Design in the World | Isambard's Lad

How many Women in the Royal Academy 2015 Cohort?

The Royal Academy of Engineering has announced 50 new Fellows: its anointed of 2015. How representative is this cohort? Objectivity is always difficult: subjective, personal perceptions are always likely to be powerful. What the hell; let’s try.

Here’s a simple approach without over-analysis.

Gender

Of the 50 new Fellows, four [8%] are women. All are University Academics; three are based in London and the other in Wales. Their disciplines are all different as Chemical, Mechanical, Materials and IT. The Fellow of the latter discipline is working in “Human-Centred Technology and Science of Cyber Security Research”.

Domain

The four domains are each to represent a distinct and somewhat different milieu for its toilers.

There is the Commercial domain: generally driven by the profit motive. There is the University Academic seeking knowledge. The Government domain is that of laboratories sponsored by Government: largely or completely funded by the public purse. Finally, the Infrastructure includes such bodies as the NHS, independent Registration bodies, and national transport networks.

Commerce	University Academic	Infrastructure	Government
20	25	4	1

50% of the new Fellows are in the University Academic domain whereas only 40% are in Commerce and 8% wrestling with the UK Infrastructure.

Once upon a time some decades ago, the Government, with such organisations as the National Engineering Laboratory at East Kilbride, employed rather more engineers than this 2%. Today, if the government employed more engineers, their effective engineering decisions would benefit. That is, if it sought out and took their advice.

Discipline

This statistic is derived from the declared, first degree discipline of the Fellow. Technologically, this does not always map exactly onto their current position. Although their career may well have moved away ‘upwards’ somewhat, they still do not usually stray too far away technically. The degree of one Fellow was unknown from the published biography with no response to a query.

Mechanical —————————— 9

Civil —————————————— 10

Electrical or Electronic ———— 7

Chemical ———————————- 3

Aeronautical —————————- 1

Manufacture —————————- 2

The top three at between 20% and 14% are about what I expect given my perceived proportions of the professional engineering workforce. The aeronautical 2% seems low considering its, perhaps self-assessed, technical brilliance. Manufacturing is only slightly higher at 4% and, assuming that all the deserving have been found, UK plc could do with a higher proportion of such engineers.

Robotics ————————————– 2

Materials ————————————- 5

Oil and Gas ———————————- 4

Bioengineering —————————- 1

Information Technology ————- 5

Unknown ———————————— 1

The Materials discipline at 10% is not surprising and also encouraging. Vast engineering improvements are being gained. These stem from both our greatly improved understanding of materials at the atomic level and also from developing the complex and accurate process control needed to benefit from that understanding. The 8% for Oil and Gas seems about right if we need to get the most out of the apparently emptying North Sea fields. I say that not in order to burn fossil fuel but using it as feed stock for complex organics. The field of Robotics at 4% as a coming speciality needs more engineering intellectual horsepower [pardon the pun] as well as IT insight.

The 10% under the IT discipline [AI, computer vision algorithms, complex data analysis, medical image computing, and cyber-security research] involves much wrestling with mathematical logic and no bending of physical forces to the human will.

Base

This is a division defined by place of work of the new Fellows according to their biographies.

London ————————————- 14

Midlands ———————————– 5

South —————————————– 7

South West ——————————– 5

North —————————————– 6

Wales —————————————– 1

Scotland ————————————- 3

Abroad ————————————— 9

Not to my surprise, or I imagine to anyone else’s, London apparently shelters the most new top engineers this year at 28%. Considering how little production occurs in London and how much elsewhere in the UK, the London 28% seems high. Not so much when we realise, firstly, that most engineers these days are not occupied in manufacture but perhaps in servicing the manufacturing process carried out abroad where costs are lower. Secondly, 14% of the ‘Londoners’ are University Academics. Indeed, the North/South divide is alive and well in that London, South and South West together account for 52% of all the new Fellows this year. This is more than all the rest put together: which is particularly striking because ‘the rest’ includes Abroad at 18%.

Talking of London University Academics, if I was mischief-making I would tell you that Imperial College blew the others away with 8% of new Fellows with only 4% from UCL and 2% from Brunel. Not only that but if I look at all the University Academics within the 50 new Fellows, Imperial has bragging rights over every one of the other Universities, none of whom has more than the 4% of Cambridge as well as UCL.

An Engineer’s New Year Fantasy

Here’s a fantasy vision. Nothing to do with snow or twerking or New Year Resolutions. It seems particularly that of an engineer: not that of a journalist or scientist or even of an oceanologist. Tell me I am wrong, go on.

In the newspaper piece, the headline was “Five trillion pieces of plastic in seas are damaging food chain”. It told of many findings and repeated, as well as much else, previously mentioned topics such as how such rubbish accumulates mostly in five large ocean gyres. There were interesting maps of distribution by particle size around the world’s oceans. The piece was based upon a research paper from the University of Western Australia.

Now I did not look, deliberately, at any of the internet, below the line comment. It might have spoilt the pristine enthusiasm of the moment or even destroyed the fantasy with facts, [though on line there are usually more abuse than facts].

Now here is the skeleton of a vision: triggered by the scenario, a Global Project envisaged by this engineer.

If much or most of this material is gathered in Gyres, then that situation is, if not good, but at least better than it might be. Concentrated in one [or five!] areas, we know where to go to pick most of it up. [First Project question – do these gyres really exist?]

If we can pick it up in the gyres once, the material that is remaining elsewhere will after a suitable period be ‘sucked into’ or go into orbit around the gyres again. So we go extracting to the same place later. [Second Project question, “Will we need to do it more than once? It may affect the engineering, if not].

One author said that in the gyres it was like “sailing through ‘plastic soup’”. So that sounds as though it is relatively easy to skim it from the surface or just below. Reminds me of, when cooking, how I extract shredded red cabbage with a colander out of its rinsing water. So: go sail through with a net or other filter and the stuff is on your boat and not in the water. [Third Project question. Specify a net or filter required in terms of pore size and power required to pass water through it?]

Perhaps there is a more subtle way of extraction developed for other problems like ocean spillages. [Fourth Project question. What can BP or other specialist salvage contractors with such as their Gulf spillage experience tell us?]

So we need to specially design extraction vessels sailing across and within the gyres. But how many do we need and how fast can they sail? May be they can sail relatively slowly to save energy: time is not of the essence in such a Project. [Fifth Project question. How big are the gyres?]

The propulsion of extraction vessels, like most other things in this world will need energy and power. This will be a significant cost apparently and affect the details of the Project. They will be sailing in the open ocean. [Sixth Project question. Can the vessels be solar or wind powered?].

The crew is another major cost in operating ships at sea. Could we dispense with them? We could plan to use of a fleet of autonomous, radar visible, small ships: they could perhaps be small and launch size [Seventh Project question. Ask the academics in the robotic field if we know enough yet to design and set up a reliable fleet].

Traversing oceans land to land is not something easily done by small ships. For another thing, a small boat extracting waste will soon reach its pay load. So it seems that a Mother Ship with a fleet is the operating scheme. Such a Mother Ship could carry an economic load to the processing plant on land. [Eighth Project question. What are the processing economics for waste plastic crumb?]

Can we overcome the problems of marine safety? Perhaps this might be easier as they may be operating in remote areas of the oceans but then maybe not. It depends on where the gyres are found. [Ninth Project question. Query the international coastguard authorities on the size of the problem and any potential solution.]

We seek to solve the economics of transporting the extracted material to process plants on land. Perhaps the inhabitants of Pacific and other ocean islands or remote corners of continents might consider hosting a plant set up. It would provide work and compressed plastic as raw material for building. [Tenth Project question. Could such a plant be powered by renewable energy sources?]

Such a Project may need and international effort. [Eleventh Project question. Does it need the United Nations or a somewhat more agile organisation?]

Well, there you have it. That’s as far as I have got as a first stab. Cost and economics are probably more central than the technology. I imagine the latter is already in sight. As an international good it does not necessarily have to make a profit.

Now go on then: en primeur, nothing more. Have a think about it, but give it a fair wind with a constructive approach. There are probably at least a dozen more major Project questions.. I fancy that there might be a feeding frenzy of the critics but may be the Project or something like it could be done.

By the way, along the route of the text of this piece there is a screech about this plastic weighing “more than the entire biomass of humans”. Shock! Horror! No, it’s not good but my first thought is that, at an estimate of 269,000 tons, this is about one or maybe two big, modern container ships. Think how many ships are afloat and then think of the weight of the buildings erected by the human race. Our biomass is, to not mince, words a stupid measure worthy of the worst Greenpeace hype.

Summer time by the river

Clever Designing 160 years ago

One drowsy, summer’s day in the World Heritage Site, Derwent Valley Mills, an elegantly curved weir makes the river swish and some ripe old engineering appears.

Beside it, through the green canopy, slightly mysterious stone structures appear.

As you approach it, machinery begins to take a clearer form; but more of that in the next post.

The stone structures and the machinery can contain and control the river flow even when it is thunderous in full winter spate. This place is where the mastery of water power brought industrial scale manufacture in its youth. The first factories here needed what, in the terms of the early to mid 19^th Century, was a lot of power. When the river was angry in those winters long ago a lot of clever, state-of-the-art engineering design was needed to avoid their destruction, let alone power extraction and control. There can be more momentum thundering by here, far inland, than you will see other than at a gale bound sea coast.

The factory manager sometimes needed to control water flow rates into his mill wheels; at other times needed to allow water to bypass the weir. Then they raised or lowered massive gates. When closed and water depth was thus high on the upstream side, , these gates needed to be able to resist, without bursting, the high pressures of the water. Some things can resist pressure but flex a lot while doing it; balloons and car tyres are examples. But, these gates had to be rigid. If they were not, the flexing would jam them in their closely-fitting slide-ways and they could not be made to move up or down when that was needed.

An ideal material for the faces of the gates wetted by the water was then timber; for the strength of its fibrous structure, its integrity in large sizes and also because it expands in water to make a good seal. Massive though the timber gate baulks were – even bigger than railway sleepers then or now – they would still deflect. So the design engineers set out to design a way of stiffening the timber beams: they used a design called a ‘composite deck’. This is like decking on some bridges where there is timber to walk on or drive a cart across and a steel structure of ties and struts below to stiffen it. Build this to the right size, turn it on its edge and, Olé, a water gate.

Now this was all being done by engineers, quite a long time ago. And here’s proof.

What? Ah yes, the gates themselves. Here’s one and we’re looking vertically down at the back of the gate at the stiffening structure.

Note here that the strut components, mounted at right angles on the backs of the timber baulks are cast iron [molten metal poured into shaped moulds] while, joining the top of the struts to each other and the to the gate frame at each end of the gate [out of shot in this image], the ties are wrought [forged at red heat by a blacksmith]. There are several identical [in this case], independent courses of struts and ties, above and below each other.

Each end of each tie is passed through to the water side of the gate and the nut is turned up tight to make the timber and the metal structure act as one.

I don’t know the name of the engineer who designed the gates and the stone structures. Whoever it was, he [it probably was a ‘he’ in those days] faced a similar conceptual struggle as does the design engineer today. Nowadays, she still has to look at a more or less blank page and produce ideas of a design that will fulfil the task specification. This designer did a good job with the technology to hand. Although the gates had to be of different sizes and so had to with stand different loads whilst doing the same job, he used a standard design concept. That concept used standard struts and ties in a determinate structure for each design.

With these simple designs of strut and ties, and depending on the depth of the water forcing the height of the gate, there are several levels of frame above each other. There are limits to the design in that those used here and shown above are determinate. By that I mean that, with these designs, it is relatively easy to calculate the loads that each component has to with stand. If you add any extra struts or ties and it is difficult to ensure that all are tight and if you do, then it is uncertain what load each is seeing. It is then called ‘indeterminate’.

This is not to say that this design did not have its shortcomings. For this, see the next post. Remember, few engineers of today will be credited with designs that are still doing a job after 160 years: I would be delighted if any of mine were.

Hard game, Engineering.

Cut slack? Not often!

The structural engineer Bill Harvey, @BillHarvey2 on Twitter followed by The Lad, is one of the few, practising engineers on the social websites. Once, when The Lad made some hard, unjust criticism of a video promoting engineering, he suggested cutting some slack. Slack, though justified there, is seldom available in daily, real engineering and here are a few examples. They are five and random: three small scale, one serious and one lethal. In the wrong place though, even small errors, if not picked up, can create dangerous havoc. Anything ever designed offers chances of error.

Mostly engineers design machines or components for a particular function. Often the upshot is they do something else, such as fail, much better. ” Damn it!” [usually worse]. “Try again” The profession of engineering is vastly important, difficult and usually misunderstood by the media.

All modern engineers know about metal fatigue failure. Loads and low stresses may not break a piece applied once, but if they are often repeated can still cause breakage or cracks. It is a danger always lurking to spring on the unwary design engineer. She designs out sharp internal corners because of the stress concentration can encourage a fatigue crack: so she designs in a nice large radius.

Radiused corner to minimise metal fatigue failure risk

Ah, but fatigue is pushed only one step further away. For how is the radius to be machined? If the manufacturing process or careless handling allows a scratch to appear: boom, even higher stress concentration and fatigue enters again and takes it’s position centre stage.

Then there used to be this massive pile of print-out. Fifty sheets were common.

pack cover — Cover of a map-folded print-out pack of stress analysis results.

Do you believe what is printed on it?

Arbitrary sample of Fortran results, frequently 50 pages of this.

In those days massive piles of map-folded printout was a product of the batch operation of the Mainframe on the air-conditioned wing of the ground floor. We had to be wary of the ‘never mind the quality: feel the width’ syndrome. Quality of the answer depends on the assumptions fed in, Watch out for GIGO, ‘garbage in: garbage out’.

A colleague was obsessing over the stresses and forces in an hydraulic system and was greatly worried about one static pipe element. In one scenario, a transient increased the compression forces up to enough to buckle the element.

Buckles — These are tubes or pipes buckling under end loads.

Buckling is bad was our usual rule of thumb. The chief stress engineer asked “Where is it and where is it going?” The eloement was passing through a small, fitting clearance in a hole. If it buckled, all it did was just touch the side. No problem, move on.

Modern gas turbine engines power most of the aircraft in which we are flown about the globe. The gas turbine prime mover is very different to a piston engine. One aspect is the compressor which compresses the gas before fuel is injected and burned.

leaky compressor — The compressor, made up of rotating discs with many blades, is to the left and the combustion chamber is to the right.

This job is also done in a piston engine when, before fuel injection, the piston compresses the air with little or no leakage possible around the piston. In the gas turbine there is a potential convoluted leak path backwards[to the left in the photo] between the blades. In a normally running engine, this leak is only avoided at optimum speed because the rotating compressor with its carefully designed blade shapes pushes air, compressing it as it goes, to the right towards the combustion chamber. Operating the engine at non-optimum speeds (say, start up or acceleration at take-off) can result in airflow slowing and the pressure at the right side growing too high. Then, with a large bang and (if repeated) highly expensive, blade damage, flames rocket out of the front and rear of the engine. Only very careful engineering design based on extensive experiment can stop these explosive forces.

There was a new design of bridge called a Box Girder. Instead of chains, frames or cables, it had a large hollow section to bear most of the loads. Without too much simplification, we can see that this had two advantages. Such a large, closed shell was very strong and stiff which is just what you want for the deck of a bridge. Secondly, such a smooth design promised low maintenance as a very large part of it, the inside, was protected from the weather. The West Gate Bridge in Australia was such a design.

High in the air supported by piers, the box section can be clearly seen.

Trouble is, being very stiff (that great advantage), it is difficult to assemble accurately on site and align when installed. Sadly at West Gate in a fatal misjudgement, what were seen as the necessary tweaks to get sections to fit accurately only overloaded the bridge sections. They buckled and crashed to the ground. Over thirty men lost their lives.

Engineering is, and always will be, hard. You want challenges? Be a professional engineer.

How to get better! Boot-strapping.

A tweet by @Therese_LW on Sir Joseph Whitworth the Victorian engineer reminded The Lad [@isambardslad] of an interesting question. It sparked off an Twitter thread with @BillHarvey2

Whitworth was an engineer close to Brunel in any global ranking. He made enormous strides in improving the methods and accuracy of machine tools. In general, he greatly improved the efficiency of engineering manufacturing techniques. In this work he drove the Industrial Revolution into a higher gear.

Screw threads are an enormously important factor in engineering manufacture quite apart from their use in a multitude of types of fastener. In the form of lead screws they not only allow heavy masses to be moved but also, in many types of machine tools, allows the distance of movement to be very accurately controlled.

A lead screw on a simple lathe is an important example of this. Here a cutting tool is usually mounted on a saddle whose position is governed by the lead screw. Such a machine can, using the lead-screw as a controller and via gearbox in the headstock, cut another screw thread.

diagram lathe — The parts of a simple lathe

The point here though is that a new screw cut on such a lathe cannot have a better accuracy than the lead-screw that controls the cut. It can only be, at best, as accurate as the lead-screw or, to some degree, worse. This seems to be a completely general feature of machining.

So, this is the question. How can you get from a screw thread that looks, in a wine-press of the early 18^thC, like this….

….to one that looks, and is, much, much more accurate like, for example, this lead-screw?

The Lad and @BillHarvey2 had an interesting, if rather compressed discussion on Twitter on the topic. He made the point that, in the early days, the toolmakers would have improved the shape and accuracy of a thread like the wine press or somewhat smaller, manually with hand tools like files and scrapers. This could then be a master screw to make others similar.

The Lad believed that there would be a limit to what could be done this way as the threads got smaller in diameter and the required accuracy increased. As was said above, you cannot expect to make an identical screw in a lathe that is better than the lead-screw you are using. It can only be as accurate or worse.

Then Bill Harvey gave what seems to be a breakthrough idea. A lathe is not limited to making screw threads that are the same dimensions as the lead-screw. So, let us fit our best, hand-improved screw as the lead-screw in a lathe. Then we set the lathe gearing suitably to cut a smaller diameter and finer [more threads per inch] screw. This way, the inaccuracies in the existing lead-screw will still be there but reduced in absolute terms in the new lead-screw. Fitting this new, finer and smaller screw back as a lead-screw in the lathe [probably a specially designed lathe for the job], we can then use it, with another gear change, to make a large screw again. This new one could be improved even more by hand.

Then this process could be repeated, with an improvement in accuracy each time, over several cycles of large to small to large threads. This is a boot-strap type process that seems to make possible an improved thread. There are other aspects perhaps such as a wide-span follower on the lead-screw as part of the improvement process.

All this so far though is deduction and an element of supposition based upon engineering judgement. The Lad must therefore check it if possible. First port of call will be “Sir Joseph Whitworth – The Worlds’s Greatest Mechanician” by Atkinson. See if that supports our deductions.

Thanks to @BillHarvey2 for the original discussion and the large/small thread idea and to @Therese_LW for raising the matter of Whitworth that sparked us off. Bill Harvey also posted on this subject.

Engineer looking into a hole in the road

Even The Lad, engineering-promoter-advocate-enthusiast-fanatic did not expect to see an interesting engineering material when he looked in a hole in the road.

There it was: a sharp-edged, massy, black moulding, not cold to the touch and with a slightly elastic feel. Its smart matt blackness was entirely new to The Lad. What was the material?

The Lad found out in the end. It was a long search through many organisations; but the details of that are certainly less interesting than the material itself. So, we’ll cut to the chase. Looking into the hole in the road, The Lad sees a engineering problem and solution like this.

Many things such as valves, cables, switches need to be sited beneath the road surface. Such devices cannot be simply buried. They need to be accessible whilst protected from the loads of the heavy lorries passing over them.

Boxes with latchable lids are efficiently made from cheap, strong, castable iron. The material has been around for 2 centuries or more but up until recently it was brittle. A metallurgist invented a treatment that made it ductile instead.

It may be ductile iron but the boxes can be prone to damage by very slow movement of the surrounding earth or macadam. You may be surprised that the surface of a road and immediately beneath it is not rigid. However it does move: with dynamic traffic, varying atmospheric temperature and simply the passage of time. The ground flexes under load and creeps with time and sometimes, cracks. We have all seen some of this in our towns. This movement is more like a slow flow of warm lava rather than impact loads. The movement can distort the box by deflections and these eventually ‘use up’ all the ductility. When that happens, the iron will fracture.

So now we need something to surround the box: something that will protect it, in its turn, against the slow, distortional forces. Concrete is a material that is much stronger under compression than the iron. So this has been done in the past with what is, compared to the section thickness of the iron box, massive concrete frames These isolate the box from the loads in the surrounding ground.

In the real world of traffic civil-engineering there is a problem though. Concrete being as weak in tension as it is strong in compression; the frame breaks easily when, without being wrapped in cotton-wool, it is transported from the concrete factory to the various road works. It is then useless: they lose 22% this way.

Here we see the stealthy entrance of one of the major engineering criteria — cost. Then a guy suggested this material for this application. It overcame that problem and met the several other engineering criteria.

It was tested against the national standards and shown to have the necessary compressive strength to do the job.

Concrete frames are enormously heavy to transport and store. One user needed a supply of 3 lorries per month. When they moved to this lighter material the transport footprint went down to 1¼ lorries per month.

Installing the concrete versions needed a team of two technicians to handle it at the roadside. The lighter material can be safely and easily handled by only one person. It helps to get more road repairs per buck.

Too much bounce as with a trampoline when a vehicle rolls over it is a bad thing. So the Coefficient of Restitution or internal damping of the material has to be right and is. If they made the material from recycled rubber tyres, for example, the damping would be too small.

They make it black to achieve the utilitarian appearance and because it is easy maintain uniformity of appearance in manufacture.

If you don’t know any of these, take it as a challenge to find out about it.

OK then. What is this material? It is a re-use of scrap PVC. This source material is mechanically shredded, dyed black, then heated and extruded into moulds of the finished shape.

It does not have the pedigree of the creep-resisting, nickel, super alloy Nimonic 105. There is not the sexiness of a single crystal turbine blade alloy [or its eye-watering cost]. It is far from the fey Aerogel [solid smoke]. It doesn’t have the imperiousness of concrete.

Instead it has a heft of a journeyman material, the density and corrosion resistance of wood with the pitch-blackness of a B2 Spirit stealth bomber. And it seems to be ecologically sound. What’s not to like?

Perhaps Mark Miodownik, Professor of Materials and Society at UCL will consider if this attractive and sturdy, engineered material can be or should be included in the Institute of Making.

The Lad’s grateful thanks for their great help – above and beyond – go to

Ian Elston info@djenterprisesuk.com and Charles Sykes in the search

Mike Holmes of Laing O’Rourke Ltd, a user.

Richard Bone of ABC-UK Ltd, the manufacturer,

Think about specifying the material for your applications.

The Devil in the detail

Dishwashers, Jets and Taxis

The handle that opens the dishwasher door broke off today. It almost scrapped the machine. If you can’t open the door, it is useless scrap metal.

The internal structures and rotors of the washer fight corrosion and stress throughout its life. Even when it is stopped and not in use: no – ESPECIALLY when it is stopped. That’s corrosion. A lot of engineering effort have gone into these internals and the outer, white-enamelled shell.

It happens time and time again to engineers. The team works hard to get the core of the machine right. At the end, the team leader sighs, ‘Phew!’, she says ‘Well done, guys’. What happens then? Something outside the core goes wrong, that’s what.

In the handle mechanism, there are steel links to take quite high latching loads. On one link is mounted a plastic moulding for the fingers which clearly has some bending in it. It broke; so too much it seems. Or it’s just old-age perhaps.

Anyway, now with strong fingers, you can still move the bare linkage and open the door. With weak fingers though, the door stays locked and you are done for. It is a machine still just working– but getting close to useless.

It happens all the time; sometimes more painfully than when it is on a dishwasher.

trent 900 turbine end — Turbine end of a gas-turbine engine where fire & explosion took place

There was a small component once on a new design of £multi-million aero gas-turbine. It had just gone into service. It was festooned with the good results of testing that had cost many, many more £millions. The component probably cost about 0.001% or less of the cost of the whole engine. One machining process in the part was badly controlled. Cracks appeared. The component failed. Oil leaked out and caught fire in the engine. The turbine exploded in flight and nearly brought down the plane with all its passengers. All the engines – and their aircraft – had to be grounded. The cost was a fortune in treasure and reputation.

The jet engine company survived the cost of the problem but a taxi steering box problem bankrupted its maker.

The London Taxi Company had been struggling with financial losses for some years. Then came a serious problem with the steering box. The detail of the problem was never made public. Now the cost of the steering box is only a very small proportion of the cost of a black taxi compared to the engine and body. It is, though, a vital safety assembly in that it is a link in the steering system.

When the problem was found to be present in taxis on the road, many hundred had to be recalled and repaired at the expense of the London Taxi Company. The financial burden of this process drove the Company into administration and most of the workers lost their jobs. After a few months of suspense and, no doubt, negotiation a Chinese car firm, Geely, bought it out.

The original manufacturer in the UK of the steering box claimed that the problem arose in the box only when it was taken away and out-sourced to, strangely enough, China. When the manufacture was repatriated to the UK [back to him, the original, of course] the problem went away.

The engineering devil is ALWAYS in the detail.

The eternal problem for the engineer is ‘How do I think of what I have not thought of?’

The engineer’s new coin

It’s 1968 and the Decimal Currency Board is planning decimalisation. This group of the great and good wanted to get rid of the Ten Shilling note. Change it, they decided, to a new coin that had not previously existed and worth what is now 50p: a value greater than the then biggest coin. Now a bigger value usually means a bigger coin. Not a good idea this time though: for, to fit into the purse or pocket, it needed to be not too large or too damagingly heavy.

What’s to be done?

Through the ages, for every State and its Mint, resistance to the counterfeiter has been vital. But modern coins need another feature too. They need to operate vending machines and be suitable for bank counting machines.

Therefore, their weight and thickness have to have the right relation to other value coins. But the major criterion, by far, is that when you pop it into the machine, however a coin is oriented, the machine recognises its value because the coin width is constant.

Ergo, the coin has to be circular. Right?

One of the great and the good was Sir Hugh Conway. He was a top notch engineer, having spent most of his career designing aero-engines and was a recent past President of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

We mustn’t hold it against him that the company portrait gave him a strong resemblance to a Stage leading man of the 1950’s. Sorry, Sir Hugh.

Anyway, Conway was familiar with the processes used by his production engineers. They are the Company team who carefully engineer the methods for making amazingly-accurate engineering devices.

There are hundreds of different machining processes. Grinding is one way of making some highly accurate pieces. There are sub-types of grinding: some for flat items, others for cylinders.

Trying to avoid the cry, ‘Too much detail!’, The Lad resists the nerdy approach. One sub-type, see image below, squeezes the ‘work piece’ between two rotating wheels. The ‘moving’ wheel moves towards the other removing the metal; the other ‘stationary’ wheel rotates the work piece. As the machine removes material, the work piece will remain circular, won’t it?

No, not always. The work piece certainly does stay a constant width. So that’s circular, then? Not necessarily. If the engineers don’t set up the machine properly, the work piece will become – not circular but a lobed, non-circular shape. Certainly it is a strange shape but one which has a constant width. To the production engineers demanding a perfectly accurate, circular cylinder, this was nothing less than a pain in the butt.

To Conway though on the Decimal Currency Board, it was an opportunity. Make the 50p piece that shape and it will still work a vending machine while yet looking and feeling different to people.

Try this video to see a spritely take on the shapes.

To see this strange, lobed shape in real life, just look at a 50 p piece from your purse. Another thing is to put the coin on edge on a table. Then roll it, very carefully to stop it falling over, between a flat rule and the table. You will feel NO BUMPS at all. I guarantee you will think that your eyes are deceiving you.

In October 1969 the 50p coin was introduced, with the 10s note withdrawn on 20 November 1970.Now, in 2013 in the UK, the 50p is not the only coin this shape; the 20p coin is another. It was an announcement a couple of weeks ago of a new coin design that reminded The Lad of this story.

Not all think it was a good thing. Here is a ‘mint’ example of a truly ridiculous, bonkers, journo screed lauding romance apparently – by someone who does not calculate very much – his partner probably does it for him.

Engineering influences our daily lives in some ways that you may not expect. So, there it is: a new coinage by the engineer – both literally and metaphorically.

DIY Fusion Design 101?

Can’t touch! Won’t touch!

If you can’t touch it, how are you going to use it?

BBC had a piece in early August 2013 on ITER or the International Thermo-nuclear Experimental Reactor. This is the new, globally international project, similar in size to CERN based in the south of France, to develop fusion power.

OK. Let’s assume that we can get fusion to work for a useful period. How are we going to get the [expletive deleted] energy out?

Are you listening to me, ITER? Course they aren’t. Engineers and scientists have been working on the myriad problems for more that 50yrs. They don’t need the help of The Lad. But some students, general public and certainly the meejah might.

Here’s an engineer, The Lad, putting his head on the block. He is venturing into an engineering place in which he has no specific expertise: no change there then. He just thinks in general terms of engineering forces. At least this is more than do most bloggers and general media. Remember, it is the working with physical forces that defines an engineer.

Fusion will only occur at temperatures that transform anything into stellar plasma. That includes ANY solid structure trying to contain it. Such energy by transmission of heat, in quantities difficult to imagine, will sublime any structure that it contacts.

Here is what happens now for most of today’s prime movers. There are several heat sources in current use; such as oil, gas, coal, wood and nuclear fission. This heat source drives the heat energy by conduction; moving energy by interaction between atomic particles. The energy passes through a pipe wall so as to heat water or gas or some other intermediary. This expands and drives a turbine or piston engine or hurtles out of the back of a jet engine generating a useful reaction.

OK. It’s currently impossibly difficult to get fusion to stay ‘alight’ for more than split seconds [or am I already out-of-date?]. Anyway that is the reason for the €billions being spent on ITER. If we assume that we will be able to improve on this; what then?

Now we need to get the energy out.

If we try to drive the energy though a pipe wall by conduction from a fusion plasma cloud, the pipe will melt it in a millisecond or less. So – not conduction then.

In boilers, both domestic kettles and Drax power station plant, they use conduction. Here bulk gas or liquid move themselves as well as their energy. Both bubbles and hot water rise because they are less dense than the surrounding water. This leads to mixing and heat transfer; producing steam for turbines driving the generators. Thanks, Archimedes. It so happens that this is also the way that radiators [a misnomer: they would be better called ‘convectors’] warm a room in a house.

Sorry, we cannot use convection. Why? Precisely because plasma is carefully arranged to be closely contained in a doughnut-shaped, Magnetic Bottle [part of a Tokamak machine]. This is a magnetic field that is designed precisely to stop the searing plasma from churning about where it is not wanted, i.e. touching anything solid.

What can be done? The Lad thought that he was asking a very difficult question. But then, it transpires, not so much. He remembered that engineers recognise three standard ways to transfer heat energy: conduction, convection and radiation.

heat transfer in the kitchen — Heat Transfer in the kitchen (c) Hilary Morgan

So if it can’t be conduction or convection what have we left? It must be radiation where heat energy is transmitted like light or radio. This is how warmth from the Great Fusion Reactor in the Sky [as Alan Partridge might refer to, of course, the Sun] gets transferred to us on Earth. There will be a ridiculously intense, thermal heat flux. Not only that though, there will be an equally ridiculous flux of nuclear radiation that will, itself, hammer at the structural integrity of the whole machine.

For ITER there is quite and impressive technical illustration here. Not a drawing,note: it’s an illustration so a lot can change.

While everybody that The Lad has seen talking about ‘limitless fusion power’ speaks of the fusion reactor generating the power, nobody seems to talk about getting out for our use. It seems to The Lad, radiation it has to be. But in detail how is quite another question. It is an equally giant problem. After all solar panels or black radiation absorbers on the roof of your house won’t hack it.

But don’t worry. Let the scientists get the physics of fusion and plasma nailed down and you can rely on the engineers to turn it into Power Stations for the benefit of us all.

Only three ways …

Oh yes – from the last post, who is this Sir John Rose?

He stood down from RR at the top of his game in a blaze of glory in March 2011 after having been with the firm from 1984 and Chief Executive from 1996.

He is one of a small group at the top of Rolls-Royce plc who, over the last couple of decades have transformed the engineering company. It has changed by expanding its product ranges, entering new markets whilst retaining a global reputation and financial strength.

Sir John Rose - Captain of Industry — Sir John Rose – Captain of Industry

The striking thing, at least to The Lad, is that he was apparently not trained as a professional engineer. The Daily Telegraph newspaper related that, born in Africa, he came to Scotland gaining an MA in psychology; it is not clear whether that was the subject of his first degree. Then he went into banking of all things. Eventually he fetched up in 1984 at RR.

On his watch, the achievements have been spectacular. Clock this! At the end of 2010 The Daily Telegraph told us that

“In 1995 – the last full year before Sir John Rose became chief executive – the company’s order book was worth £7.6bn. Today it is worth £58.3bn”

“Rolls-Royce’s figures speak for themselves. In 1995 – the last full year before Sir John became chief executive – the company’s order book was worth £7.6bn. Today it is worth £58.3bn. Revenue in 1995 was £3.6bn, today it is £10.1bn and is expected to double in the next decade. In 1995 profit was £175m compared to £915m today. Since 1996 the company’s share price has increased from 188p to 603.5p.”

Note that in mid 2013, that share price has doubled again. This is in global engineering.

His speech to the RSA offered a striking insight. He said:

“ … there are only three ways to create wealth – you can dig it up, grow it or convert something in order to add value. Anything else is just moving it about.”

That thought floodlights the churning in the modern, economic world: much of which is as useful to UK prosperity as the driven fluff. There was much more: it was a fabulous fighting speech. Read it and run with it.

The Lad found it striking but significant that in all the video footage of the speech he found on the net, the beginning has been cropped and only starts at the paragraph that has the first mention of “… politicians, economists and commentators …”. Good Grief, so many of the media only twitch or open their eyes when these people are mentioned.

There are other points about John Rose’s term as CEO of Rolls-Royce plc. On his watch the preferred principle of commerce with airlines changed and the RR business model changed with it – for the better.

Engine makers, during most of the Twentieth Century, sold their machines to the aircraft makers and, in the aircraft, on to the airlines. The airlines had their own engineers to maintain the engines, repair them as necessary and to buy new engines when they reached the end of the engine life. All this is a continuous, organisational, burden for the airlines. This approach was replaced by a new model: “Power by the Hour”. In effect the engine maker promised that he would take the full responsibility to provide the necessary power in the aircraft.

It is not clear whose idea “Power by the Hour” was originally but certainly it came to full, Roll-Royce flower under his leadership. It lead to increased engineering design emphasis on reliability and easier maintenance now that it affected the RR financial performance directly instead of being sloughed off onto the airline. The Lad is reminded of a saying that probably dates back to Henry Ford “An engineer does for 50c what any fool does for a dollar”.

It was a win-win result. The airlines were more comfortable with a cash outflow that did not vary [accountants do not like uncertainty] and, as a result, RR got more engine orders and its financial turnover grew massively.

He likes less what an accountant once told him. An engineering business [or any business for that matter] is merely a process linking buying money cheap and selling it dear. In the heat of recent financial meltdowns, that seems to be too abstract, ungrounded and risky.

All this is engineering too.

Engineering is one of the three drivers advancing the human race. This blog describes professional engineering in the real world as it is not well served by the current media. An engineer is posting: not a ‘scientist’. Its target is the career seeker and also the general public.

Category: Design in the World