Category Archives: Soapbox

Poetasting engineers

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donegal ruinA few weeks ago we spent a long weekend in Dublin. Its a capital city on a small scale but well-endowed with world-class museums, galleries and civic grandeur with good victuals available nearly everywhere.  We are frequent visitors to Dublin and, for me, no visit would be complete without half-an-hour or so spent sitting in the National Library listening to recordings of Yeats’ poems being read out loud.  You can listen on-line by visiting the ‘Verse and Vision‘ exhibit at the National Library of Ireland website.  I find reading poetry really challenging but I enjoy listening to someone else reading it.

My link to John Updike’s poem ‘Ode to Entropy‘ in my post entitled ‘Cosmic Heat Death‘ didn’t work – sorry about that!  It is reproduced in full on Clutterbuck.  I made another mistake last week and unintentionally published two posts, which perhaps reduced the impact of my request for ‘Good reads for budding engineers‘.  I have had no responses yet…

Staying with poetry.  Engineers appear to have a poor reputation for writing poetry.  Hilary Mantel in her short story ‘How shall I know you‘ describes reading clubs founded ‘by master drapers and their shop-girl wives; by poetasting engineers, and uxorious physicians with long winter evenings to pass.‘  Poetasting means writing indifferent verse.  Admittedly writing good poetry is not part of the role of an engineer but writing clear and concise prose is an essential skill.  Unfortunately most young engineers and many older colleagues are the prose equivalent of poetasters –  they write terribly turgid text.  Our inability to communicate in sparkling prose means that our profession appears uninspiring to potential recruits and remains hidden and obscure to most of society.  Climate change, poor air quality, autonomous machines and ubiquitous big data  are amongst the many challenges facing society for which we need engineering and science-literate citizens and lawmakers.  The responsibility for educating society lies with engineers who understand the technology and must strive to communicate more effectively [see my post entitled the ‘Charismatic Engineer‘ on June 4th, 2014].

Source: Hilary Mantel, ‘Assassination of Margaret Thatcher’ Henry Holt & Co, New York, September 2014.

Photo credit: Tom

‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’

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130-3071_IMGMy title is unashamedly borrowed from Richard Plepler, CEO of the premium US cable network, HBO.  He was quoted in an interview reported in the Financial Times on January 11th, 2015 [Lunch with the FT by Matthew Garrahan].  It was said in the context of discussing how a company can encourage creativity.  I like it because it sums up my own approach to nurturing an environment in which high-quality innovative research can flourish.  The role of the leader is to establish and maintain that environment in which everyone must feel able to express their opinions and then once the decision is made be prepared to unite in achieving the goal.  This requires a level of transparency that many leaders find hard to implement and ability to listen to dissenting views that most leaders find difficult or impossible to tolerate. Good leaders create a culture in which people feel safe expressing their views.  To quote Richard Plepler again “Someone once said to me, ‘You made the room safe to talk.’ And I said. ‘If you want to win, what other way is there to be?'”.

Engineering is a creative profession in which we need to worry more about culture and less about strategy.  Of course, bringing about culture change is much harder than writing a new strategy!

Dream machine

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Painting by Katy Gibson

Painting by Katy Gibson

A machine that can do work indefinitely without any external input of energy.  It would solve the world’s energy problems, eliminate global warming and make the inventor very rich.  There have been so many attempts to design such a machine that a classification system has been established.  My machine, that does work indefinitely with no energy input, would be a perpetual motion machine of the first type because energy is not conserved – a contradiction of the first law of thermodynamics.  The second type contravene the second law of thermodynamics, usually by spontaneously converting heat into work, and the third type eliminates friction and, or other dissipative forces.

I said ‘my machine’ in the sense that I have an on-going sporadic correspondence with the inventor of a machine that is claimed to produce ‘power above the primary power that drives it’.  It is an epistemic impossibility, which means that it cannot exist within our current understanding of the real world.  In other words, if a perpetual motion machine was to be proven to exist then the laws of thermodynamics would have to be rewritten.  This would probably lead to an invitation to Stockholm to collect a Nobel prize.

Such arguments make no difference to inventors of perpetual motion machines.  Many appear to start from the premise that the laws of thermodynamics have not been proven and hence they must not be universally applicable, i.e. there is space for their invention.  Whereas the laws of thermodynamics form part of our current understanding of the world because no one has demonstrated their falsity despite many attempts over the last two hundred years.  This is consistent with the philosophical ideas introduced by Karl Popper in the middle of the last century.  He proposed that a hypothesis cannot be proven to be correct using observational evidence but its falsity can be demonstrated.

So, inventors need to build and demonstrate their perpetual motion machines in order to falsify the relevant law of science.  At this stage money as an input usually becomes an issue rather than energy!

 

The painting by Katy Gibson is from a series made as part from an art and engine collaboration between Okemos High School Art Program and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Michigan State University.

 

 

Enabling or disruptive technology for nuclear engineering?

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INDEA couple of weeks ago [see ‘Small is beautiful and affordable in nuclear power-stations’  on January 14th, 2015] I ranted about the need to develop small modular reactors whose components can be mass-produced in a similar way to the wings, cockpit, tail-planes, fuselage and engines of an Airbus aeroplane that are manufactured in factories in different countries in Europe prior to final assembly and commissioning in Toulouse, France. The aerospace industry is heavily dependent on computer-aided engineering to design, test, manufacture, operate and maintain aircraft in a series of processes involving a huge number of organisations. The civil engineering and building services industries are following the same model through the introduction of BIM, or Building Information Modelling. I have recently suggested that the nuclear industry needs to adopt the same approach through an Integrated Nuclear Digital Environment (INDE) that has the potential to reduce operating and decommissioning costs and increase reliability and safety for existing and planned power-stations but more importantly would enable a move towards mass-production of modular power-stations.

Recently I presented a paper at a NAFEMS seminar on Modelling and Simulation in the Nuclear Industry held on November 19th 2014 in Manchester, UK.  To judge from the Q&A session afterwards, the paper divided the audience into those who could see the enormous potential (the enablers?) and those who saw only massive problems that rendered it unworkable (the potentially disrupted?). The latter group tends to cite the special circumstances of the nuclear industry associated with its risks and regulatory environment. These are important factors but are not unique to the industry. From my perspective of working with many other industrial sectors, the nuclear industry is unique in its slow progress in exploiting the potential of digital technologies.  Perhaps in the end, as one of my academic colleagues believes, research on solar power will produce such efficient solar cells that even in cold and cloudy England we will be able to meet all of our power needs from solar energy [given incoming solar radiation is about 340 Watts/square meter], in which case perhaps the nuclear power industry will become extinct unless it has evolved.

Schematic diagram showing the digital environment (second column from left in purple), its relationships to the real-world (left column in red) and the potential added value (third column from left) together with exemplar applications (right column). Coloured arrows are processes and coloured boxes represent physical (red) or digital (purple) infrastructure.

Schematic diagram showing the digital environment (second column from left in purple), its relationships to the real-world (left column in red) and the potential added value (third column from left) together with exemplar applications (right column). Coloured arrows are processes and coloured boxes represent physical (red) or digital (purple) infrastructure [from Patterson & Taylor, 2014].

The diagram is an extract from Patterson & Taylor, 2014.  The views expressed in this blog post are those of the author and not necessarily of those of his co-authors on other publications, or their employers.