Where there is muck there is an engineer

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Dr Lou Balmer-Millar at the FPC 2015 & the CAT 366E

Dr Lou Balmer-Millar at the FPC 2015 & the CAT 366E

Here’s a second post on what engineers do [see my post entitled ‘Press button for exciting ride‘ on March 25th, 2015].

Dr Lou Balmer-Millar leads a team that develops new technology for off-road vehicles.  She is Director of Research and Advanced Engineering at Caterpillar Inc. and she gave a keynote talk at the  Future Powertrains Conference, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.  She talked about the innovations that Caterpillar are developing to increase the efficiency of their vehicles.  This includes driverless giant trucks.  If you are worried about driverless cars then what about driverless 226 tonnes trucks?  It is already a reality –   watch the Caterpillar video.

However, what stuck in my mind from her presentation was not the enormous mining trucks but the way in which Caterpillar measure the efficiency of their diggers, such as the CAT 366E Hybrid.  They are not so much interested in miles per gallon as tonnes of dirt (or muck) shifted per gallon.  Efficiency is defined as what you want out of a machine divided by what you have to put in to a machine, or work done for energy supplied [see post entitled ‘Energy efficiency‘ on June 18th, 2014].  So for a passenger car, miles travelled divided by energy used is a reasonable measure of efficiency.  But for digger, tonnes of earth moved is what you are want done, so tonnes moved per gallon is the right measure of efficiency.   The machine in the picture does not look like anything special but Caterpillar claim it is 30% more efficient than its competitors.

So there is money to be made in shifting earth more efficiently than your competitors.  If you enjoy watching machines move earth the watch this video.

Photo credit: Joshua Tucker http://www.apcuk.co.uk/2015/03/future-powertrain-conference-2015-report/

Trees are made of air

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162-6273_IMGYes, it is April Fools Day but I am serious.  Trees are made of air.  Think about it.  What happens when they are burned?  You are left with a small pile of ash.  So where did the rest of the tree go?  When the tree ‘is burned, in the flaming heat is released the flaming heat of the sun which was bound in to convert air into the tree’.  These words are from Richard Feynman, who explains it much better than me.  Watch him on Youtube.

Sources:

Max Tegmark, Our Mathematical Universe, Penguin Books Ltd, 2014.

National Public Radio blog

Press button for an exciting ride

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Painting by Katy Gibson

Artist: Katy Gibson

Someone has suggested that I should write more about what engineers do.  So here is the first in a series of posts in that vein.

A few weeks ago, I went to the ‘Future Powertrains Conference‘ held at the National Motorcycle Museum near Birmingham, UK.  A ‘powertrain’ is the system that creates and delivers power to the wheels of vehicles.  It is at the heart of a motorcycle but they were not discussed at the conference and instead the discussion was about cars and commercial vehicles.  There was a big focus on achieving the EU commitment under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) to below 18% of 1990 levels.

Electric powertrains figured strongly and would certainly improve the air quality in our urban environment but they shift the GHG emissions problem to our powerstations [see my post on ‘Energy Blending‘ on May 22nd, 2013 and on ‘Small is beautiful and affordable in nuclear powerstations‘ on January 14th, 2015]. Even so, the high energy density of fossil fuels means that they remain a very attractive option.  The question that engineers are trying to answer is whether their GHG emissions can be reduced to below 18% of their 1990 levels.

CO2 emissions vs mass of light commercial vehicles (see source below)

CO2 emissions vs mass of light commercial vehicles

When you plot CO2 emissions as a function of kerb weight for all passenger cars the graph reveals that the best in class achieve about 0.1 grams CO2 emitted per kilogram of kerb weight.  Kerb weight is the term used for the weight of a car without passengers or luggage but with a full fuel tank.  Of course, this means the simple answer is that we should all drive lighter cars!

The EU has assumed that most of us will not opt for lighter cars and has introduced legislation which is forcing manufacturers towards 0.02 grams CO2 per kg, which is a huge challenge that is being tackled at the moment by engineers, such as Paul Freeman at Mahle Powertrain Ltd who spoke at the conference.  To help meet this challenge, the UK Automotive Council has produced a series of technology roadmaps such as the one shown below and discussed by Dr Martin Davy from Oxford University during the conference.

As an alternative, we could move more quickly towards driverless cars which would both use the powertrain more efficiently and reduce the risk of accidents to almost zero.  A very small risk of accidents would allow lighter cars to be designed without a heavy crash-resistant cage.  But, as one conference delegate commented on ‘driving’ a driverless car “where would be the fun in that!”  Perhaps that shows a lack of imagination. After all, we can create exciting and safe fairground rides in which you have no control over the ‘vehicle’ into which you are strapped.  So why shouldn’t there be an ‘extra excitement’ button in a driverless car in just the same way that some modern cars have a ‘sport’ button.

passenger_vehicle_roadmap

Source:

Top graphic: http://ec.europa.eu/clima/events/docs/0019/final_report_lcv_co2_250209_en.pdf

Bottom graphic: http://www.automotivecouncil.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/Automotive-Council-Roadmaps.pdf

 

Thinking out-of-the-skull

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bustLast year after the relaxation of our annual vacation, I wrote about the benefits of ‘Mind wandering‘ [see my post on September 3rd, 2014].  Our brains work in two modes known as central executive mode, for those tasks requiring focussed attention, and mind-wandering mode that involves day-dreaming and surfing from one idea to another leading to the emergence of new ideas.  We tend to feel tired and stressed when we try to switch between the two modes repeatedly.  At the moment, I struggle to set aside time for mind-wandering and indeed writing a weekly blog can induce a headache!

Perhaps this is because our brains are of finite size; and sometimes it feels as if we have reached their limitations.  I wrote about our attention capacity in my post entitled ‘Silence is golden‘ on January 14th, 2014.  More recently, Antonio Macaro and Julian Baggini have written that ‘savants who remember everything often understand very little’.  Probably this is because if you fill your brain with information there is less capacity for processing ideas to create understanding.  I would like to think that maintaining space for understanding is why I can’t remember anything whereas in fact it is probably just the impact of growing old!  However, Macaro and Baggini also suggest that we should use our smart phones and tablet computers as mental prosthetics to extend the capacity of our brains.  In other words, we should let these mental prostheses handle all of the routine processing of information associated with central executive mode tasks and keep the mental processes in our skulls for the creative thinking associated with mind-wandering.

Traditionally, engineers have followed Leonardo di Vinci‘s example by writing and drawing in a series of notebooks;  perhaps in the hope of emulating his creativity but also to extend the capacity of our minds by recording and ordering thoughts.  However, the processing capacity of modern devices creates the opportunity to go even further.  So that thinking out-of-the-skull could lead to more thinking out-of-the-box!

Source: Macaro, A. & Baggini, J., ‘Do we need props?’ in Financial Times magazine, January 10/11, 2015.

Photo credit: Tom