Category Archives: Engineering

Grand Challenges for Engineering

Here are the Grand Challenges for engineering as determined by a committee of the National Academy of Engineering:

* Make solar energy economical
* Provide energy from fusion
* Develop carbon sequestration methods
* Manage the nitrogen cycle
* Provide access to clean water
* Restore and improve urban infrastructure
* Advance health informatics
* Engineer better medicines
* Reverse-engineer the brain
* Prevent nuclear terror
* Secure cyberspace
* Enhance virtual reality
* Advance personalized learning
* Engineer the tools of scientific discovery

Committee members included: J. Craig Venter, President, The J. Craig Venter Institute; Dean Kamen, Founder and President, DEKA Research and Development Corp; Raymond Kurzweil, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Kurzweil Technologies, Inc and Larry Page, Co-Founder and President of Products, Google, Inc.

The web site (which by the way fails to even display the text on many pages without javascript – phb design) goes into more details on each challenge and will chronicle the ideas the public shares based on the challenges.

Engineering Education at Smith College

How to Re-engineer an engineering major at a women’s college:

The first women’s college to offer an engineering degree, Smith is forging new paths in a field that’s eager to swell its ranks in the United States. Women receive only 20 percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering, according to a new report by the National Science Board (NSB). Like a handful of other liberal arts colleges, Smith is producing graduates who’ve had a different type of engineering education – one that goes beyond technical training to focus on a broader context for finding solutions to humanity’s problems; one that emphasizes ethics and communication; one so flexible that about half the students study abroad, which is rare, despite the multinational nature of many engineering jobs.
…
Smith’s program boasts a 90 percent retention rate and high participation of underrepresented minorities. Ms. Moriarty hopes to find out which elements of the experience at Smith most contribute to students’ success. Female role models play a part (6 out of 10 engineering faculty here are women), but she says other factors are likely to be more important: “I think the methods being used here could probably translate very easily to other institutions that aren’t all women,” she says.

One Step Closer to Holographic TV

UA team creates new holographic display

A 3-D holographic image that can be updated and viewed without special glasses may soon find its way from a UA optics lab to operating rooms and battlefield command centers.
…
That holographic bird on your credit card can’t turn into something else every few minutes, but Tay’s display can take an image rendered in three dimensions — initially photographed or computer-generated — and display it on the display surface, followed by another and another.

In addition, the device requires no special glasses or headgear to see the image, unlike present-day virtual-reality systems.
The scientists who worked on the device first speak of using it as an aid in brain surgery or as a close-to-real-time battlefield display, but Tay and UA optical sciences professor Nasser Peyghambarian are not unaware of its much more commercial potential.
…
The heart of the innovation, says Tay, is the photorefractive polymer — a thin plastic film that reacts to light — that can hold an image indefinitely and be updated. Tay says the method that allowed the polymer to hold the image and update it came to him “out of the blue” while at a meeting about that very problem.
…
Cramming the pinball- machine-size collection of equipment into a “table-top” commercial unit is also possible, Tay says, but a challenge. Tay says the work, which started about two years ago, was done in collaboration with Nitto Denko Technical Corp. and was funded by the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research.

China’s Technology Savvy Leadership

China’s Sci-Tech Savvy Leadership by Jocelyn Ford

Until last year, the top nine members of China’s politburo were ALL trained engineers! And guess what? The Communist Party made innovation and global leadership in science and technology national goals.

Ancient China is famous for its early scientific advances, some of which predated western developments by centuries. Its inventions include paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass.
…
Leadership does matter, but so does the system. It seems to me it should take a lot longer for China to build a sci-tech friendly system than for the U.S. to bring in sci-tech friendly leadership. That’s where you come in Ira & co.

If I may make one final comment: in my ideal world, borders shouldn’t matter. Victory by the best system, with the best leaders, will hopefully be a victory for all earthlings.
…
CHINA’S POLITBURO (2007): Decline of the engineer. Last fall China introduced a new top lineup that included two law graduates, as well as an economist, and graduates in history, journalism, management and business administration.

I agree that the increase in science and engineering investment around the globe is a positive development. But the USA faces loses that it has enjoyed due to past technology leadership.

China benefits greatly from such scientific knowledge at the highest level of government. The top 9 leaders in China are know as the “Politburo Standing Committee,” the new additions in 2007 were:

Xi Jinping, 54, studied chemical engineering at the Qinghua University and later earned a doctorate in law.

Li Keqiang, 52, obtained MA and doctorate of Economics after attending the on-the-job postgraduate program on Economics at the School of Economics of Peking University.

He Guoqiang, 63, B.S. Beijing Institute of Chemical Engineering.

Zhou Yongkang, 64 “Graduated from the Exploration Department, Beijing Petroleum Institute, majoring in geophysical exploration. With a university education. Senior engineer with a rank equivalent to professor. ” Funny, I don’t remember any U.S. politician exalting their experience as “equivalent to a professor.”

They joined the nine-member echelon with the five remaining members of the previous standing committee, namely Hu Jintao, Wu Bangguo, Wen Jiabao, Jia Qinglin and Li Changchun.

The Man Who Unboiled an Egg

Very cool article on HervÃ© This and the science of cooking: The man who unboiled an egg:

HervÃ© has taught at the universities of Tours and Montpellier, and has his own laboratory at the venerable CollÃ¨ge de France, which, today, is also the base for all four of France’s living Nobel prize winners. One of them, Jean-Marie Lehn, invited HervÃ© to join his department in 1995. In HervÃ©’s laboratory, there is a cupboard full of chemical compounds such as sulphuric acid, sodium carbonate and Mercurochrome, while the shelves are stacked with things you’d normally associate with the kitchen: bottles of balsamic vinegar and olive oil, pots of mustard and cinnamon, bags of salt and shallots, and a bar of chocolate.
…
‘I go through ancient recipe books, preferably from the 18th and 19th centuries, jot down what they have to say and test it,’ he says.
…
On the morning of our second meeting, HervÃ© measures the pressure inside a chip. He’s aiming to disprove a famous scientific paper which states that oil infiltrates chips during cooking. He heats oil to 168Â°C, measures a chip, hooks it up to a manometer and plunges it in the oil. Unfortunately, the experiment goes wrong and ends up with the chip falling to the bottom of the pan. He is unconcerned. ‘In order to come up with conclusive results, I’ll have to carry it out 100 times.’
…
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to ‘uncook’ the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours.

Very fun read, go read the rest of the article. And try out that uncooking an egg thing and post a comment below – it sounds interesting but I doubt I will actually try it.

Clean Clothes Without Soap

photo of eco washing balls

The Soap-free Green Laundry Revolution by Tania Rabesandratana:

Then, there’s the sheer weirdness of entirely eradicating washing powders in favor of such an intangible washing concept. “The balls are made of a special kind of plastic,” explains Steve Jones, the founder of Ecotopia, which sells a variety of washing balls he believes are top of their league, and a scientific breakthrough. “It is the chemical reaction between the plastic and the agitated water that actually does the washing,” he says. The product’s blurb says the balls “produce ionized oxygen that activates the water molecules naturally and allows them to penetrate deep into clothing fibers to lift dirt away.”

Right. Let’s go back to washing basics. Our machine works by combining three actions. First comes chemical action. Here, detergents act as surfactants: they lower the water’s surface tension, making it more likely to mix with oil, so that yucky grease and grime can be removed during rinsing. Second comes the mechanical action from the spinning of the washing machine drum. And finally, there is heat action, which consists of dunking your laundry in hot water.

The eco balls mostly increase the mechanical action so that you can do without the chemical action, thereby saving money and avoiding the use of evil pollutants. The increase of mechanical action also does away with the need for heat action, which in turn conserves electricity and water, which is good for your wallet and your planet.

Pretty cool, if they actually work. I think I might have to try these out. For the next stage of the process, DryerMax Dryer Balls claim to cut the drying time by 25% and soften the fabric. Some other cool gadgets and gizmos.

Water Pump Merry-go-Round

I wrote about PlayPumps in 2006: Safe Water Through Play. This video by National Geographic gives more detail on PlayPumps and water needs in general. Some facts from KnowH₂O

A child dies every 15 seconds from diseases related to unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene.

1.1 billion people worldwide lack access to safe drinking water.

40 billion hours each year are spent collecting water in sub-Saharan Africa, equal to over 19 million full-time employees.

Every $1 invested in water yields an economic return worth $8 in saved time, increased productivity and reduced healthcare costs. (UNDP)

In many areas of sub-Saharan Africa women and girls often walk an average of five miles to the nearest water source every day. If a woman only had to carry water for one hour a day, she could earn an additional US $100 a year.

National Science Board Report on Improving Engineering Education

Moving Forward to Improve Engineering Education a report from the National Science Board:

Changes in the global environment require changes in engineering education. Markets, companies, and supply chains have become much more international and engineering services are often sourced to the countries that can provide the best value. Basic engineering skills (such as knowledge of the engineering fundamentals) have become commodities that can be provided by lower cost engineers in many countries, and some engineering jobs traditionally done in the U.S. are increasingly done overseas. To respond to this changing context, U.S. engineers need new skill sets not easily replicated by low-wage overseas engineers.
…
Society at large does not have an accurate perception of the nature of engineering. Survey data indicate that the public associates engineers with economic growth and defense, but less so with improving health, the quality of life, and the environment.
…
The third challenge for engineering education is to retain those students who are initially attracted to engineering. Attrition is substantial in engineering, particularly in the first year of college. About 60 percent of students who enter engineering majors obtain a degree within 6 years. Although this retention rate is comparable to some other fields, it is especially critical for engineering to retain the pool of entering students.

Energy-Efficient Microchip

Team develops energy-efficient microchip

The key to the improvement in energy efficiency was to find ways of making the circuits on the chip work at a voltage level much lower than usual, Chandrakasan explains. While most current chips operate at around one volt, the new design works at just 0.3 volts.

Reducing the operating voltage, however, is not as simple as it might sound, because existing microchips have been optimized for many years to operate at the higher standard-voltage level. “Memory and logic circuits have to be redesigned to operate at very low power supply voltages,” Chandrakasan says.

One key to the new design, he says, was to build a high-efficiency DC-to-DC converter–which reduces the voltage to the lower level–right on the same chip, reducing the number of separate components. The redesigned memory and logic, along with the DC-to-DC converter, are all integrated to realize a complete system-on-a-chip solution.

One of the biggest problems the team had to overcome was the variability that occurs in typical chip manufacturing. At lower voltage levels, variations and imperfections in the silicon chip become more problematic. “Designing the chip to minimize its vulnerability to such variations is a big part of our strategy,” Chandrakasan says. “So far the new chip is a proof of concept. Commercial applications could become available “in five years, maybe even sooner, in a number of exciting areas”

Internet Undersea Cables

In a previously post we highlighted some of the engineering involved in fixing undersea cables and the challenges in laying internet fiber underwater. Given the recent news those posts might be of interest: Cut undersea Internet cables slow India’s connectivity

Early estimates suggested that half of India’s Internet capacity vanished after the first two cable lines were cut Wednesday. In other countries, such as Egypt, the figure was as high as 70 percent. The two Mediterranean cables cut Wednesday carry the bulk of the region’s Internet traffic
…
Much of this traffic has now been rerouted along Pacific cables. Because of the redirected traffic, a third cable cut, discovered Friday in the Gulf region, has had no effect. Some 90 percent of India’s bandwidth has been restored and cable repairs are expected to take two weeks, but bad weather has prevented a repair ship from setting off to mend one of the cables.

For some businesses, the cut meant a slightly degraded service – poorer reception for call-centers that use Internet telephony, for example. But for larger businesses that carry the bulk of outsourcing from the United States and Europe, there was virtually no disruption.

“We have diversity in path and providers globally, and hence we have not lost any connectivity to our offices or customers,” according to an e-mailed statement by Infosys, one of India’s largest Information Technology companies.

While the initial reports talk of the cables being damaged by a ship anchor, at least one new report disputes that, Ships did not cut internet cable:

No ships were present when two marine cables carrying much of the Middle East’s internet traffic were severed, Egypt’s Ministry of Communications has said, contrary to earlier speculation about the causes of the cut.
…
“A marine transport committee investigated the traffic of ships in the area, 12 hours before and after the malfunction, where the cables are located to figure out the possibility of being cut by a passing vessel and found out there were no passing ships at that time,” said the statement.