This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany computing
Follow That Document
In a world bombarded by digital messages, it can be a daunting task to keep track of documents in your personal life. So, it’s not surprising that when it comes to engineering practice, keeping CAD files, change orders, and other documentation at hand can be much more challenging.
Task Force Tips of Valparaiso, Ind., recently began using document management software from Synergis Software of Quakertown, Pa. The software helps track documentation and follows the approval process, said Scott Akins, vice president of new product development at Task Force Tips.
The company makes specialized nozzles for firefighting hoses, which continually adjust to the varying pressures of the water pouring through a hose.
The nozzle maker also does a significant amount of custom modifications. The document management software helps engineers keep track of files related to specific modifications.
“We need to keep accurate drawings and be able to track the changes to those drawings, including the bill of materials, relationships, and how they go together,” Akins said. “The software helps us on the workflow, knowing when things are approved and allowing teams to collaborate with a clear check-in and check-out system for documents.”
Those features should help cut product development time by streamlining paperwork, Akins added.
His company specifically sought an application that allowed engineering files to remain unencrypted.
“As an engineer, I believe things can break. So if all our files are encrypted and something in the PDM system would have a bug or break, it’s still possible to get to the files,” he said.
The new system handles a wide variety of files, not just CAD files, which is another plus, Akins said.
Effective Heat
Photovoltaic power will be competitive in price with traditional sources of electricity within 10 years, according to predictions by the U.S. Department of Energy. But solar cell manufacturing isn’t yet where it could be in terms of profitability.
 Solar Power Industries Inc. manufactures solar cells. It installed a rooftop solar array at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently using FEA to optimize the furnaces used in solar-cell production.
Solar Power Industries Inc. of Belle Vernon, Pa., is looking to develop faster, more efficient, and less expensive ways to manufacture solar cells. The company has turned to finite element analysis for help.
Engineers use analysis software from Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh to analyze the casting of silicon ingots inside a furnace.
To cast polycrystalline silicon ingots—the first step in solar-panel manufacturing—silicon is melted and solidified inside a directional solidification furnace. The ingots are cut into rectangular blocks and the blocks are then sawed into thin wafers, said Chenlei Wang, a senior engineer at SPI.
FEA helped his team to optimize the furnace’s hot-zone design, a key factor for the project.
No Combing Through Files
Getting the right information to the right person at the right time is essential to engineering firms that are engaged in product development.
But it’s not always easy.
Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa., has released Engineering Knowledge Manager, a new product focused on simulation process and data management.
It includes tools that allow for the archival and management of simulation data. Users can also track historic files and data, search files, and create reports to track down the proper digital document needed at that exact moment.
A Different Direction
An aerospace supplier was asked recently to design a heat sink that works both vertically and horizontally.
Most external heat sinks are designed to work in one orientation, with respect to gravity—thus, the challenge.
Crane Aerospace and Electronics of Lynnwood, Wash., makes systems and components for aerospace and defense. When a customer recently asked the company to propose a direct current power subsystem for a commercial airliner, the request included the challenging design quirk.
 Solar Power Industries Inc. manufactures solar cells. It installed a rooftop solar array at Carnegie Mellon University and is currently using FEA to optimize the furnaces used in solar-cell production.
Engineer Mark Resler had a hard time backing down from such a challenge, but this one, he said, was a doozy. As per customer specifications, two of the dc subsystems would be included on one airliner. One would be placed horizontally, the other vertically.
Geometry dictates that the conventional finned heat sink is far more efficient when air moves parallel to the orientation of its fins. If the fins were perpendicular to the gravitational forces, then the rising air would contact only the lowest fin and the rest of the heat sink would not be engaged, Resler said.
If Resler and his staff were to call upon build-and-test methods to develop new geometry, they’d still be at the job. Instead, they simulated a range of heat sink configurations using thermal simulation software.
The software helped Resler determine that an unusual design with a plate and standoffs provided the best performance.
For these tests and simulations, he and his team used Flotherm thermal simulation software from Flomerics of Marlborough, Mass.
What’s for Dinner?
Solar-powered trash compactors are eating their way to the forefront of the green movement.
Take BigBelly. Standing 50 inches tall and weighing 300 pounds, the compactor can be used in shopping and entertainment centers and food courts, or in remote places such as parks and beaches. The compactor relies on the sun’s energy to generate up to 1,250 pounds of force to compact trash periodically until full, said Jeff Satwicz, product manager at BigBelly Solar of Needham, Mass., which created BigBelly.
Engineers called upon CAD to design the never-before-seen compactor. In this case, they used SolidWorks from the company of the same name in Concord, Mass. They were particularly interested in creating a design that used as little steel as possible.
“Escalating steel prices forced us to rethink our approach to early development models,” Satwicz said.
Engineers used the CAD system’s sheet metal features along with simple load analyses in its attendant analysis system to redesign the machine with 30 percent fewer steel parts than an earlier model had.
NCAA Math
Fans get pretty emotional about their picks for the NCAA basketball tournament each year, and the intense partisan feelings can cloud their judgment.
But three engineering professors at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta have created a computer ranking system that they said consistently predicted NCAA basketball rankings more accurately than the Associated Press poll of sportswriters, the ESPN/USA Today poll of coaches, formulas such as the Ratings Percentage Index, and computer models like the Massey and the Sagarin ratings.
The researchers call their method the Logistic Regression Markov Chain, or LRMC. The college basketball rankings system uses basic scoreboard data, including which teams played, which team had home court advantage, and the margin of victory. It was originally designed by Joel Sokol and Paul Kvam, and has been maintained by Sokol and George Nemhauser. The three are all optimization and statistics professors in the Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Georgia Tech.
 LRMC differs from other computer rankings systems in one way, Sokol said. When determining the value of home court advantage, LRMC considers how much playing at home helps a team win, rather than how many points playing on a home court is worth.
The Georgia Tech researchers have also been able to show that very close games are often toss-ups, meaning that the better team wins barely more than half the time. So, they determined that winning a close game shouldn’t be worth as much as winning easily, and losing a close game shouldn’t hurt a team’s ranking as much as losing badly. LRMC’s ranking methodology takes this into account.
Similar to other rankings systems, LRMC also uses the quality of each team’s results and the strength of each team’s schedule.
After correctly picking all four of this year’s finalists and picking the University of Kansas as this year’s champion, LRMC has now identified 30 of the last 36 Final Four participants—with 83 percent accuracy over the past nine years of NCAA tournaments. During that same nine-year stretch, the seedings and polls have correctly identified only 23, and the RPI identified 21.
LRMC predicted Kansas as champion, although North Carolina, UCLA, and Memphis were the top three ranked teams by most systems.
“As fans, we only get to see most tournament teams two or three times at most during the season, so our gut feelings about a team are really colored by how well or poorly they played the few times we’ve been watching,” Sokol said. “On the other hand, our system objectively measures each team’s performance in every game it plays, and mathematically balances all of those outcomes to determine an overall ranking.”
Toward a Smarter Bot
Insects are providing the inspiration for a team of European researchers looking to raise the IQs of robots.
The research team calls its new software architecture a spatial-temporal array computer-based structure, or SPARC. The project seeks to build more intelligent robots. Smarter robots would be better able to find humans buried beneath the rubble of a collapsed building, for example, said Paolo Arena, the project coordinator. He’s an electrical engineering professor at the Università di Catania in Italy.
Robots are complex systems that rely on software, hardware, and mechanical systems all working together, Arena said. One of the challenges facing researchers is to develop robots capable of several different behaviors. These future robots would be able to sense or perceive external signals and, most importantly, to learn and react appropriately to changing conditions.
For example, a robot traveling over unknown terrain may need to adapt its way of moving, depending on whether it is navigating flat, rocky, or wet ground. Or it may need to modify its course to reach a defined target.
The objective is to enable a robot to do this without human intervention, based on its own powers of perception and ability to adapt, Arena said.
The European Union-funded project is made up of researchers from academic institutions across Europe and business partners.
Basing their work on the functioning of the insect brain, the team has already developed an architecture for an artificial cognitive system. Such a system could better allow robots to react to changing environmental conditions and to learn behavior in response to external stimuli.
Within the SPARC software architecture, the robot’s powers of perception are enhanced by its ability to use information from visual, audio, and tactile sensors to form a pattern. The robot uses the pattern to determine its next movements.
“The SPARC architecture is a starting step toward emulating the essential perception-action of living beings, where some basic behaviors are inherited—like feeding—while others are incrementally learned, leading to the emergence of higher cognitive abilities,” Arena said.
Briefly Noted
Rapidform Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif., and Metris USA of Brighton, Mich., have entered into an agreement wherein Metris will offer Rapidform 3-D scanning software with Metris’s range of 3-D scanning systems. Metris now offers Rapidform XOR, XOS, and XOV software tools for creating CAD models from 3-D scan data.
drcauto software of Sydney, Australia, has released its AutoCAD 2009 compatible !SlingShot Max, which introduces more than 60 commands to AutoCAD 2009. Commands include: true type color, irregular view port, move object’s layer, and layer previous mode.
AGT Inc., an Autodesk partner and developer in Marietta, Ga., focusing on training for Autodesk products, has released its training module, AutoCAD 2009 Features and Enhancements.
A provider of durability software and instrumentation, nCode International of Southfield, Mich., has released ICE-flow Automation for Web-based analysis and management of test data.
CCE of Farmington Hills, Mich., a provider of CAD/CAM data translation and viewer products, has upgraded EnSuite version 2—its multi-CAD viewing, translation, and productivity software—to support point cloud files.
A maker of portable computer-aided measurement hardware and software, Faro Technologies Inc. of Lake Mary, Fla., has acquired an exclusive license from Dimensional Photonics International Inc. of Wilmington, Mass., a provider of digital shape scanners. Faro will now develop, manufacture, and sell Dimensional Photonics’ products.
SmartCAMcnc of Springfield, Ore., has released SmartCAM version 15, which includes a tutorial module for learning the SmartCAM suite of computer-aided manufacturing system software.
A raster-vector graphics software developer, CSoft AS of Lillestrom, Norway, has released CSView Base. This product is similar to the company’s standard CSView 3.0, but does not include the mark-up and measurement functionality. It is free.
Planit Holdings Ltd. of Reading, England, has released EdgeCAM 12.5, the latest release of the developer’s CNC offline programming system.
Lattice Technology of San Francisco, developer of the XVL suite of 3-D publishing applications, has announced that XVL Player version 9 is available for free download.
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