Fun-Engineering Notes and Thoughts

This week the Railway Accident Investigation Unit’s report about the Malahide Viaduct Collapse has been published. I am unhappy at the response so far to the extremely serious non-disaster that occurred along the viaduct on the 21st August 2009. The structural failures that occurred, owing to inadequate inspection and preventative maintenance, could have caused a large number of fatalities and a large number of injuries. It is extremely fortuitous that this was a non-disaster, rather than a disaster. In consequence of the hair’s breadth between the actual direct consequences of what happened and what the consequences could have been, a very serious shake-up of the status quo is called for and I do not feel reassured by the recommendations in the report of the Railway Accident Investigation Unit or the written response that has been published by Irish Rail.

In the Irish Times of Saturday 7th August 2010 Claire O’Connell has brought together a number of facts and points of view relating to ‘After the spill’. This accident cost human lives and caused injuries. The economic cost of the mistakes that have been made is enormous. The environmental damage is also enormous and its full extent will only become know in the course of time. Claire O’Connell points out that everyone, especially governments, must learn the lessons of the disaster. It seems deep-water exploitation of oil reserves is continuing in the Gulf of Mexico and elsewhere—it is to be hoped that those responsible are fully mindful of the issues.

From following the updates at the official site of the Deepwater Horizon Unified Command (which has been at http://www.deepwaterhorizonresponse.com) I expect that the well will be permanently plugged within a matter of weeks at the most, all going well. Nonetheless, as an ordinary engineer and academic who is following what is going-on out of interest, I consider there are a lot of open questions and things about which to be somewhat concerned.

SEAWAVE stands for Simulation Engineering Applied to Wave Analysis, Validation and Estimation. I put forward this proposal in 2009 under the Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Proof of Concept scheme. It did not proceed, partly because there was a view in my own institute that the idea was not sufficiently developed and that adequate groundwork in seeking commercial backers had not been done.

I have trawled the web in my attempts to understand and make sense of the Gulf of Mexico oil leak disaster. I still do not understand it and I would like more information to help me to understand it. As a Mechanical Engineer I feel professional shame. Engineers learn from disasters and it will be very important to learn all possible lessons from this one.

The original explosion and fire on the Deepwater Horizon platform cost human lives. It would not be acceptable to continue such operations in the same manner until the mechanisms involved in this disaster are understood and appropriate measures can be taken to address them and assure the safety of personnel when there is a sudden major surge of methane gas.

A final year student at the Dublin Institute of Technology has made a major technical breakthrough in tractor safety. James O Meara, a final year Manufacturing and Design Engineering student, won the Innovative Student Engineer 2010 (Level 8) award sponsored by Siemens and Engineers Ireland for his project. Details are available at http://www.dit.ie/news/archive2010/studentengineer/

Imagine a ball pen that would remember what it writes, whether sketches or hundreds of pages of text. When I thought of it in May of 2008 I did not know that such a device had already been invented, but realised that most of the elements that would comprise the invention were already there in existing technology. I subsequently learned that a very similar device to what I had in mind had been invented and was being commercialized. This was the EPOS-enabled Digital Pen and USB Flash Drive from Advanced Digital Positioning Technologies (http://www.epos-ps.com).

Unaware of the existence of a comparable device, such as the EPOS-enabled Digital Pen, I thought there must be many ways that the device I had in mind could be realized. To narrow the options, I decided to let the ball be light-permeable. The technical name of the device could be ‘an optical ball pen stylus’. The marketing people might come up with a trendier name like a Stilly: a silly stylus with memory. The descriptions below are my original ideas and are not identical to those implemented in the commercial device.

The concept to be analysed is a proposed camera that would operate somewhat like the human eye. Rather than capturing an image on a rectangular flat surface, as is common in current cameras, the image would be captured on the inside surface of a sphere or spheroid.

This project will develop new methods of characterising and simulating components, machines, plant or systems that involve heat transfer, mechanical operations, energy conversion, cycles or flow processes (thermo-mechanical components, systems or machines) through discrete characterisation (the use of arrays of numerical data), topological network models (characterising components, systems or assemblies by what-is-connected-to-what in a physical or functional sense), lumped elements (simplifying, where possible, by replacing something that is non-uniform or rather complicated by a simple lump that can be easily described yet adequately represents that something) and the characterisation of interaction interfaces (bringing the way a component or subsystem interacts with things outside itself to the simplest form to represent each significant interaction it can have with its outside world). In effect, what is proposed is the engineering equivalent of object oriented programming. Generic models will be developed for common, or uncommon, components, systems and assemblies that capture the essence of those things in the simplest and most compact form and also define how the represented item can interact with generic models of other items that might be introduced to it, brought into contact with it or connected to it.

Symmetry in engineering, science and mathematics—a study of the fundamentals with a view to developing new cross-disciplinary methodologies and applications—MPhil or PhD project by research

It is well recognized that symmetry underlies the processes and laws of nature. Developing an understanding of symmetry has already helped engineers, scientists and mathematicians to make significant advances in their respective fields. This research project will be characterized by the fact that the study will be undertaken within a Department of Mechanical Engineering and making use of some of the approaches, tools and techniques that are used by engineers, but yet also reaching out to other disciplines.