Vertical Farms

Taking the “wall of plants” idea to the next level is something called “vertical farming“.  Cool!

Are Mechanical Design Engineers Becoming Extinct?

So Matthew Loew wrote an article about whether the Mechanical Design Engineer is a vanishing breed.  (Matthew refers to a “Design Engineer” but here in the Bay Area that is often a particular kind of Electrical Engineer, so I’m using the longer term.)  He’s looking at it from the point of view of someone doing the hiring, so I want to talk about it from the point of view of the person seeking to be hired.

I have always considered myself to be a generalist.  My undergraduate degree is from St. John’s College, whose program consists of what used to be considered an education, reading and discussing the classics.  I went there rather than a more conventional school even though I knew I was most interested in math and science in some form.  I made that choice partly because the students there were engaged and excited about learning in a way I didn’t see at other schools, and partly because I wanted to understand the basics and the beginnings and the underpinnings of things, and where else was I going to get to actually read and study Euclid, Ptolomy, Newton, Einstein, Lobachevsky and so many others, rather than reading a textbook?

After St. John’s I knew I wanted to study engineering, and I specifically targeted Stanford because of their emphasis on both aesthetics and performance.  While taking undergraduate engineering courses to prepare for applying to graduate school, I fell in love with free body diagrams and hand calculations (i.e. solving a problem, usually to find stresses, using pencil, paper and calculator, but not a finite element analysis (FEA) tool).  They were so cool!

I give all of this as a preface to comment on Matthew’s shock at someone saying about a statics problem, “I have not solved one of those since college.”

I’m a seasoned mechanical engineer, with a Master’s Degree and over 10 years of experience.  Not only that, but I’m someone who loved to do hand calculations and was extremely fluent in them at one time.  And I’ve done a hand calculation maybe once a year in all the time I’ve been out of school.  That’s probably being generous.  Could I do one today?  Of course.  Would I be as fluent at it today as I was when Shigley was fresh in my mind?  I don’t think so.

So why is that?  There are a couple of reasons.  When you work in a large company in a mature industry, your job tends to be very narrow.  There is the perception that if you’re doing only one function day in and day out, that you’re going to be especially fluent and proficient.  While there is some truth to this, there is also a big downside to so much specialization.  It can easily make someone become so narrowly focused on that one function that they lose sight of other aspects that affect the part.  Designing the perfect part for crashworthiness, for example, is completely useless if the part can’t be manufactured, can’t be assembled to other parts, or costs 20 times what any other part in the structure does.

So let’s say my job is working on side impact for safety and crash.  I’m doing FEA, I’m evaluating test setups to make sure they are correct, I’m correlating my analyses to test results, I’m suggesting design improvements to get the performance we want, I’m working closely with the stamping guys and the assembly guys to make sure my design improvements can be manufactured, etc.  But one thing I’m definitely not doing is doing any hand calculations.

Which brings me to the second reason.  When you’re working on something with a complex geometry such as an automotive structure, and the type of performance you are concerned with is the crash performance, or even separating out the primary normal modes of the structure from those of the engine, there just is not a hand calculation that makes sense.  Now if you’re working on a small component part whose geometry is fairly simple and the main concern is whether a human hand pushing on it will break it, then sure, a hand calculation is great, and will give you at least a first order answer.

From my point of view, the frustrating thing is that, even if you’re very  interested in being a generalist engineer, there is no career path for that.  On the one hand there is the factor of each job being fairly narrow, as outlined above.  So that would lead the would-be generalist to do a bunch of very different jobs.  Yet short of an admittedly impressive stunt like the San Jose recent graduate who did 50 jobs in 50 states in a year,  most employers would rather hire someone who’s already done the exact same job in the same industry.  This makes the mission of doing a bunch of different roles a very difficult one.  As a result people, even those who are actively fighting it, tend to get typecast into one particular role.

Robert A. Heinlein once said, “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”  I agree with him, and while there are things on his list I haven’t yet done, there are others I have done that he didn’t list, like milk a cow or weave a cloth.

I agree with Matthew’s list of what a mechanical engineer should be able to do.  But just because I haven’t done something lately, that doesn’t mean I don’t have the brains and the drive to figure it out!

Two articles on electric cars

The Mercury News has had two interesting articles recently on the topic of electric cars.  This one, from Sept 17th, is a pretty good summary of electric cars that are coming soon, many made by big boys like Volkswagen, GM, Hyundai, and BMW.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find an online copy of the second article, but in some ways it’s even more interesting.  The title:  “Nissan to make electric cars hum”.

It turns out that electric vehicles are naturally very quiet.  And since people working on cars have been struggling to make engines quieter for decades, it wasn’t intuitively obvious that there was such a thing as too quiet.  But there is.  Pedestrians tend to expect cars to make some noise, and especially kids, the elderly, blind people, or those listening to iPods may not notice a very quiet vehicle.

So the Nissan engineers started thinking about sound, and what kind of sound to add.

“We decided that if we’re going to do this, if we have to make sound, then we’re going to make it beautiful and futuristic,” Toshiyuki Tabata, a Nissan engineer, said.  Then he and his team went out to consult Japanese composers of film scores.

Now that’s thinking about things in a new way!  I’m so happy they didn’t just make a recording of a throaty gasoline engine.  What they decided to do instead solves the problem in a much more interesting way.

Electric Vehicles — a disruptive technology?

I finally read The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton Christensen, which originally came out in 1997 (with a revised edition in 2000).  See my review.  I clearly should have read it a long time ago.

When reading it, I kept thinking how much it explains so many things about the GM EV1 project.  It explains how the crack EV1 marketing team still had trouble defining a market (Christensen’s Principle #3:  Markets that Don’t Exist Can’t be Analyzed).  It explains why Tesla, which has sold something like 700 vehicles, is considered a success, while the GM EV1, which put out a lot more, is considered a failure (Principle #2:  Small Markets Don’t Solve the Growth Needs of Large Companies).

It even explains how a big company like GM might have been able to do more with a disruptive technology.  It’s in Chapter Six — Match the Size of the Organization to the Size of the Market.

It makes me wonder.  What if GM had spun off the EV into its own small company, and put that company into its own markets, its own value network, and most of all, its own culture.  I had noticed right away, in moving from California to Michigan in 1991 how much the culture was different.  But they wouldn’t have had to move the project all the way to California.  Nope, Ann Arbor, which physically is practically next door, is culturally way different.  I think spinning it off, even if kept as a fully owned subsidiary, and moving it to Ann Arbor, would have resulted in a far different organization, one that could get excited about small markets, and could grow and nurture the small markets.

The EV1 that actually was built was a great car.  The small market that loved it, really, really loved it.  But imagine if it had been allowed to mature, to improve every couple of years with a new version.  Imagine where we would be today!

Then again, hindsight is 20/20 as they say.  A lot of very smart people tried very hard, but the innovator’s dilemma got them.  Let’s try and stay awake and not let it get us the next time.

Mergers continue in Automotive land…

So now it appears that VW has purchased Porsche.  How many global automotive companies can we get down to, do you think?   This should mean some cost savings in the scaling.  But the trick, as usual, is to get the cost benefits while still managing to keep the unique characteristics of each brand.  I hope it works.

Inflatable umbrella?

Imagine a totally new take on the humble umbrella.  Instead of a structure of wires and fabric, one inflates it to provide the stiffness required.  And it looks like the sort of big puffy white clouds that one learned to draw in first grade.  Inflatable umbrella.

Tree house!

Check out this amazing tree house.  I really love the way the curved lines and the straight lines interact with each other, in both the interior and the exterior pictures.  I just wish that there were floor plans too, as I can’t totally picture how the whole thing fits together yet.  Still, a really wonderful design.

SF Bay Green Fair

I’m thinking about attending this.  Join me!

Interesting article on hydrogen fuel cells

See it here.

Did you say a WALL of plants?

Why yes, it really was a wall of plants!  This was probably the coolest thing I saw at Maker Faire this year.  The system consists of a close to vertical wall covered with a polymer mesh that is maybe 1/2 inch thick.  Holes are cut in this mesh and plants grow with their roots under the mesh and the rest of the plant above it.  Water trickles down the face of the wall, watering the roots.  Then this water falls into a fish pond filled with fish, and is then pumped up to the top of the wall again.  The fish waste nourishes the plants, and the plants filter the water to clean it for the fish.  Also above the plant section on the wall there are some solar panels, which power the water pump.

A picture of the setup at Maker Faire is here.

I was dubious when I saw things like squash plants and tomato plants, wondering what would happen when the fruit got ripe and heavy.  But I was assured by the representative there that the system could handle it.  In some cases they might add some stakes or structures to support the plants, but then again in a regular dirt garden one often does this too.  I’m thinking that watermelons would still be difficult, however.  Also they have not had success growing root vegetables with this system.  Still, those restrictions leave a lot that can be grown this way.

This system is interesting because it actually uses less water than the traditional method of growing plants in dirt.  It also uses less space, and is therefore ideal for urban settings where one may not have room for a traditional garden.  In addition to all of that, it is beautiful!  Check out the company’s website for pictures of various places this system has been installed.

Added note:  WordPress found this article on Aquaponics to be related.  Interesting!