APRIL CLIPPINGS

To the Editor: I really enjoyed this issue of the ME magazine (April). I am making copies of the baseball articles for our baseball coach here at Auburn, copies of the ball bearing article for my new Ph.D. student, who is going into micromanufacturing, and a copy of the Jay Leno page for my files.

I suspect that the steam engine (Input Ouput) was made by James Nasmyth, who was working in Manchester, England, at that time. He invented the drill press and had access to the Maudslay lathe and Wilkinson’s boring mill, machine tools which would have been needed to make the engine.

Finally, I would provide the following comment to Jean Thilmany on the mass customization article. The term is an oxymoron. What is replacing mass production is lean production, which can deal with great variety in products through great flexibility in the manufacturing system design.

I am seeing the evolution of a new engineer—the lean engineer—ready to carry the revolution started by Toyota and implemented by many companies (we estimate somewhere around 70 percent) as lean production (to contrast it with mass production) to its place as the way to achieve small lots at superior quality with short lead times.

J T. BLACK
AUBURN, ALA.

Editor’s note: The author, an ASME Fellow, is professor emeritus of industrial and systems engineering at Auburn University.

ENERGY CONCERNS

To the Editor: Non-engineers discuss energy without understanding it. We have a higher responsibility.
We mechanical engineers know that the preponderance of heat from fuels and nuclear reactors is discarded into cooling water and hot exhaust. We call it entropy. We conveniently forget that energy—including entropy—cannot be destroyed.

Until recently, entropy, solar gain, and geothermal heat radiated to outer space. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere regulated the cosmic thermal balance. The freezing and melting of polar ice—a heat sink—moderated global temperatures within an inhabitable range. Today, carbon dioxide from carbon-based fuels impedes cosmic radiation. Our heat sink is rapidly disappearing. Approximately 2 trillion tons of Arctic ice have melted since 2003.

In the United States, some 95 quadrillion Btu became entropy in one year (2006). One pound of a typical fuel delivers between 10,000 and 20,000 Btu. One pound of ice absorbs 144 Btu to become water. Thus, one pound of fuel produces enough entropy to melt 100 pounds of ice. When there is no polar ice to absorb entropy, global warming will accelerate until our habitat is destroyed—or the burning of carbon-based fuels is drastically reduced and excess carbon dioxide is removed from the atmosphere.

Photosynthesis produces our food and removes atmospheric carbon dioxide. Biofuels, which squander photosynthesis and emit carbon dioxide, are not a viable option.

Maybe we can capture tidal and ocean thermal energy in the future. Wind turbines and solar collectors must replace carbon-based fuels in the immediate future.

JOHN L. HILL
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

To the Editor: I would like to amplify Tom Parrish’s letter to the editor in the March issue. If I recall my long-ago thermodynamics class, energy is always conserved, not created or destroyed. Given that fact, I often wonder about the effects of the conversion of wind, solar, and tidal energies, and the law of unintended consequences.

I believe this law will emerge as we dispose of our energy-efficient fluorescent bulbs, lithium ion batteries, obsolete electronics, and the like. It seems that a life cycle analysis of some kind should be attempted, not to rule out these alternatives, but to prepare us for the consequences of the inevitable recycling/disposal.

FRED G. RUSSENBERGER, JR., P.E.
SOUTH HACKENSACK, N.J.

Editor’s Note: Tom Parrish’s original letter is available online at www.memagazine.org.

SEEING RED

To the Editor: Do you realize how insulting your article “The Many Shades of Green” (January) is to older engineers like me? It implies that until the idea of being “green” came into vogue, manufacturers and the engineers they employed were cavalierly and recklessly wasting materials and energy. That is absolutely untrue.

I worked for the old Westinghouse Electric Corp. as a manufacturing engineer for several years after I graduated from college 50-plus years ago, and I can testify from personal experience that we were always looking for ways to reduce scrap, to recycle the scrap we did produce, to make parts more efficiently and with less material, and to cut energy consumption. And I know from conversations with many other engineers that those frugal attitudes were not unique to Westinghouse.

Of course, we were practicing frugality primarily to save money, not for some vague societal goal. But when you think about it, from a business perspective our attitude made a lot more sense than the current idea that saving material and energy is a worthy objective irrespective of costs.

However, contrary to what your article implied, I do not believe any successful modern manufacturer really puts a higher priority on saving energy and materials than on controlling costs and putting out a high-quality product. Any manufacturer who is not primarily concerned with costs and quality is not going to be in business long. For this reason, I suspect the majority of people you quote in the article who suggest that saving energy and materials is a worthy end in itself are just blowing smoke and that in the final analysis their goals are really no different than ours were.

HENRY BORGER
LAUREL, MD.

CORRECTION

An editing error misidentified one of the authors in the April issue. Steven Kerno is an Affiliated Scholar with the Center for the Advancement of Scholarship on Engineering Education, a center of the National Academy of Engineering.