Category Archives: Engineering

Building an Electricity Producing Wind Turbine

How I home-built an electricity producing Wind turbine:

Several years ago I bought some remote property in Arizona. I am an astronomer and wanted a place to practice my hobby far away from the sky-wrecking light pollution found near cities of any real size. I found a great piece of property. The problem is, it’s so remote that there is no electric service available.
…
Whether you build your own, or buy one, you will need some sort of controller for your wind turbine. The general principal behind the controller is that it monitors the voltage of the battery(s) in your system and either sends power from the turbine into the batteries to recharge them, or dumps the power from the turbine into a secondary load if the batteries are fully charged (to prevent over-charging and destroying the batteries). The schematic and write-up on the above web page does a good job of explaining it.
…
My ultimate goal is to have enough power from wind and solar sources to power a small cabin and observatory on my remote property that will only be occupied occasionally and won’t have much need for electricity. If you need a bigger system, then you need someone with experience with bigger systems to help you out.

Very interesting home engineering project. Related: Awesome CatCam – Engineering at Home – The sub-$1,000 UAV Project

Re-engineering Engineering Education

Re-engineering the engineer, Business 2.0’s take on the Olin education experiment:

You don’t have to spend much time at Olin to sense that something important has changed. Instead of the difficult, and often boring, math and physics classes of the old weed-’em-out-early engineering schools, you find courses like Engineering 2250: User Oriented Collaborative Design. In a typical session, you might encounter kids dressed in pajamas, sweats, shorts, and sandals and an atmosphere that feels more like an art studio than a classroom. On one spring day, a couple of couches and armchairs occupied the center of the room, and a student sat cross-legged atop a table, philosophizing about the lives and demands of makeup artists. Students in UOCD don’t build actual products, touch any technology, or even work a single math problem.

“It doesn’t look like engineering,” admits Benjamin Linder, the assistant professor who helped create the class. Olin’s curriculum is centered on courses like UOCD and Design Nature — the class that produced those climbing critters. Miller, 57, a thin, bald, engaging administrator who is prone to analogies, likens the traditional curriculum to a music school where students learn history and theory but never touch their instruments. Olin, by contrast, introduces project-based courses to its students early and often.

Olin also insists that students spend more than a quarter of their time studying business and entrepreneurship, humanities, and social sciences. “Olin really bends over backward to get the students to recognize the interactions between these disciplines,” says Constance Bowe, who studied the college as a researcher at Harvard Medical International. To help instill the entrepreneurial spirit, the college created the Olin Foundry, in which the school houses and partially funds as many as a dozen student startups.

Students also experience the business world firsthand through Olin’s senior consulting program for engineering. This year 12 corporations — including Boeing, Boston Scientific, Hewlett-Packard, and IBM — paid Olin a combined $700,000 to have groups of five seniors serve as consultants for a full academic year on some of the companies’ pressing technological and engineering problems. “By the time they’re seniors, they’re nearly operating at a professional level,” says David Barrett, the Olin associate professor who heads the program. “It gives them authenticity they wouldn’t get in a classroom.”

EasyJet EcoJet

The easyJet ecoJet: to cut CO2 emissions by 50% by 2015:

Rear-mounted “open-rotor” engines offer unrivalled environmental performance for short-haul flying due to their higher propulsive efficiency. However, there are significant difficulties in fixing such a large engine under a wing of a narrow-body aircraft, making rear-mounting of the engines the optimum solution.
…
In addition to engine efficiency and weight reduction, one of the primary methods of reducing fuel burn is by reducing drag. Conventional jet aircraft currently suffer increased drag from turbulent airflow over their wings. A wing profile that allows the easyJet ecoJet to maintain laminar flow over a significant proportion of the wing will greatly reduce cruise drag.

Giving the wing a slight forward sweep increases the proportion of laminar flow over the wing (as the clean airflow from the wingtip tends to flow to the wing root in contrast to the turbulent air from the fuselage being dragged across the wing with conventional reverse sweep). In addition, it improves the stall performance of a laminar flow wing. Minimising drag is imperative in the design of glides and most gliders with laminar flow wings also have a slight forward sweep to the wing.

Goldwater Science Scholarships

I have mentioned previously, I work for ASEE (the curious cat blog is not associated with ASEE). At ASEE, we have started a science and engineering fellowship blog. The latest post covers the Goldwater Science Scholarships – for undergraduate students in science and math. Approximately 300 are awarded each year.

For 2007, 28 mathematics majors, 223 science and related majors, 54 engineering majors, and 12 computer science majors received awards (many of the Scholars have dual majors in a variety of mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines). The one and two year scholarships will cover the cost of tuition, fees, books, and room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year.

The Goldwater Foundation is a federally endowed agency established by Public Law 99-661 on November 14, 1986. The Scholarship Program honoring Senator Barry M. Goldwater was designed to foster and encourage outstanding students to pursue careers in the fields of mathematics, the natural sciences, and engineering. Applications will be available starting in September for next year. Schools nominate up to 4 students for the scholarship, see the web site for details on the application process.

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration

Education, Entrepreneurship and Immigration: America’s New Immigrant Entrepreneurs is part 2 of a study by Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering and UC Berkeley. Some interesting points from the study:

52 percent of immigrant founders initially came to the United States primarily for higher education, 40 percent entered the country because of a job opportunity, 6 percent came for family reasons, and only 2 percent to start a business.
91 percent of Indian founders, 35 percent of Chinese and 97 percent of Taiwanese founders completed their undergraduate degrees in their home country
Indian and Chinese founders graduated from a diverse set of schools in their native countries, many of which are considered
second- or third-tier universities (only 15 percent of Indian founders were graduates of the IIT).
Immigrant founders of technology and engineering firms have strong backgrounds in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. 75 percent had completed their highest degree in a STEM field.
Advanced education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics is correlated with high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation. The U.S. economy depends upon these high rates of entrepreneurship and innovation to maintain its global edge.

Singapore Students Engineer New Products

Students design products to help environment and disabled people

“Now it’s in the eighth year and we’ve had 5,000 students on the scheme. This year the quality is quite good, I’m quite happy. Some amazing ideas such as the fish scaling device and the shuttlecock launcher,” said Mr Butler. There is no limit to innovation and creativity.

An automated shuttlecock launcher, which can adjust the launching angle of shuttlecocks, came in tops in terms of design. Currently there are no mechanical shuttlecock launchers in the market. But this launcher can not only be produced at a low cost, but also help beginners execute different strokes. Another practical design is a retractable bamboo system that improves safety when drying laundry. It also comes with a plastic cover to keep out the rain. The above are just a few examples of the 52 innovations that may just find their way into our homes and lives, once these young technopreneurs find the right investors.

I like the increasing efforts to engage university students in actually creating useful innovations. It isn’t easy to actually create winning solutions but the efforts to do so I think teach many valuable lessons. Such efforts support a change to our education system to engaging students in actual engineering projects not just problem sets (for example: Educating the Engineer of 2020: NAE Report – Olin Engineering Education Experiment – Changes at MIT for Engineering Education – Educating Engineering Geeks).

Self Healing Plastic

Plastic That Heals Itself

The first self-healing material was reported by the UIUC [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] researchers six years ago, and other research groups have created different versions of such materials since then, including polymers that mend themselves repeatedly when subject to heat or pressure. But this is the first time anyone has made a material that can repair itself multiple times without any external intervention, says Nancy Sottos, materials-science and engineering professor at UIUC and one of the researchers who led the work.
…
the researchers bend it and crack the polymer coating. The crack spreads down through the coating and reaches the underlying microchannel. This prompts the healing agent to “whip through the channels and into the crack,” Sottos says. There, it comes into contact with the catalyst and, in about 10 hours, becomes a polymer and fills in the crack. The system does not need any external pressure to push the healing agent into the crack. Instead, the liquid moves through the narrow channels just as water moves up a straw.

Boston Travel Photos

After I presented the Deming Seminar in Boston last year a spent a few extra days in to enjoy the city. See photos from my Boston visit including: Boston Science Museum (above photo), Boston Fine Arts Museum and Boston Common.

Educating Engineering Geeks

Yossi Sheffi, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Engineering Systems, Director, MIT Center for Transportation and Logistics, presents his thoughts on engineering education changes at MIT in this webcast.

So MIT must shift gears, and embrace two basic missions: continuing to produce world-class experts (geeks) – practicing engineers who design complicated systems – and generating world-class leaders (chiefs), who will deploy their technological expertise in the real-world. “My hypothesis is that the great leaders of the next century will have to have a technological background, because we’re going toward a technologically innovative society.” These leaders will be problem definers as much as problem solvers, and, says Sheffi, “either we or China will educate them.”

Sheffi suggests a School of Engineering-wide undergraduate program, where all the fundamentals courses are rethought and taught differently. This means sacrificing problem sets for case studies, and “learning how a subject fits into the grand scheme of things.” MIT should integrate humanities with engineering subjects, ensuring undergraduates understand business, ethics, legal language, environmental concerns, organization and process design. There should also be a formal leadership workshop, required time in a foreign culture and along the lines of the European Union, a five-year educational model. If MIT builds it, others will follow, assures Sheffi.

via: Geeks and Chiefs: Engineering Education at MIT

Life-patents

New Life, New Patent by Carl Zimmer:

ETC is right in suggesting Venter might become “Microbesoft”–controlling operating system for anyone who wants to build an organism from scratch. Other researchers, such as Keasling, are promoting a different way of doing synthetic biology–what they call open source biology. Scientists and their students are amassing an open inventory of parts that anyone can use to design organisms of their own. And it’s open source biology, these researchers argue, that will provide the best protection against any evil uses of synthetic biology. Instead of being hidden behind patents, the information about these parts would be available to everyone, and collectively solutions could be found. As this debate starts to unfold, I think open source biology will keep it from becoming nothing but deja vu.

I support keeping science open. Patents are a tax on society that the government grants inventors for their efforts, in order to benefit society, by encouraging the inventors to innovate. The end is benefiting society. The means is granting a right of the patent holder (a right they do not have without patent law) that will encourage them to make the effort to innovate. I support the proper use of patents, but we have perverted the patent process into something that harms society. The system needs to be fixed. And the whole area of patents on life I find very questionable.