μblog: engineering from the trenches

It is well known that written composition is not one of the strong points of most engineering-oriented curricula. The joke around my undergraduate university (George Mason University) was that Computer Engineering majors, such as myself, were totally illiterate as they were only subjected to two English courses in order to maximally combine the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering programs. Most of the other engineering programs had three courses, so although they could read and write, we made their computers operate.

I have been trying to fill the hole left by the one missing English course and to be more coherent in written and verbal conversations, so I have spent a little bit of time looking to avoid common pitfalls in the English language. To my surprise, there is a fairly good list of commonly misused Physics terms as maintained by Donald Simanek. There is some humorous intention, however, it is a good starting point. There is also the list of commonly misused English phrases, as well as a list of English words with disputed usage. I am sure that undergraduate engineering students will continue to loathe their English courses (as I did), however, the bright pupils may use proper grammar and composition as a tool to separate themselves from the rest.

( Photo is from surrealmuse. )

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Whenever I get a shiny new copy of Electronic Design magazine, I eagerly read the section called Pease Porridge, at the very end of the magazine. This section is written by Bob Pease and typically contains whatever material Mr. Pease decides to include that month. In my view, this is the only page in the magazine that actually includes electronic designs and is in contrast with the rest of the magazine’s content (advertisements that look like written text).  Sometimes there are designs for circuits that detect dropping temperatures in boots, sometimes something on taxes, and sometimes the section contains responses to letter (or emails) that readers have sent in. This month’s porridge dealt with sent in letters and the first one, by Anonymous Engineer, has provoked some thought.

Hello Bob,

A note concerning electric cars and plugin hybrids: Consider that politics has little to do with engineering and/or science. It only pays lip service at those altars. So, somebody has to do serious planning for the immediate future.

I’ve been working on some serious battery-charger designs. One of our planners (an engineer) did some research in good old California. We learned that your utility companies have problems with metering even small numbers of plug-ins, nor can the California infrastructure absorb many cells of even 5000 plug-ins. You’re running at about 81% capacity, and without a smart meter and control, we would easily overload the electricity capacity on two peaks every day. That’s not politics. It’s business.

American, Japanese, and European manufacturers were contacted, and none of us can really do this without the cooperation of the utilities. Oh sure, we can sell a few and look green. The press wouldn’t even know who to blame when the grid broke. Some of our competitors have been doing that, but without that smart meter, it’s the wrong thing to do. They know it. But that’s business.

All of the automakers easily agreed on the meter and protocol. The utilities did not. They already have contracts on meters that aren’t smart. That’s business. The real greenies were there, too. They’re part of politics. They want California to be energy neutral in 10 years—sorry, no data on how to do it. Industry must be hiding it.

Back in the Midwest, we run about 1/2 the total power per person aggregate (at 740 W per person continuous) than you do out west, but that’s because of our low transport and air conditioning costs. Perhaps just targeting our levels would be a better starting point. There is no magic bullet in the next 10 years. So the utilities answer to the greenies and business, not to the engineers. Our charger is going to be great. We will get patents. It will be used all over, but not in volume in the west.

-An Anonymous Engineer

Prior to reading this, I have been all for plug-in electric vehicles, although I have never worked out the power load requirements to support such a population. Now thinking a of the power blackouts that crippled the North-Eastern United States a few years back, I am no longer sure that switching privately owned vehicles to plug-ins is the right thing to do right now due to obvious issues with the power infrastructure in the U.S. Although the need to address environmental issues related to automobiles is apparent, I doubt there will be a serious motivation behind it unless there are economic benefits involved. The switch over to electric (or hydrogen for that matter) vehicles should start with the sector that can be converted most efficiently which would allow for the highest return on investment.

In my mind, the public transportation system should make the switch first. I am mostly experienced with the Metro fleet in Washington D.C. and can note that all of the buses are made by Orion Bus Industries (owned by Daimler Trucking) and fall into two models (larger and smaller). Given that the buses operate on a pre-determined route and are equipped with GPS (to automate the current location display inside the bus), the energy demand per vehicle per day can be predicted with high accuracy. Furthermore, most of the vehicles are at the depot during the late night and early morning, when electricity is cheaper than the daytime, which would make for an ideal charging period.

Over all, this would lead to a very predictable off-peak energy demand that can be negotiated with the local power generation utility in advance to ensure that the power demand is met economically and without sacrificing the power grid’s integrity. An on-site generator may be employed to charge batteries in case of a power emergency where public transportation service is required. A more clever (and more difficult) design may involve modifying the buses to have a modular power system that can be swapped between conventional diesel and electric power-plants.

Again, most of this is mostly my intuition as I have not worked out most of the mathematics behind it, however, it seems that power demand predictability might be a mitigating economic factor for public transportation conversion. Unlike us, the bus driver rarely gets sleepy while reading at night and takes the bus out for a spin to the coffee shop.

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I randomly found this book in the in the sciences section of a local book store and decided to buy it given that it was only about ten dollars. I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of the book, the readability, and the commentary of the author on applying the latest understanding of our physical world to the long-standing philosophical questions such as those dealing with determination and free will.

The book starts out by giving a summary statement of physical and philosophical advancements to year of the first publication (1943). For me, the historical accounts of philosophical advancement was very interesting given my ignorance of the subject. I was surprised to learn that Gottfried Leibniz, one of the fathers of calculus, had also tried to create a operational logic system to make philosophy universal and on par with mathematical proofs. Unfortunately he failed and to this day this universal language is still missing. The physical overview spends substantial time on new discoveries in quantum mechanics and goes over the probabilistic nature of the universe and ties this together with philosophical understanding of reality, knowledge and will. I will not spoil the conclusions, however, I will mention that they are well stated and supported.

Besides the substantial new (to me) content of this book, I found the book to be easily readable and understandable. The book was very complete and even offered references for further study of various intricate subjects. The organization of the book superb where each chapter built on information from the previous chapters and everything flowed together. I highly recommend it does a good job of provoking critical thought and introducing the reader to questions regarding our position and some of the motivations for the way we carry out our lives.

ISBN 0-484-24117-3 (This is the ISBN number off the back of the book, however, I noticed that this book is a little hard to find. A title and author search might work better than the ISBN.)

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Adding references, or data from, publications that are over a hundred years old seems to be a popular trend among scientific presentations these days. Sometimes it is to give a false sense of scholarship, however, it is often to remind us that some ‘new’ scientific breakthroughs may be simple re-interpretations of old discoveries. I try to note the references and look them up, when time permits. Here is the first paragraph from the preface of ‘Epilepsy and Its Treatments‘ (1904) by Spratling:

 The great progress made in the knowledge of epilepsy and its treatments during the past decade and a half, and in fact that no complete treatise on the subject has appeared in the United States since Echeverria’s work was published thirty-three years ago, was the chief reason that lead to the preparation of this volume.

With the exception of Manuel Echeverria (On Epilepsy: Anatomo-Pathological and Clinical Notes (1870)), the sentence can still be used in a modern book/review of Epilepsy without much alteration. The reason that the 1904 book was cited was to show that, a hundred years ago, physicians were aware that, on very rare occasions, were non-clinical. For example, it was noted that verbal interactions were sometimes enough to bring people out of seizure, something that researchers who seek alternative epilepsy treatments are rediscovering. (On a slight side note, there is an interesting personal account by Feydor Dostoyevsky starting at the bottom of page 466 where he links a pre-seizure state to a state of mental enlightenment.)

This long winded introduction was to present a pair of review articles from the early 1900s that covered what the authors thought were the highest achievements in physics and applied math of the previous century.

1905barus-the-progress-of-phsyics-in-the-nineteenth-century.pdf

1900woodward-the-centurys-progress-in-applied-mathematics.pdf

The image is from the IEEE and is of the Georgetown, CO steam/hydro powerplant.

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I came across this interesting post at the Mouse Print blog and thought, that I have found a compliment to feature creep. The keen observation was that the Dial soap company introduced a grip feature to the soap and added “all day odor protection” and reduced the size of the bars from 4.5 to 4.0 oz. From reading the comments, the Mouse Print readers were unhappy and one recalled the days when soap was bars were 5.0 oz. Those readers, and I am sure some other consumers, seemed to feel that the soap was less effective because of reduced size and thereby less of a value for them.

This line of reasoning to me was odd because soap, and detergent for that matter, has very little of the main active ingredient, called surfactant, in relation to the overall weight or volume. This is the chemical that has both hydrophobic and hydrophilic end groups and is can be used to allow water to act as a solvent for fats. This chemical also facilitates soap bubbles by reducing the surface tension between water and air and forming a air-surfactant-water-surfactant-air interface.  Anywhere from 1% to 5% is probably sufficient to get a nice, creamy lather and a clean wash. Most of the remaining mass of the soap is can be made up of something like a paraffin wax and lotions with trace amounts of anti-bacterial chemicals and deodorants. The point that I am trying to make is that we can have a much smaller bar of soap do the same job as a larger bar of soap by keeping the amount of surfactant in the two bars about the same and by altering the waxy substrate for increased longevity. The addition of odor-fighting chemicals on the package seems to indicate that at least some of the soap chemistry was changed, so it may be possible that other chemistry was also altered and the slightly smaller bar of soap will still last for just as many showers as the larger one. A single milliliter of Tween-80, a popular commercial surfactant, is probably enough to clean a load of laundry, however, people still have the mentality that adding more detergent will give a better wash.

A topic closer to the thoughts of many engineers may be the Everex TC2505 being sold at Walmart. What is interesting is that the mid-sized tower contains a mini-ITX mainboard with a Via C7-D processor, something that can fit into the same volume as four or five DVD cases. It is suggested that Walmart performed some market research and concluded that people still see size as an indication of performance for a desktop computer and would therefore think that a smaller system would be inferior.

My conclusion is that changing an existing design characteristics, like size, is very difficult and doomed to rejection by the consumer. The best hope is to try to launch a new product and hope to put positive spin on the improvements. In 1985, the Coca Cola drink recipe was altered resulting in a backlash and a subsequent re-introduction of Coke Classic. Diet Coke, however, has received a warm reception from many. As far as the soap goes, a whole new application will have to be designed. Although body wash is fairly new, we are already ingrained with the idea that we need about a tea-spoon of it to wash up. I guess the future could be some soft device with built in electronics and microfluidicts. It would be the size of a good, old fashion bar of soap and will feature a button and a LED. When we press the button, the LED will blink, the microfluidics will dispense micro-liters of surfactant and deodorant to the device’s surface and the device will wiggle or click a little letting us know that something useful has happened. We will lather and wash with it just like normal soap today and think back to the days where respectable soap bars weighed 5.0 oz.

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