Engineering Lessons Research Articles

Learning Systems Engineering Lessons from an Electric Vehicle Development

AbstractThe Joule Electric Vehicle (EV) was developed “from a clean sheet” by Optimal Energy, a South African start‐up company established in 2005. In the seven years to its liquidation in 2012, the company grew to 108 people, built up significant international partnerships, developed substantial in‐house technology and performed three development iterations culminating in four market‐testable prototypes.Developing a vehicle from scratch requires a different approach to the traditional automotive development processes, which are optimised for evolutionary vehicle improvements and cost reduction.Developing a new EV in a new organisation without legacy processes or manufacturing infrastructure presents additional challenges but also provides opportunity to work “top‐down”, focussing on the real “mission requirements” instead of being trapped by legacy practices, design concepts and infrastructure. Systems engineering “best practices” may be applied to a larger extent and the concept of passenger mobility can be optimised for electric propulsion instead of accepting the traditions of fossil‐fuel power.This paper provides highlights of the unique challenges and opportunities related to EVs, and presents the tailored development process that was established for the Joule EV.

How Engineering Standards are Interpreted and Translated for Middle School

In this exploratory study we examined the alignment of Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) middle school engineering design standards with lesson ideas from middle school teachers, science education faculty, and engineering faculty (4–6 members per group). Respondents were prompted to provide plain language interpretations of two middle school Engineering Design performance expectations and to provide examples of how the performance expectations could be applied in middle school classrooms. Participants indicated the challenges and benefits of implementing these performance expectations and indicated personal experiences that helped them to interpret the performance expectations. Quality of lessons differed depending on the performance expectation being addressed. Generally, respondents were better able to generate ideas that addressed the paradigm of students ‘‘analyz[ing] data from tests to determine similarities and differences among several design solutions’’ than having students ‘‘define the criteria and constraints of a design problem.’’ A notable finding was the scarcity of quality engineering lesson ideas. The greatest proportion of lessons were categorized as Vague and/or Overly Broad. It appears that NGSS engineering design standards can too easily be decoded in an excessively expansive manner, thus resulting in indefinite ideas that are difficult to translate into classroom practice.

Promoting intellectual property education for engineers in China

Chinese government has been inserting a great force to enhance innovation abilities especially in intellectual property rights (IPR) learning in Chinese universities and companies. This paper examines the inherent relationship between engineers and intellectual property in Chinese background and discusses how to integrate a marginal element like IP into a graduate engineer curriculum without hindering any existing core curriculum elements. Surveys and interviews have been conducted to analyse the perception and understanding of IPR in China. Results showed that students recognise the need and importance of IP in engineering and IP lessons will increase the level of this recognition. And students prefer to learn IP by case studies and conference. Therefore an IP instruction module has been developed in the IE department of Tsinghua University and a second survey has been launched to examine the effects. At last a website has been developed to help the IP learning.

Containment for petroleum products – lessons learnt from Buncefield, UK

A massive explosion and fire at the Buncefield oil terminal in Hertfordshire, UK on 11 December 2005 caused significant damage to the terminal and neighbouring buildings. Significant environmental damage was also caused by leakage of petroleum products and contaminated firewater through failed secondary containment bunds and tertiary containment measures. Since the groundwater was contaminated over an area in excess of 1 ha, the incident was defined as a major accident to the environment. This paper highlights the civil engineering lessons learned from a review of the Buncefield incident, which should help to improve the safety and environmental protection of oil storage depots worldwide.

Design of Project Management Information System for Electricity Infrastructure

In order to solve the existing problems of power system infrastructure project management, through the summary of power engineering project management experience and lessons learned, and make use of modern computer technology, network technology, various kinds of information integration and processing, the paper constructs the infrastructure information management platform that can provides a wealth of necessary information for construction project decision makers. This paper designs a kind of electric power construction project management information system, design and presented the function module structure and its subsystems in this paper, and finally completes the system development. The function of this system meets the design requirements, to improve and standardize the project management of electric power engineering.

A High‐Quality Professional Development for Teachers of Grades 3–6 for Implementing Engineering into Classrooms

With the increasing emphasis on integrating engineering into K‐12 classrooms to help meet the needs of our complex and multidisciplinary society, there is an urgent need to investigate teachers' engineering‐focused professional development experiences as they relate to teacher learning, implementation, and student achievement. This study addresses this need by examining the effects of a professional development program focused on engineering integration, and how teachers chose to implement engineering in their classrooms as a result of the professional development. 198 teachers in grades 3–6 from 43 schools in 17 districts participated in a yearlong professional development program designed to help integrate the new state science standards, with a focus on engineering, into their teaching. Posters including lesson plans and student artifacts were used to assess teachers' engineering practices and the implementation in their classrooms. Results indicated that the majority of the teachers who participated in the professional development were able to effectively implement engineering design lessons in their classrooms suggesting that the teachers' success in implementing engineering lessons in their classroom was closely related to the structure of the professional development program.

PV Reliability Development Lessons From JPL's Flat Plate Solar Array Project

Key reliability and engineering lessons that were learned from the 20-year history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Flat-Plate Solar Array Project and thin-film module reliability research activities are presented and analyzed. Particular emphasis is placed on lessons applicable to evolving new module technologies and the organizations involved with these technologies. The user-specific demand for reliability is a strong function of the application, its location, and its expected duration. Lessons relative to effective means of specifying reliability are described, and commonly used test requirements are assessed from the standpoint of which are the most troublesome to pass, and which correlate best with field experience. Module design lessons are also summarized, including the significance of the most frequently encountered failure mechanisms and the role of encapsulant and cell reliability in determining module reliability. Lessons pertaining to research, design, and test approaches include the historical role and usefulness of qualification tests and field tests.

Use of the Lean Product Development Approach by Capital Goods Companies in Brazil

Abstract The purpose of this article is to describe the diagnostic of the application of a survey conducted with the largest private capital goods companies in terms of income in Brazil. The focus was on identifying the principles and practices of the lean approach that are being used in the Product Development Process such as Value Stream Mapping (VSM), Voice of Customer (VOC), Early Supplier Involvement (ESI), Standardization, Visual Management, Set-Based Concurrent Engineering (SBCE), Virtual Simulation, Project Library and Recording lessons learned. The questionnaire was sent to 17 companies, of which nine responded, for a 53% rate of return. This amount did not allow making generalizations, but it is possible to sketch a scenario for this sector and indicate the practices that are being implemented in an isolated and or systemic manner.

First-Year Effects Of An Engineering Professional Development Program On Elementary Teachers

The ultimate objective of teacher professional development (TPD) is to deliver a positive impact on students’ engagement and performance in class through teacher practice via improving their content and pedagogical content knowledge and changing their attitudes toward the subject being taught. However, compared to other content areas, such as mathematics and science, relatively few engineering TPD programs have been developed, and there has been a lack of research on the effective practice of TPD for K-12 engineering education. As a part of a five-year longitudinal project, this study reports the first-year effect of TPD offered by the Institute for P-12 Engineering Research and Learning (INSPIRE) at Purdue University on elementary teachers integrating engineering. Thirty-two teachers of second through fourth grade from seven schools attended a one-week intensive Summer Academy and integrated engineering lessons throughout the year. Based on a pre- and post-test research design, multiple measures were utilized to examine changes in teachers’ knowledge and perceptions of engineering and their variations in knowledge and perceptions by school and teacher characteristics. Overall, teachers were satisfied with the engineering TPD program, significantly increased their engineering design process knowledge, and became more familiar with engineering. While teachers’ knowledge about engineering did not vary by school and teacher characteristics, some aspects of teachers’ perceptions regarding engineering integration and their practice differed by school and teacher characteristics.

On evaluating commercial Cloud services: A systematic review

BackgroundCloud Computing is increasingly booming in industry with many competing providers and services. Accordingly, evaluation of commercial Cloud services is necessary. However, the existing evaluation studies are relatively chaotic. There exists tremendous confusion and gap between practices and theory about Cloud services evaluation. AimTo facilitate relieving the aforementioned chaos, this work aims to synthesize the existing evaluation implementations to outline the state-of-the-practice and also identify research opportunities in Cloud services evaluation. MethodBased on a conceptual evaluation model comprising six steps, the systematic literature review (SLR) method was employed to collect relevant evidence to investigate the Cloud services evaluation step by step. ResultsThis SLR identified 82 relevant evaluation studies. The overall data collected from these studies essentially depicts the current practical landscape of implementing Cloud services evaluation, and in turn can be reused to facilitate future evaluation work. ConclusionsEvaluation of commercial Cloud services has become a world-wide research topic. Some of the findings of this SLR identify several research gaps in the area of Cloud services evaluation (e.g., Elasticity and Security evaluation of commercial Cloud services could be a long-term challenge), while some other findings suggest the trend of applying commercial Cloud services (e.g., compared with PaaS, IaaS seems more suitable for customers and is particularly important in industry). This SLR study itself also confirms some previous experiences and records new evidence-based software engineering (EBSE) lessons.

Approach-Span Failure of the Hoan Bridge as a Case Study for Engineering Students and Practicing Engineers

On the morning of December 13, 2000, all three steel girders in a three-girder approach span of the Hoan Bridge in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, fractured. Two of the three girders had a fracture propagate completely through the 3.05-m-deep girders. The bridge was adequately designed and fabricated according to existing code specifications. The failure was caused by the geometric arrangement of the lateral bracing connection into the web of the girders that created a highly constrained condition and prevented yielding of the girder web when overloaded (a situation known as constraint-induced fracture). Other brittle fractures had been observed in steel bridges and ship structures in the United States, which also resulted from this condition. However, the Hoan Bridge attracted more publicity as it was near collapse. The failure of this bridge can serve as a case study for students and professionals. This paper describes the failure and its causes and suggests engineering lessons to be learned. The unique details of the failure offer the opportunity to promote critical thinking and problem solving at levels appropriate to undergraduate students, graduate students, and practitioners, through investigating the cause of failure, emphasizing the lessons learned, and highlighting the resulting change to engineering practice through modifications to code provisions.

The World Trade Center 9/11 Disaster and Progressive Collapse of Tall Buildings

The collapse of the World Trade Center buildings on September 11, 2001 posed questions on the stability of tall buildings in fire. Understanding the collapse of the WTC Towers offers the opportunity to learn useful engineering lessons in order to improve the design of future tall buildings against fire induced collapse. This paper extends previous research on the modelling of the collapse of the WTC Towers on September 11, 2001 using a newly developed “structures in fire” simulation capability in the open source software framework OpenSees. The simulations carried out are validated by comparisons with previous work and against the findings from the NIST investigation, albeit not in the forensic sense. The column “pull in” that triggers the instability of the structure and leads to collapse is explained. The collapse mechanisms of generic composite tall buildings are also examined. This is achieved through carrying out a detailed parametric study varying the relative stiffness of the column and the floors. The two main mechanisms identified in previous research (weak and strong floor) are reproduced and criteria are established on their occurrence. The analyses performed revealed that the collapse mechanism type depended on the bending stiffness ratio and the number of floors subjected to fire and that the most probable type of failure is the strong floor collapse. The knowledge of these mechanisms is of practical use if stakeholders wish to extend the tenability of a tall building structure in a major fire.

Potential Composite Structures for NASA Future Launch Vehicles and Crew Spacecraft

Because of their well known specific strength, stiffness and excellent durability properties, advanced composites are being considered for primary structures in launch vehicles, crew modules and various components for increased performance and cost reduction. Therefore, it is prudent and beneficial to review the engineering practices and lessons learned in connection with their use in related aeronautic and energy applications, where they are already replacing formerly used metallic materials. Examples of composite components will be shown for the reusable space shuttle orbiter where a number of different composite systems performed very satisfactorily. In addition, very large potential polymer composite designs for future launch vehicles will be discussed. Among them are payload shrouds, interstage structures and the typical intertank shell, wherein thrust booster rockets are often attached between the core stage propellant and oxidizer tanks. In addition, cryogenic propellant composite vessels of different sizes and shapes were fabricated with mostly excellent results, although some spectacular failures were also observed. High pressure composite overwrapped vessels, with and without metallic liners, will be described. Compared to widely used metallic materials, some special features of composites are listed. Relevant design allowables, depending on mission requirements, will be summarized and currently used design practice for aircraft and spacecraft in the US will be reviewed. The well-known “building - block” approach, which is often used to design military as well as civilian aircraft, will be summarized. Some of the most popular micromechanics and macromechanics computer programs used to analyze composite structures, especially with finite elements, will be listed. Although very high temperature composites like carbon/carbon, carbon/ceramic and ceramic/ceramic fiber/matrix systems are also selectively used, the focus in our discussion will be on advanced polymer matrix, carbon/glass fiber systems.

Comms redundancy proves its value

Engineering lessons learned during previous disasters have helped lessen the impact of the 11 March earthquake and tsunami on Japan's communications infrastructure. Although no amount of preparation could protect communications systems in the worst-hit areas, elsewhere a combination of redundancy, resilience and disaster planning appears to have paid-off. Each operator has disaster plans that were put to work once the quake struck, with message boards on their service through which users could message family and friends without overloading the network with voice calls. The disaster may prove to be an opportunity to change the architecture of Japan's cellular network so that it is more robust.

Call for Papers on Engineering Management during the Global Recession and Recovery

The global financial crisis has had a significant impact on the world’s most powerful economies and is contributing to an international crisis of confidence. Considering the significant role that the construction industry plays in a country’s economy, it is imperative and important to identify the effects and challenges of the global financial crisis on that industry, to evaluate and examine existing engineering management theories and practices during the global recession and recovery, and to explore innovative research directions. The Journal of Management in Engineering is seeking original contributions on this subject with a particular interest in innovative engineering management theories, best practices, and lessons learned from different geographic areas while tackling the global recession. It is expected that the special issue or section will showcase the economic impact and importance of the construction industry from a global perspective and stimulate debate over recovery policies and critical strategies and tactics that engineering and construction firms can use to survive current economic turbulence.

Starting Early: Increasing Elementary (K-8) Student Science Achievement With Retired Scientists and Engineers

Teaching Opportunities for Partners in Science (TOPS) is an outreach program using volunteers (the ¿partners¿) for: 1) assisting teachers in grades K-8 with preparation and delivery of science and engineering (S&E) lessons in the classroom; 2) providing content knowledge to teachers when needed to teach quality science and engineering lessons; 3) motivating students with career and educational models and information; and 4) educating families through after-school family science events. The outreach program began with partners who were retired scientists and engineers. Currently, the source of volunteers includes scientists and engineers who are employed or on leave as well as retired. The program began in 1993 at the San Joaquin County Office of Education, Stockton, CA, with three Partners at three elementary schools. The program now has 33 Partners at 32 schools in a five-county region in central California. Most partners volunteer to serve a minimum of a half-day per week during the school year; however, the schedule can be flexible to accommodate differing needs of the Partners. The partners attend a TOPS Institute during the summer preceding each school year. The Institute serves as a training course for new partners. This paper covers the history of the TOPS program, the selection and training of partners, the relationship between the partners and classroom teachers, development of lessons, comments from a partner and a classroom teacher, and the results of an evaluation of the program.

科目横断型特別講義(先端事例から学ぶ機械工学) : 慶應義塾大学理工学部機械工学科における試み(<メカライフ特集>四力学を活かしたものづくり)

科目横断型特別講義(先端事例から学ぶ機械工学) : 慶應義塾大学理工学部機械工学科における試み(<メカライフ特集>四力学を活かしたものづくり)

Field testing of robotic technologies to support ground ice prospecting in martian polygonal terrain

Polygonal terrain, a landform commonly associated with the presence of ground ice, is widespread throughout the high latitudes on Mars. In this paper, we present the results of field testing a potential mission concept for the robotic prospecting of ground ice in polygonal terrain. The focus of the paper is on the key robotic technologies that could be used to implement the concept and the engineering lessons we learned (as opposed to the specific scientific findings of our field tests). In particular, we have found that a lander- or rover-mounted lidar and a rover-borne stereo camera/ground-penetrating radar suite are two important scientific tools that may be used to help pin-point ground ice prior to subsurface sampling. We field tested some aspects of this mission concept on a previously - unstudied polygonal terrain site on Devon Island in the Canadian High Arctic (a common Mars/Moon analogue site) during the summer of 2008. This unique collaboration between technological and scientific communities has led to a deeper understanding of how such a science-driven mission could actually be implemented robotically.

Computing in Civil Engineering—Lessons Learned from the 2007 ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering

On July 24–27, 2007, a group of approximately 150 researchers and practitioners met in Pittsburgh for the 2007 ASCE International Workshop on Computing in Civil Engineering to present and learn about current research and developments on IT/AIS: Information Technology Support to Advance Infrastructure Systems Management. The conference was geared toward academics and professionals who are interested in computing in a wide range of civil engineering research areas, such as sensing and sensor systems, mobile/wearable computing, data modeling, management, mining, and life-cycle assessment and sustainable infrastructure. The three keynote speakers presented fascinating and forwardlooking talks that provided insights on the future directions of the major conference topics. Dr. Steven B. Chase, the chief scientist of the Federal Highway Administration, talked about the role of information technology in the management of an aging highway infrastructure. He introduced the limitations in the data collection practice of bridge inspection and bridge management, and particularly in visual inspections. He then presented example applications of smart sensing technologies that help create smarter bridges. Dr. Dan M. Frangopol, the Fazlur R. Khan Endowed Chair of Structural Engineering and Architecture at Lehigh University, introduced a method for the integration of monitoring and maintenance management of civil infrastructure systems under uncertainty from a life-cycle perspective. He explained the importance of maintaining a satisfactory long-term performance not only of individual bridges, but also of the overall highway network. He presented a novel analytical and computational framework for network-level bridge maintenance management using optimization. This framework integrates time-dependent structural reliability prediction, highway network performance assessment, and life-cycle cost analysis by prioritizing the maintenance resources to deteriorating bridges through simultaneous and balanced minimization of three objective functions: maintenance cost, bridge failure cost, and user cost. The resulting multiobjective optimization problem is solved by a genetic algorithm. Dr. Edward J. Jaselskis, former program director at the National Science Foundation responsible for managing the information technology and infrastructure systems program, talked about

Brown Water in the Building: Infection Control and Engineering Lessons Learned from a Water Supply Incident

Brown Water in the Building: Infection Control and Engineering Lessons Learned from a Water Supply Incident