Union, which experts warn, would set them back even further in engineering fields.

However, what is encouraging is that engineers who have made it in the industry - in Britain specifically - are now looking back and creating opportunities for engineers to continue creating. Dyson spoke to the Telegraph, saying: "Britain has a wonderful tradition of inventing technologies and products. Rutherford Appleton Labs has more Nobel Prizes per square inch than anywhere else in the world. But I wonder how long that will go on. Science and engineering are no longer subjects that young people here are interested in." 

The center includes 3D printers, laser cutters, machine tooling areas and more, according to the Telegraph. The center allegedly cost £2.65 million for Dyson who says that the new center will achieve new breakthroughs and will change the way we live today. On top of that, the Dyson Foundation has put £60 million into encouraging younger people to embrace STEM subjects to lead to more engineers in the world. 

Dyson also felt proud in the fact that his center will see a handful of women engineers. He said, "At the Dyson School of Design Engineering, 50 percent of its first intake of 44 students is female. That's a phenomenally high percentage and I'm thrilled. One of the tragedies of engineering is that so few are women." 

Network security engineers, we need your help. Kaspersky Lab has released a report named the IT Threat Evolution in Q1 2016 and names ransomware as the main threat to cybersecurity in the year 2016. According to their report, there was 459,970 known attempted malware attacks in the beginning of the year. Crypto ransomware attacks stood at 372,602 individual computers that had tried to illicit money from unsuspecting victims. 

2016 has only just got underway, but the first three months have already seen the same amount of cybersecurity events that just a few years ago would have seemed normal for a whole year. The main underlying trends remained the same, while there was signficant growth in trends related to traditional cybercrime, especially mobile threats and global ransomware epidemics.

- excerpt from IT Threat Evolution in Q1 2016

The more worrying realization companies should come to is that if the future of industrial production is the Industrial Internet of Things - where their systems will be vulnerable to ransomware or cyber attacks -  measures need to be taken to protect themselves. The names to watch out for, according to Kaspersky are:

• Teslacrypt
• CTB-Locker
• Cryptowall/Cryptodef
• Cryakl
• Scatter & Rakhni

Those are the most notorious crypto-families operating right now, infecting computers all over the world and causing some companies to fork out amounts of money to unlock all of their data files. 

Kaspersky says there have been 30 percent more ransomware attacks than last year and only in the first three months of the year. Security is becoming the name of the game and will be in the future boom of the Internet of Things revolution. 

ZDNet spoke to Aleks Gostev, chief security expert in Kaspersky's global research and analysis team. He says: "Once the ransomware gets into the users' system, there is almost no chance of getting rid of it without losing personal data. The demand to pay the ransom in bitcoins makes the payment process anonymous and almost untraceable which is very attractive for fraudsters. Another threatening trend is the ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) business model where cybercriminals pay a fee for the propagation of malware or promise a percentage of the ransom paid by an infected user." 

Another company keeping a close eye on cybersecurity is Cisco. They have released a document named The Cisco Annual Security Report 2016. They have put the number of cybercrime business per year at $2.1 trillion. 

Computer Weekly has published a list of precautions a business/individual/corporation can take to avoid ransomware:

• Backup and be ready
• Keep a layered approach
• Keep up to date
• Check your privileges 
• Prepare to deal with criminals 

In an unsurprising move, Total, the French oil company, has decided to make a hefty bid to take over a battery maker named Saft Groupe SA. With the assistance of the French Financial Markets Authority, the two companies announced on Monday, that the battery maker would be bought for $1.082 billion. The acquiring of the company happens amidst a brand new branch recently launched by Total that will encourage cleaner practices of energy production. 

Total has offered to pay $41.62 per share, which equals the amount of money they are being bought out for. Saft is also a French firm that specializes 

Total's Chief Executive, Patrick Pouyanné, said: "The acquisition of Saft is part of Total's ambition to accelerate its development in the field of renewable energy and electricity." Saft, according to their website, claims to have made $863 million in 2015, making them the world leader in advanced technology batteries. "The combination of Saft and Total will enable Saft to become the Group's spearhead in electricity storage.It will notably allow us to complement our portfolio with electricity storage solutions, a key component of the future growth of renewable energy."

Yann Duchesne, chairman of Saft's Supervisory Board said in their statement: "We are delighted with this rapprochement, which was unanimously approved by the Supervisory Board thanks to its strong industrial rationale and its financial interest for our shareholders. 

Elsewhere

Amidst Tesla officially releasing their Powerwall to U.S. households, a rival has entered the game. An Australian company has released their battery storage unit called the Enphase. The orders are now open and the company employs 1,000 installers to assist consumers in getting the units up and running in their households. 

Nathan Dunn, managing director of Enphase Asia-Pacific told Gizmodo: "We believe the Enphase Home Energy Solution represents the most compelling and technologically advanced residential energy solution in the world today. In fact, it is the only complete energy system that we've seen to date and we expect the initial demand to be driven by installers looking to retrofit existing residential solar PV systems. Enphase expects the next wave of demand to be driven by new solar PV systems owners enticed by the elegance and simplicity of our solution."

The company is selling to Australia and New Zealand right now, however, they are focusing on the worldwide market just like Tesla has been doing. The first shipments are estimated to be happening in August and if you would like to contact an installer in your area, you can apply on their website: HERE. The interesting part of their product is that it can be added to pre-existing solar PV systems where some companies require their own PV systems to be used. It could be a draw card for some consumers who have already tried to remove themselves from the grid. 

What could save the oil industry's plummeting price crisis? Perhaps wind-powered water injection could save the oil and gas industry. Allegedly, the water injection will assist with oil recovery in "offshore oil fields." The project to enforce this new system is called WIN WIN which directly translates into WINd-powered Water INjection. How it would work is to build floating wind turbines which will supply power to water injection technology that would include pumps and "basic water injection" according to DNV GL, who were the initiators of the project. 

Gas and oil industry heads signed their companies up for the project of building floating turbines to test out the feasibility of the project for the future of making oil and gas cleaner and more efficient. The companies that took part were: ExxonMobil, ENI Norge, Nexen Petroleum UK Ltd., Statoil, VNG Norge, PG Flow Solutions and ORE Catapult. 

Remi Eriksen, Group President, and CEO of DNV GL, said: "The WIN WIN project showcases that the oil and gas industry can become a creative force in solving the world's energy trilemma by driving the development of reliable, clean and affordable technologies. This is a win for both the oil and gas and for the wind power industries." 

The company says that the wind turbines handling the water injection in a stand-alone system could completely change up the game and get more and more companies changing their ways and producing with more cleanliness. It would improve environmental performance and reduce costs, whilst avoiding emissions, says DNV GL. The system is also fully automated and powered by lithium-ion battery banks. The wind turbine can also be transported to different wells if needs be. 

"Recent developments  in floating wind turbines will now facilitate a new era where renewable energy is integrated with oil and gas operations. The first step in that journey is the WIN WIN concept," said DNV GL in a promotional video. 

DNV GL has spent time developing off-shore wind turbines, and is now assisting the oil and gas industry with these turbines that utilize a principle that they have coined called 'In-Float'. It is cost effective as well, being built by automated factories, transported to quays and then towed to the site and then used to generate electricity and now more recently, used to inject water. 

Career Junction is a website in South Africa that has released their 2016 Salary Review for engineers. The research was conducted between October 2015 and February 2016 to investigate how engineering salaries start out at beginner positions, and then how the salary changes in a senior position.

Engineering 

Building Construction

These numbers are limited to South Africa, however, they could give engineers around the world a good idea what salaries look like elsewhere in the world and could apply to the industries they are currently working in. It should give an idea of what to expect based on what engineers are making in South Africa. Or the situation could be improved elsewhere in the world, meaning engineers would be happy where they are right now and not considering travelling overseas to find better opportunities. 

Are you an engineer actively seeking to fill a position at a company that has its priorities straight when it comes to the environment? A global engineering firm named Arcadis might be the one for you. Their particular focus is on water, infrastructure and construction projects. And they're hiring. 

John Jastrem, Arcadis' North American CEO, told CNBC: "We're looking to hire approximately 400 engineers and scientists this year." He also confirmed that payroll would increase by 10 to 15% for the next five years. The company currently works on cleanup of sites in the mining sector to ensure the environment is protected after the first phase of engineering is completed. They also investigate the impact an engineering project will have on the environment, especially in oil projects. 

The company currently has 27,000 employees working in over 70 countries and improve the quality of life. They concern themselves with environmental and social impact assessment business. 

A recent hire by the company, Allesandro Casartelli, told Arcadis' official website: "The impact of business on the environment and the communities it serves has never been more important. Having a better understanding of these issues will not only help make corporates make better decisions but will also improve the quality of life for those who these businesses touch. I am very much looking forward to getting started and helping to develop this key part of the Arcadis business on behalf of our clients."

The company also reportedly brings in high school students who are currently studying STEM subjects to shadow the company for a day and see how their future-focused engineering firm works. On top of that, they also recruit students who have just graduated from college and put them straight into a STEM career. 

"We compete with Silicon Valley, we compete with the pharmaceutical industry," said Jastrem. "We really look for people who are on a lifetime mission to make the world a better place to live and have that desire to learn and innovate and to make some changes. 

Regardless, if you work for Arcadis or whether you find another engineering company that actively cares for the environment, it must be a good feeling to be involved somewhere that doesn't include harming the environment. The importance of being happy in a job and knowing that it is contributing to the greater good is valuable.

The Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology, Steve Mackay, speaks about the rule of two third for happiness, in his 33^rd episode of the Engineering News Network. He says: "If you are happy in your job, that's one, if you are happy where you live, that's item number two, and item number three is, if you're happy with who you're with...if you can achieve two of those three, then you are happy and should be very grateful."

Mackay puts this in the context of being in an engineering position. He also says that health is an important issue for engineers as well, an engineer should be healthy on top of being happy with where they are at in the engineering industry.  

There are engineering opportunities out there but finding the right one that enables a balanced life and being comfortable in your workplace environment, is the tough part. Mackay concludes his cautionary words on happiness with a quote. He said: "One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important." 

The global construction company Caterpillar has announced its very "integrated micro-grid solution" which reportedly utilizes solar photovoltaic panels and units to store the energy in. It is going by the name Cat Microgrid Technology  and will come in 1kW to 100MW solutions. PV-Tech confirms they are including thin-film solar panels, Caterpillar generators and energy storage technologies which now include lithium-ion batteries. 

Caterpillar said that their microgrid technology would be best suited for telecom towers, rural electrification, mining and industrial facilities where the units could be combined and connected to supply energy in an energy network setup. It has taken Caterpillar only one year since the announcement of their collaboration with photovoltaic developer First Solar. They called it a 'strategic alliance' and are looking at supplying to areas such as the Asia-Pacific regions, Africa, and Latin America, then gradually adding other customers not long after. 

The announcement from Caterpillar comes after Lockheed Martin - known for their aerospace engineering endeavours - joined the game with corporate and industrial sized battery units to supply energy to businesses in peak hours, alleviating stress on the grid. 

Rick Rathe, the general manager of new ventures for Caterpillar's Electric Power Business told Power Mag: "With the declining cost of renewable energy sources and rapid advances in energy storage technology, the time is right to provide an integrated application for remote power. Cat Microgrid technologies deliver an innovative, financially viable way to incorporate sustainable sources of energy into our existing portfolio of traditional power generation offerings." 

Visit their website to learn more about their entry into renewable energy technologies: http://www.cat.com/powergeneration. Their aim is to be the leader in offering renewable energy sources to multiple industries including agriculture, commercial businesses, construction, data centers, greenhouses, healthcare, landfills, manufacturing, mining, municipality, power plants, telecom, and utilities. Sounds like the heavy hitters are here to stay.

Australia wants to be the leader

The political party known as The Greens in Australia has said it would be beneficial if they were granted up to $2.9 billion to equip 1.2 million houses with energy storage units which could see the country becoming the leader of renewable energy in the world. The proposition also includes 30,000 businesses that would benefit from the energy storage units. An endeavour that would only cost the government $38 million, says the group. 

The Greens energy spokesman, Adam Brandt spoke to the Guardian Australia, saying: "Now is the time to jumpstart the battery industry, encourage the take up of storage and help make Australia a renewable energy leader." The group wants Australia to be fully integrated with energy storage units by up to 90% by 2030. 

These plans were thrown into the mix along with the Clean Energy Council's impending safety regulations on the photovoltaic panel installers in Australia, which is starting to equate to the country being the most prepared for the energy storage revolution. 

However, it seems the government of Australia has not yet latched on to The Greens plans, however, their fight continues. The Greens say too much money is going towards companies that still produce fossil fuels and that the government should strongly consider giving them the backing and make Australia the most forward thinking nation in terms of energy storage units. 

Earlier in the year the Consumer Electronics Show, 2016 took place in Las Vegas, allowing electronics manufacturers to show off the new innovations they had been building up in their factories. An autonomous passenger drone by the name of EHang was teased as the first autonomous aerial vehicle in history. Since then, more and more engineers have been lending their minds to companies to create autonomous passenger vehicles that could potentially take to the sky.

The company behind EHang is upping the ante with its confident claim that they will be able to manufacture 1,000 drones for a company named Lung Biotechnology PBC. The company in question wants to design lungs and other artificial organs which can then be flown to hospitals in need. The drone will be renamed to the Manufactured Organ Transport Helicopter (MOTH) and will be the efficient vehicle that transports the organs. 

The EHang 184 carries a single person at a speed of 10 MPH to 65 MPH through the air. The company is also able to fly their drones at night, which would be beneficial for hospitals that are in need at odd times of the night or the morning. According to the team of engineers, the drone can be preprogrammed on a course within a 10-mile radius. 

The company says: "Currently, organ transplants are limited by the number of brain-dead donors, which results in thousands of death on an organ transplant waiting lists each year." 

The plans to launch this initiative might take a while seeing as though artificially designed organs are not yet a reality. Lung Biotechnology rakes in $700 million in yearly sales, according to Engadget. However, the companies are excited by the prospect of being able to transport the artificial organs of the future. The company is conducting research in the pig-to-human xenotransplantation and stem cell technology biomedical engineering industry. Once it is declared safe to use, if at all, the drones and the artificial organs will be flown around the clock and save lives. Or at least that's the intention.

Tesla Motors Inc. Vice President of Production, Greg Reichow, and Vice President of Manufacturing, Josh Ensign have both left the company ahead of the announcement from Elon Musk that they would be ensuring 500,000 vehicles would be sold by 2018. This would mark five vice presidents that have exited the company in the space of three months. One of the former VPs was just scooped by Apple Inc. in a move that makes the critics wonder if an electric iVehicle could be making its way to the market by 2017. 

Apple Inc. also lost an employee to another big company this year. Danny Coster, the industrial designer for Apple joined GoPro. Seemingly, engineers are always looking for a company that will offer them the best work environment, the best pay and the most likely, the most open space for innovation. These are engineers who would probably prefer to keep their job hunting efforts on the down low, so that, the companies who currently employ them don't get wind of their desire to resign. This can be a very hard task for some. Imagine an engineer gets found out for wanting to jump ship and gets fired from his job but hasn't secured a job in the company he was thinking of sending his curriculum vitae to. It's a stress-inducing prospect for any person. 

Steve Mackay, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology highlights this problem in the 32^nd episode of the Engineering News Network. He highlights certain scenarios that would lead an engineer to search for other means of employment. He says: "You're perhaps an engineer or a technician, you've been in the same company for many years, you think there's a purge coming. The price of whatever you're selling is going through the roof or the competitors are pouring in and you're worried about the future. But you need to be very careful about your job search."

In the video, Mackay gives tips on keeping your job search confidential so your current employer doesn't pick up on the fact that you are wanting to jump ship. We will paraphrase some of them here:

• Network with trusted peers
• Big brother is watching: Companies have access to internet activity, sites you're visiting. 
• Phone confidentiality: Make sure there is no one listening in
• Only work with professional executive search firms. Make sure you emphasise that you are a confidential candidate.
• Social networking sites: Employers can see what you are putting online on a public domain
• Exhibitions and conferences: An exhibition stand could give you a lot of information about a potential job

Career Directors also published a list of things to look out for when attempting to secure other employment without the current employer making a snap judgement and firing you for wanting to leave the company: 

• Keep your own confidence 
• Tell recruiters your search is confidential - Which Mackay highlights as well 
• Ask your prospective employer to keep your job search in confidence 
• Develop a confidential version of your resume
• Maintain or expand your efforts and work style while you conduct your job search
• Conduct your search from home
• And most interestingly, if your boss confronts you about your job search, own up to it

Source: Career Directors

Graphene since its discovery in 2004 has been an investigated by engineers across the globe. Brazil is attempting to commercialize the material by opening a Graphene and Nanomaterials Research Center which will be called MackGraphe. Graphene is the thinnest compound that weighs in at one atom thick and is the lightest known, strongest compound ever discovered. So the desire to capitalize on the material and build into our everyday lives is of heightened interest to engineers and scientists all around the world. The honeycomb-like texture the material takes on, is also of importance to some engineering designers. Thus, the Mackenzie Presbyterian University in São Paulo wants to open the facility that will concern itself with graphene and see how it can be introduced into the world.

MackGraphe will actively work with nanomaterials, a team of 20 engineers will be lending their minds to the project. According to Chemistry World, the material will have eventual benefits for "electronics, biological engineering, filtration, energy storage" and the development of strong and non-heavy materials. 

Brazil is late to the party, however, due to the University of Manchester in the UK, who have already invested money into the National Graphene Institute (NGI) that has been open for over a year. An inquiry was opened against the institute criticizing it for the speed at which revelations in the graphene industry are being made. It is alleged that the institute will not be able to take graphene from lab to the market anytime soon, which has alarmed government investors who have pumped £38 million into the research. 

The University of Manchester replied to the claims that they were spending all their time on research and not so much on development. BGT Materials, a company involved with graphene development also said it was working on something but wouldn't divulge what. Their research and development manager, Liam Britnell, said: "We have definitely tried to keep under wraps what we're doing. There's no advantage to shout from the rooftops." The company was rumored to be working on a lightbulb that utilizes graphene to transfer heat from a light-emitting diode (LED) which would improve its efficiency, according to Nature. 

There have also been 25,000 patent applications in graphene development between 2005 to 2014, according to the UK Intellectual Property Office, showing that graphene could soon be making its way into the newest product consumers will be getting their hands on. 

Interesting week for electric vehicles and the companies that are producing them. Tesla Motors Inc. has seen the exit of two top executives whilst they confidently stride forward to releasing the Tesla Model 3. Tesla initially said that they would be delivering the car at the end of 2017 and intend to push out 500,000 units a year by the year 2020. 

Then Elon Musk (CEO of Tesla and SpaceX) decided to supercharge their initial statement in a conference call saying that they are ready to deliver 100,000 cars by the end of 2017 and will reach the 500,000 mark in 2018. According to Reuters, the company's shares jumped up by 5 percent when the announcement was made. 

Musk said: "The key thing we need to achieve in the future is to also be the leader in manufacturing. It's the thing we obviously have to solve if we are going to scale and scale profitably." Critics have said that the company will not make the new goal they have set but are interested to see if it's possible. Musk notoriously said if they want to make half a million vehicles this year they would have to deplete the world's lithium-ion sources. 

Elsewhere, Toyota is looking into its own alternative to lithium-ion and potentially throwing their weight behind magnesium. The engineer initially working on hydrogen storage at Toyota's Research Institute of North America (TRINA) says that her findings could be applied to a magnesium battery. The company says magnesium batteries could lead to longer lasting electric cars that travel further and go at a faster speed. The company also said that magnesium batteries could replace the batteries in the smartphones of today. 

Toyota published its finding in a paper titled 'An Efficient Halogen-Free Electrolyte for Use in Rechargeable Magnesium Batteries '. The company

is playing it safe for now and saying that it could be an eventual solution because it has not yet perfected the use of a magnesium solution for powering vehicles. The issue they are having - that they detail in the abstract of their research paper - is the fact that the electrolytes in magnesium batteries are "corrosive toward metallic battery components." It doesn't do great around metals. However, Toyota is hellbent on continuing their research to potentially redefine the power source of electric vehicles in the not so distant future. The company - in a statement - said: "While it's easy to get caught up in the potential of a dramatically improved battery, it could take 20 years of research and development before magnesium batteries reach the consumer market."

The chemical engineer who made the discovery at Toyota, Rana Mohtadi, told media: "We were able to take a material that was only used in hydrogen storage and we made it practical and very competitive for magnesium battery chemistry. It was exciting." 

Researchers at the University of Michigan are calling a device they have used to imitate the "flow of medication" around a system similar to the human kidney, the 'kidney on a chip'.The device allows the researchers to determine how kidney cells would be affected by certain medications which could lead to a more accurate dosage of drugs for patients in the future. Overdosing a patient could lead to deaths and this engineered kidney simulation device is on its way to avoiding overdosage. 

It has been reported that two-thirds of patients in the ICU have damaged kidneys when admitted. The problem is, up to twenty percent of these cases are due to medications that have damaged the kidney. This is because of the sort of medications that are given for kidney damage in ICU units of which some are considered toxic. 

Shuichi Takayama, a professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Michigan said: "When you administer a drug, its concentration goes up quickly and it's gradually filtered out as it flows through the kidneys. A kidney on a chip enables us to simulate that filtering process, providing a much more accurate way to study how medications behave in the body." 

The chip was made with what's called a permeable polyester membrane and a layer of actual kidney cells, sandwiched in between the microfluidic top and bottom parts. The device then simulates the environment of an actual kidney and delivers one large dose instead of one continuous dose of medicine. The idea is that one large dose kills fewer cells instead of one continuous dose that tends to kill more, according to the group's video. 

The study was published in the IOP Science Journal under the title  Pharmacokinetic profile that reduces nephrotoxicity of gentamicin in a perfused kidney-on-a-chip. In the abstract, the researchers say that the paper aims "to illustrate the potential to fill in such pharmacokinetic gaps between animals and humans using a microfluidic kidney model." This means the research will also be able to apply to animals' kidneys as well. Thus, human and animal lives could be saved as a result of the correct amount of drugs being administered at a time. 

At Flat Rock Assembly plant in Michigan in the United States, Ford is testing out their new, portable 'aeroacoustic wind tunnel'. They are going as far as to say that this portable wind tunnel is the first mobile version of its kind and are waiting on a patent for the portable invention to clear. Now, Ford's engineers can test vehicles at the plants they are built in without having to transport the vehicles to facilities with built-in wind tunnels.

The aeroacoustic wind tunnels will deal with the noise generation of the wind that flows past a car when it is travelling at a speed, or staying stationary. The portable wind tunnel is nestled into two 53-foot shipping containers, which can be lifted onto flatbed trucks and transported. The process takes about six hours, but then the tunnels are ready to go. 

In a statement, Bill Gulker, Ford's wind noise core supervisor said: "This project was born from a desire to be the best when it comes to controlling and limiting the cabin noise customers are so sensitive to. And our new mobile wind tunnel saves our engineers time and increases productivity." 

According to AutoNews, a standard aerodynamics lab costs around $50 million to make, but this new invention would shave almost half off of that cost. 

"Now, we're able to detect even the most subtle noises. We can identify an area in need of improvement, have key people gather, communicate quickly and resolve the issue without delay," said Gulker. 

The team of engineers can push out 80 MPH to perfectly simulate the speeds of air that whooshes by on the highway. By doing this, they can minimize the amount of sound that makes it into the cabin during a trip in the car. 

Markit Economics and the Chartered Institute of Procurement & Supply has confirmed that Britain's construction sector is expanding at a slow rate. It hasn't expanded this slowly in three years the report said. According to IBTimes, it is the 36th month of expansion, however, it is the slowest construction output since 2013. 

Britain has recently seen issues in the steel industry and is unsure about its future when the European Exit vote happens in June. 

Markit's senior economist Tim Moore, said: "Stalling new order volumes not only set the scene for further weakness ahead but are already weighing on staff hiring and input buying across the construction sector. Softer growth forecasts for the UK economy, alongside uncertainty ahead of the EU referendum, appear to have provided reasons for clients to delay major spending decisions until the fog has lifted." 

Markit also reported that confidence in the sector is also not high and is also hurting the industry. The unwillingness of companies ordering new projects will not improve the situation, it will only make it worse. The Bank of England warns that the EU referendum is mostly to blame and it would be beneficial for Britain not to exit the European Union to ensure that engineering sectors remain protected. 

George Osborne said: "Investments and building are be delayed, and another group of international experts, the OECD confirms British families would be worse off if leave the EU." 

Comparatively, the United States' construction industry has grown to an 8 and a half year high. Their industry hit the highest level since October 2007. 

The United Arab Emirates is planning to take civil engineering to a whole new level. The engineers of the country plan to build a man-made mountain to produce rainfall. The hope is that with a mountain range effect, they will be able to cloud-seed the area. Cloud-seeding refers to weather modification that can increase the amount of rainfall in an area. 

The UAE has already invested US$11 million into cloud-seeding efforts in the past which have allegedly shown results but it seems the country wants to do more. 

The country will be working along with the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) who operate out of the United States of America. The researchers there say they are working through a "detailed modelling study" of potentially building a man-made mountain to attempt to increase rainfall in the UAE, known for its dry conditions. 

"Building a mountain is not a simple thing. We are still busy finalising assimilation, so we are doing a spread of all kinds of heights, widths and locations [as we simultaneously] look at the local climatology," said Roelof Bruintjies, an expert in weather modification from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research told Arabain Business. 

Steve Mackay, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology calls endeavours of this kind: engineering with the natural order of things. In his YouTube series, the Engineering News Network, he encourages engineers to use the natural order of things to work more efficiently. He says: " Try and use the environment to make your job easier when doing your engineering design...Try and use the natural order of your environment to do a lot of the work for you." However, the building of a mountain would be engineering a seemingly natural object to work alongside the natural order of things, tweaking how the natural order operates but not in an invasive way. In addition, the engineering of something that could assist a community and improve it is a good thing. 

Bruintjies further explained: "What we are looking at is basically evaluating the effects on weather through the type of mountain, how high it should be and how the slopes should be. We will have a report of the first phase this summer as an initial step." The hope is that just like mountain ranges in the actual world, the weather will be modified to the point where more rainfall is produced. 

IBM is allowing the public to access its quantum processor from the cloud. Through applying on their website, anyone could get rights to test out the only known quantum computer known to be in operation in the world. NASA, Google, and Microsoft are all reportedly looking into how they could utilize quantum computing and how to use it for the benefit of their companies. 

Arvind Krishna, senior vice president and director of IBM Research in a statement: "This moment represents the birth of quantum cloud computing. Quantum computers are very different from today's computers, not only in what they look like and are made of but more importantly in what they can do. Quantum computing is becoming a reality and it will extend computation far beyond what is imaginable with today's computers." 

The five-qubit quantum computer can be accessed over the internet which critics are saying would open a new window to the world that would figure out what quantum computing could be used for to improve the world. 

TIME magazine recently published a list of theoretical uses for quantum computing:

• Safer airplanes 
• Discover distant planets
• Win elections 
• Boost GDP
• Detect cancer earlier 
• Help automobiles drive themselves 
• Reduce weather-related deaths 
• Cut back on travel time 
• Develop more effective drugs

Quantum computing might be the future of computing, especially for Internet of Things devices that need to be connected to a network and produce data and analytics. Quantum computing would make any data available at the click of a button. Data that would have taken days. months or years to access in the past. 

Never before has a quantum computer been opened for widespread use by the public, so IBM's cloud-based operation will be a test drive for how the technology can be applied to the world. It is being named the IBM Quantum Experience and will allow the running of algorithms and will allow the use of individual qubits. 

The quantum computer utilizes quantum theory and in turn stores information that way. It is faster than any computing system invented in the world today and can perform thousands of tasks at once. 

Jay Gambetta, the manager of Theory of Quantum Computing and Information at IBM, spoke to Computerworld, said: "Since this open to the public, there is no organization or business that will have priority. There are several opportunities for material and drug design, optimisation, and other commercially important applications where quantum computing promises to offer significant value beyond what classical computers can offer." 

Researchers at Oregon State University in the United States have discovered a new method of boiling water that utilizes new technology. They have published their findings in the Scientific Reports journal under the title Large-scale Generation of Patterned Bubble Arrays on Printed Bi-functional Boiling Surfaces.

The researchers investigated bubble nucleation control to attempt to enhance boiling heat transfer performance, according to the abstract of their report. 

We report a novel bi-functional heterogenous surface structure that is capable of tuning bubble nucleation, growth and departure dynamics.

Heterogenous surfaces with various configurations were fabricated and their bubble dynamics were examined at elevated heat flux, revealing various nucleate boiling phenomena. In particular, aligned and patterned bubbles with a tunable departure frequency and diamater were demonstrated in a boiling experiement for the first time. 

The researchers have filed a patent application for the method they have discovered. The researchers say the method includes the boiling of water and the creation of steam. 

Chih-hung Chang, a professor of electrical engineering at the OSU College of Engineering said: "One of the key limitations of electronic devices is the heat they generate, and something that helps dissipate that heat will help them operate at faster speeds and prevent failure. The more bubbles you can generate, the more cooling you can achieve." 

Engineering the wettability contrast of the surface holds great potential to enhance the heat transfer in both boiling and condensation proccesses. 

The bi-functional boiling surfaces were fabricated on large-size stainless steel substrates using fleible and scalable approach in contrast to much more expensive photolithography and etching processes. 

The discoveries the team has made will allegedly assist industrial-sized steam boilers achieve their goals more efficiently and will have an effect on electricity production in electric generating facilities, according to Science Daily. 

The newly discovered method enables the engineers to induce and control boiling bubble formations. They showed the possibilities of this by forming bubbles in the letters 'USO'. 

Geospatial engineering is a recent addition to the list of engineering roles you could find yourself in if you have an affinity for circumnavigating the world of civil engineering. These engineers are currently trying to imagine the introduction of European-styled roundabouts for the United States of America. the engineers would work closely with civil engineers, town planners and the like, to plan out how to design roads so that traffic and accidents are significantly lower. 

According to The Economist, America only has 4,800 roundabouts in the entire country and says that a quarter of road deaths occur in intersections. 

Explaining why there is a lack of roundabouts in the States, Lee Rodegerdts, an international roundabout expert at the Portland transportation engineering and planning group, told CityLab: "My guess is that the possible benefits of roundabouts weren't widely known, and we had a long history of using traffic signals. It took some bold people -- both on the elected-official side and on the transportation professional side -- to get the first ones installed, and they deserve a lot of credit for sticking their necks out there. 

Steve Mackay, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Insitute of Technology believes American engineers did not align themselves with the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) principle. He implies that they did not see the facts and figures to see how beneficial roundabouts would have been for the United States, instead of their complicated, more unsafe, four-way intersections. Engineers at Kansas State University discovered that delays were 65% less at roundabouts. 

Mackay, in the YouTube series Engineering News Network, said: "Roundabouts reduce your delays by 90% compared to the four-way intersections. Accidents are down by 80%, this is actually research proven. Considerably simpler. There are far fewer conflict points in a roundabout compared to a four-way intersection."

Mackay also speaks of the angle of collision in a roundabout in comparison to the American alternative. He says, "If you do have an accident in a roundabout, it's at an angle so the actual impact would be lower than in a four-way intersection. From a financial point of view, which is an area which we often neglect as engineers - dare I say - your return on investment for a roundabout is about eight times greater than that of a four-way intersection."

Amsterdam has even added a special ring for cyclists who are given the right of way to make the roundabouts safer for them. This is something missing from some recent adopters of the roundabout who are now trying to build cities with bicycle lanes and roundabouts that maintain a flow of traffic with the right of way rules for cyclists due to bicycle and car-related incidents in the past. 

Skycatch is a drone data software company in the United States who's tagline is: Connecting people and machines to the real-time physical world. It is a tagline that indicates what the future of construction could look like. Machines doing what the people would be doing in real-time. The company recently received funding to the tune of $22 million that would see them producing hardware and software for unmanned aerial vehicles that would assist with civil engineering endeavours. 

According to BBC News, a Japanese construction company named Komatsu is taking Skycatch's hardware and software further by implementing the technology into automated bulldozers. Reportedly, the drones would deliver a 3D model of a building to a computer and then the information is sent to the unmanned machinery so that it can successfully do its job on a construction site.

The drones look down on a construction site and can produce data about the site for the civil engineers that would be able to estimate how long a job is going to take based on the analytics.  

Skycatch's chief executive, Christian Sanz, spoke to BBC, saying: "The more visible data that you have on a site, the more you'll see machines and robots moving things around rather than humans." 

Mapping a site has never been easier than with the drones that scan the entire site and turn into a virtual design that is easily accessible to the civil engineers to peruse. "With the former, traditional method, it takes about two weeks, on average, to survey a certain piece of land. Meanwhile, with Skycatch it can be completely down within one day, or even 30 minutes," says Kenishi Nishihara, a project manager with the Smart Construction division. 

A website called Wise Guy Reports has compiled a 60-page report that states that the global market research they conducted on the civil construction industry revealed that the global market for construction robots will grow by more than 5% by 2020. The report also said that Japan is the pioneer of the application of robots in the automated construction industry. So it is no surprise that Komatsu is interested in Skycatch.

Alternatively, Technavio also released a reported titled Global Mobile Robotics Market 2016-2020 and estimated that the robotics market would spike by 12% by 2020. 

Komatsu is calling their drone-ground-scanning-bulldozer-navigating initiative is being called 'Smart Construction'. Martin Schulz, an economist at Fujitsu Research Institute in Tokyo, spoke to Bloomberg last year, saying: "The labor shortage in the construction industry could reach a crisis level in the next few years."

Self-driving cars and self-flying drones are always in the news, however, have you ever heard of self-driving ships?. The Titanic would have been a different story if somehow the self-driving technology the ship had could have spotted and avoided the iceberg. Oh, the possibilities. Just imagine getting on a cruise ship that has no crew steering it. Fiction becomes fact quite quickly in the engineering world these days.

The Pentagon has revealed the world's largest unmanned surface vessel. A self-navigating, self-driving 40-meter ship that would be able to sail up to 10,000 nautical miles by itself. The ship is the brainchild of the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) with the contribution of the Navy. The ship is being held at the San Diego coast and will be tested there for the next two years. In that time, the ship will interact with other ships and will also learn how to navigate around ships that are manned with personnel. 

DARPA employee Jared B Adams said: "It's not a joy-stick ship." Meaning, the ship is not controlled by a controller like some drones are in the world today, the ship has been designed to drive itself with artificial intelligence like the self-driving cars we see today. However, if the ship does run into troubles it can be overridden by a human driver. 

Allegedly, the U.S. has been hard at work trying to ensure that the ship is hacker-proof so that it cannot be programmed to go places that the Navy hasn't cleared it for. It reaches up to 29,9 MPH which is not amazing but it is something. The ship cost $152 million for the first prototype but DARPA confirmed one can be built for $16 million in the future, according to CBC News. 

A team of engineers at the University of California, San Diego have taken inspiration from nature for a new model that could be manufactured at a larger scale for usage in multiple engineering industries from civil engineering, but their focus right now is on aerospace engineering. The object is modeled after a sea urchin's mouth and teeth that have been made into a grappling tool. The researchers have published the details of the model in the  Journal of Visualized Experiments. 

The team modeled the mouth after the description of 'Aristotle's lantern' in Greek philosophy which speaks of a sea urchin's mouth. A sea urchin's mouth has movable spines and pincerlike organs which can scrape algae from rocks. The teeth are housed in a dome formation that works like a claw crane in an arcade. 

The mouth has the ability to grip up soil or cut straight through rock, which has led to the researchers say that the vehicle could assist with gathering samples on Mars once the mission kicks off in 2018. The most recent vehicles sent to Mars collects samples through using shovels. Michael Frank, on his way to getting his P.h.D. at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego and one of the author's of the paper said: "Our goal was a bio-inspired device that's more precise and efficient at grabbing ground samples from different areas, and won't disturb the surrounding area like a shovel would." 

This could be useful in the future of civil engineering if the team could team up with construction vehicles to build a similar system for site construction. The group is led by Joanna McKittrick, a mechanical engineering professor and encourages the group to look at nature for inspiration when designing something. 

The engineers tested the claw out by connecting it to a rover-like vehicle and letting it capture soil that was at a similar density of Mars' sand. 

In the abstract to their report, the engineers say:

Bioinspired design is an emerging field that takes inspiration from nature to develop high-performance materials and devices. 
We describe the bioinspiration process as including animal observation, specimen characterization, device fabrication and mechanism bioexploration.

The last step of bioexploration allows for a deeper understanding of the initial biology.

How much is your intellectual property worth? Surprisingly, quite a bit. In the engineering field, a lot of invention occurs in research facilities by the employees or students of that university. The intellectual property of a student usually becomes the property of the university that the invention or idea was crafted in. However, there are engineers out there that are continually innovating and creating intellectual property that can be patented or copyrighted etc. Therefore, engineering mentors are encouraging students of engineering faculties to become more accustomed to patent, copyright, trade secret and trademark laws so that they cover themselves sufficiently and can publish their ideas and products to the public. 

Nkosana Makate has been embroiled in a fifteen year battle with South African telecommunications company and cell phone service provider, Vodacom. Makate was an employee of the company when he invented the 'Please Call Me'. It utilized the USSD (Unstructured Supplementary Service Data) technology within GSM communication technology to send a free communication to another cell phone, that would alert a user, that their friend/colleague had no funds/airtime to call them, thereby hoping that the caller who did have funds/airtime would call them back. 

Makate then claimed he had the idea for the 'Please Call Me' and had said Vodacom vowed - in a verbal agreement - to pay him for the idea in the year 2000. He never saw the money. The invention of 'Please Call Me' allegedly made Vodacom over $4 billion of revenue, of which not a single cent was paid to Makate. He took Vodacom to three different courts which dismissed the claims that he should be paid for the idea, resulting in Makate taking the battle to the Constitutional Court of South Africa. 

The Constitutional Court then ruled that Makate would have to be paid for the idea. 

Justice Chris Jafta of the Constitutional Court said: "Having admitted that it had used Mr. Makate's idea to develop the 'please call me' service, it was not ethical for Vodacom to refuse to compensate him. What compounds the matter is the fact that Vodacom entered into a contract with him, under which it now sought to avoid liability by raising technical defenses." 

The agreement that Makate wants to settle on is 15% of the calculated revenues the 'Please Call Me' service made in its 15 years of operation. When asked about the advice he would give to other people who would be selling their ideas to big corporations, Makate said: "Based on the experience that I've had, people need to protect their ideas and they need to make sure they get lawyers for advice and other people who are skilled and knowledgeable in business to actually take them through the process."

So the question to be asked is: What should engineers know about intellectual property before entering the workplace? You could be sitting on a goldmine idea within a company that could make that company millions or even billions. 

Industry expert, Robert J. Sinnema, Vice President & Counsel of intellectual Property at Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation said engineers should file for a patent as soon as possible before any use of the idea. In the United States, a patent should be filed within one year of the use of the product or idea. He describes getting a patent as having a twenty-year monopoly on a certain idea. 

"You may be horrified about the value you've got with your intellectual property. You need to look after it and protect it from your friends across the river who may be keen to steal it or use it in their commercial undertakings," says Steve Mackay, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology. 

Mackay highlights three forms of intellectual properties in his YouTube series, the Engineering News Network. In the 28^th episode he cautions engineers to protect their ideas through the following methods: 

• Patents - 20 years protection. It gives you protection no one else can get once you've been granted it, but you have to do it internationally. The other issue is, once you've defined the patent, you may find that your friends who don't care about patents or any IP now have a defined product they can now go and copy. Mackay also says it is mostly iron clad. 
• Copyright: A drawing or a design. You can typically get 95 years protection for a corporation and then for individual its the lifetime of the individual plus seventy years. The other good thing is, in countries like Australia you don't even have to register it, however, in the United States you do. 

At Iowa State University, Attorney Rich Beem speaks of copyright saying: "Copyright makes it illegal to copy but not illegal to design around. If you have a Windows program on a CD and you install the Windows program on another computer you've just become guilty of copyright infringement. What a patent can do that a copyright cannot, is, protect the process or the method claimed for the inventive software."

Rich concludes by saying if the intention of an engineer is to make money on the idea, then patents is what they want. He says, "The best practice if you're going to publish is to file a patent application first and then publish and commercialize." 

Germany divides its renewable energy consumption into six categories. Hydropower, wind energy, solar energy, geothermal energy, biomass and waste. The country also consumed more oil than coal in 2015, according to the AGEB's Energy Consumption Report of 2015. The PDF is available to read through, to see how far Germany is from ditching non-renewable sources of energy and how they move into the renewable energy age. 

In the report it is stated:

In 2015, the use of renewable energy in private households, industry as well as the trade, commerce, and service sector increased by 6.2% whch was primarily due to the cooler weather (albeit still at a comparably low level) 

When it comes to the use of renewable energy in electricity production, wind energy exhibited by the far the greatest increase with a plus of 50% compared to 2014 which was due to the strong wind year and the additionally installed capacity of 6GW

Reuters says coal still produces 40 percent of the current energy being produced in Germany and cuts in the sector will equal unemployment in the industry. Now a draft document to be processed through government will make them stick to an outline of increasing green energy production by 75% by 2030. Today, Reuters has released a report saying that Germany could be leaving coal-fired power production before 2050. The government of Germany is also reportedly supposed to decide on a climate action plan for 2050 and must outline their renewable energy portfolio. Recently, critics have doubted Germany will be lending themselves to photovoltaic cells as a source of energy as freely as forward-thinking countries like Australia, for example. 

By March of this year (2016), Belgium follows a list of European territories who are closing their coal powered power stations. EcoWatch confirms Belgium successfully closed down their Langerlo plant  

Joanna Flisowska, an employee of the Climate Action Network told EcoWatch: "Ending coal power use in Belgium marks a significant step in the inevitable transition away from fossil fuels." 

The rest of the world is watching as Europe tweaks its renewable energy resources and policies that pertain to them and will learn from them. Currently leading the charge in the renewable energy sources is Britain. But the other European countries are trying to get in line as well for the betterment of the environment. Engineers in the coal industry should be watching the changes in the energy sector quite closely as more and more countries decide to move towards being aligned with renewable energy sources. 

This is survival of the fittest. This is do or die. This is: the winner takes it all. Not just Eminem lyrics, but also the rule of thumb to the evolving renewable energies market. The country making the most strides forward in the renewable energy market is allegedly Britain, if a report by FT.com is to be believed. The report says thanks to the £10 billion cash injection into renewable energy, Britain has "quietly" become the leader in the market. 

Allegedly, over the last year, renewable sources provided more energy to the UK than coal. FT points out that the industrial revolution began in the UK, which would mean that if the Godfather of industrial expansion could use more renewable energy than fossil fuel agents, it's a win for renewable energies. 

James Court, head of policy at the Renewable Energy Association said: "There are now solar PV modules installed on over 800,000 homes and businesses [in the UK]." He also says the UK possesses the "largest offshore wind industry, nearly 30 grid-scale energy storage facilities, and several biomass power plants."

 Elsewhere, American company SunEdison, who was a renewable energy firm, has filed for bankruptcy under chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Court. You can read their entire press release HERE. Does this relate to a slump in solar energies in the United States? SunEdison has a promising future ahead of them. Any time a renewable energies company files for bankruptcy, something in the industry must have gone wrong, or else it's just mismanagement. 

The Columbia University's, David Sandalow, discussed the future of solar energy with the New York Times due to SunEdison's filing for bankruptcy. He detailed three factors that will drive the solar energy industry forward:

• Solar module costs: They have fallen by 80 percent since 2007. Solar is cheaper than the competition. 
• Governments around the world will throw their support behind solar power
• Integration of solar technologies into grids is "easier than many thought"

According to Sandalow, these factors will ensure that solar energy does not simply die in places like the United States. 

Furthermore, the Department of Energy in the United States is backing solar somewhat, and putting $25 million into a project titled Enabling Extreme Real-Time Grid Integration of Solar Energy, which is part of the Grid Modernization Initiative. The $25 million will reportedly fund 10 to 15 solar software and hardware solutions. This on top of the $220 million that was pumped into the DOE for research and development of grid modernization. The United States is not giving up on solar anytime soon. 

"Our ongoing grid modernization work will help accelerate the widespread adoption of the clean energy resources that will define our low-carbon future. This funding will help that mission by supporting industry partners working to integrate, store, and deploy solar energy throughout our electric grid," said Lynn Orr, science, and energy undersecretary at the Department of Energy. 

The University of Washington has been harbouring some forward thinking engineers lately. The amount of invention coming out of the university has been astounding recently. Now, researchers at the university have come up with something that could save lives all over the world. The computer science and engineering and electrical engineering students have developed what they call SpiroCall'. A tool that measures lung function over a standard telephone call. 

In the abstract of a paper they will be publishing this May, the researchers say:

Lung impairments account for roughly 10% of global deaths. The severity of these diseases is usually measured and managed using spirometers, devices that measure patient lung infection. Home spirometry is gaining acceptance in the medical community due to its ability to detect pulmonary exacerbations and improve outcomes of chronic lung ailments. 

We have developed a smartphone app, SpiroSmart, that allows measurement of common lung infection measures using the phone's microphone. 

Recently, we have developed a call-in service to allow patients to perform spirometry on any phone -- using the standard telephony voice channel to transmit sound of the spirometry effort. 

The issue with spirometry over the phone would obviously be accuracy. There is no possible way that someone breathing into a telephone would produce the correct measurements, right?

Allegedly, the team's SpiroCall - which utilizes any telephone microphone - is within 6.2 percent of current clinical spirometers that are used in the medical industry today. That is enough accuracy to meet the medical community's standards according to the University of Washington. 

Shwetak Patel, a Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering at UW said: "We wanted to be able to measure lung function on any type of phone you might encounter around the world -- smartphones, dumb phones, landlines, payphones. With SpiroCall, you can call a 1-800 number, blow into the phone and use the telephone network to test your lung function." 

The 1-800 number would be useful for people who do not have funds to call and can call for free, meaning that the product also benefits the low-income communities of the world. "People have to manage chronic lung diseases for their entire lives. So there's a real need to have a device that allows patients to accurately monitor their condition at home without having to constantly visit a medical clinic, which in some places requires hours or days," said Mayank Goel, a UW engineering doctoral student.

The team also reportedly printed a 3-D printed whistle that would make up for the bad call quality on some telephones and give the researchers a clearer idea of a patient's lung function. And it would help patients who are unable to utilize their vocal chords to produce a loud breathing sound effect that is needed in spirometry. 

It was just the other day when tech leaders all converged on Barcelona for the Mobile World Congress in February. The hot topic was the inevitable Internet of Things and what kind of internet connections the world is going to have to have to accommodate it.  The word of caution was that 5G networks would have to be here by 2020, which analysts are estimating as the year that IoT reaches its full potential. You can read our story on that HERE.  The world now faces connectivity issues for virtual reality, self-driving cars, home appliances, automated industrial plants and more if the move to 5G is not made. 

QZ spoke to Asha Keddy, general manager of mobile standards for advanced tech at Intel. She said:

 "These next-generation networks and standards will need to solve a more complex challenge of combining communications and computing together so intelligence is at your fingertips and available to the machines that make up the internet of things. The 2G networks were designed for voice, 3G for voice and data, and 4G for broadband internet experiences. With 5G, we'll see computing capabilities getting fused with communications everywhere, so trillions of things like wearable devices don't have to worry about computing power because network can do any processing needed."

In the United States this summer, Verizon, and AT&T are planning to test out their 5G networks. According to Bloomberg, 5G networks will be generation billions of dollars for the early adopters such as Nokia, Oyj, Ericsson, Qualcomm Inc. and of course the aforementioned Intel. 

Chief Executive Officer Hans Vestberg, told Bloomberg: "5G is not about another G with super-fast Internet. 5G is about beyond smartphones and tablets. We think 5G could provide an excellent opportunity to transform our world." 

The global expenditure on 5G networks will be $400 billion says Chetan Sharma Consulting. AT&T will be one of the first mobile operators to test out the technology. According to DSLReports, the first round of tests will be happening in Austin and New Jersey. They will be testing "millimeter wave components and/or modified existing millimeter radios." Tom Keathley, SVP of Wireless Network Architecture & Design at AT&T said the testing will start at 15GHz and move up to 28GHz. 

Even Facebook is relying on the rollout of 5G being successful. Facebook's vice president of engineering said: "The hope is that this will lead to better wireless networks -- wireless networks that can keep up with all the stuff we're doing on our cell phones, from listening to music and watching videos too, yes, diving into virtual reality. These really immersive experiences are all looming." 

For a clearer picture of how 5G will be assisting the Internet of Things, check out this video: 

Good advice for engineering graduates - who are now entering the workplace - comes in many forms and from many industry professionals. Older engineers who have been in the industry for a long time, also need good advice so that they can remain in the positions they currently hold. Engineering UK estimates that 65 % of engineering graduates find employment within six months. According to Engineering and Technology Magazine STEM qualifications have been in-demand for jobs that don't even pertain to engineering, and so, the draw card of a 'fat-salary' takes engineers out of the industry and employs them in financial sectors. Allegedly one in nine employed graduates is working in engineering professions. 

Marcus Body, speaking to Engineering and Technology Magazine, said: "Reality is every year, virtually every grad role is filled -- it's just that despite all this talk of skills shortages, the engineering schemes aren't big enough to recruit all graduates. So they go and do other things because there literally aren't enough jobs for all of them to get in engineering."

It seems the trick for graduating engineers getting into the profession, or older engineers wanting to stay in the profession, is broadening the skillset. DesignNews writer Jacob Beningo published an article detailing the 7 skills every engineering grad needs, to be successful.:

• Networking
• Resume Writing
• Cover Letter Writing
• Interviewing
• Salary negotiation
• Communication
• Entrepreneurship

We have covered these skills extensively on EngineeringCareer.org, except for one skill that seems to be under-emphasised: Networking. 

The Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology, Steve Mackay, has also underlined the importance of networking in the industry. In his YouTube series, the Engineering News Network, he said: "One of the amazing things you can do is build up a network of colleagues and friends. You start doing that when you are at college and university and you keep building it up. The network of friends and colleagues will actually help you get employment or point you towards opportunities." 

Mackay also says that over 70% of opportunities are not advertised widely on job sites and are rather found through the networking an engineer has done. "One of the most amazingly important things in your career armory is to have a network. To keep building it, maintaining it and working it and to be part of the network to help other colleagues that might need jobs or opportunities."

It was the start of the weekend in Nairobi, Kenya, on Friday the 29th of April, 2016. Tragedy struck the capital city when a six-storey building collapsed due to a storm. The death toll has risen to 21 in an event that will raise questions about the civil engineering  practices of Kenya and their safety. 

According to News24, the Kenyan Red Cross said 60 people remained missing, meaning the death toll could be much higher. The police, however, spoke to media and said that 121 people had been rescued by the 30th of April. 

After four days, a child was rescued from the rubble according to a tweet Kenya Red Cross sent out.

 Then, on Monday, the owner of the collapsed building was arrested. The owner's name is Samuel Karanja Kamau and appears in court, today, the 3rd of May. 

According to BBC News, the officials who approved the construction of the six-storey building in what is considered to be a low-income part of Nairobi would be fired effective immediately. 

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta handed down the order for the owner to be arrested. The Deputy Governor of Nairobi spoke to media, saying: "At least seventy percent of buildings are erected without proper certification especially in areas like this." The district in question is the Huruma district in Kenya's capital.

The people of Kenya are calling on the government to review the practices in civil engineering in the country so that these sorts of tragedies do not happen again. 

Speaking to All Africa, a Kenyan architect, Peter Mungai said: "In many upcoming buildings, county by-laws are disregarded. You'll be shocked to find that permits are granted for questionable projects with the people mandated to monitor buildings processes rarely on site." The website also references an unconfirmed study that reportedly states that between 2006 and 2014, 17 buildings collapsed in Kenya. 

The Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology, Steve Mackay, has called the collapse of the building 'horrific'. He said: "Civil engineers and structural engineers have a critical job to perform. The job is to design structures that are safe at all times, no matter what stressors happen." He also says that engineers only work to the limit of their knowledge. "Whenever you've got some doubts about the environment in which you're working, put in additional safety factors or go back to the labs and do further testing. If you're building a structure such as a bridge or a building, safety is paramount." 

The online crypto-currency, Bitcoin, is no doubt an impressive feat of engineering minds coming together and creating something that has the ability to change the world. However, the engineers behind it and who in fact created Bitcoin was not known. That all changed on the 2nd of May, 2016. 

Craig Wright, an Australian cryptographer, says he is behind the Bitcoin currency. WIRED spoke to the chief scientist of the Bitcoin Foundation and one of the programming engineers who worked on the early stages of Bitcoin and confirmed that Wright is definitely who was thought to be Satoshi Nakamoto.

Satoshi was a fake name that Wright gave as a pseudonym while a group of engineers and cryptographers worked on the currency. Andersen wrote a blog post conceding that the man known as Satoshi Nakamoto, was in fact, Craig Wright, in a blog post. He said:

I hope he manages to mostly ignore the storm that his announcement will create, and keep doing what he loves -- learning and researching and innovating.

I am very happy to be able to say I shook his hand and thanked him for giving Bitcoin to the world.

Wright did not adopt an 'I in team' approach to talking about how Bitcoin was set up. He said, "I was the main part of it, but other people helped me." 

Jon Matonis, an economist and founding director of the Bitcoin Foundation said: "During the London Proof sessions, I had the opportunity to review the relevant data along three district lines: Cryptographic, social and technical. It is my firm belief that Craig Wright satisfies all three categories." 

Wright praised the community that assisted and grew Bitcoin into what it is today. In a blog post, he wrote:

You have dedicated vast swathes of your time, committed your gifts, sacrificed relationships and REM sleep for years to an open source project that could have come to nothing. And yet you still fought. This incredible community's passion and intellect and perseverance has taken my small contribution and nurtured it, enhanced it, breathed life into it. You have given the world a great gift. Thank you. 

Source: BBC/Wired

If you build any sort of process or machine control system there is a very good chance that when you first put it into service or test it you will be plagued by some kind of ‘bug” either in the wiring or in the software. The proper term (for such bugs) is:  “Systematic Error in Design”

Dear Colleagues

If you build any sort of process or machine control system there is a very good chance that when you first put it into service or test it you will be plagued by some kind of ‘bug” either in the wiring or in the software. The proper term (for such bugs) is:  “Systematic Error in Design”

I am grateful to Dave Macdonald, our safety control systems expert (and author of three highly praised books on the topic) who has kindly put together a short note on systematic errors, which is worth reading whether you are designing a control system for an instrumentation, mechanical or electrical system.

Some thoughts (by Dave) on Systematic Errors in Control Systems
Most of us are familiar with the routine of version upgrades or specification revisions.  It’s not too big a problem for a control system on a production process. “Sorry, just hold on a few minutes!  ” Says the control engineer “but I didn’t quite understand what you wanted”.

But it’s a different story if the bug is dormant in a functional safety system, better known as a safety instrumented system (SIS) or emergency shutdown system. We can’t afford to have a wrong response just when the plant is about explode!  So it’s not surprising that SIS projects involve some heavy duty quality assurance work to try to minimize the chances of systematic errors creeping into the design.  

Some examples may help us to see the problem:

1.  Faulty trip logic: An error in the trip logic diagram may not be revealed by testing the SIS as the faulty response will be built into the safety system. Testing the diagram with the (independent) process engineer might be a good idea here.
2.  Not separating the safety sensor from the regular control sensor. Whatever goes wrong with the control loop will also afflict the safety function. We call this a common cause failure but it originates from a systematic design error.
3.  Installing the trip sensor where it will not correctly read the process condition.
4.  Failure to consider all possibilities when scoping a safety function. See below for a notorious example from the London Underground.

5.  Safety controls often employ redundancy to ensure fault tolerance for random failures in the instruments. The benefits of doing this are significantly limited if the redundant instruments are identical since they may both suffer the same failure for the same reason.

A systematic failure example from my own experience: Two identical diaphragm seals for pressure transmitters on a distillation column failed together when a severe vacuum occurred during a shutdown. The diaphragms were stretched leaving a 30% zero offset on both transmitters. Not much help if one is for control and the other is for safety!

How can you avoid systematic errors?

• Always be on the alert for common cause failure possibilities between control and safety instruments. Always look for diversity between instruments on the same application.   
• Use the best quality assurance methods in hardware specification and in application software projects. Check back at each step forward in the project.
• Apply the safety life cycle guidelines of IEC 61511 and then find someone who is genuinely independent of your project to review the project stages for pitfalls.
• Strictly manage all design modifications and evaluate them for impact on the original safety requirements.

The more you look at design projects, the more you see the potential for built in errors. Be alert!

Although the famous Economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, probably wasn’t thinking of systematic errors specifically, nonetheless this does apply: “If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error”.

Thanks so much Dave Macdonald for this elegant dissertation above.

Yours in engineering learning

Steve

Mackay’s Musings – 3rd May’16 #598
780, 293 readers – www.eit.edu.au/cms/news/blog-steve-mackay

An estimated 34 billion devices will be connected to the internet by 2020. The current number was 10 billion in 2015. IoT devices will make up 24 billion of the 34 billion. 

• $6 trillion will be spent on IoT systems over the next five years.
• Businesses will be a top adopter of IoT solutions. For business, IoT will: 1) lower operating costs ; 2) increase productivity and 3) expand to new markets or develop new product offerings. 
• Governments are focused on increasing productivity, decreasing costs, and improving their citizens' quality of life. They will be another huge adopter. 
• Consumers will lag behind business and government in IoT adoption. 

- BI Intelligence

Gartner Research has also reported that there will be 500 networked devices connected by 2020. And Ericsson also said that they expect 50 billion connected IoT devices in 2020 as well. Jumping into the game as well were Intel and Samsung who announced the launching of their own cloud services to join the long list of companies functioning from the cloud. 

Jim Tully, the Vice President of the Internet of Things at Gartner, spoke about the benefit of businesses implementing IoT strategies. In a weekly magazine show for Gartner, he said: "From surveys, we find that most of the roles that we speak with - in enterprises - have all heard of IoT. It's a familiar term. Relatively few enterprises have actually used IoT yet. That's largely because most of those enterprises don't see how IoT could lead to business benefits for their kind of organization." 

Tully says the biggest issue that delays IoT solutions from picking up and could delay the numbers in 2020, is purely just the fact that it is new. He says the concepts are unfamiliar to enterprises and that is the confusing part for a lot of companies. 

The importance of IoT in the future of manufacturing is said to be thrusting the world into another industrial revolution, and if companies do not adapt, they will be left behind. At least that is what the industry is saying and how fast the adoption of the Internet of Things is happening. 

To find out why the Internet of Things is going to be invaluable in the manufacturing industry, Intel shows examples of how they would be powering a factory setup along with the Internet of Things: 

It has taken a while but finally the Clean Energy Council of Australia (CEC) has released guidelines that will tighten home battery storage reliability in terms of installations. A picture of an 'exploded' lithium-ion battery was circulating on Australian social media channels back in March which spurred an ongoing push for more reliable installation methods. 

In Australia, specifically, installation standards have not been upheld and installation training has not been prioritized as of yet. In the United States, the National Fire Protection Association has been training firefighters to respond to fires caused by energy storage systems, according to MicroGridKnowledge. The fires synonymous with home energy storage units is caused by thermal runaway. This is where one cell fails and catches fire which causes the rest of the cells in a unit to also catch fire, causing an explosion. A firefighter, Matt Pais, explains: "When lithium-ion burns, it creates its own oxygen. It can create a violent explosion depending on the chemistry. The cells can explode why they overheat. If you take 20 or 30 of those cells and subject them to heat when you're testing the cells, you can have huge amounts of toxins and flammables." 

Thus, the CEC in Australia has released the installation and safety guidelines for installing home energy storage units. The CEC now has Solar Accredited Installer cards that an installer is required to have to ensure that an installer is proficient in the tools of installing home energy storage unit systems. They have currently accredited 4,800 installers in Australia alone. Recently, you did not have to have any form of formal training to install energy storage units inside homes.

According to One Step Off the Grid, the Installation Guidelines for Grid-Connected Energy Systems with Battery Storage would be able to ensure secure installations that are done correctly and minimize the chance of accidents occurring with the installation of the estimated 50,000 battery storage systems to be connected in Australia in the next year. 

CEC Chief Kate Thornton said: "Everyone is excited by the potential future of a future created by a combination of renewable energy, home energy storage and smart energy technologies. The new guidelines are an important step in making that vision a reality. It is obviously important that industry professionals take these risks extremely seriously and operate in a way that ensures the safety of themselves, their colleagues and consumers." 

These guidelines also rely on the energy storage unit companies to engineer reliable products that don't malfunction and explode. To emphasize reliable engineering, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Insitute of Technology, Steve Mackay, broached the topic in the nineteenth episode of the Engineering News Network. The reliability is not limited to energy storage units, but it would be a good reminder to energy storage unit manufacturers to build reliable systems. And most of the electronic devices we use today are powered by lithium-ion, so the reliability of lithium-based products needs to be emphasized. 

Mackay says:

A lot of devices exhibit the 'bath tub' reliability curve which you're probably familiar with. Which means at the beginning of the life cycle of a product, high failure rate and then it settles down and then most of the product lifetime there is a low failure rate. Then, near the end of the lifetime you get that tweak upwards of high failure rate.

No product is going to be manufactured with a 100% reliability, for the simple reason that it would cost too much. Manufacturers and vendors wouldn't be able to sell their products. A lot of products - such as phones  - do have a lower than 100% reliability. That is the way of the commercial world. 

Mackay concludes by saying the only industry that needs to have complete, one hundred percent reliability is in the manufacturing of aircraft parts. However, it is clear that policymakers cannot keep up with the speed of invention in the battery storage industry, but, the Clean Energy Council of Australia are monitoring the situation and ensuring that installation methods are safe and reliable. 

To receive accreditation in Solar PV installations, visit the Solar Accreditation Australia website. 

The civil engineering, defense, forestry and agriculture industry have been adopting LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) technology. A trend that started in 2014 and will continue to 2020. This according to a report by Allied Market Research that has published its findings in a journal titled  Global LiDAR Market - Size, Industry Analysis, Trends, Opportunities, Growth and Forecast, 2013-2020.

Explaining the benefits of LiDAR, Director of Remote sensing at Dewberry, said: "The laser ranging device sends out millions of pulses - today they can send out over four hundred thousand pulses in one second. That technology gives you the distance and the range to the target." The technology also uses global positioning systems and IMU systems as well. It is the most reliable way of navigating terrain that currently exists in the world of today. It is the technology that allows self-driving cars to navigate and avoid obstacles that come across its path. Hence, the LiDAR market is growing rapidly. 

The Indian government also spoke of how they will be adopting more LiDAR technologies in the near future. The Surveyor General of India spoke to The Hindu, saying: "Use of LiDAR technology is quite beneficial and it gives quality data in digital form in a short time. This data can be used in many projects related to roads, canals, surface transport, city planning, landslides, irrigation etc," 

The report by Allied Market Research says that the LiDAR market is expected to rake in $3.22 billion by 2022. The reason for the spike in the market, analysts say, is due to the automotive sector and civil engineering industries continuing to make use of LiDAR technology.

LiDAR technology has been estimated to have the biggest CAGR (compound annual growth rate) in the UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) sector due to the number of drones being purchased by the media, entertainment, precision farming and personal hobbyist industries, including the governmental use as well. The market will grow most in the Asia-Pacific regions between 2016 and 2022, the report said. 

However, North America currently owns 45% of the current market in 2015, with Europe trailing them with a 33% revenue share, according to DirectionsMag. 

Ford has recently used LiDAR to allow a self-driving car to see in the dark. To see what a self-driving car utilizing LiDAR technology would 'see', check this video out: 

The competition for space on your wall in your garage or in the basement of your business is heating up in the energy storage battle as more companies bring out their answer to renewable, clean energy units. Tesla's Powerwall caught the attention of the public globally, whilst in Australia, Redflow's ZCell impressed audiences. Now, Mercedes-Benz and Lockheed and Martin are entering the game, to confuse consumers even more as to who to give their money to. 

Mercedes-Benz says:

Innovative new energy storage systems for businesses and private customers -- powered by lithium-ion batteries commonly found in electric vehicles -- are now able to efficiently store and release energy on demand. Lithium-ion energy storage systems are at the ready to provide complete freedom to consumers

Therefore, Daimler AG with the contributions of Deutsche ACCUMOTIV have developed their own home energy storage systems and have begun shipping them. The companies supply the latest Mercedes-Benz models with their electric systems. 

Harald Kroger, the Head of Development Electrics/Electronics and E-Drive Mercedes-Benz Cars said: "There is tremendous interest in our energy storage units and we have already received numerous orders. Over the coming months, we will continue to step up and expand both sales in Germany and on the international market." 

Daimler can reportedly connect up to 8 battery modules that have 2.5kWh each that would add up to 20kWh, which would provide a good backup system for grid peak times. According to their press release, the price for the photovoltaic cells would be calculated based on the customized package a customer would order. These would include the photovoltaic system, battery inverter, energy management services from Daimler and the Mercedes-Benz energy storage unit. Then installation costs as well. 

In Daimler's press release they spoke of the reliability of the product they are launching: 

Their network of qualified specialist installers take care of providing the end customers with on-site advice, planning, compiling an individual quotation for all components and the actual installation. Stationary battery storage units are generally installed together with a photovoltaic system. Some 500 installers throughout Germany have already undergone training in collaboration with partners. 

Lockheed Martin also wants in on the action, it seems. They are launching an industrial-sized photovoltaic system that trumps the current Tesla Powerpack. The Powerpack currently pushed out 100kWh, but Lockheed Martin's will achieve both 250kWh and 500kWh depending on which one is purchased. For now, it doesn't look like they will be doing private (home) energy storage systems, however, it seems they are trying to assist electricity grids around the world so that cleaner energy can be produced. 

Whether or not Lockheed Martin becomes a major competitor remains to be seen due to their focuses on aerospace engineering that seems to be getting more attention than energy storage. Thankfully, the more entrants into the private and public energy sector mean more security training and further development in the industry which relates to safer batteries and a good selling price point. 

Have you ever been in the position where you've had to communicate with a person from the deaf community? It is a daunting task for some to attempt communication with a person who has that disability due to not understanding sign language. Two students from the University of Washington intend to redesign the way deaf people communicate with tech-gloves called Sign Aloud. The students  (Thomas Pryor and Navid Azodi) won a competition named the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize that searched the United States for new inventions from students. The Sign Aloud gloves can be worn by a deaf person, who then would talk sign language and the tech attached to the gloves would convert the sign language movements into text or speech. 

Talking to UW Today, the students said: "Our purpose of developing these gloves was to provide an easy-to-use bridge between native speakers of American Sign Language and the rest of the world. The idea initially came out of our shared interest in invention and problem solving. But coupling it with our belief that communication is a fundamental human right, we set out to make it more accessible to a larger audience."

To see what it is capable of, check out this video: 

The two students are calling it an American Sign Language Translator. The gloves have sensors connected to the hands and the wrist that measure hand position and movement. Then through Bluetooth, the data is sent to a program coded by the students that convert the movements into actual text or speech. 

Some online commenters are saying $10,000 is not enough money to jumpstart the project and have encouraged the students to either start a Kickstarter page or take the idea to Shark Tank - a reality program for inventors - to get their gloves funded. 

Pryor and Azodi say that the gloves for right now are a prototype and require clunky elements like a laptop and the gloves themselves. The students say that the future of the product could be an app on a smartphone. However, their prototype right now seems to be a working, functional method of converting sign language into text and speech, that is understandable to able-bodied people. 

Product engineers reinvented the wheel this week. Okay, maybe they just redesigned the hair dryer. Dyson known for their vacuum cleaners, hand dryers, fans, and heaters has now entered the beauty game with their new design, that reportedly cost $71 million to develop. The company has called it the Dyson Supersonic and will cost $400. The price tag is astounding for a hair dryer, however, the fashion industry is probably going to latch on to the premium product quite quickly, getting the money to those engineers who arguably reinvented the hair dryer. 

Tom Crawford, the Head of Product Development for New Categories at Dyson told TechCrunch, "When Dyson goes into a new category, we always think about how we can make it better. Part of the challenge is making sure we invest in the right technology and testing to do so. The first part of this was to learn the science of hair. How to test it, how to make it repeatable, and then how to measure it. We built our own state of the art laboratory dedicated to investigating the science of hair." 

Yahoo spoke to Dyson as well, revealing that the company sent their engineering team to beauty school to gain inspiration before developing the new hairdryer. How many engineers can say they've been to beauty school in their illustrious careers? Dyson said, "We are experts in all things airflow, fluid dynamics, hardware...all things engineering. But we surely aren't style experts. Having a group of young engineers attend styling classes made them see the end benefit of this machine and how the hair dryer can truly be improved." 

What is under the hood, you ask? 

Dyson says they have created the Dyson digital motor V9 . It is a small motor that the engineers managed to fit in the handle of the dryer, instead of the usual head placement of the motor in other dryers. They have also developed a glass bead thermistor which transmits data to a microprocessor which the company says "intelligently controls the patented double-stacked heating element." 

We're starting to understand why this engineered hair dryer costs $400. 

Check out this video that shows off the technology - the part we care about most, right engineers? - of the new Dyson Supersonic.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota have written a report in Physics of Fluid that make a case for a change of methodology when studying turbulence pertaining to jets. 

The researchers say that fluid flows in predictable patterns with high-speed jets which explain why jets are so loud. The team wants to use their findings to influence the dynamics of jets to minimize the volumes they produce. 

Joseph W. Nichols, an assistant professor of aerospace engineering and mechanics at the University of Minnesota, spoke to Eureka Alert, saying, "Back during the 1960s, it was shown that coherent parts of turbulent fluctuations inside jets are connected to instability wavepackets, which are linked to noise radiation. A wave packet is an oscillation that repeats if you look at it over a short time and length scales, but when you zoom out you can see it varies slowly over a long distance." 

The abstract published by the team explains: 

For supersonic jets, the optimal response closely resembles a wavepacket in both the near-field and the far-field such as those obtained by the parabolized stability equations, and this mode dominates the response. For subsonic jets, however, the singular values indicate that the contribution of sub-optimal modes to noise generation are nearly equal to that of the optimal mode, explaining why the PSE do not fully capture the far-field sound in this case. 

Mihailo Jovanovi, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, said: "We treat high-speed turbulent jets as amplifiers that take fluctuations inside the jet as inputs and give back sound. And we use this mathematical framework to identify modes that induce large-output amplification and generate loud noise." 

The studies into quietening down jet planes could lead to healthier airport staff, say the researchers. It was confirmed by health professionals last year that exposure to loud aircraft could lead to heightened blood pressure. 

Aerospace engineering will reach another milestone when SpaceX and NASA launch the Red Dragon on a mission to reach Mars. Elon Musk has announced that by May 2018, they want to be prepped and ready to go to Mars. The mission will see a bigger version of the Falcon 9 - which successfully landed itself on a barge earlier this year - known as the Red Dragon, enable a capsule to land on the surface of Mars. 

The end game for SpaceX would be getting more spacecraft to Mars and starting a colony on the planet. Musk is planning to let the media in on their plans for colonization of Mars in September. This keynote will happen at the International Aeronautical Congress in Mexico. 

The 2018 launch will be an unmanned launch and will see the Red Dragon travel to Mars and attempt to land on the surface. According to Musk's twitter, the engineer said: "Dragon 2 [the spacecraft travelling to Mars] is designed to be able to land anywhere in the solar system. Red Dragon Mars missions are the first test flight." This means that Mars is not the only planet SpaceX is considering. 

"Building on an existing no-funds-exchanged collaboration with SpaceX, NASA will provide technical support for the firm's plan to attempt to land an uncrewed Dragon 2 spacecraft on Mars. This collaboration could provide valuable energy entry, descent, and landing data to NASA for our journey to Mars while providing support to American industry," NASA said in a statement. 

NASA intends to take humans to Mars by 2030, hence their involvement in the SpaceX launch. Both companies want to theoretically entertain the idea of sending humans to the Red Planet and the data that comes from this mission would be beneficial to both of them. 

SpaceX has also announced they were successfully awarded an $83 million contract to launch a GPS satellite into space, funded by the US Air Force. Lockheed Martin, an aerospace engineering and design company - who are busy working on the next Concord-like aircraft - used to be the only company entrusted with space launches but it seems SpaceX's recent successes in the industry has changed the game up. 

A Lieutenant General Samuel Greaves, head of the air force's Space and Missile Systems Centre, told the Guardian: "This GPS III launch services contract award achieves a balance between mission success, meeting operational needs, lowering launch costs, and reintroducing competition for national security space missions." 

The United States' first shipment of liquefied natural gas (LNG) has made its way to Europe this week. The U.S. has always been a big LNG producer but not big on export. Now that the country is becoming an exporter, analysts are saying it will be causing competition in the LNG market. 

The market has been dominated by Russians companies. However, Thierry Bros, an analyst at Societe Generale told Wall Street Journal: "It's the start of the price war between U.S. LNG and pipeline gas." 

The U.S. delivered the LNG to Portuguese company Galp Energia. Analysts say that the U.S. will become a key player in LNG exporting by 2017. 

Russia is currently shipping LNG that is 35% more expensive than the U.S, but according to WSJ, the suppliers were prepared for a price war and would be able to cut rates in half. Russia cannot afford to lose business in the LNG sector due to the export being one of the most profitable exports the country has. 

An energy analyst from Strategy&, Rui Almeida, spoke to SputnikNews about the Russians' situation:

Gazprom [the Russian energy company] will be faced between losing market share or lowering prices. And Gazprom has publicly said they will defend market share so the best is on lowering prices. What we may see play out in gas is not dissimilar to Saudi Arabia's strategy in crude market - going for market share, maintaining production to price out higher marginal cost producers namely US oil. We may witness a similar strategy by Gazprom as it protects market share in Europe.

Cybersecurity engineering is quickly becoming a lucrative field to become well educated in due to the digital exodus that companies are making into cloud-based solutions. Entire companies and even power utilities that service an entire country are moving their operations and interfaces into the cloud, using the Internet of Things to access data output they were previously never able to observe. These systems need security and that is where cyber security engineers come in. 

Tertiary institutions now offer modules that would assist individuals with becoming proficient in securing companies, and in turn, protecting them from cyber attacks. To lay the groundwork for being qualified as a cyber security engineer, an individual - for example - could take a six-week Cybersecurity for automation, control, and SCADA systems course.

CloudPassage, who offer cyber security to enterprises, say that cyber security education in U.S. tertiary institutions got an 'F' for cybersecurity education. The group says that they conducted research of 121 top-ranked U.S. universities and discovered shocking revelations. 

Their findings regarding the top 50 universities [out of the 121 surveyed] revealed:

• None of the top 10 U.S. computer science programs require a cybersecurity course for graduation. In fact, three of the top 10 university programs don't even offer an elective coourse in cybersecurity 
• University of Michigan (ranked 12th) is the only one of the U.S. News & World Report's top 36 U.S. computer sccience programs that requires a security course for graduation
• Only three of Business Insiders' top 50 U.S. computer science programs require a cybersecurity course for graduation: University of Michigan, Brigham Young and Colorado State University 

CloudPassage also quoted Commerce Secretary, Penny Pritzker, who said that there are 210,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs in the U.S. 

Robert Thomas, the CEO of Cloudpassage said: "There needs to be a fundamental shift in the cybersecurity paradigm; we must get to a point where every university requires computer science majors to complete cybersecurity training as a graduation requirement, so that the programmers and developers of the next generation have security front-of-mind when delivering products to the market." 

These revelations reported on whilst the Government Accountability Office of the United States issues a warning about cybersecurity of vehicles. The fact that self-driving cars can be hacked into is becoming a concern for the GOA and the current capability hackers might have to hack into vehicles. 

"Researchers have shown that these interfaces -- if not properly secured -- can be exploited through direct, physical access to a vehicle, as well as remotely through short-range and long-range wireless channels. For example, researchers have shown that attackers could compromise vulnerabilities in the short-range wireless connections to vehicles' Bluetooth units -- which enable hands-free cell phone use -- to gain access to in-vehicle networks, to take control over safety-critical functions such as the brakes." 

Engineers are often presented with an opportunity to create something they never thought they'd be attempting due to the way humans integrate with technology. Humans are constantly staring down at their smartphones whether it's the increasingly dangerous texting and driving in a car, or walking down the street, with their eyes glued to the screen. 

Engineers in Germany noticed that when people look at their smartphones at traffic lights, they tend to ignore the traffic lights. 

According to the Washington Post, the city of Augsburg will be looking into implementing traffic lights built into the pavement. This way, people who are looking down at their phones will see an illuminated pavement and know when it is safe to walk over the road. The light-up pavements have been tested at tram stations in the town, and may lead to further development if proven to be successful. 

Stephanie Lermen, a spokeswoman for Augsburg, said: "It creates a whole new level of attention." 

But some of the German residents of the town are not convinced pavements that light up with the colour of the traffic lights are good to have. The greater public are not convinced taxpayer money should be spent on the pavement lights. 

Multiple reports in several countries have alluded to the fact that smartphone distraction in public areas is killing humans, which makes the case for engineered solutions for life-saving inventions. 

Should other countries follow suit or are the light-up pavements a waste of taxpayer money?