SURVEY: AMERICANS UNDERESTIMATE MANUFACTURING STRENGTH
By Alan S. Brown

Americans may not know much about manufacturing, but they know what they want, according to a survey sponsored by Rockwell Automation. Opinion Research Corp. conducted the survey of 1,001 adults January 15 through 18.

Most Americans had little idea of the true strength of the nation’s manufacturing sector, which is still the largest in the world. Only 18 percent think U.S. manufacturing technology is ahead of the rest of the world, while 39 percent believe it is even and 42 percent imagine that it has fallen behind.

When asked how manufacturing competitiveness has changed over the past 10 years, 42 percent said it declined compared with other countries, 23 percent said it stayed even, and 34 percent said it improved. Young people, Midwestern residents, people with incomes over $100,000, and those with college or more education are more likely to believe the United States has grown more competitive.

What attributes are important to consumers in a manufacturing company? A full 86 percent ranked safe, quality products as very important. This was followed by safe workplaces (84 percent), efficient use of energy, water, and natural resources (80 percent), and minimal waste or other environmental impacts (74 percent).

Price and availability rank far below: 59 percent think companies should maintain or lower prices and only 58 percent believe product availability is very important. When asked about jobs, 34 percent said it was very important to provide high-paying jobs, even if it meant fewer jobs overall, while 27 percent favored low-paying jobs but more of them.

More than three-quarters (79 percent) of respondents said the government should provide incentives for U.S. companies to invest in technology and automation. They wanted the investments used to improve energy and natural resource efficiency (92 percent), remain competitive (89 percent), minimize pollution (86 percent), boost product safety and quality (85 percent), respond faster to customer demands (85 percent), and improve workplace safety (83 percent).

Rockwell Automation would benefit significantly from government sponsored incentives, since it is a major supplier of automation equipment.         

SHOW OF POWER
By Jeffrey Winters

For most people, the only time they are aware of their power consumption is when the utility bill arrives. Then, it’s tidily totaled for the month. But a gadget that would enable users to publish their daily electricity usage won a green industrial design competition in February.

The second Greener Gadgets Design Competition, held in conjunction with a one-day conference of the same name, invited designers to submit concepts for devices that would reduce the environmental impact of modern life. The entries ranged from the elegantly practical, such as a compact fluorescent light bulb with a replaceable tube, to the simply bizarre. Some of the most fanciful concepts entered included an inkjet printer that uses coffee grounds as ink, a desktop computer built into a corrugated cardboard housing, and a bed that harvests energy via piezoelectric springs.

(As some of the competition judges noted, the designs weren’t always practical and some proposed gadgets seemed to “run on magic.”)

Starting with a standard Kill A Watt current meter, a team added the ability to communicate information to the Web.

The winning entry, however, not only was based on sound engineering, but had a prototype in actual use. Called the Tweet-a-Watt by its inventors, a design team headed by Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries in New York, the device is an adaptation of the Kill A Watt, an existing plug-in meter that enables users to monitor the electricity consumed by the appliances run through it. The Kill A Watt has found a following among people interested in uncovering unsuspected draws of electricity, such as shut-off TVs and DVD players in stand-by mode.

The Tweet-a-Watt concept adds a small wireless module to the monitor. Electricity from a capacitor runs the module just long enough each day to send power consumption data, via a nearby computer or wifi station, to an account on an Internet message service such as Twitter. There, the user and his friends can see whether he is being frugal with his consumption. The idea is that in the absence of market signals such as carbon taxes, peer pressure will cause people to change their habitual energy usage.

The Tweet-a-Watt is not commercially marketed, but instructions on how to make one’s own are freely available on Fried’s Web site.                      

ACADEMY TO REPORT ON K-12 ENGINEERING
By Alan S. Brown

The National Academy of Engineering will release a report this spring that looks at 24 engineering curricula and how they complement traditional science and math courses in grades kindergarten through 12.

The study analyzed 24 separate engineering curricula—nine high school, seven middle school, and six elementary school engineering courses.

“Most studies show that learning engineering improves student interest and understanding of science and math. In some cases, it has a significant impact on achievement scores,” Linda Katehi, head of the NAE committee writing the report, told a small audience during a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Chicago in February. Katehi is provost of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the former dean of engineering at Purdue University.

She said that early intervention appears to reduce the gender gap among students who want to study engineering. Engineering courses that promote teamwork may also make it easier for “female students who are not members of majority culture friendship groups” to participate.

The committee members found enormous range of materials in the 24 curricula they reviewed. The courses ranged from 46 pages on a subject as broad as biotechnology to 425 pages on one as narrow as gliders. Some used supplies found in hardware stores, while others required major investments in laboratory equipment and teacher training.

Not surprisingly, they also varied in cost. On one side of the scale was a set of eight three-ring binders for $1,100. On the other, six boxes crammed with curricula and laboratory materials for free.

They also varied in educational intent. Some courses had no defined educational objectives, while others had as many as 60. Some were designed to fit easily into existing science and even reading programs. Others required substantial investment in laboratory equipment, teacher training, and curriculum development.

It was difficult to pin down the long-term merits of the programs because so much of the evidence was anecdotal. “There was no evidence of sustained changes in student performance,” Katehi said.

She also noted that engineers did not develop many of the courses. “A lot called only for analysis, so it was like a science experiment,” she said. “Without design, it is hard to understand how engineering system are put together and work.” The ones that did emphasize design usually cost more to implement and required more teacher training.

“While there is a lot of work out there, what we have available is not necessarily effective or appropriate for learning,” Katehi said. She spoke about engineering curricula that would feature more design, simplify tasks to improve understanding, provide analytical tools that enable students to understand interactions at multiple levels, and enable them to develop mathematical models that make design tradeoffs more explicitly.

Perhaps most tellingly, she chided many existing curricula for lack of appropriate guidance. “We cannot just rely on trial and error for design. We must progress beyond that,” she said.

She sees engineering as a complement for existing science and math classes. “In most schools, it’s not emphasized or even taught,” she said. “Yet engineering can help students learn math and science by showing how they can apply those disciplines to solve real problems.”          

A LOW-ALLOY STEEL GETS ITS SITE
By Harry Hutchinson

A consortium of businesses with an interest in a low-alloy steel containing vanadium, a product derived from refinery waste, has launched a Web site devoted to the material. The group is promoting high-strength, low-alloy steel containing vanadium, or HSLA-V steel, and they say it is an alternative to traditional low-carbon manganese steel for building bridges, vehicles, offshore platforms, and other structures where weight and strength are both considerations.

The sponsoring group is the Vanadium Technology Partnership, a consortium of vanadium producers and researchers. The organization says the target audience for the site, www.HSLA-V.org, includes users of traditional steel.

The site contains information on the nature of the steel, arguments for using it, and a locator for buying it.

According to the Web site, “Vanadium, when used as an alloy, leads to: ease of use during the steelmaking process, high recovery of alloy additions, good castability, high solubility during reheating, and avoidance of high roll forces.” Vanadium usually constitutes less than 0.12 percent of the steel alloy.

The site also contains reports of application studies, including one on the use HSLA-V steel to reduce weight and improve performance of military trailers.

HSLA-V steels “are normally supplied in the as-rolled or as-forged condition, eliminating the need for subsequent heat treatments,” the Web site says. Elimination of heat treatment saves on energy costs and also permits lower content of chromium, nickel, and molybdenum, which is the source of the term “low alloy.”

The group issued a statement quoting Robert Glodowski, director of technical services at Stratcor, a member company of the Vanadium Technology Partnership. “The new administration has pledged almost $200 billion dollars to modernize and improve infrastructure as part of the $787 billion economic stimulus bill,” he said. “We believe that HSLA-V steel is well positioned to be a key component of these efforts because of its favorable comparison to traditional steel as well as potential cost benefits.”

According to David Lewis, commercial director at Metallurg Vanadium Corp., a member of the Partnership, “The primary source of domestic vanadium is through the recovery of spent catalysts from oil refinery operations.”          

SURFACE METROLOGY SEMINAR
By Harry Hutchinson

The ASME B46 committee on surface texture measurement and analysis will be presenting a free seminar on the latest updates to the ASME B46.1 Standard on Surface Texture Measurement/Analysis on April 24 from 7:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at the Hilton Garden Inn Detroit Airport Hotel in Romulus, Mich.

The editorial committee, led by Brian Renegar of the National Institute of Standards and Technology, has been working over the past few years to update the standard, and the revised standard is scheduled for publication later this year. Speakers at the seminar will include members from industry, government, and academia.

Although the event is free, participants must register to attend. Details are available on ASME’s conference Web site at http://www.asmeconferences.org/B46Seminar/schedule.cfm.

The B46 Committee develops standards for technology in the field of surface texture metrology. It defines surface texture and the parameters for specifying surface texture. The terms and ratings are in the B46.1 Standard. The current standard dates to 2002.   

CARBON CONVERTER
By Jeffrey Winters

The great question of our time may well be how to power society without adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Some vigorously promoted solutions to that question include nuclear fission and wind power, but researchers at the Pennsylvania State University recently published results that point to an unlikely fuel source: carbon dioxide itself.

The research team, led by materials science professor Craig Grimes, has built and tested a nanotube-filled reactor that directly converts carbon dioxide and water vapor to a gaseous mixture of methane, hydrogen, and oxygen. The only energy input for the conversion was ordinary sunlight.

The synthesis of fuel using atmospheric carbon dioxide has been a longstanding dream of many researchers, who recognized that such fuels have no net impact on the atmosphere. One potential path is the reaction of CO₂ and hydrogen over a nickel catalyst which was discovered by Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Sabatier in the 1890s, but this reaction requires too much energy input to be practical.

After a couple of hours, carbon dioxide in these chambers was converted to fuel via catalytic reactions driven by sunlight.

It remains to be seen whether the Penn State reactor will be more efficient. The reactor consists of an array of nitrogen-doped titania nanotubes covered with a very thin layer of copper and platinum. These materials were placed inside a stainless steel chamber. When exposed to a few hours of full sunlight, the energy of the light was captured by the titania and copper to help drive reactions on the platinum. The reaction rate the team reported—160 microliters of methane per hour per gram of nanotubes—was the highest ever recorded for this kind of experiment.

The researchers hope to find a replacement for the platinum catalyst and reported that they believed the reaction rates of the process could be improved by several orders of magnitude. They are also exploring whether the use of concentrated sunlight could enable the reaction to produce fuel in more economically viable quantities.     

BRIEFLY NOTED

A British engineering startup, dezineforce, has received $2.5 million in second-round financing. The company provides industry-standard computer-aided design and finite-element analysis as well proprietary design optimization software to subscribers over the Internet. It claims its software-as-a-service model can slash IT-related design costs in half. /// Despite the down economy, Ford Motor Co. plans to introduce three new model cars this year as it retools to make smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles. The key introduction will be the new Fusion hybrid sedan, the first mass produced gas-electric hybrid by a U.S. producer. It will also introduce a new Taurus sedan and Transit Connect van, and reopen an engine plan to make its new direct injection, turbocharged EcoBoost V-6. /// Dassault Systémes of Paris has released Isight and Fiper 3.5, the first new release of its simulation process automation and design optimization solutions following Simulia’s acquisition of Engineous Software. /// Ledas Ltd. of Novosibirsk, Russia, which makes computational components for the product lifecycle management market, has upgraded its LGS 3D geometric solver. Computer-aided engineering software development companies use the software to implement parametric modeling capabilities in engineering applications.