Today's Engineering Research Articles

Engineering your way to the top

Today's junior and middle engineering managers hoping to make it to chief executive level need a broad portfolio of skills. The author spoke to two leading headhunters to find out more.

The science of creativity

An influential writer has been employed by leading US science, engineering and technology university to teach creativity. E&T finds out why MIT is teaching engineers to think laterally. It was not so long ago that companies wanted universities to stress the value of teamwork and structure in preparing undergraduates for working life. Creativity and an interest in arts or humanities were seen as mercurial, peripheral, even dangerous. However, the problems facing engineering today have forced a rethink overcoming broad challenges such as global warming and more focused ones such as the physical limits abutting progress in electronics will demand original thinking. How do you provoke that? It's no great surprise to learn that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is an old hand at this game. The US educational system has always had a certain amount of flexibility in allowing students to mix degree majors in the sciences with minors in the arts, and MIT is one of its leading innovators. So much becomes clearer still when you learn that its current Rudge and Nancy Allen Professor of Creative Writing is also the holder of the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Literature. Junot Diaz is well on the way to becoming a literary superstar. He won the Pulitzer for his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao', and before he joined MIT produced 'Drown', a powerful collection of short stories.

Pinning a complex dynamical network via impulsive control

Complex dynamical networks are being studied across many fields of science and engineering today. The issue of controlling a network to the desired state has attracted increasing attention. In this Letter, we investigate the problem of pinning a complex dynamical network to the solution of an uncoupled system. Our strategy is to apply impulsive control to a small fraction of network nodes. Based on the Lyapunov stability theory, we prove that the theoretical results derived here are effective. In addition, a B-A scale-free network with 20 nodes is taken for illustration and verification.

Acclimating International Graduate Students to Professional Engineering Ethics

This article describes the education portion of an ongoing grant-sponsored education and research project designed to help graduate students in all engineering disciplines learn about the basic ethical principles, rules, and obligations associated with engineering practice in the United States. While the curriculum developed for this project is used for both domestic and international students, the educational materials were designed to be sensitive to the specific needs of international graduate students. In recent years, engineering programs in the United States have sought to develop a larger role for professional ethics education in the curriculum. Accreditation requirements, as well as pressures from the private sector, have helped facilitate this shift in focus. Almost half of all engineering graduate students in the U.S. are international students. Further, research indicates that the majority of these students will remain in the U.S. to work post-graduation. It is therefore in the interest of the profession that these students, coming from diverse backgrounds, receive some formal exposure to the professional and ethical expectations and norms of the engineering profession in the United States to help ensure that they have the knowledge and skills--non-technical as well as technical--required in today's engineering profession. In becoming acculturated to professional norms in a host country, international students face challenges that domestic students do not encounter; such as cultural competency, language proficiency, and acculturation stress. Mitigating these challenges must be a consideration in the development of any effective education materials. The present article discusses the project rationale and describes the development of on-line instructional materials aimed at helping international engineering graduate students acclimate to professional engineering ethics standards in the United States. Finally, a brief data summary of students' perceptions of the usefulness of the content and instructional interface is provided to demonstrate the initial effectiveness of the materials and to present a case for project sustainability.

Grid Interoperability for e-Research

Computational simulations and thus scientific computing is the third pillar alongside theory and experiment in science and engineering today. The term e-science evolved as a new research field that focus on collaboration in key areas of science using next generation computing infrastructures such as Grids to extend the potential of scientific computing. More recently, increasing complexity of e-science applications that embrace multiple physical models (i.e. multi-physics) and consider a larger range of scales (i.e. multi-scale) is creating a steadily growing demand for world-wide interoperable Grid infrastructures that allow for new innovative types of e-science by jointly using a broader variety of computational resources. Since such interoperable Grid infrastructures are still not seamlessly provided today, the topic ‘Grid interoperability’ emerged as a broader research field in the last couple of years. The lack of Grid interoperability is a hindrance since we observe a growing interest in the coordinated use of more than one Grid with a single

Bridging the engineering workforce gap through community outreach

The National Science Foundation has predicted a shortage of 70,000 engineers by 2010. Yet, engineers are needed more than ever to come up with novel solutions to reconcile the ever‐increasing demands on water resources. Through community outreach activities, today's engineers can become role models for middle school and high school students, encouraging them not only to become powerful stewards of water quality and conservation, but also to inspire the students to become tomorrow's engineers. Little information has been available, however, on how to interact effectively with students and keep them engaged during classroom visits and field trips. This article provides engineering firms and water agencies with guidelines that have been proven effective for conducting outreach activities in a classroom or at a worksite. The authors provide field trip schedules, a hands‐on activity to design and build a water filter, scavenger hunt/tour ideas, and sample questions to help stimulate interaction among students and role models.

Engineering the future at IEEE

IEEE's 125th anniversary celebrations focus on how today's engineers are inventing and building technologies that will shape the world's future over the next 125 years.

Database and information-retrieval methods for knowledge discovery

Comprehensive knowledge bases would tap the Web's deepest information sources and relationships to address questions beyond today's keyword-based search engines.

The people who make it happen

The editors publish a list of who we believe to be 25 of the most influential figures in the world of engineering and technology today. Continued part two.

Advancing technology management education focused on industry demand

To manage technological innovations successfully in today's high-tech industries, science and engineering students are often expected to have management skills to deal with multidisciplinary problems that occur during research and development. However, a majority of employers feel that the supply of education to enhance the business and management competencies of engineering students and their employees is lacking. This illustrates the mismatch between the demand and supply sides of technology management education. To narrow the gap, this paper first conducts a survey of the industry demand and reviews several major technology management education programmes abroad and in Korea. This paper then proposes a curriculum structure based on the technology management subjects that are most required of science and engineering students at the workplace. The results and lessons learned from technology management education at Yonsei University are also presented and the implications for global collaboration are discussed. Overall, this is a historical research paper on the development of Korean technology management education with examples in other countries, together with industry survey data. This will provide insights for educators in the technology management field when they first establish programmes in developing countries, in particular.

A thermodynamic analysis of the use of exhaust gas recirculation in spark ignition engines including the second law of thermodynamics

This work examines results from a thermodynamic engine cycle simulation of a spark ignition engine with exhaust gas recirculation (EGR). EGR is a common feature of today's engines and is an effective technique to reduce combustion temperatures and nitrogen oxide emissions. Results were obtained for an automotive engine using isooctane. These results are presented as functions of EGR for constant load and speed, and as functions of load and speed for constant EGR level. For both a cooled and an adiabatic EGR configuration, the thermal efficiency first increased, reached a maximum, and then decreased as the EGR levels increased. The thermodynamic gains were largely due to favourable thermodynamic properties, reduced cylinder wall heat losses, and, for part-throttle operation, reduced pumping losses as the EGR level increased. The destruction of availability during the combustion process was highest for the cooled EGR configuration. For the cases examined, the destruction of availability due to combustion ranged from about 18 per cent to 22 per cent of the original fuel availability.

The Four‐Domain Development Diagram: A Guide for Holistic Design of Effective Learning Experiences for the Twenty‐first Century Engineer

AbstractThe twenty‐first century challenges engineering educators to design learning experiences to strategically and holistically target students' development, including cognitive, psychomotor, social and affective domains. We propose a guide for the design process. The Four‐Domain Development Diagram (4DDD) is a synthesis of learning theory and empirical data. This guide maps the relationships among the major factors that influence learning and presents them in the form of a causal loop diagram, a tool used by systems dynamicists to show how changes in important factors affect other factors within the system. In this paper, we present the theoretical and empirical basis of the 4DDD. We also describe how the 4DDD can be used as a design guide for instructional changes that promote more effective learning experiences for the broader cognitive, social, affective, and psychomotor development required of today's engineering graduate.

Special Issue: Developing and using engineering ontologies

Engineering today is overwhelmingly a collaborative activity, often widely geographically distributed, in which different participants bring specialist viewpoints to bear on their engineering tasks. In the process, the participants generate and use large quantities of information, often making use of sophisticated computer tools. Important challenges in this context are the sharing of information and the effective application and interoperability of the tools. A key technological approach in addressing these challenges is the use of ontologies. There are various notions of what these allow, but they are widely seen as involving the development and recording of conceptualizations of domains of shared interest. Ontologies allow sense to be made of a domain of interest through definition and classification of key entities, properties, relationships, and their dependencies. They allow richer knowledge models to be developed, they facilitate the communication through such models, and they enable knowledge-based technologies that depend on semantic access to be developed and applied. The application of ontologies has been widely explored in many domains, from art to zoology, and the associated technologies form the foundation for the enhancing of the World Wide Web through the Semantic Web. Engineering, which has also seen a good deal of development, presents a particular challenge. It is characterized by diversity, complexity, and multiplicity. It involves many stages, each of which has unique tasks and activities. In engineering design, in particular, the focus on the possible or potential leads to a strong emphasis on abstraction. As noted, the engineering enterprise is often interdisciplinary and geographically distributed, with tasks carried out in many different languages, and this may constrain access to domain experts for the purposes of ontology construction or verification. Thus, although there are almost certainly no problems associated with the development of ontologies for engineering that cannot be found elsewhere, engineering is perhaps unique in the combination of the challenges that are faced. The goal of this Special Issue is to explore a number of these particular challenges of the application of ontologies in engineering, especially to illustrate the diversity that characterizes the domain. This has been addressed through 6 papers, selected from 17 originally submitted for review, that illustrate issues from underlying philosophy to applications in specific branches of engineering. The papers were selected by double-blind reviews of each paper by at least three expert reviewers, and those papers that gained preliminary acceptance were reviewed again after resubmission to ensure that any critical comments by the reviewers had been considered. The review of manuscripts that included a coeditor as an author was managed exclusively in a screened manner by the uninvolved coeditor. Key to collaboration in any domain is the shared understanding of the fundamental concepts of the domain, and in this regard the meanings of function and behavior are very important in engineering design. In their paper, Stefano Borgo, Massimiliano Carrara, Pawel Garbacz, and Pieter Vermaas present a formal characterization of these concepts in the context of technical artifacts, based on the meanings identified by Chandrasekaran and Josephson. In doing so, they demonstrate that using foundational ontologies to provide a common definition of core terms is well suited to the engineering domain. The modeling of function and behavior are also central to the work of Ashok Goel, Spencer Rugaber, and Swaroop Vattam, who encompass also the modeling of structure, in their description of the structure, behavior, and function (SBF) modeling language. SBF takes a teleological approach, using a representation that specifies both the functions of the system and the causal processes that result in the system functions. The precise specification potentially enables a range of additional automated capabilities such as model checking, model simulation, and interactive guides and critics for model construction. In this paper, the abstract syntax and the static semantics of an SBF language are described, with a view to providing a basis for interactive construction of SBF models. In the third paper we turn to the use of ontology for the support of general information sharing and reuse, in particular, Reprint requests to: Chris McMahon, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. E-mail: c.a.mcmahon@bath.ac.uk Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing (2009), 23, 1–2. Printed in the USA. Copyright # 2009 Cambridge University Press 0890-0604/09 $25.00 doi:10.1017/S0890060409000067

Technology and science epistemology, rationality and the empirical turn

Today there is a deep and growing interest in understanding technology and its role in society. We witness an immense number of philosophical studies of technology covering a wide range of issues such as the connection and difference between science and technology, the discrepancy between the idea of scientific progress and technological development, and the nature of technology itself. For a long time the paradigm of knowledge was located in the natural sciences. Consequently, technology was perceived as "applied science". Today the increased interest in technologies has led to philosophical analysis of the epistemological basis of engineering knowledge and the study of its particular development. Now we find that the direct dependence of technologies upon science is put in question in favour of various accounts of their interdependence and entangled histories. At the Copenhagen Conference on the Philosophy of Technology (13-15 October, 2005), a number of leading scholars on philosophy of technology and engineering were gathered around the common interest in these and related questions. They had been asked in advance to present their latest views upon and to discuss the interrelationship between scientific knowledge and technological knowledge, to locate paradigms and trace some of the original and innovative trends in the philosophy of engineering and technology today. In this special edition of Synthese we present the captivating outcome of this unique meeting. To facilitate the understanding and encourage the discussion of the contributions, we have decided to present the content under the following three headlines: Engineering Knowledge, Technological Change After the Empirical Turn and Limits to Scientific and Technological Rationality.

Electrodialysis‐based separation technologies: A critical review

AbstractTo support a sustainable industrial growth, chemical engineering today faces a crucial challenge of meeting the increasing demand for materials and energy. One possible solution is to decrease the equipment size/productivity ratio, energy consumption, and waste generation via process integration and optimization. This review focuses on the integration of electrodialysis with traditional unit operations and other membrane separations. Such integrations, due to their diversity and practicability, can be versatile tools to meet specific needs from chemical, biochemical, food, and pharmaceutical industries. © 2008 American Institute of Chemical Engineers AIChE J, 2009

Differentiated routes for the simulation of the consequences of explosions

The use of numerical modelling is a “natural” step in today's engineering work, even in safety. Up to a certain extent, solving more or less accurately the basic Navier–Stokes equations has replaced the traditional analytical approximate solutions of the same equations. Doing this, we surely have gained in flexibility, sometimes in accuracy, but we may have lost in expertise and ergonomics. In this paper, different modelling techniques are set in perspective for the specific case of explosions. It is the opinion of the authors that simple physical “modelling” is justified in areas where a consensus is required on “basic“ approaches such as standards, that complex numerical modelling is particularly fruitful in research, and that some intermediate “phenomenological” modelling is possible and proves profitable for process safety. Examples of such tools are given and compared to existing data.

Electrospun biomimetic nanocomposite nanofibers of hydroxyapatite/chitosan for bone tissue engineering

The development of bioinspired or biomimetic materials is essential and has formed one of the most important paradigms in today's tissue engineering research. This paper reports a novel biomimetic nanocomposite nanofibers of hydroxyapatite/chitosan (HAp/CTS) prepared by combining an in situ co-precipitation synthesis approach with an electrospinning process. A model HAp/CTS nanocomposite with the HAp mass ratio of 30 wt% was synthesized through the co-precipitation method so as to attain homogenous dispersion of the spindle-shaped HAp nanoparticles ( ca. 100 × 30 nm) within the chitosan matrix. By using a small amount (10 wt%) of ultrahigh molecular weight poly(ethylene oxide) (UHMWPEO) as a fiber-forming facilitating additive, continuous HAp/CTS nanofibers with a diameters of 214 ± 25 nm had been produced successfully and the HAp nanoparticles with some aggregations were incorporated into the electrospun nanofibers. Further SAED and XRD analysis confirmed that the crystalline nature of HAp remains and had survived the acetic acid-dominant solvent system. Biological in vitro cell culture with human fetal osteoblast (hFOB) cells for up to 15 days demonstrated that the incorporation of HAp nanoparticles into chitosan nanofibrous scaffolds led to significant bone formation oriented outcomes compared to that of the pure electrospun CTS scaffolds. The electrospun nanocomposite nanofibers of HAp/CTS, with compositional and structural features close to the natural mineralized nanofibril counterparts, are of potential interest for bone tissue engineering applications.

The search for interoperability

Today's Internet search engines are not providing adequate digital-content search. With the growth in the quantity of online digital content and growing interest from users, search engines will need to provide better capabilities for finding relevant content. A significant part of the solution can come from increased use of standardized metadata. Unfortunately, limitations to the breadth and depth of search will remain as commercial competition among search engines is preventing the convergence on a single international standard for search services. The result is a highly fragmented and frustrating digital-content search experience. However, the narrow silos of content and constrained search can be improved through cooperation among search engines by building on a common interoperable search framework. While the general problem is being explored through applications and extensions of the Z39.50 standard, new focused efforts, such as JPSearch and MPEG MAFs, might provide the needed breakthroughs.

Evaluating the extent to which sociability and social presence affects learning performance

Active Learning in Computing (ALiC) is the first Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning (CETL) project for Computing Science in England. Funded by HEFCE, the initiative seeks to prepare students for the realities of working in their chosen field by aligning their learning experiences and transferable skill sets with those sought by today's software engineering industry. One way ALiC achieves this is by introducing cross-site, collaborative group-programming tasks into the curriculum. Running over an academic year, this approach encourages active interaction and dialogue between student teams at Newcastle and Durham universities, and develops strong, real-world problem solving skills in participants. The ALiC project has thus far generated a great deal of positive feedback from undergraduates, and we feel our approach to inter-institutional teamwork offers students a realistic and relevant "real world" experience [2]. However, we are also becoming increasingly aware that time and resource pressures can make it difficult for students to maintain adequate levels of communication for any length of time [4], and once a team disperses it becomes difficult for its members to preserve the channels needed to interact and collaborate effectively. Consequently, an emerging area of research at Newcastle University concerns how learning can be enhanced through the use of computer-mediated social networking environments - online communities such as Facebook, Friendster and Bebo - through which registered users connect with friends and colleagues to explore similar interests and activities. In a collaborative educational context, these online social networking services offer an attractive means to foster student interaction and community building by providing a means to explore the common ground that exists between participants. [1] To that end, we intend to embed the communication and "social awareness" affordances - profile creation, synchronous and asynchronous chat, status updates, etc. - of popular social networking sites into our undergraduate, cross-site software engineering projects [3]. Social network analysis will be used to identify, map and analyse the flow of information and resources between distributed team members. The pedagogic motivation behind this work is to foster greater group-oriented interaction by filling the communication void that often arises between face-to-face meetings [5]. By reducing the geographic and temporal barriers to interaction and community formation (especially where 'peripheral', passive team members are concerned), team members will become increasingly aware of each others' skills, personalities, work rhythms and needs - both online and off - within a pre-existing, persistent, convenient infrastructure.

Comportement mécanique au triaxial d'un mâchefer d'incinération d'ordures ménagères

ABSTRACT MSWI bottom ashes constitute particular granular materials because these industrial by-products are the results from the incineration of domestic waste. The field of beneficial use of these waste mainly lies in the road engineering today, like materials of substitution for the traditional natural aggregates, which are usually used in this field. For this reason, the characterisation of the mechanical behaviour of the material—which is currently little developed—proves to be essential in order to perennalize this field of beneficial use, assuring thus the transition “waste MSWI”/“material MSWI”. This paper presents a first approach of the mechanical behaviour under shear triaxial tests. A special methodology is investigated for the realisation of tests, because of the origin and the specificity of the MSWI bottom ash. The analysis of the mechanical behaviour shows a mechanical behaviour similar to the classic granular materials initially dense.