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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Software engineers are the mighty guardians of keeping Google up and running 24/7. In a report written on Wired, Google uses three words in explaining how it stays up: Site Reliability Engineering. According to the report and Google's own numbers, in 2015, Google's App Suite - which includes Gmail, Google Docs, Google Drive et al - were up 99.97 percent of the year.
The Vice President of Engineering at Google, Ben Treynor Sloss, said, "The result of our approach is that we end up with a team of people who will quickly become bored by performing tasks by hand and have the skill set necessary to write software to replace their previously manual work."
Site reliability engineers are up for more hires around the world due to site maintenance that exists in the world due to the chance of a site being a victim of cyber-crime or just general maintenance that keeps the website functioning with all of its bells and whistles.
One of the site reliability engineers at Google, Andrew Widdowson detailing what its like to be an SRE - as it is abbreviated - said, "Our work is like being a part of the world's most intense pit crew. We change the tires of a race car as it's going 100mph."
The team that works for Google has worked with a publisher to release a textbook that is now available for purchase named Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems.
Here's an application form to be a Software Engineer for Google.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
"I think robotics is a new manufacturing and it can help people to do some high-risk work and go to top of the mountain and deep ocean to realize our world adventure," said Scarlett Johansson.
Okay...maybe she didn't say it. However, an artificial intelligence replying to the question of what she thinks about the future did. An engineering student by the name of Ricky Ma decided to build his own humanoid from scratch and modeled it after Scarlett Johansson. According to Engineering.com, the robot cost $50,000 (USD) to build.
Using CAD, CAE and a 3D printer he built his robot, even printing out a torso and pelvic bones so the robot could stand upright and move its limbs. He is calling it 'Mark 1' and more than half of her is 3D printed.
The Nanyang Technological University in Singapore has a similar robot called 'Nadine'. The robot can have a conversation with you, change her facial expression and greets someone by name based on the last time they met. The woman behind the robot is the director of NTU's Insitute for Media Innovation, Nadia Thalmann, in an interview with Vice's Motherboard, said, "Nadine is using a 3D camera and can detect and recognize people due to a binary pattern algorithm. Then she has a short time memory linked to her language database. When we tell her something, she will analyse what is being said and link to the database, itself linked to the memory."
Check it out and then prepare for the robopocalypse:
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Construction is fluctuating globally if new reports are to be believed. Australian reports indicate that construction work has fallen to a 13-month low in the country, however, Germany is reporting a rise in construction activity. The Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) is a global survey that observes the construction activity over the world in a space of one month.
According to BusinessInsider, Australian residential, commercial and engineering industries have all experienced a slump in March compared to the figures calculated a month earlier in February.
Another company that investigated the slump in Australia's construction sector, the AI Group-HIA, published their findings. It shows that March's observations of construction engineering are under the 12-month average in 2015.
An economist at the HIA, Georgan Murray, says, "This is a concern because the ongoing contraction in mining-related work still has a way to go yet. It is unlikely that a pick-up in conditions in other sectors will fully offset the contraction in mining investment over the next years, but we need to give non-resource businesses the best possible chance. Bolstering business confidence is the key."
Business in the German construction sector reached new heights for the fourteenth month in a row, according to ConstructionIndex. Oliver Kolodseike, an economist at Markit, spoke to the website, saying, "Despite falling to a three-month low in March, the Germany Construction PMI signalled a sharp rise in building activity, thereby adding to hopes that the sector will contribute positively to economic growth in the opening quarter of the year. Moreover, capacity pressures continued to build, as companies reported an ongoing shortage of subcontractors, with the respective index falling to its lowest level in two-and-a-half years. The forward-looking indicators suggest that building firms should remain busy: employment levels rose strongly and companies scaled up their buying activity in anticipation of rising demand."
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The world's leading industrial showcase will be taking place on the 25th to the 29th of April, 2016. Hannover Messe is celebrated worldwide as a significant event that sees heads of state and top-level engineers make their way through the event. The event will also take a look at the latest trends in multiple engineering industries. According to their brochure, the event sees 200,000 visitors per year of which 30% of them are from abroad. Some of the talking points include industrial automation, energy, industrial supply, digital factory and research & technology. The theme this year is 'Integrated Industry - Discover Solutions'.
Dr. Jochen Kockler, a Member of the Board at Deutsche Messe, said, "Hannover has become the global hotspot for issues such as Industrie 4.0, energy efficiency and smart grids. Every year HANNOVER MESSE sets new trends - for example, smart services, 3D printing, collaborative robots."
Digitimes.com has reported that a Taiwanese company, NEXCOM, will be releasing a "blueprint for industry 4.0" in the upcoming event, as engineers try to make more sense of where the industry is leading and how to work along with the fourth industrial revolution. IoT automation solutions and the industrial 4.0 wireless factory, including industrial cloud and security are just some of the talking points of NEXCOM coming up at the event.
MIT has confirmed its attendance as well due to the United States as the partner company for the event. Carnegie Mellon University that invented the GPS systems NASA's mars rover used and is the self-professed home of artificial intelligence and will also be at the event.
Marc Siemering, senior vice president of Hannover Messe, said to media, "Carnegie Mellon and MIT are two of America's most storied research universities. Their participation further spotlights the innovative power of Partner Country USA at HANNOVER MESSE."
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An annual survey by MHI and Deloitte shows that 51% of 900 different supply chain companies agree that robotics and automation have changed the way their companies operate. The Wall Street Journal reports that the technologies have added new fields of network management, cloud computing, and sensors.
Deloitte - on their website - says that people sometimes confuse robots with walking, talking, Transformer-looking helper bots, but in actual fact the robots that supply chain managers now concern themselves with is the computer is "computer coded software, programmes that replace humans performing competitive rules-based tasks and cross-functional and cross-application macros."
Last year only 39% of companies were saying robotics was influencing the way they did things and now that number has escalated.
Gregg Goodner, past president of Hytrol Conveyor Co. told WSJ, "The customer today is demanding their suppliers be able to deliver their product faster. Customers demands are stronger and you've got to be able to meet them, or quite truthfully, you don't play the game."
35% of the companies surveyed say that their supply chains are almost fully robotics. The report indicates that in the next ten years that number will rise to 74%. The report went on to say, "While the vast majority of forwarders agree technology is the future of freight, they see any types of technology as over-hyped. Warehouse robotics are the only innovation that a majority consider will have a profound impact on the industry."
The MHI's report is indicating that automation is improving in terms of technology. They report that safety in design of automation machines and affordability of companies will mean more will be reporting that their supply chains are automated soon.
The MHI says, "In the past, safety barriers and sensors prohibited people from working too near machines - creating a time-consuming process if someone noticed. Now robots aren't just safer, but more sophisticated, with "3D vision and the ability to make the decisions necessary to handle different product types and sizes."
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The WWF has released a report named Protecting People Through Nature: Natural Heritage Sites as Drivers of Sustainable Development that criticises industrial activity as being an irreparable problem to the environment.
In the foreword of the document, written by the Director General of WWF International, Marco Lambertini:
Shockingly, almost half of all natural World Heritage sites are threatened by harmful industrial activities and operations, such as oil and gas exploration and extraction, mining, illegal logging, construction of large-scale infrastructure, overfishing, and unsustainable water use.
According to TIME Magazine, 114 out of 229 natural heritage sites - which were awarded that status by UNESCO - are said to have oil, gas or mining concessions attached to it.
Lambertini says:
Healthy natural World Heritage sites contribute to poverty reduction, help alleviate food insecurity, combat climate change, and restore and promote the sustainable use of ecosystems. Protecting these sites and investing in their future should be part of each government's national action for achieving its Sustainable Development Goals commitments.
The WWF now calls on governments to develop policy guidelines to protect natural heritage sites from being damaged by industrial activity, amongst some other demands listed in their report. They have also called on corporate and finance entities, as well as NGOs and society groups to lend their help in preventing industrial activity by engineering companies which damage the natural heritage sites and conservancies.
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Engineers from the University of California, San Diego, the University of South California and the California Institute of Technology have been investing their time to develop a new kind of steel that would be strong enough to survive damage without being significantly deformed, according to Design-Engineering.
The steel is being called SAM2X5-630 and is an "amorphous steel alloy" that is cheap to make but a solid steel that has never been seen before. Made up of atom arrangements that contradict steel formations of the past.
It is breaking elasticity limits of steel alloys, the researchers say. They say the alloy can survive pressure up to 12.5 giga-Pascals. This would translate to 125,000 atmospheres.
Olivia Graeve, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego, said, "Because these materials are designed to withstand extreme conditions, you can process them under extreme conditions carefully."
The researchers conducted experiments that saw the alloys react to shock by shooting the steel with a gas gun with copper disc 'bullets' at 500 to 1300 meters per second. The researchers say that the alloys were deformed but more protected than any other steel would have been and it was not permanently damaged.
Is this the steel of the future? We will keep your eyes on it.
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Self-aware WiFi. You read that right. A WiFi system that instead of being searched for, does the searching and connecting to a WiFi enabled device.
That is the future of WiFi according to researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They say that they have developed software called Chronos that, according to RoboticTrends.com, "enables a single WiFi access point to locate users to within tens of centimeters." In their video, the researchers explain that this could lead to single room WiFi access, but shut out other users in one building.
The team also shows in their video that using the Decimeter-Level Localization with a Single WiFi Access Point could ensure that drones stay a safe distance away from humans because it can pinpoint exactly where a person is standing in relation to its vicinity.
"From developing drones that are safer for people to be around, to tracking where family members are in your house, Chronos could open up new avenues for using WiFi in robotics, home automation and more," said Deepak Vasisht, an author of the paper and a Ph.D. student at MIT. "Designing a system that enables one WiFi node to locate another is an important step for wireless technology."
The engineers say that the experiments they conducted in an apartment were able to accurately calculate in which room a person was in 94% of the time. A true indoor GPS. The team uses the "time-of-flight" that the data takes to travel from an access point, which was usually calculated with triangulation. Chronos, however, doesn't only calculate the triangulation but also "the actual distance from a user to an access point.
Vasisht says, "Knowing both the distance and the angle allows you to compute the user's position using just once access point. This is encouraging news for the many small businesses and consumers that don't have the luxury of owning several access points."
Another author of the research paper, Professor Dina Katabi, said, "Imagine having a system like this at home that can continuously adapt the heating and cooling depending on a number of people in the home and where they are. Eliminating the need for cooperation between WiFi routers opens up many exciting new applications for localization."
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According to Reuters, engineering exports to the United States from Germany are not happening at a fast pace this year. The reasons given are "lower fracking investments, a weaker global economy and a euro-dollar rate stabilisation" according to an industry association, that remained unnamed in the report.
More than half of German firms believe that these figures will improve later on in 2016, according to a survey conducted by the VDMA association. The VDMA is one of Europe's leaders in industrial associations that presides over 3,100 member companies.
The VDMA reported that the improvement - if any - would not be able to eclipse the last measurement of an 11% rise in 2015.
The VDMA, in a statement, said, "The American market does not offer grounds for euphoria. But the engagement of German engineering firms in America is not short-term."
Reuters reports that the U.S. was the largest market for engineering exports in 2015. The exports rose to $19.1 billion. China struggled due to a 6 percent drop.
Germany and the U.S. were also big trading partners, reaching one hundred twenty-nine billion three hundred forty-two million six hundred and ninety thousand dollars.
Furthermore, engineering jobs opening up in Germany, according to Reuters are:
...power train engineering, materials handling, construction equipment, agricultural engineering, machine tools, and food technology and packaging.
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Safe Work Australia and Good Design Australia are teaming up to present an award celebrating innovation, creativity and most importantly, safety in design in engineering projects. Safety in design has been reiterated globally due to recent incidents involving collapsing structures and bad design practices.
Michelle Baxter, Safe Work Australia's CEO spoke to SafetyCulture.com, saying, "Considering safety in design is important because well-designed work can prevent work-related deaths, injuries, and illnesses. The most effective design process begins at the earliest opportunity during the conceptual and planning phases. Effective work design considers how work is performed, the physical working environment, and the workers themselves." The winners of this award will be announced on the 27th of May, 2016.
SafetyCulture.com outlined the categories that are awarded in the new awards program:
Categories for the Good Design Award include product, service, digital, communication, architectural and business model design, and social innovation.
According to Malcolm Barker (a BSc Civil Engineering graduate from the University of Natal Durban in South Africa) and Simon Casey (a man with 20 years experience as a Risk and Safety Consultant), there has been a "significant reduction" in LTIs (lost time injuries) in the last 5 to 10 years in Australia specifically. However, this does not mean that the requirements of safety in design fall away in the country. Thanks to a law implemented from the Queensland Work Health & Safety Act of 2011, there are laws in place that require designers, engineers and governments to ensure that sites are safe and the end product are safe as well. These would be matters including:
a) the likelihood of the hazard or the risk concerned occuring; and
b) the degree of harm that might result from the hazard or the risk; and
c) what the person concerned knows, or ought reasonably to know about
i) the hazard or the risk; and
ii)ways of eliminating or minimising the risk; and
d) the availability and suitability of ways to eliminate or minimise the risk; and
e) after assessing the extent of the risk and the available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, the cost associated with available ways of eliminating or minimising the risk, including whether the cost is grossly disproportinate to the risk
However, the Queensland Health & Safety Act of 2011 is limiting in the sense that it does not "require a positive demonstration of safety due diligence." Thankfully, to remedy this fact, the Health and Safety Executive published the UK Health & Safety Executive Reducing Risks, Protecting People document and that has a clause that ensures risk management needs to done even when the chance of risk is small:
Our policy is that the precautionary principle should be invoked where:
- there is good reason, based on empirical evidence or plausible causual hyptohesis, to believe that serious harm might occur, even if the likelihood of harm is remote;
- the scientific information gathered at this stage of consequences and likelihood reveals such uncertainity that it is impossible to evaluate the conjectured outcomes with sufficient confidence to move to the next stages of the risk assessment process
The precautionary principle is a ruling that refers to the obligation that designers, architects, engineers, and governments have. It ensures that elements of a product they produce must be evaluated to determine whether or not they are harmful to either humans or the environment. They have a social responsibility to stop any form of harmful object making its way to the public. This is very important in civil engineering specifically.
Safety is important, but that starts at the designing phase. Quality designing is key in the safety in design. In Engineering News Network Episode 8, the Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Insitutue of Technology, Steve Mackay says designers should be focusing on what the market wants. He says, "As engineers we are taught to think about what the best thing is but in fact, we need to go one step further with our designs and think about what does the market want? What can I make which is simple? What will make my customer ecstatic?" He further says that engineers should think of the end user so that the product can result in a good engineering design.
To read more about Safety in Design practices read: Safe Design of Structures - Code of Practice
For useful tips on 'SiD' if you do happen to be a designer, architect, engineer or government official and want to know what to look out for, take a look at this educational video:
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An engineer out of the Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore named Dr Arindan Basu has developed a smart chip that is able to measure brain signals. The chip was created for tetraplegics. These are people who have lost the use of most or all of their limbs due to illness or injury.
"Patients who are tetraplegic cannot move their arms or legs but their brain is still actively thinking about moving them. I wanted to make a smart chip that would recognise that thought and translate it into action," Basu said.
Basu and a team of researchers received donations from investors to go ahead with the chip. Dr. Basu has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.
Explaining how the chip works, Basu spoke to media, saying, "Think of it as Bluetooth. The chip recognises the thought signals that the brain is making and the thought of action gets sent to the prosthetic arm or leg, enabling the movement." The chip decodes what the brain is thinking and then sends the commands to the prosthetics.
"What we have developed is a very versatile smart chip that can process data, analyse patterns and spot the difference," Basu said, adding that the tests on animals had resulted in 95% accuracy of decoding brain waves.
TheEngineer.co.uk had their own ideas of what else the chip could be used for:
The device could also be useful for non-medical applications, such as Internet of Things-enabled devices. For example, the chip can be programmed to send a video back to the servers only when a specific type of car or something out of the ordinary is detected, such as an intruder. With an increasing number of devices, in factories, for example, sending and recieving large amounts of data, this will assist significantly in keeping network traffic down to manageable levels.
The 128-Channel Extreme Learning Machine-Based Neural Decoder for Brain Machine Interfaces reading/journal can be purchased for further reading.
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Should self-driving cars get their own lane? That is the question left in everyone's minds after Volvo's CEO, Lex Kerssemakers, saw that one of their autonomous vehicles couldn't see the lane it was supposed to be driving in due to how shoddily the lanes looked due to wear and tear. Something that should interest civil engineers all over the world.
Kerssemakers was at the LA Auto Show with the mayor of Los Angeles. Things got heated when the car wouldn't drive to which Kerssemakers shouted, "It can't find the lane markings. You need to paint the bloody roads here."
According to Reuters, 65% of roads are in poor condition, which would render autonomous cars useless if they cannot read and calculate without lane markings. Autonomous vehicles already struggle in rainy weather conditions as well, in a long list of hurdles that need to be overcome before they make these vehicles commercially available.
Christoph Mertz, a research scientist at Carnegie Mellon University, speaking to Reuters, said, "If the lane fades, all hell breaks loose. But cars have to handle these weird circumstances and have three different ways of doing things in case one fails."
But what about at night when visibility is questionable even with headlights and lamposts? Will these cars still be able to function then?
Mercedes is quite confident they might have an answer in their new 2017 E Class. It utilizes what is called 'Driver Pilot' and consists of 23 sensors that would be able to make observations on the road that would detect guard rails, barriers, and cars. The kicker is that it doesn't require lane markings to stay in a lane.
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Engineers at Iowa State University have been hard at work at creating something that might pique the military's interest. It is a translucent material that would make whatever it covers invisible to radar. In a recent report published in Scientific Reports, the engineers said: "It is believed that the present meta-skin technology will find many applications in electromagnetic frequency tuning, shielding and scattering suppression."
According to TheEngineer.com
The cloaking device is formed of rows of split ring resonators filled with galinstan, a metal alloy that's liquid at room tempreature but less toxic than mercury. These rings, which have a radius of 2.5mm and a thickness of 0.5mm, are embedded inside layers of silicone sheets. Together they create a resonator that can trap and suppress radar waves at a certain frequency.
In the paper, the team writes about doing tests with a frequency range of 8 to 10 gigahertz. They report that the fabric they invented suppressed the radar waves up to 75%. This number can only improve, which means soon in the future the fabric would be able to resonate with radar waves and appear invisible to them.
The group concluded their tests by saying:
Therefore, the meta-skin technology is different from traditional stealth technologies that often only reduce the backscattering, i.e., the power reflected back to a probing radar.
The engineers are confident that one day they will be able to cloak aircraft with the invention.
Liang Dong, an associate professor working on the project, said, "The long-term goal is to shrink the size of these devices. Then hopefully, we can do this higher-frequency electromagnetic waves such as visible or infrared light. While that would require advanced nanomanufacturing technologies and appropriate structural modifications, we think this study proves the concept of frequency tuning and broadening and multidirectional wave suppression with skin-type metamaterials."
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No matter whether you are chief design engineer for Intel or a plumber, negotiation is a key skill which can contribute enormously to your career.
The art of negotiation can be a thorny topic. The wise words from a guru ring in my ear: “You don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate”.
Applying these suggestions within my blog can put thousands of additional dollars in your pocket every year.
Dear Colleague
No matter whether you are chief design engineer for Intel or a plumber, negotiation is a key skill which can contribute enormously to your career.
The art of negotiation can be a thorny topic. The wise words from a guru ring in my ear: “You don’t get what you deserve; you get what you negotiate”.
Applying these suggestions below can put thousands of additional dollars in your pocket every year.
We don’t negotiate enough
I believe most of us engineering professionals don’t negotiate enough. We accept the status quo when purchasing or selling something. In our precise, meticulous and trusting minds, we accept that the price must be right as it is generally set by others “who know better”. Or we believe it is unprofessional and demeaning to “haggle” over an item. And we often believe that it is about a win-lose scenario - if you beat the price down sufficiently, the other party loses.
But believe me, even in established department stores, with a supposedly rigid pricing structure, you can negotiate if you have a reason (e.g. imperfections in goods, out-of-date goods, no spares available). People are looking for reasons to give you a great deal. And a better price. Obviously, you have to justify the reason for the lower price. Simply applying the battering ram approach and demanding a lower price without pointing a reason for your request ain’t gonna work.
Understand the other point of view
It is critical to understand the other person’s point of view almost as well as your own – ensure you are clear about what he/she wants and then look for alternatives to the standard solutions.
Don’t destroy the other party
There is definitely no point in destroying the other party in negotiations. It is better to protect their interests, particularly if you are looking for a long term relationship – otherwise it may come back to haunt you.
We were the consultants to the construction of a power station. The client was tough and wasn’t prepared to tolerate any relaxation of the original contract terms (delays in delivering the power station occurred due to unexpected wet weather and labour disputes). The contractor ended up with particularly severe terms in the negotiations for liquidated damages and went out of business shortly afterwards. This resulted in a power station that had to be completed by someone else at an enormously increased cost and with huge delays. Negotiating a solution to arrive at a win-win would have saved both parties ruinous additional costs.
Proven Techniques for Negotiation
A few proven techniques with negotiating – no matter whether you are the buyer or seller:
- Avoid an adversarial – you-lose-I-win approach
- Build trust and co-operation - work as partners
- Try and uncover hidden issues when listening to the other party.
- Research your position and that of the other party thoroughly and work out possible solutions before you negotiate.
- Communicate your position clearly and simply and make sure the other party understands you. Clarify your understanding of the other party’s requirements. Indicate a proven commitment to coming to a win-win solution - What do you have that the other party wants? What can you give away at minimal cost to yourself, but which is worth a lot to the other party?
- Reframe the problem so that it is solvable by a win-win solution. What compromises are possible?
- Wait in silence when you have stated your price - do not talk.
- Look for solutions by “expanding-the-cake.”
- Write down the final agreement and confirm this is what has been understood.
And if you can’t negotiate a good solution, then be prepared to walk away.
As far as negotiation goes, William Shakespeare’s advice (in Much Ado about Nothing) from the 1500’s is timeless, insofar as trusting a third party when interpreting a situation:
Friendship is constant in all other things
Save in the office and affairs of love:
Therefore all hearts in love use their own tongues;
Let every eye negotiate for itself
And trust no agent.
Yours in engineering learning
Steve
Mackay’s Musings – 5th April’16 #594
125, 273 readers – www.eit.edu.au/cms/news/blog-steve-mackay
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
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Weather forecasts seem to be a hot topic amongst engineers these days. Everyone is trying to invent the next weather measurement tool that will change the game. Hey, people love knowing what the weather is going to be, what can we say? Scientists over at Oklahoma State University are working with something vastly different to weather balloons. Drones.
Meteorologists who are working with the team say they are going to be able to produce forecasts more accurately with the new method of measuring weather patterns. The drones would source the information about the weather patterns by calculating information based on the earth's atmosphere.
Jamey Jacob, an aerospace engineer and professor of mechanical engineering at OSU is pioneering the Unmanned Systems Research Institute that is using the drones. The team claim the drones can fly for large stretches of times, recording data on several atmospheric levels.
"Oklahoma is a really good, good example, because even though we're already a very weather-dynamic state, Oklahoma only has two balloon launches a day -- one at dawn and one at dusk -- from a single location in the state, and that's where all the weather forecasting information comes from. So that data is really sparse, and it's difficult for meteorologists that are developing these forecasting models to get a very good idea about how that weather is changing from these very limited number of data points."
A professor of meteorology at OSU, Phillip Chilson thinks the drone program would be low-cost and will ensure that storms are understood better. Probably best to do it in Oklahoma since they are prone to tornadoes in their state.
Chilson told Voice of America, "Our real goal is to try to develop systems that really, I don't want to say replace but there may be that possibility of replacing weather balloons, but currently augmenting them -- so, increasing the capabilities."
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Are lightweight lithium-sulfur batteries the solution to the uncertainty that some associate with lithium batteries? Whether critics like it or not, lithium batteries are here to stay due to them being the operative force of current energy storage batteries like Tesla and Redflow's house powering cells and of course, in our cell phones and the driving force of the latest electric cars.
Now, the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR) is saying lightweight lithium-sulfur batteries might hold twice the amount of power than regular lithium batteries. Working out of DOE's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory the researchers found that the liquid in lithium batteries and its salt content is important when it comes to how many times a battery can be used. According to Phys.org, a specific salt named LiTFSI that assists lithium atoms and sulfur on the electrode and then releases it in quick succession, which is good. Other lithium batteries with different liquids don't release off of the electrode at all and the battery is weaker as a result.
As lithium design becomes more popular, a more sustainable, longer lasting battery needs to be developed especially for cars that intend to run for long stretches of road.
The researchers experimented with LiTFSI and LiFSI and concluded that the first iteration they used was interwoven with sulfur more successfully and led to lithium sulfide that broke apart more easily which leads to a stronger battery.
Dr. Ji-Guang Zhang, who was at the helm of the project, said, "By conducting a macroscopic compositional analysis combined with simulations, we can see which bonds are easily broken and what will happen from there. This process let's us identify the electrolytes behavior, guides us to design a better electrolyte, and improve the cycle life of lithium-sulfur batteries."
You can read the official Effect of the Anion Activity on the Stability of Li Metal Anodes in Lithium-Sulfur Batteries on the Wiley Online Library.
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- Category: Announcements
Andrew Stephen Grove was born in Hungary but lived in America and is one of the most lauded businessmen and engineers in recent history. He pioneered research in the semiconductor industry after escaping from Communist Hungary in his 20s. He then built the largest factory of semiconductors we know today as Intel.
Grove is celebrated as one of the forefathers of electronics manufacturing and how it is performed to this day. It is said that Steve Jobs idolized him and would call him for personal career advice. In 2000, he was diagnosed with Parkinsons Disease.
In 1968, he joined Intel as the Director of Engineering and kickstarted the companies electronic manufacturing wing. They started with dynamic memory chips and then moved on to microprocessors. By 1997, the company had progressed past the $20 billion mark.
On the growth of Intel, Grove said, "In various bits and pieces, we have steered Intel from a start-up to one of the central companies of the information economy." Grove thrust Intel from being plain manufacturers of memory chips into undoubtedly the most important company for microprocessors.
One of Grove's mottos was as follows: "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive."
Grove died on the 21st of March, 2016 at the age of 79 years old.
Condolences have been streaming in after the passing of Grove, with engineers sending their well-wishes to his family and remembering the master of engineering he was.
Grove not only cared about microprocessors, he was also interested in lending a hand wherever he could in engineering and science fields. University of California San Franciso Chancellor, Sam Hawgood, said, "Andy Grove was a champion of innovation in the health sciences. His generous and tireless support of UCSF has transformed our university and helped accelerate our research into breakthrough treatments and better patient care."
In the seventh episode of the Engineering News Network, hosted by Steve Mackay, Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institue of Technology, he recounts what made Andrew Grove special. He said, "[He was] an amazing guy, extremely modest, design orientated, extremely precise, meticulous, all of those great attributes of a fine engineer. And, in addition, he had creativity."
Mackay also spoke of the difference Grove was making in the engineering world as one of the last feats before his sad passing. Mackay said, "One of the last contributions he made was to emphasise jobs over money. He was very interested in the US economy, creating jobs rather than just making bucks."
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
The United Arab Emirates cannot put up with the number of graduates looking for jobs, but the one industry they cannot seem to place anyone in is the engineering industry. The construction industry was the first one named in the report by GulfNews. The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) say that those with degrees in architecture, civil engineering and post-graduate degrees in finance, international business, and real estate are among the more difficult qualifications to find jobs for in the UAE.
A managing partner at Morgan McKinley (a renowned placement agency especially for engineering careers), Michael Gilmore, says, "It is clear there is an oversupply of talent, however, clients have far more difficulty in the recruitment process as every hire into a construction firm is crucial in this market and a weak hire can prove critical. It is also evident that construction clients are looking for more specialists rather than supply, so becoming more niche in their choice of candidate. Candidates are also much more cautious about leaving their current company as there are few solid companies in the market and it becomes very difficult to predict the right move."
The UAE is experiencing the problem of their most skilled engineers hopping over into other countries that offer higher salaries and better working opportunities. "The lower packages are affecting the talent crunch also, as our neighbors Saudi Arabia benefit from the downturn, offering highly skilled workers higher increments to make the move, while Oman offer similar packages but much more cost-effective," Gilmore added.
The jobs the UAE are lacking skilled professionals in - in case you were thinking of immigrating - are:
...Development director, project director, director of planning and strategy and cost control professionals
- Michael Gilmore
It seems that engineering graduates need to go over and above what they have been studying in their degrees and get more competency certificates and becomes specialized in a field and will be scooped up by firms that require their skills.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Engineering experts are delivering opinions on a flyover railway bridge that collapsed, killing fourteen, in Kolkata, India. Panduranga Rao, of the IVRCL Construction Company in charge of the flyover, said to media, "It is nothing but God's act. About 70% of the construction work was completed properly. The experts regularly monitored the progress of the project...It is a total act of God. This has never happened before, we are also in shock.
Details have emerged that say the tender was handed down in 2009 to IVRCL Construction. Since then the problems with planning and tender corruption led to the flyover's collapse, say engineering experts.
The project - which was pushed back substantially due to delays - is part of a 1.6 mile (2.5km) flyover that would minimize the amounts of traffic in Kolkata's Burrabazar area, according to Mid-Day.com.
At the Indian Institue of Technology-Kharagpur, Joy Sen of the architecture faculty said, "Phasing of construction and time and use of materials are interlocked. If these things are not done on time, then construction like these which are exposed to weather becomes very risky."
This will bring up many questions about the safety and security of construction sites in India. Sen added, "They have a time schedule and you cannot delay with these projects. You need proper planning and you can't play with human lives."
Tenderpreneurship gone wrong or an act of God, either way, an engineering feat has caused deaths and that is never a good thing.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Nanoscale technology is quickly becoming the most fantasized answer to the future in the engineering world. The University of Alberta's mineral engineering researchers might have just saved the manufacturing processes of electronics industries some money. The researchers have been working with 'Atomic layer deposition' (ALD) which sees slim films covered in molecule materials like "zinc, silicon and nitrogen" which would assist with the manufacturing of electronic chips and how efficiently they are manufactured.
The Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering in the university are confident the new films they have developed will assist computers and electronic devices by altering the atomic layer deposition.
Ken Cadien, a materials engineering professor put the discovery into context, saying that zinc or silicon are a prerequisite to making thin film devices but are heavily overpriced. "Some of these are big molecules and in semiconductor manufacturing if you're a company producing 10,000 12-inch wafers a week -- small amounts of something add up to big amounts of something."
Triratna Muneshwar, a graduate with his doctorate from the University of Alberta told Phys.org, "My interest in this came about in conversation with Dr. Cadien and one of his colleagues who said that precursor costs are a challenge...There are more than 1,000 atomic layer deposition systems in the world but there's only a small handful of people asking why and how these things work, who are trying new things. When you're doing that, you can come up with breakthroughs like this."
The two confirm that since they have published their findings, leading players in the electronic manufacturing industry have purchased the journal to learn from the work they are doing.
Muneshwar published his findings in the Journal of Applied Physics.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Singtel, a Singapore-based service provider is joining hands with Perth in Australia in the form of a subsea cable. The new link will ensure that customers growing want for bandwidth-heavy applications like unified communications, enterprise data exchange, internet and online gaming will be efficiently run. Along with Australia's Telstra and SubPartners, Singtel signed a Memorandum of Understanding on March 31st, 2016.
The cable goes by the name of APX-West and will measure in at 2,796 miles (4,500km) in length and will provide 10 Terabits of speed both ways between Singapore and Australia, according to AustralianNewsNetwork.
Ooi Seng Keat, vice president, Carrier Services and Group Enterprise at Singtel, said in a statement, "The APX-West cable will be a new data superhighway to expand data connectivity and capacity between Singapore and Australia, providing network redundancy and the lowest latency from Australia to South-East Asia, the Middle East and Europe."
The data superhighway is expected to be finished in 2018 and promises that engineers will be constantly making sure the project runs without fault in the next two years.
Bevan Slattery, SubPartners founder and chief executive, said, "This is a unique commercial model for the Perth-Singapore route that will satisfy the ongoing bandwidth requirements of both network operators and internet content hosts."
This project comes on the back of an announcement from Singtel that they would be working alongside Ericsson to improve Singapore's 4G capabilities for the Internet of Things (IoT) technologies they have been working on.
Tay Soo Meng, group CTO at Singtel told ZDNet, "IoT connectivity is an important part of Singapore's enterprises, and supports the Singapore government's Smart Nation initiative. We anticipate a growing demand to connect a multitude of sensors and devices in a cost-effective manner."
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Education
The College of Engineering Pune (CoEP) in Maharashtra, India is reporting that 50 percent of its students in city colleges are jobless. The PuneMirror reported that the industrial and economic slump is the culprit, which has seen only 24 percent of graduates find jobs this year compared to the ninety percent of graduates who found placement in 2015.
Dr. Govind Kulkarni, head of CoEP's training and placement cell, said, "This year, around 101 students enrolled for placements, but only 24 got jobs. Last year, 131 companies had visited the college and almost all students were placed. This year, the umber of companies was the same, but there is a dramatic drop in the selection of students. Companies have attributed this to the industrial slump. Also, overall steel production and the Chinese economy have also been hit."
"Companies are not coming to campuses as much as before. They are also not willing to pay the minimum package at par with the IT industry," says A S Kulkarni, head of the placement cell at Vishwakarma Insitute of Technology. This could suggest why some engineers end up going to the IT industry instead of pursuing civil engineering.
Elsewhere in India, in Manipal, the Minister for road transport, highways, and shipping, Nitin Gadkari, said a new plan is being put in place for civil engineering students. The idea is that they will be awarded projects with pre-determined payments that they would be paid to instead of going through the process of trying to get a tender to start working on projects. "In doing so, thousands of engineering graduates will get work experience. This will give them hands-on experiences before venturing into big projects. In road construction, the problem is not resources, but manpower. It is the right time for students to enter the business. The government system is more transparent and supportive now," Gadkari said.
However, the slump in hiring graduates still persists. A final year student at CoEP, Swati Shinde, said, "The real estate sector has ceased to grow and companies are offering less salary. Also, companies with portfolios in water supply, planning and construction have not come this year at all. I will apply to companies on my own, too."
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Industry
Like something out of an Isaac Asimov novel, Microsoft has shown what its HoloLens might be capable of in the near future. The HoloLens - if you haven't seen it by now - is a new augmented reality (AR) headset that integrates with the spaces visible in front of you, displaying objects around the world you know. Now, a new feature is being advertised that might revolutionize the technology and get the consumers salivating.
It is called 'holoportation'. In short, it is a hologram that looks very Star Wars-esque. Shahram Izadi, a Partner Research Manager with Microsoft says that this could change the way humans communicate.
"Imagine being able to virtually teleport from one space to another in real time," Izadi said in the company's announcement video. The idea is that those wanting to communicate via hologram both would have to wear the HoloLens from Microsoft and will be able to view each other in real time in augmented reality.
Microsoft's newly designed 3D capture system utilizes cameras set up around a room and tracks any movement, transferring data into computers that can represent it in a 3D space. The engineers also say that the sessions can be recorded and played back. Something that could revolutionize business and home life.
Izadi spoke of the possibilities, saying, "Imagine using this type of capture technology to connect with family members who are thousands of miles away."
If there was any doubt as to why you would want one of these HoloLenses, there is little doubt now.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Education
Elon Musk and Elton John are best known for their tagline, "WE BRING THE NOISE". If you haven't seen their advertisements on the telly,there's a good chance you live down under, on the underside of a rock. Now ceramics engineering and electrical engineering will walk hand in hand once again when the new 10-kilowatt THUNDERBOX is unleashed onto markets all over the world.
The THUNDERBOX will be an in-house energy storage system that will - in the words of its makers - "keep you off the grid and ensure zero skid". It is said that it might save you $1900 (USD) per month if you purchase one right now for the INSANE selling price of $60,000.20. Furthermore, if you order NOW you get a free roll of 3-D printing paper to use the new THUNDERBOX with.
In a new video previewing the THUNDERBOX, Bradsef Mack-daddy-Kay, Head of Engineering at ZEID (Ziplining Engineering Institute of Dermatology) said, "I bought myself one of these so-called THUNDERBOXES and I must say, it runs quietly and works efficiently. My wife loves the THUNDERBOX and even reads a magazine whilst operating it, so I mean...that's convenience."
The engineering firm behind the THUNDERBOX has asked artist Elton John if he would consider doing a cover of his hit song Tinderbox and kindly changing the lyrics and its title to THUNDERBOX. Musk said, "The original lyrics say, 'we were living in a Tinderbox, two sparks would set the whole thing off' and we really think that if the lyrics were tweaked a little they would be the perfect theme tune for every time you press the metallic handle on our THUNDERBOX. All in the name of feeling great about storing energy into our THUNDERBOX." They haven't heard back from Sir Elton John as of yet.
Musk & John & Associates will put the THUNDERBOX on sale as of the 1st of April, 2016. So, that's today. Critics of the new energy solution claim that they have had thunderboxes in their houses for quite some time and the new solution is nothing new.
Happy April Fools.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Education
What are the best-paying jobs of 2016 so far? Which jobs are in trouble? Employment website Glassdoor and higher-ups in certain industries claim to have the answers. The company published their findings on their website, also reporting that 7 in 10 people said that salary was the main factor when it came to deciding where to work.
For interests sake, here is a recap of the top 10 highest paying jobs from Glassdoor:
1. Physician
- Median Base Salary: $180,000
- Number of Job Openings: 2,064
2. Lawyer
- Median Base Salary: $144,500
- Number of Job Openings: 995
3. Research & Development Manager
- Median Base Salary: $142,120
- Number of Job Openings: 112
4. Software Development Manager
- Median Base Salary: $132,000
- Number of Job Openings: 3,495
- Median Base Salary: $130,000
- Number of Job Openings: 1,766
- Median Base Salary: $130,000
- Number of Job Openings: 701
- Median Base Salary: $128,250
- Number of Job Openings: 655
8. Integrated Circuit Designer Engineer
- Median Base Salary: $127,500
- Number of Job Openings: 165
9. IT Manager
- Median Base Salary: $120,000
- Number of Job Openings: 3,152
- Median Base Salary: $120,000
- Number of Job Openings: 2,838
Chief Economist at Glassdoor, Dr. Andrew Chamberlain, says, "The report reinforces that high pay continues to be tied to in-demand skills, higher education and working in jobs that are protected from competition or automation. This is why we see several jobs within the technology and healthcare industries."
Which jobs are in trouble? Dean of Engineering at the Engineering Institute of Technology (EIT), Steve Mackay, highlighted the jobs that will experience 30 to 40 percent drops in the next five to ten years on the fifth episode of the Engineering News Network (ENN). The report was released with Australia in mind, but Mackay believes it is relevant to the worldwide scope of jobs in 2016. One of the struggling industries that the report said to avoid was "civil engineering construction."
"There is a bit of a downturn, government infrastructure spending is down, hopefully, it'll pick up," said Mackay.
The other jobs that Mackay mentioned include:
Transport equipment manufacturers, coal miners, forestry and logging, electricity distribution worker, civil engineering construction, agriculturist, printer, fish farming, beverage and tabacco manufacturer and publishing
TheNewsTribe.com also published a list of industries that would thrive in 2016. They emphasise the need for doctors in health care and say that engineers are of equal importance in the year 2016. Here is their list:
Health Care
Engineering
Software Application developers
Content Writers
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Industry
Tesla's Powerwall is no longer the only player in the game. Australian energy storage company, Redflow, has thrown their hat into the ring with the announcement of a 10-kilowatt battery called the ZCell. The cell will cost between $17,500 and $19500 (USD) including installations and is the latest competitor in the energy storage range of products available to consumers.
Executive Chairman of Redflow, Simon Hackett has hyped the battery up by saying: "ZCell lets you discharge 100 percent of its total stored energy every day, whereas other battery types can require a significant amount of their underlying storage capacity to be locked out to prevent battery damage and to extend battery life. ZCell is a unique flow battery that loves to be fully charged and discharged daily."
Hackett also thinks that they have the better battery technology right now, compared to Tesla, however, he believes it is not about winning or losing amongst the battery storage competitors. According to OneStepOffTheGrid, the battery was designed with "zinc bromine flow battery technology" that was formulated at the University of Queensland.
When asked about how this will affect the future of power utilities and the entities that operate the grid and the country's energy, Hackett said, "I agree that the grid operators don't need to price themselves out of existence, but my strong view is that 5 years from now the smart ones will have realised they want battery storage operated to send power back when the grid needs it."
In the sixth episode of Engineering News Network, the Dean of Engineering at EIT (Engineering Institute of Technology), Steve Mackay, shares Hackett's sentiment, that the power utilities might be in for a tumultuous period. He said, "When you have a decreasing amount of power from the utilities' requirement - because you are producing your own power at your home - you'll find that the utility is having a drop in revenue." Mackay also admits that the government controlled power utilities "jack-up" the prices which cause power consumption to "drop-off" even further. "This is causing major challenges for power utilities around the world and is often referred to as the 'power utility spiral of death'."
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Education
Having 'the knack' for engineering sometimes involves looking at already existing systems prevalent in nature and trying to turn them into machines that are inspired by the natural design of our world. This is no different. The structure of the mouths of filter-feeding fish has given engineers the idea to build fluid-filtering mechanisms based on the design of fish mouths.
In a study published in the Nature Communications journal, the team behind a new crossflow filtration design come out of the College of William and Mary. From the abstract of their journal, the team writes: "Suspension-feeding fishes such as goldfish and whale sharks retain prey without clogging their oral filters, whereas clogging is a major expense in industrial crossflow filtration of beer, dairy foods, and biotechnology products."
Jason McDevitt, director of technology transfer at the College of William and Mary calls the revelations that filtration systems resemble oral filters from fish a "great example of biomimetic technology." He added, "We are particularly hopeful that this technology will be commercially developed and widely used for crossflow filtration."
The team built a "vortical cross-step filtration model" that removes the chance of clogging materials, using a "hydrodynamic tongue" to assist the materials along, preventing any clogging. The "vortical cross-step filtration model" would look very similar to a fish's mouth, granted you've pulled one out of the sea or lake and marveled at the inside of its mouth. If you have done that, you would have seen the 'ribs' in the mouth of the fish, which have been replicated in the model and assist a more efficient filtration system.
Using juvenile paddlefish - who swim with their mouths open and consume prey that way - were researched and learned from. The models were 3-D printed into cone-shaped nylon plastic models modeled after the mouths of the paddlefish and have now given more insight into creating filtration systems directly similar to the mouths of these fish.
For the full report and study notes: Click here
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Man-made earthquakes will now feature in the U.S. Geological Survey's (UGSG) seismic risk maps. This would assist civil engineers and design companies in their contemplation of where to build buildings and how strong those buildings should be.
The Daily Mail writes that these measurements will be included in the survey due to, "temblors linked to wastewater disposal wells used by the oil and gas industry in Oklahoma." The UGSG recently reported that 7 million people reside in zones that are directly in danger of experiencing man-made earthquakes due to oil and gas drilling
Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project delivered a statement wherein he said, "By including human-induced events, our assessment of earthquake hazards has significantly increased in parts of the U.S."
The states affected most by human-induced earthquakes are: Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Colorado, New Mexico and Arkansas.
"In the past five years, the UGSG has documented high shaking and damage in areas of these six states, mostly from induced earthquakes," Petersen continued.
Now that these areas are being measured and mapped out, there can be more pressure on civil engineers to minimize the amount of man-made earthquakes in densely populated areas. However, The American Society of Civil Engineers' 2016 report does not include the human-induced earthquake figures. Regardless, whether or not the new implementation of man-made seismic activity statistics in the UGSG reports will influence anything, the recent developments should leave people saying, "better safe than sorry."
For detailed seismic risk maps and further information visit: The USGS website
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- Category: Developments
Environmental scientists, engineers, and meteorologists have been working together to improve the efficiency of warnings for heat waves. This according to Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Science.
The new study from Harvard University in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has been researching sea surface temperature patterns that could enable meteorologists to give 50-day warnings, prior to the heat wave hitting land.
The team used data from the Eastern United States and observed weather trends from 1982 to 2015 to measure patterns of heat waves across 80 different weather stations.
A Harvard graduate and author of the study, Karen McKinnon told Harvard's official site, "We began the analysis by empirically exploring relationships between extremes in summer temperature and sea surface temperatures." They observed what is called the Pacific Extreme Pattern which involves warm and cold waters that span across the Pacific during the summer.Through the observations, they can cross-reference temperature behaviors, and according to their official study, provide "skillful prediction of hot weather [in the Eastern United States] as much as 50 days in advance."
The lack of rainfall was also looked at according to another co-author, Peter Huybers, a professor of earth and planetary science and of environmental science and engineering. He said, "Lack of rainfall dries the land surface, making it difficult to remove heat by evaporation and primes the land for more extreme heat." As a result, they can measure what an oncoming heat wave might look like.
If the study progresses to the point of teaching other countries how to work towards discovering how to sufficiently warn a population of a large-scale heat wave it could mean the saving of lives, farmers' crops being prepared for the heat waves and the stocking up of water in case of shortages due to the crippling effect heat waves have on the mass population.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Education
Chemical engineering and soils. How do they fit together? Well, Aaron Daigh is the assistant professor of soil physics at North Dakota State University and is living proof that an engineering degree can take you wild and wonderful places.
"In chemical engineering, a lot of the classes deal with the movement of fluids through a series of pipes and converting those fluids into useful and marketable products," Daigh said, in a report by FarmAndRanchGuide. "The goal of chemical engineering is to make and optimize a system for producing that product."
With that in mind, Daigh pursued a degree in Soil and Water Science. He had been studying his engineering degree in plastics manufacturing and oil refineries but he found himself yearning to work in the office of nature.
"While studying water science, that also introduced me to soil science, and with my chemical engineering background, I naturally gravitated to soil physics," Daigh said matter-of-factly. "In a chemical plant, you optimize the system of pipes and fluid movement to produce a product, while in agricultural systems, we manage soil pores and nutrient flows to optimize the system for producing food and for maintaining a healthy ecosystem,"
Daigh says he works with the movement of water, gas, heat and chemicals. He has his bachelor's and master's engineering degrees and then did his doctorate in the Soil Science Department at Iowa State University. Living proof that if you have the knack to be an engineer, it could take you to places where your expertise could be utilized to its full potential.
Elsewhere in the Chemical Engineering world, The University of Alabama will be hosting a conference for the American Insitute of Chemical Engineers which will be holding a competition for who could build small-scale cars "fueled by chemical reactions".
"The University of Alabama College of Engineering is one to be on the lookout for because we're growing exponentially, and so is the quality of our students," said Elizabeth Cook, a senior in chemical engineering from Houston, Texas.
It is being called the Chem E Car Competition, follow the link for the rules and regulations of the car competition, but it is an exciting opportunity for students to integrate their studies with practical experimentation and fun. Perhaps other universities could set up their own competition of the same kind. Biofuel research is an important body of work in the engineering world lately.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
What will factories look like in the near future? We've seen car production and assembly lines revolutionized by robotics in the last decade. Industrial production is changing as 'smart factory' devices become available to the world of industrial automation. New skills are needed for engineers to run these newly invented machines all over the world.
"In the factory of the future, all individual steps included in the production process will be fully connected and integrated." - RCRWireless.Com
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be featured in the factory of the future due to every single automated machine 'talking' to each other in the production line as they already do. In Korea's North Chungcheong Province, one of the top electric equipment producers has installed "integrated automation systems" into its manufacturing facilities, according to KoreaTimes.
The company, LSIS, is looking into the future of the 'smart' factory. Through what is called a PLC - or programmable logic controller - a factory can fully work by automated means with the assistance of a manufacturing execution system (MES).
An official from LSIS said, "The PLC is at the center of our smart factory system, serving as a brain to manage the whole process like central processing unit (CPU)."
LSIS hopes to develop more technology that will utilize IoT and make the process of manufacturing products that much faster in their smart factories.
The implementation of communications technology will enable smart factories to transfer huge amounts of data in real time and with minimum delays: connect a large number of personal devices with high data security standards
- RCRWireless.com
As we've reported, fiber-optic networks have been tested up to 57gbps and could streamline businesses and production lines so that the internet is fast and efficient so that the automated production lines and the employees of a smart factory can work at a fast rate.
In the fourth industrial revolution, the inter-connectivity of devices is imperative to running smart factories of the future. Not familiar with the term 'industry 4.0/ fourth industrial revolution'?
McKinsey.com defines it perfectly:
We define Industry 4.0 as the next phase in the digitization of the manufacturing sector, driven by four disruptions: the astonishing rise in data volumes, computational power, and connectivity, especially new low-power wide-area networks; the emergence of analystics and business-intelligence capabilites ; new forms of human-machine interaction
An added process that needs to occur in a smart factory is the surveillance and security of these vulnerable automated machines interconnected through what is essentially the internet. According to AutomationWorld.com, Siemens offers a system called Plant Security Services that will provide security and network monitoring. They have now opened Cyber Security Operation Centers (CSOC) in Portugal, Germany and the United States because they have seen the industrial security necessity gap in the market. Anything that can be connected to the internet can be hacked and that means security across networks is imperative.
Does your factory abide by some of these principles? If it doesn't, are you doing enough to ensure your factory becomes a smart factory of the future?
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
The aerospace engineers over at SpaceX and NASA have been innovating again. Along with Bigelow Aerospace, on April 8th, 2016, a resupply mission along with a new module named The Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (BEAM) will be sent to the International Space Station. Once docked on to the space station it will create another room for the astronauts to use.
According to TechCrunch, the Dragon capsule - as it is being called - will be connected to Node 3 on the ISS in mid-April, and inflation will follow in the beginning of June. It will grow to ten times its volume at launch.
ArsTechnica says the module costs around $17.8 million, but won't have astronauts living in it just yet because NASA aren't convinced that inflatable living quarters are fully safe to live in yet.
Mike Gold is the director of Bigelow's DC operations and business growth. He said, "The major concern I hear is if it's a balloon, will it pop? Quite the opposite." He says the 'balloon' is a kevlar-like material and will be as protective as the aluminium hull that already resides on the ISS.
The payload will be sent up by the Falcon 9 rocket belonging to SpaceX and will also have 250 other scientific experiments that the astronauts will conduct whilst they are in space.
Jason Crusan, the director of Advanced Exploration Systems at NASA headquarters said, "We're fortunate to have the space station to demonstrate potential habitation capabilities like BEAM. The station provides us with a long-duration microgravity platform with constant crew access to evaluate systems and technologies we are considering for future missions farther into deep space."
The theory that is being drummed up as a result of Crusan saying they could use it on future missions is that one day we would be able to live in one of these inflatable habitats on Mars. Just imagine that.
Courtesy of NASA and TechCrunch
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A game of cyber security chess has been playing out in the United States between the FBI and Apple Inc. The FBI had the San Bernadino shooter's (Syed Farook) iPhone and asked for Apple's assistance to unlock it so that they could view the contents of the folders inside the phone. Engineers at Apple admitted that software would need to be invented to introduce the 'back door' that the FBI required, and that it would go against their values of privacy that they hold dear for every iPhone/Apple device user. So, they refused to build the software.
A battalion of other tech companies stood behind Apple in the case and tried to veto an oncoming court order that would render any argument against the FBI useless and Apple would be legally liable to unlock the phone.
Eventually, the FBI decided they wouldn't ask Apple for their assistance and would research methods of how to unlock the phone themselves. And it seems they have succeeded. According to the LATimes, the FBI announced, on Monday, that they had successfully unlocked the shooter's phone without Apple's help.
Now, Apple is concerned about the possible vulnerabilities of their devices if the claim by the FBI is true. The FBI subsequently dropped their case against Apple.
Melanie Newman, a spokeswoman for the Justice Department, said: "It remains a priority for the government to ensure that law enforcement can obtain crucial digital information to protect national security and public safety, either with cooperation from relevant parties or through the court system when cooperation fails. We will continue to pursue all available options for this mission, including seeking the cooperation of manufacturers and relying upon the creativity of both the public and private sectors."
Unsurprisingly, Apple now wants the FBI to inform them how they were able to unlock the iPhone, however, with their stance towards the FBI, it doesn't inspire confidence that they would tell them. Here is the official reply to the situation:
From the beginning, we objected to the FBI's demand that Apple build a backdoor into the IPhone because we believed it was wrong and would set a dangerous precedent. As a result of the government's dismissal, neither of these occured. This case should never have been brought.
Apple believes deeply that people in the United States and around the world deserve data protection, security and privacy. Sacrificing one for the other only puts people and countries at greater risk.
...this new method of accessing the phone raises questions about the government's apparent use of security vulnerabilities in iOS and whether it will inform Apple about these vulnerabilites.
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- Category: Developments
Printable magnets are the new buzz word around engineering circles when the topic of magnets is brought up. A group called Correlated Magnetics are conducting research on how magnets will continue to form part of our world in engineering. The end result of this research is an invention they call 'polymagnets'.
Jason Morgan, head of engineering at Correlated Magnetics has indicated that what they are trying to do is reprogram magnets from the normal north/south magnet to a magnet that can achieve more than just a standard magnet. He says, "What actually happens is that you have the north and south on one face of the magnet. Instead of a long field that wastes energy, you have a tight field that is tightly controlled and have the force focused near the magnet."
In the video (see below) the company shows how it 'cuts' magnets of all sorts in what looks to be 3-D printers. It uses a technology called a Magnetic shear force transfer device to cut magnet pixels into magnets that cause the magnets to have new magnetic fields assigned to them. The printer is now called a MagPrinter
Ron Jewell, the vice-president of sales & marketing at Correlated Magnetics says: "We've invented a way to make magnets better. We make them stronger than the conventional magnet, we make them safer, we can make them behave as springs, we can make them behave as latches." All of this done with hardware and software to create what they call polymagnets, says Jewell.
"Polymagnets can be engineered with the same level of detail and care that every other aspect of a product is engineered," said Stephen Straus,another vice president of marketing at Correlated Magnetics. Straus also states that with technology like the MagPrinter you can now print magnets that are compatible with devices that would usually be damaged by contact with magnets.
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- Category: Industry
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign's computer science engineers have made an unprecedented leap into the future of fiber-optic speeds. The university said that their engineers successfully reached 57 gigabits per second error free on a network of fiber optic technology. According to BGR, it is a new record in the industry.
The team effort was led by Professor Milton Feng who was also in charge in 2014 when the team broke through the 40gbps mark. Feng said, "There is a lot of data out there, but if your data transmission is not fast enough, you cannot use data that's been collected; you cannot use upcoming technologies that use large data streams. like virtual reality. The direction toward fiber-optic communication is going to increase because there's a higher speed data rate, especially over distance."
Therefore, these kinds of breakthroughs have far-reaching benefits for the future of IoT devices and - as Feng has pointed out - speedier access to future and current virtual reality networks. The only problem is extensive cooling for far-range fiber, the current research is only currently useful for short-range fiber, according to Engadget.
The issue with running break-neck speeds on fiber-optic networks is the heat that comes with it. The team was running the 57gbps at 185 Fahrenheit (85 degrees celsius). "That's why data centers are refrigerated and have cooling systems," Feng said.
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- Category: Industry
It was just the other day when we saw a video of a mechanical engineer pushing a robot down with a stick and that same robot getting up and continuing its job. That video came out of a robotics company called Boston Dynamics that is owned by the company that owns Google, Alphabet. Then the news came streaming in that Alphabet was looking to sell off its robotics division in an interesting plot twist. On the back of that announcement, Amazon has announced its very own robotics branch named Amazon Robotics. Amazon recently acquired Kiva Systems for $775 million and scheduled a super-secret meeting with media outlets and investors to see what they had been working on in the last four years.
The details of that 'super-secret' meeting have finally been divulged and present an interesting chance for the company to eclipse the recent strides Boston Dynamics has made in creating potential 'helper robots' for households around the world. However, Boston Dynamics being sold off in the fashion that it doesn't inspire confidence in whatever they were building because Alphabet looks uninterested in continuing and probably do not think the company will be profitable.
Amazon Robotics' event was called MARS (Machine learning, home Automation, Robotics and Space exploration). They showed off robots built by UCLA students, and also had Kiva robots that served food and drinks on a mobile table that rode around the event. The photos of the events can be found on BusinessInsider. Both Amazon Robotics and Boston Dynamics are looking into the profitability of potential household robots and will continue to do so wherever the conversation lands up.
In the United Kingdom, the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee will be launching an inquiry into how society will soon be altered by robotics. They will be looking into how it will affect the workplace, how it will affect jobs numbers and more concerns. Recently, Google's DeepMind AlphaGo Artificial Intelligence beat South Korean 'Go' professional Lee Se-dol.
Talking to ZDnet, Nicola Blackwood MP, Chair of the Science and Technology Committee at the House of Lords, said: "Robots are now beating humans at even the most complex games, like Go. Artificial intelligence will play an increasing role in our lives over the coming years. From navigation systems to medical treatments and from new manufacturing techniques to unmanned vehicles, new applications are rapidly being developed that involved robotic decision making."
Therefore, educating engineers to ensure safety in terms of robotics software and hardware is necessary. The United Kingdom sees this opportunity for the future of engineering education in robotics and expands the funding net for robotics company start-ups at the Royal Academy of Engineering.
One of the eight finalists is Alexander Enoch, a student at the University of Edinburgh. He wants to build a robot that costs less than £100 and would lead to education in "engineering and coding". Enoch, speaking to TheEngineer says, "I think robotics is a great example of how many aspects of engineering can all come together to make a complex system. There's already a shortage of engineers in the UK, and with automation becoming more commonplace it's really important that young people are given the opportunity to get engaged with as many aspects of engineering as possible."
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Biomedical engineering scientists at North Carolina State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have observed the effects of microneedle technology in the assistance of immunotherapy for melanomas on human bodies. Dermatologists' ears should perk up at the new findings because it directly affects their practices. The new findings could mean more efficient methods of ridding a person of skin cancer in the future - perhaps even circumnavigating the need for cutting out melanomas.
According to HNGN, current cancer immunotherapy researchers have investigated using anti-PD-1 antibiotics to prevent cancer cells from "binding a receptor on T cells". This process eventually leads to the body confusing healthy cells with cancerous cells, and thereby the cancer is more difficult to battle.
However, the process of introducing anti-PD-1 is what the researchers over at NC State are interested in. Chao Wang, a co-author of the new study says, "First, the anti-PD-1 antibodies are usually injected into the bloodstream, so they cannot target the tumor site effectively. Second, the overdose of antibodies can cause side effects such as an autoimmune disease.
As a result, the team created a patch of needles that had tiny microneedles made from hyaluronic acid. This would deliver the antibodies to the skin tumor directly. "It is an efficient approach to enhanced retention of anti-PD-1 antibodies in the tumor microenvironment," Zeng Gu, an assistant professor at NC State said.
An animal test was set up to hopefully gain some insight into how this would eventually be used on humans. After the tests were completed, Yanqi Ye, a Ph.D. student at NC State, said: "After 40 days, 40 percent of the mice who were treated using the microneedle patch survived and had no detectable remaining melanoma - compared to a zero percent survival rate for the control groups."
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- Category: Industry
2015 was a big year for renewable energy and energy storage, according to a new report. The report issued annually has shown that "renewable energy investments" went up by 5 percent in 2015. The new number indicates that the amount of money invested in renewable energy in 2015 would amount to $286 billion. This excludes any hydroelectric programs currently in the world. The report in question is UNEP's 10th Global Trends in Renewable Energy Investment Report 2016. The report is a collaboration between the Frankfurt School-UNEP Collaborating Centre for Climate & Sustainable Energy Finance and Bloomberg's New Energy Finance (BNEF) centre.
In UNEP's video report, the Executive Director of UNEP and the Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, Achim Steiner said: "Not only has for the first time the percentage of total gigawatts installed in the world now exceeded - in terms of renewable energy installations- that of all other energy technologies put together." He also says the developing world has contributed almost half to the $286 billion, indicating that the global South is in need of renewable energy. About this he said, "What is remarkable renewable energy technologies is that they have also migrated from being perceived as a technology of the rich and a luxury for those who could afford it, to actually becoming a shortcut to access to energy."
The number that UNEP estimates renewable energy has reached in the last 12 years of renewable energy investment - in their press release - is $2.3 trillion.
Chairman of the Advisory Board at BNEF, Michael Libreich, said: "Global investment in renewable capacity hit a new record in 2015, far outpacing that in fossil fuel generating capacity despite falling oil, gas and coal prices. It has broadened out to a wider and wider array of developing countries, helped by sharply reduced costs and by the benefits of local power production over-reliance on imported commodities." The research indicates that China - unsurprisingly - is ahead of the pack with $103 billion into the market in 2015.
The groups do admit there is still a lot of work to be done in the industry to ensure a clean energy future, however, the latest figures on encouraging in terms of global expansion of renewable energy.
Expanding on renewable energy news, Tesla has pulled the 10 kilowatt-hour Powerwall device before it even goes on sale, according to HuffingtonPost. They are now committed to working on the 6.4 kwh and 7 kwh models that instead of supplying twenty-four-hour power to households will only supply energy to the highest consumption hours during the day.
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- Category: Blog - Steve Mackay
We should always try and align our engineering works and activities within the ‘natural order of things’. This would appear to be challenging but is generally not a difficult undertaking – conceptually speaking, requiring a little finessing and can be done from tiny projects all the way through to massive undertaking such as the Panama Canal.
Dear Colleagues
We should always try and align our engineering works and activities within the ‘natural order of things’. This would appear to be challenging but is generally not a difficult undertaking – conceptually speaking, requiring a little finessing and can be done from tiny projects all the way through to massive undertaking such as the Panama Canal.
The best way of illustrating this principle is with a few (civil) engineering examples.
The first one is the Panama Canal.
Raise a Ship 30m – Naturally without any energy required
When ships travel between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans through the Panama Canal, they are raised and lowered about 30m (85ft). Absolutely no pumps are used for the locks to raise or lower the ships. So no energy is required. Gravity moves millions of liters of water from the lakes (located in the higher middle ground of the canal) of the Panama Canal to the lock chambers. As long as rain keeps falling into the lakes, this system will keep functioning.
As you know, these ships are gigantic and there is a veritable fleet of them travelling through the Panama Canal on a daily basis.
What an incredible saving in energy.
The second one refers to the old practice of balancing cut and fill.
Balancing Cut and Fill
One item which is always irritating to people in the surrounding areas is when an excavation is being undertaken and the earth needs to be moved. Lots of trucks and loads of inconvenience. And clouds of suffocating dust. And rubbish left on the access roads.
However, when undertaking site work (intelligently) the trick is always to balance the amount of earth that has to be removed (cut) with the amount that has to be added (fill) for a specific construction site. This means no unnecessary transport of moving earth from one site to another. Thus a huge savings in cost and efficiencies. Naturally, your client will always want to have an imbalance between cut and fill; but perhaps you can change your design to balance the two?
Dan Simmons in The Fall of Hyperion makes the very important point: The Great Change is when humankind accepts its role as part of the natural order of the universe instead of its role as a cancer.
Thanks to 101 Things I learned in Engineering School by John Kuprenas with Matthew Frederick.
Yours in engineering learning
Steve
Mackay’s Musings – 29th March’16 #593
125, 273 readers – www.eit.edu.au/cms/news/blog-steve-mackay
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
Two companies are bringing construction and drone technology together. 3D Robotics (3DR) has announced that they will work in tandem with Autodesk's Forge Platform. This would lead to the drones using cloud services, developed apps and SDKs with the Forge Platform, opening up the world of construction.
"Capturing site data today is costly, time-consuming, and often dangerous. Drones can easily go where it's inefficient or unsafe for field personnel, making it easier to accurately measure our world so we can better manage it," says Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3DR.
He further went on to celebrate the FORGE platform and ensure that this would "help business customers save time and money" as well as ensuring more on-site safety.
3DR would be utilizing certain APIs from FORGE such as their ReCap Photo web application that would allow drones to perform inspections, "surveys and scans of worksites". Something that would take human construction workers much longer to perform.
"The real value is that it is super easy to set up," Goerge Hatch, the senior technical specialist at Autodesk said, speaking of the flying of the drone to scan for existing conditions on a construction site.
The drone can fly on a path that is pre-drawn, pre-planned and executed from a tablet computer and then the drone does the rest. Downloading the data and exporting it to the Autodesk apps look easy enough for any construction worker to learn.
"Sometimes we want to build a model in the context of our surrounding," says George Hatch. He says that this is easier with the geo-reference data that drones can collect as they fly around. What takes hours or days is now a streamlined process with automated drones on construction sites.
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Lund University in Sweden has discovered a new method of using ultrasound to determine whether the plaque levels in blood vessels are harmful or not. Harmful plaque levels are what leads to strokes and heart attacks. Now, with the new method, this could prevent unnecessary surgeries and is a better method of checking cardiovascular health.
Magnus Cinthio, a professor of biomedical engineering, said: "Ultrasound enables you to screen a larger population, and that, in turn, means that life-threatening cardiovascular diseases can be detected at an earlier stage."
Currently, vascular surgeries are performed to determine what is causing a blockage of blood flow due to plaques. However, if the plaque is unharmful a costly surgery has already been performed and that is not sustainable. Now, with this new technology, the harmfulness of a cell can be determined without having to undergo surgery.
"We have shown that there is a strong correlation between changes in the centre frequency and the size of the reflecting particles. The more harmful substances, the greater the so-called centre frequency shifts," says Tobias Erlov, a researcher at the Department of Biomedical Engineering.
Talking about the inexpensive nature of the ultrasound measurements, Erlov said, "Another advantage is that the method is inexpensive and completely harmless to patients."
Researching how the ultrasound machine can measure plaque levels in the carotid artery will assist in determining what cardiovascular problems a person has. The researchers are confident it will also assist with people who are at risk of diabetes and other cardiovascular diseases. They also claim that the ultrasound method will be accurate as well.
Source: EurekaAlert
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Stanford University, California, United States. The university is conducting research that would lead to more comfortable contact lenses, or so the researchers claim. This would come as welcoming news to people who genuinely struggle to either get the contact lenses in to start with or the ones who can't wear them for long.
Why on earth did this research suddenly pop up at Stanford University?
The culprit was a graduate student named Saad Bhamla. He said: "As a student, I had to stop wearing lenses due to the increased discomfort." Turns out, his eyes would dry up during the day leaving him with discomfort. He conducted the research in Gerald Fuller's chemical engineering laboratory, according to Stanford University's website. "Focusing my PhD thesis to understand this problem was both a personal and professional goal." How about that for writing about what you know?
In the States, it is claimed that 30 million people are wearing contact lenses and around half of them go back to their glasses because of levels of discomfort. So the idea was spawned to create a film that would work with a contact lens and make wearing them more comfortable. They did this by researching the lipid layer - the oily coating on the tear film - that protects the eye by retaining liquid and being strong enough to keep things out.
The researchers say the lipid layer of the eye also stops the tear film from evaporating due to the temperature human eyes achieve (95 degrees Fahrenheit). Sounds like a really important layer to have, right?
The researchers say that the answer to making comfortable contact lenses is engineering the lenses that don't interfere with the lipid layer and the job it is doing for the eye.
Bhamla along with the assistance of Gerald Fuller built a device called the Interfacial Dewetting and Drainage Optical Platform (i-DDrOP). This device will enable engineers to monitor and influence the tear film and perform different tasks upon it. This will - according to the researchers - lead to more comfortable contact lenses in the long run.
You can thank them later. First stop your dry, red eyes from occurring.
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- Category: Developments
Griffith University is taking one giant leap into the future of clean energy. According to EurekaAlert, the university is using carbon as a method of delivering energy using hydrogen. The specific team is Griffith's Queensland Micro and Nanotechnology Centre. They have produced hydrogen from water. This would replace platinum as an electrocatalyst of producing hydrogen from water. The team is venturing to say that this is the first proof that power can be generated at a low cost and at no harm to the earth. The results come from the Nature Communications Journal .
The senior author of the work, Xiangdong Yao said: "Hydrogen production through an electrochemical process is at the heart of key renewable energy technologies including water splitting and hydrogen fuel cells."
Yao further admits hydrogen has always been a "great challenge" and platinum has been the most stable electrocatalyst for the purpose
Explaining how exactly they are achieving their results, Yao said: "In our research, we synthesize a nickel-carob-based-catalyst, from carbonization of metal-organic frameworks, to replace currently best-known-platinum-based materials for electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution."
Hydrogen is already being used in cars as a fuel medium but recently energy storage has become a focus as well. Will hydrogen and clean energy be the logical step in an industry that is utilizing lithium-ion? If it is a more natural process of creating clean energy, it might become the next logical norm.
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- Category: Developments
The Airlander 10 is here. It looks like a mix between something the Thunderbirds would operate and the futuristic looking blimp from the Golden Compass movie. The airship was built by an automotive engineering firm called Hybrid Air Vehicles (HAV).
The ship is 302-feet long. That is 60-feet longer than a jumbo jet, says Gizmodo in their report. HAV has slapped a $35 million price on the vehicle and say that they have interested parties, wanting to purchase the ship. Standing at 26 metres high and weighing in at 20 tons, the hope is that the next strengthened, explode-proof Hindenberg is here. It will run on 1.3 millon cubic feet of helim and its max speed is 92 mph.
Chris Daniels, HAV's head of partnerships and communications said: "There's a number of militaries around the world [that are interested], but we can't say who."
Daniels further explained what they can use the massive blimp-like carrier for. In an interview with the BBC, he said: "We will not compete with a 747 flying across the Atlantic, but we can offer the ultimate flight experience for tourism and leisure purposes. It's perfect for sightseeing because we can have floor to ceiling clear panels, and we can open the windows because we are not flying as high or as fast as traditional planes, but we will not be offering a service to get from A to B as quickly as possible."
The company thinks it could be more useful for the transportation of sand, water, health materials and anything that can be delivered to places in need of assistance.
Daniels, speaking to Sky News, warned against calling it an airship. "It is not an airship, it's a mix between an aeroplane, an airship, with a bit of helicopter thrown in. It uses the absolute latest materials...It uses the latest avionics and the latest computer software."
How does it work? Here's a video:
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- Category: Education
The BBC's Andreas Schleicher wrote - a week ago - that China would be building "the equivalent of almost one university a week" due to the rising population. Recently, we reported that China and India were left out of the World Economic Forum's research that detailed which country produced the most skilled engineering graduates.
The BBC report revealed a clearer picture than the World Economic Forum, saying that 25 to 34-year-old graduates would rise in China by "300% in 2030". The report further stated that in 2013, 40% of Chinese graduates completed their studies in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and maths) subject. This, they claim, is more than twice the amount of US graduates that were graduating with STEM degrees.
Furthermore, the BBC claimed that in the year 2030, China and India "could account for more than 60% of the STEM graduates," whereas the US would hold only 8% and Europe will hold 4%.
Chinese universities aren't excluding the rest of the world either. According to CapitalFM in Kenya, the country is sending 60 students to China in 2016 to "study railway trained engineering for four years". So, if a country strikes a deal to allow exchange programs for African countries like Kenya, it's probable that they would take other countries' students as well.
However, there are widely published doubts that the degrees earned in China would be useful elsewhere in the world. The World Economic Forum was not clear on whether or not they considered the quality of degrees from India or China and that is why they left them out of their report, or whether or not the data was truly unavailable from the countries themselves.
So there is still some confusion as to who supplies the best qualifications in engineering in the world. Although, there are online solutions that are starting to show promise in the industry.
A student from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Tresor Wa Kahilu, who works as a junior engineer at a mining company named Anvil Mining is broadening his knowledge of engineering online. He studied an Advanced Diploma of Industrial Automation at an online tertiary solution, the Engineering Insitute of Technology. He says studying online is more practical for him because he can continue working in the industry and then study at the end of the day. It took him 18 months and by the end of it received his diploma and now has more behind his name.
"Engineering is evolving," Wa Kahilu said. "People who do extra work get promoted. I want to push forward and get my masters so that I can have more opportunities in the engineering industry. Through studying online I became more confident and became better at approaching problems in engineering."
Wa Kahilu said he sees that doing a bit more expansion on your studies whilst working gets employers attentions and leads to promotions, and stands behind online studies as an avenue that might be fruitful for engineering students in the future.
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It's the stuff of science fiction, however, it is already here. The University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) has purchased a '3-D printer' that would be able to theoretically print human organs. Biomedical engineering has been revolutionizing the medicine field in a big way in the last few years and it continues to be a field that is most influenced by automation.
The assistant professor of biomedical engineering at UTSA, Teja Guda, acquired the equipment and intends to put it to good use. Guda said, "There aren't many organ printers in the world. We wanted to explore this new space in regenerative medicine since so many at UTSA have those strengths."
According to UTSA's website the device will print cells and keep them from perishing as they have before in 3-D printers before this one. This is because it "operates without heating or high pressure."
"Essentially we're creating our own materials with embedded living cells," Guda stated. He further explained that they load the embedded living cells up in little syringes, "insert them into the machine", and then it prints an organ as a regular 3-D printer would - layer by layer.
"Transplantation of tissues is a huge challenge because they're not always successful and they're limited in supply. If we're able to make transplantation significantly more successful, that's huge," Guda confessed.
The aim of the project is to eventually print "replacement" organs for people who might need them. The engineers feel they are on the verge of something massive that might influence the future, and all of it done within the walls of a university.
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The fast food industry in America is becoming more automated year by year. The New American has reported that companies would be interested in automation hardware and software for the future of delivering food, due to heightened employee wages in the United States.
Eatsa, a restaurant in San Francisco, has a human kitchen staff that make the food but the process of ordering food is completely automated. There is no front-of-house liaison that takes the orders and delivers it to the kitchen staff, instead, the computer tells them what the order is.
Andy Puzder is the CEO of a restaurant chain in the States called 'Carl's Jr' and has been quoted by the media saying, "Millenials like not seeing people. I've been inside restaurants where we've installed ordering kiosks...and I've actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there's a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody."
There are critics of automation software at places like restaurants where a human face isn't seen but rather a computer. A Facebook comment on the New American's website read: "Are we raising a generation of antisocial, hermit, misanthropes?"
The Univeristy of Oxford published a study in 2013 named Combined Food Preparation and Serving Workers, Including Fast Food. They concluded that it was extremely likely - up to 92% certainty - that jobs in the fast food industry would be replaced due to automation.
Olo is a company that designs and builds mobile ordering technology for restaurants. The CEO, Noah Glass spoke to the media, saying: "I fully believe that it will seem crazy, even just two or three years from now, that we used to wait in long lines until we got our turn, and then told [a cashier] what we wanted, and had them punch it into a machine for us."
Puzder is the one on the forefront of undermining the minimum wage increases and stated that "its not rocket science" that automation would overtake actual labor. He said: "Machines are always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there's never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case."
Will fast food become even faster and cheaper thanks to automation? Only time will tell.
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
It just seems that Australia has their priorities straight when it comes to engineering projects.
Australia is making 10 million Australian Dollars ($7.6 million) available to local councils to repurpose materials from construction and demolition waste, according to WasteManagementWorld.
These materials would assist in projects being conducted by civil engineers, such as the building of roads, drains and car parks. This would form part of a strategy called Creating the Right Environment that will see the removal of "75% of construction and demolition waste from landfill by 2020."
The State Governments Environment Minister, Albert Jacob, said: "Achieving the target for diverting waste from landfill is a shared responsibility and requires action from State and local governments, industry and the wider community."
Construction and demolition companies using recyclable materials would see funding making its way to the metropolitan councils that would assist them in their industry. Up to AU$8 million of the allocated money is set aside for these rewarding payments. It would bode well for them to stock up on materials that could be recycled.
Jacob further said: "Each year we generate 3 million tonnes of construction and demolition and Western Australia sends 2 million tonnes to landfill. This is a valuable resource that we could be using in everyday construction projects."
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- Category: Blog - Steve Mackay
As you all know – reliability is a highly sought after measure (especially in engineering) of how long a product or system functions correctly before failure. The ultimate goal is always a reliability of 1 or 100% reliability with no failure over the life of the product. Zero % (0%) reliability refers to immediate failure and should obviously be avoided.
Dear Colleagues
As you all know – reliability is a highly sought after measure (especially in engineering) of how long a product or system functions correctly before failure. The ultimate goal is always a reliability of 1 or 100% reliability with no failure over the life of the product. Zero % (0%) reliability refers to immediate failure and should obviously be avoided.
You may recall the old ‘bathtub curve’ of reliability. At the beginning of a product’s life there is a heightened probability of failure. Subsequently, during the product’s life time this drops to a hopefully very much lower probability. Near the end of the product’s lifetime (as it wears out); there is again a heightened probability of failure (as you would expect). Hence the reference to a bathtub curve.
I am sure you have become irritable when a product fails soon after purchase. Or immediately after the warranty period has expired (e.g. phones). Leading many cynics to refer to the vendor’s (often unethical?) ‘planned obsolescence’ of a product where it fails after a given planned time. It fails, so that you are forced to upgrade or buy a new one. Thus keeping the manufacturer’s production lines busy churning out new products.
100% is Crucial for Safety
The target reliability of a pacemaker has to be 1 because failure may result in loss of a life. Similarly with a bridge or other critical element in our lives. No compromises possible here, for obvious reasons.
Cost Plays a Key Role in Reliability
However, most consumer products (e.g. a toy, radio or dishwasher) most decidedly do not have a reliability of 1. Designing for perfect reliability would result in a very expensive product resulting in loss of competitive advantage for the manufacturer.
Oddly enough, some aircraft parts are not 100% reliable as weight has to be minimised. This shortcoming is dealt with by a rigorous inspection regime (e.g. for cracks) and regular replacements of parts. The growth in (often illegal) second hand defective parts for aircraft is thus of major concern as their reliability would be unpredictable and certainly not what the manufacturer originally anticipated.
An interesting take by Orison Swett Mard on success: Success is not measured by what you accomplish, but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.
Thanks to 101 Things I learned in Engineering School by John Kuprenas with Matthew Frederick.
Yours in engineering learning
Steve
Mackay’s Musings – 22nd March’16 #592
125, 273 readers – www.eit.edu.au/cms/news/blog-steve-mackay
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- Written by: Quintus Potgieter
- Category: Developments
The University of Michigan's engineers and biologists have been bird watching. They have been doing this with the intention of designing aircraft according to how birds fly, fantasizing about ditching the stiff-winged airplane.
The team was given $6 million from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research to create what is being called the "most detailed analysis of bird flight ever" by Product Design & Development. The leader of the researchers is a gentleman named Daniel Inman. He is a professor of aerospace engineering at the university, who has recruited some UCLA students to assist with the endeavour.
Inman said: "With new materials, advanced sensing and control techniques, and inventive methods for observance birds in flight, our team will begin to bring avian efficiency and agility to aircraft."
Inman has shown off the new technology the researchers have been working on that would affect flight control in the future.
In the video (see below) Inman shows a bending material that curves upwards. He explains that "the thing that makes this contouring possible is a thing called macro fibre composite actuators."
To put it more plainly, Inman says the structure and the actuation device "are all one thing". As a result, the material is lighter and can do "unusual maneuvers like a bird can do."
According to the Daily Mail, the group are confident they could possibly 3-D print structures that reflect the bone structures in bird's wings. However, Inman believes due to the FAA, this kind of technology they are working on will take at least another decade to be put into aircraft.
Another team of researchers are in charge of installing certain software into the different areas of the aircraft that would process data that can be perused and learned from.
Yong Chen, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at UCLA said: "A biological network can process signals at a speed comparable to a supercomputer while weighing only one millionth as much and consuming one millionth the power."
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