This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

UNDERGROUND SAFETY

In Madrid, urban planners are developing down. In addition to its extensive subway system, Madrid recently constructed several bus depots to help ease congested streets. The Madrid transportation agency built its first underground bus station two years ago and plans four more.

Building down comes with its own set of design, engineering, and safety challenges. That’s why the Consorcio Regional de Transportes de Madrid—the city’s regional transit authority—asked Analisis-DSC to review the ventilation and fire safety of designs for the underground bus depots, said Juan Enríquez, commercial director at Analisis-DSC. 

Engineers at the Madrid-based company assess ventilation and fire safety plans and call upon computational fluid dynamics software to help, Enríquez said.


Engineers at Analisis-DSC called upon CFD and visualization software to assess ventilation in Madrid's proposed underground bus terminals to look for fire hazards.

From the outset of the study, it was generally expected that most of the designs would handle daily ventilation needs successfully. The main concern was ventilation in the event of a fire, he said.

Analisis-DSC began its work using the final architectural and engineering drawings for the depot buildings. From these two-dimensional AutoCAD files, the company’s engineers created three-dimensional AutoCAD models.

With those models in hand, engineers zeroed in on areas that would be most critical in a fire. They looked at all threats from a fire: temperature, smoke concentration, and visibility, Enríquez said. 

Some of the areas the project targeted included the tunnels that lead from street level to the interior of the bus depots. If not properly ventilated, these long and narrow tunnels could be dangerous in a fire, Enríquez said.

The engineers also focused on the passenger boarding areas and the shopping areas in each complex. The many concrete, glass, and metal surfaces used throughout the structure posed little threat, but a bus in the passenger boarding area could catch fire, as could a vending machine or newsstand. 

Analisis-DSC not only looked at proposed designs but also created models that studied alternative designs. This allowed them to compare heating, cooling, and ventilation systems that relied on different types of grilles and nozzles to move air throughout the facility, Enríquez said.

To create CFD models, Analisis-DSC used Ansys CFX from Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa. The data generated from the models were then loaded into EnSight, a visualization software program from Computational Engineering International, or CEI, of Apex, N.C.

Using EnSight, Analisis-DSC created separate animations that showed the progression of heat and smoke and changes in visibility over time. This made it easy to show developers, representatives from the transit authority, and engineers the conditions at one, five, and 10 minutes into a fire. The animations also showed how long various ramps and exits would remain usable.

After looking at the animations, transit authority engineers made a few minor modifications to allow for extra precautions, Enríquez said.

DELETE YOUR HISTORY

Computers have made it virtually impossible to leave your past behind.

Facebook posts or pictures can surface during a job interview. A lost cell phone carries personal photos and text messages. A legal investigator can subpoena the contents of a home or office computer.

“If you care about privacy, the Internet today is a very scary place,” said Tadayoshi Kohn, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle. “If people understood the implications of where and how their e-mail is stored, they might be more careful or not use it as often.”

With that thought in mind, researchers at the university said they’ve devised a way for information to expire. After a set time period, electronic communications such as e-mail and Facebook posts would automatically self-destruct and couldn’t be retrieved from Web sites, inboxes, or home computers.

The team of computer scientists at the school developed a prototype system called Vanish, which will eventually erase text uploaded to any Web service through a Web browser. Over time, text written using Vanish will—well—vanish. Not even the sender could retrieve it.

Vanish was released in July as a free, open-source tool that works with the Firefox browser.

According to doctoral student Roxana Geambasu, who also worked on the system, many people believe that pressing delete will make their data go away. “The reality is that many Web services archive data indefinitely, well after you’ve pressed delete,” Geambasu said.

The Vanish prototype relies on the turnover, called churn, on large file-sharing systems known as peer-to-peer networks. For each message that it sends, Vanish creates a secret key and encrypts the message with that key, Geambasu said.

It then divides the key into dozens of pieces and sprinkles those pieces on random computers that belong to worldwide file-sharing networks. The file-sharing system constantly changes as computers join or leave the network, meaning that over time parts of the key become permanently inaccessible. Once enough key parts are lost, the original message can no longer be deciphered.

While the Vanish prototype now works only for text, Geambasu said the same technique could work for any type of data, such as digital photos.

FLYING MUFFIN

Is a Little Debbie muffin aerodynamic? That’s what interns at Pointwise in Fort Worth, Texas, wanted to know.

And for their efforts to find out, they were declared the winners of the Intern Hero contest conducted by McKee Foods, which makes the line of Little Debbie snacks.

Interns at Pointwise hold up computer simulations they ran of Little Debbie
Muffins to determine whether the muffins were aerodynamic. They won the
Intern Hero contest, sponsored by McKee Foods, maker of Little Debbie Snacks.

Interns who worked on the project were Matt Kijowski, Allison Johnson, Riane Kiraly, Travis Carrigan, and Satyam Kondle. They had the bakery send them several Little Debbie snacks—large muffin sampler boxes in this case—so they could model the product for simulation.

Pointwise software creates meshes for computational fluid dynamic analysis.

The team first analyzed a three-dimensional model of a muffin. They created and meshed the model using Pointwise software. They used Fluent flow visualization software from Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa., to determine how air flows around the muffin.

So is the muffin aerodynamic?

“Our analysis shows that they are not very aerodynamic, but we ate them before we could verify it with testing,” Carrigan said.

CAR FOR THE BLIND

A specially outfitted car now being tested could help give the blind more independence by allowing them to drive.

A four-wheel dirt buggy retrofitted by a student team from the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory at Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering in Blacksburg uses laser range finders, an instant voice command interface, and a host of other technology tools to guide blind drivers as they steer, brake, and accelerate. Although in the early testing stage, the vehicle could be a major breakthrough for independent living of the visually impaired, according to the National Federation of the Blind, which spearheaded the project.

Sitting inside the vehicle, a blind driver can turn the steering wheel, stop, and accelerate by following data from a computing unit that calls upon sensory information received from a laser range finder. Voice commands and a vibrating vest worn by the driver supplement the range finder’s feedback.

Above: Wesley Majerus finishes driving the Virginia Tech Blind Driver Challenge vehicle on a campus driving course. In the passenger seat is Greg Jannaman, who led the student design team during the past year. Below: Patrick Johnson, a legally blind graduate student at Virginia Tech, test-drives the vehicle.

“It’s a great first step,” said Wes Majerus of Baltimore, the first blind person to drive the buggy on a closed course at the Virginia Tech campus in July. “As far as the differences between human instructions and those given by the voice in the car, the car’s instructions are very precise. You use the technology to act on the environment—the driving course—in a very orderly manner.”

In 2004, the National Federation’s Jernigan Institute of Baltimore, which promotes independent living for the blind, challenged university research teams to develop a vehicle that would one day allow the blind to drive. Virginia Tech accepted the nonprofit’s call two years later, said Dennis Hong, director of the Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory, which is part of the Virginia Tech mechanical engineering department.

Should the technology behind the car be perfected, laws now barring the blind from driving must be changed, along with public perception, said Mark Riccobono, the Jernigan Institute’s executive director, who is also blind.

“This is the piece that we know will be the most difficult,” Riccobono said, adding that the car must be nearly perfected before the National Federation of the Blind can truly present the car to lawmakers and the general public.

SHARED PIANO PARTS

As in many engineered products, a large number of parts compose a piano.

Executives at Korg Italy Spa of Milan, Italy, which makes electronic keyboards and digital pianos, recently found they needed a new way to manage components.

Each Korg product contains anywhere from 300 and 1,000 components, some off the shelf, some customized. So when managers wanted to optimize the entire product-development and part-management process, they faced no small undertaking, said Franco Ripa, hardware development manager at Korg Italy.

Ripa and his colleagues were looking for a product lifecycle management system that would let them manage parallel projects and share information in-house and with outside suppliers.

The company recently brought in a PLM system from think3 of Milan, Italy, that lets engineers do just that. Korg also implemented a Web interface feature, which allows distributors to order spare parts in real time. The reseller sees the object, places it in the trolley with the price shown, and the order is processed automatically at Korg, Ripa said. This new system has cut from three to one the number of employees needed to oversee the spare-parts system.

The company has now moved to the next phase of the PLM project: the exchange of parts lists with China, Ripa said.

At Korg, product engineering is done in Italy, and two facilities in China handle production.

“At present we transfer the lists manually on Excel spreadsheets, which take a considerable time to draft and check,” Ripa said. “Our objective is to ensure that our parts list is automatically present on the Chinese management system. This will enable considerable savings in the time and resources needed to manage the lists and reduce the amount of human error present in the current system.”

BRIEFLY NOTED

Delcam of Birmingham, England, has launched version 10 of its PowerMill computer-aided manufacturing system, which offers toolpath generation on multi-processor computers and incorporates background-processing and multi-threading technologies. /// Dassault Systèmes of Paris announced that 3-D models hosted on the 3DVIA.com library, including those created using the company’s free 3DVIA Shape modeling application, will now be automatically converted to both Dassault Systèmes’ 3DXML format and the Collada open 3-D format (.dae format) created by an industry consortium for open standards, the Khronos Group. /// Prostep AG of Stuttgart, Germany, a provider of product data exchange solutions, has released a number of new upgrades for version 6.1.8 of the OpenDXM GlobalX portal. It is now possible to copy and move files and folders, to group users according to organizational unit, and to display unique transaction numbers from other source systems. /// Quickparts of Atlanta, which provides custom-designed rapid prototyping and production parts, has launched a Pick Your Ship Date calendar for stereolithography parts. The calendar allows users to select their ship dates and save money if their schedules are flexible. /// Mechanical Simulation Corp. of Ann Arbor, Mich., has released CarSim 8.0 vehicle dynamics software. /// A CAD software and services provider SolidVision of Littleton, Mass., has entered a partnership with Solido of Yehud, Israel, to bring Solido’s 3-D desktop prototype printer to SolidVision CAD users. /// Vero Software of Gloucestershire, England, a provider of CAD and CAM solutions for the tooling industry, has upgraded its flagship product to VISI 17. /// TEDCF Publishing of Springville, Calif., has released Autodesk Inventor 2010: Sheet Metal Design on CD. It is the fourth course in a series of certified courses for Autodesk Inventor 2010. /// A developer of digital manufacturing applications using the XVL format, Lattice Technology of San Francisco, has released version 3.0 of Lattice3D Reporter, an application for delivering interactive 3-D data in Excel spreadsheets. /// Maplesoft of Waterloo, Ontario, has released the next version of its testing and assessment tool, Maple T.A. 5.0. /// Siemens PLM Software of Plano, Texas, a business unit of the Siemens Industry Automation Division and a provider of product lifecycle management software and services, has released an upgrade to its Femap software, which provides new finite element modeling and visualization tools. /// CD-adapco of New York has released Star-CCM+ version 4.04, which is a CFD code and an integrated platform for multi-disciplinary engineering simulation, including combustion, multiphase flow, heat transfer through solids and fluids, dynamic fluid body interaction, and solid stress. /// Adeptol of Santa Clara, Calif., which makes viewing technology, has launched an add-on product for its viewing platform. The AutoCAD module adds enhanced support for AutoCAD files and allows users to view more than 200 document types in a single universal viewer.