Engineering ethics of the design of longevity

Engineering ethics is part of any engineer's life. Most every time their pencil meets the pad and every click of the mouse there is an ethical motive behind it. Most of the issues are not big, but small things throughout a design. The biggest ethical concern is with public safety, this is probably pretty obvious to most people. When a civil engineer is building a bridge everyone's life, who passes over and under the bridge, is indirectly in engineers hands.

An issue that has always revealed its face to me is that of engineers designing things to break. I would have my dad say 'why would they put that here, its just going to break from this' or 'this is the xth number of this part I have had to replace'. To me it seems crazy that a company could allow somthing to be desined to fail, so I never believed it.

Lokilech. "Stress Fracture of Aluminum"

After a few years in college I realized that it was a reality  Consumer products could be and were design to fail after a certain point. Sometimes it was for money others for safety. How could they be designed in this way? Most commonly by geometry and/or material selection. Not to be confused with bad engineering or poor manufacturing. One example of this is utilizing fatigue.

Fatigue - lowering of strength or failure of a material due to repeated stress, which may or may not be above the tensile strength.

Data can be represented in a stress vs number of cycles graph. As the number of cycles increases the max stress decreases. These charts are well defined for many different material. This means that a part can actually be designed to fail at a total number of cycles. In the automotive business the standard number of cycles required to withstand is usually around 500 million. It needs to be understood that theres graphs plateaus off at a certain stress. This means it is possible to design a part that could withstand an 'infinite' number of cycles, you could say it will last forever.

Schlichting, Austin. "SN plot for a brass alloy" 27 Feb 2013

This is where the dilemma lies. Should a company design parts that could last for the life of the machine or ones that will break after x amount of time? In some cases it might be a saftey hazard to have a part break, so an attached piece could be designed to break after an amount of use (that is well under the fatigue life of the dangerous part).

Fatigue Life - The total number of stress cycles that will cause a fatigue failure at some specified stress amplitude. 

If safety is not an issue, it is really up to the company on how these things are designed. I am more on the side of designing things to last for ages. I am willing to bet that there are lots of companies that do design stuff to fail at a certain point. They are probably pretty successful companies. The reasoning behind it is to force consumers to keep coming back to buy parts. The downside to this is consumers might think your product is cheap and might not buy the next new thing from the company. If things were built to last forever consumers would like the durability and linke the brand with quality  That single person may buy things from the company over their lifespan and may recommend it to others. Looking at the downside you might find that the one product does it job and never works resulting in no need to upgrade or purchase parts. To me, the ideal would be to design a product to last as long as the original owner is interested in it.

In the end it is the companies decision on how to design their own parts. If an engineer is on one side or the other they may want to carefully look at what a company is doing before acceping a job with that company.

Here is an example of digital fatigue testing.

Mission for America: Trip to Mars 2018

"Daybreak at Gale Crater." http://www.nasa.gov/

Space exploration has always fascinated me, it can produce great technologies and possibly be the answers to our human origins. CNN did a story on a planned trip to Mars. The specifics of the details are not released yet, just an over view of what should happen. This was all announced January of this year and has shocked some of the public being that the NASA program has stopped being funded by the US government by the Obama administration. This is one of the first missions going into planning since then. The thing is that the mission isn't being planned by NASA, but by a single man.

"Dennis Tito in 2001". http://www.deccanchronicle.com/

The man who is funding this mission has claim to the title as the first private space traveler. Millionaire Dennis Tito spent 20 million dollars to travel to the International Space Station in 2001. Dennis is quite learned when it comes to space. He used to work for a NASA program in the 60's developing jet propulsion systems to be used in the orbit of mars.

When I first heard of Obama cutting NASA funds I was scared for technology's sake. Manny/most of the technical shizzle wizzle we take for granite today has been developed by NASA. At first I thought that progress would be hindered. When I read this article I realized that may not be completely true. Space exploration being in the public market may not be a hindrance, it may just help boost progress.

"Mars surface taken by Curiosity." http://www.nasa.gov/

When companies are doing the research in space there is more risk and reward. Lets say that a group of people are headed to outer space. The company is responsible for those people. Our US history has showed us that the government has not always been the best at claiming responsibility for mistakes. This should may reverberate into faster, cheaper, safer, and better designs. Companies may be more money conscious when compared to the government. I am sure that NASA employees are some of the worlds smartest engineers, but was about the ones that aren't as book smart but may have idea and skills that are not thought in books. This would create a different view point when a mission or product is on the drawing board. Once last point that could be made is the competition factor. This will inspire marketing  which in turn could actually get engineers out of the lab and into the public's eye. They could then show what is being researched and how the newest technologies could affect the individual.

Mission for America is meant to take flight in 2018, a mere 5 years from its first announcement. This may seem like a short time frame but Eugene Cernan, who was the last man to walk on Earth's moon, seems to think a mission like this one is long overdue. Cernan explains in his interview with CNN that he thought that mars would be old news by now. He goes as far as to say that we should be inhabiting Mars and the first native born Marsions should be high schoolers by now.

Is this true? Should we already be on mars? If so, what has hindered the coarse? It could be that we are just not advanced enough to travle there or that there has not been enough interest to go there, or maybe that the Government has hindered human movement to mars. Motivation from the private sector may just be the catalyst needed to delve deeper into the great unknown. This would open up even more jobs in engineering.

Engineers should be able to appreciate the idea of the new frontier being a public playground. There is no doubt that the funding will be available to new innovative technical shizzle wizzle. The proof is is shown by how much one man, Denis Tito, is willing to pay for space flight. The amount of funding from a corporation could be outstanding. It could be compared to the auto industry. Engineers are very, very tied into the auto industry from the beginning of the last century; I don't see it being much different from that. Engineers will be developing safe and cheap public space flights.





Source Links:
CNN report
Interview of Eugene Cernan

Review: 2002 Volkswagen Golf

Volkswagen is a Germen car company that was started in 1937. In the circles that I hang out in, it is accepted that Germen engineering is quite good. This seems to reflect on the 2002 Golf. Not only is this car functional it seems to be ahead of its time in its design. Throughout the years Volkswagen switched between the Rabbit and the Golf model of a car. These two cars are mainly the same.

 Mehta, Sajeev. http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/. 9/14/09

Unknown. http://encarsglobe.com/. April 2002.

The Golf that I own is equipped with a 2.0 liter AVG engine. This year has three different 2.0-liter engines. The AZG has a interference head on it. I do not know the difference between the AVG and the AEG engine, my intuition tells me that it is the difference between being American sold or European sold. They could just be backwards of each other (i.e. driving from the left or the right). The 2.0-liter engine gets 25-city mpg. On the highway the mileage bumps up a bit to 33 mpg. These numbers are real life tested numbers on an engine that has over 100,000 miles on it. The sticker mpg on a new car is tested on a machine, with no air passing the vehicle, with a brand new engine. The next question is, is the engine reliable? Yes, yes it is. I have owned my car for five years and it is worthy to not that the engine has not failed me yet.

The performance of the engine in geared towards economics. As I written before the car gets 30 miles per gallon. But this is at a snails pace. The torque output is a mere 122 ft-lb and the hoarse power being 115 hp. It is somewhat equivalent when compared to an equivalent 2003 GM 2.2 liter with 150 ft-lb and 140 hp.

The Golf comes with an option of a manual transmission, as do most cars. It seems number of manual transmissions sold in European cars is larger than that of the American counterpart. This transmission has a radical design where the reverse gear is in the same place as the first gear, but it is under it. Yeah I said under it. The shifter drops down into the floor and the stick can then be pushed into what is normally first but now is reverse. The shift linkages are quit confusing, which causes trouble if you need to disconnect them for repairs. Also the design needs for the vehicle to be at a complete stop for a grind-free shift into R. Now moving forward into gears 1-5. To be blunt ... they are slow. Its good for torque around town, but it feels like the engine is going to yerck itself out of the car when you are cruising down the highway. I am not even kidding, I have changed my driving just because of this. Everyone knows it takes me an extra 30-60 min. to get from Fargo to Minneapolis.

The last feature that makes this a technical piece of shizzle wizzle (for the time) is the interior design. The interior is clean and crisp. The dash is black, with blue and red gauges. In my opinion, the American car designs did not reach this elegance until just recently (07-08).

What's the Deal With Mechanical Engineers?

What is an engineer and what do they do? Some people think that they are auto mechanics, designers, inventors, or even human calculators. Working at O'Reilly Auto Parts I have heard a lot of people blame engineers for poor designs on autos or machinery. But what is it that engineers do. The best answer that I can come up with is that they are simply problem solvers. Most of the time this problem solving requires lots of math but not always. Sometimes the problem might be evaluated by a political or economical viewpoint.

One could argue that engineers started the industrial revolution. The idea of interchangeable parts, assembly lines, power plant, and infrastructure development are some of the staples of engineers. All of the basic mechanical engineering classes haven't changed in the past 60-80 years, which makes me wonder why we get new textbook editions every few semesters. Now engineers are leading the 'green revolution'. These green innovations  show up in all of the engineering fields.

But what could a mechanical engineers day to day schedule look like? A design engineer might be working on creating a support strut for an airplane, a suspension system for a vehicle, or a hydraulic system for heavy machinery. A testing engineer may drive a skid steer back and forth all day collecting data then evaluating the data and formatting a solution to any problems. An engineer in a power plant may find out what size turbine is needed to create x amount of power, or what size pipes are needed to carry steam at x temp.

eco-friendly

An engineer can have a big impact on regional, country, and world economics. Low cost and Eco factors are largely related to well being of a product or company. Cost must always be considered, products have to be efficiently designed as to not produce a cheap easily destroyed produce. On the other hand, a product cannot be overly designed. This will drive the cost up unnaturally. A few poorly designed product could result in the ending of a company. The other new innovation today is the idea of being Eco-friendly. Products can be designed with life span, recycleablility, energy to produce,and toxicity can be considered when developing a product. 

The variety of jobs is huge. The basic idea of a mechanical engineer is to problem solve. I like to think of an engineer as a glorified handy man. The biggest difference is that the engineer uses math as his/her tool instead of a wrench. One thing is for certain, engineers are always pushing the envelope of technical shizzle wizzle to create a better future.

Here is a link to some FAQ. 

Sources:

Callister, William D. Materials Science and Engineering an Introduction. 8th ed. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010. Print.