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The Drawing Board - Engineering News with Attitude - Be Inspired -
Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Thousands of people felt the thrill as Justin Verlander closed in on a no-hitter for the Tigers in 2007. Four years earlier, I was among a handful listening as a kid named Josh Ritter unslung his guitar and played his song "Kathleen" under an oak tree in a park near Austin, Texas. In both cases, anyone present knew they would remember the moment.
A few thousand owners will get the same tingle -- this is the real deal -- when they start the 638-horsepower V8 under the carbon-fiber hood of the new Chevrolet Corvette ZR1.
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Thursday 6 November, 2008 08:13 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
As every five-year-old knows, balancing on a bicycle is not as easy as it looks. But, as engineers know, getting a bicycle to balance by itself – without a human riding it – is even more difficult.
Despite the challenge, engineers from Keio University in Yokohama, Japan, are developing a self-stabilizing electric bicycle, one that can stay upright by itself while being propelled and steered by electric motors. Their ultimate goal is to create a sophisticated, high-performance bicycle that could serve as a convenient alternative to a small car.
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Wednesday 5 November, 2008 11:57 PM |
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Environmental and Life Cycle
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Sean
BC Hydro is in the midst of a better-than-40 per-cent increase in its workforce, citing the need for more "human resources" to deliver a multi-billion-dollar program of capital construction.
The massive expansion of the giant publicly owned utility comes at a time when the B.C. Liberals are under fire for getting out of the business of public power.
Hydro was supposedly blocked from further growth and forced to rely exclusively on private power producers.
But Hydro's recent submissions to the regulatory authorities at the B.C. Utilities Commission tell a different story.
The Crown corporation is well underway in a six-year hiring drive, aiming to boost the staff count to 6,104 (full-time equivalents or FTEs) by 2010, up from 4,271 in 2004.
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Wednesday 5 November, 2008 03:55 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
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Foster Wheeler Ltd announced that its South African subsidiary, Foster Wheeler South Africa (Pty) Limited, part of its Global Engineering and Construction Group, has been awarded a front-end engineering design (FEED) contract by Sasol Chemical Industries Limited for the Sasolburg Fischer-Tropsch Wax Expansion Project in South Africa. The FEED is scheduled for completion in the second quarter of 2009.
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Wednesday 5 November, 2008 07:53 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
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The Scribe-iT family of products comprises the original, top-selling device integration and modeling solutions for portable CMM-type digitizers and mainstream 3D software applications for design, modeling, inspection, animation, visualization and reverse engineering. The solutions provide proven and unmatched value in the rapid production and analysis of high quality 3D CAD datasets and Polygon/Sub-D models from physical sources, including precise capture and editing of NURBS, Spline, Polygon, data points, and other geometries; accurate measuring of datums; and precise manipulation, animation, visualization, and editing of 3-Dimensional objects. Scribe-iT DCC now supports Maya 2009 Unlimited and Complete versions, Maya 2008, previous Maya versions, and other 3D software applications.
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Tuesday 4 November, 2008 11:56 PM |
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Electrical & Process Control
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
NKK Switches , the world's leading designerand manufacturer of innovative electromechanical switching devices, todayannounced the formal launch of operations for its Customized Design Team, aspecialized in-house group which is focused on providing design engineersfrom virtually all industry segments with customized switch solutions fortheir human-machine interfaces.
The Customized Design Team will use NKK's proven and industry leadingdesign expertise, rapid response capabilities and broad product base toprovide customers with unique switch designs targeted at meeting theindividual challenges experienced in their industry segments and atimproving their overall interface effectiveness. These customized solutionscan be either completely new designs or modifications of existing NKKswitch models.
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Tuesday 4 November, 2008 07:52 AM |
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Environmental and Life Cycle
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Eureka project E!2962 Euroenviron Biosorb-Tox has succeeded in developing a water treatment system for industrial oil polluted water at a tenth of the cost of other commercially available tertiary treatments, leaving water so clean it can be pumped safely back out to sea without endangering flora or fauna.
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Tuesday 4 November, 2008 02:59 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Carbon Sciences Inc., the developer of a breakthrough technology to transform carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions into gasoline and other fuels, today announced that it anticipates the completion of a prototype that will demonstrate its innovative biocatalytic CO2 to fuel process by Q1 2009.
Other renewable fuel technologies such as those based on corn, sugarcane or palm seed require large amounts of energy and time to grow, process, and ferment the crops into fuel equivalents. Likewise, conventional chemical engineering approaches to creating fuel require immense energy due to high pressure and high temperature operating conditions, such as Fischer Tropsch processes.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 11:57 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Dave Ellery
The Scuderi Group , developers of what is expected to be the world's most fuel efficient internal combustion engine, will debut the Scuderi Engine to the Japanese automotive industry this week at the Nagoya Eco Clean Car Fair, Nov. 7-9 at the Port Messe Nagoya. (Booth B-7)
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Monday 3 November, 2008 07:56 PM |
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Environmental and Life Cycle
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Ali Hamoud
Established in Abu Dhabi in October 2007, Enviromena is one of the first alternative energy providers in the United Arab Emirates. Enviromena is a solar power systems integrator dedicated to meeting the growing energy needs of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region through the creation of environmentally friendly, zero carbon, turn-key solar power solutions.
The company specialises in custom-designed photovoltaic power systems for residential and commercial developments, utility scale solar farms, and also designs and installs solar hot water systems and solar powered lighting.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 02:01 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Rose Shah
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GM India is confident of achieving 20% growth in car sales compared to last year in spite of the recession and the growing interest rates. This is against the general Industry growth rate of 7%. GM targets to produce 80, 000 vehicles this year and even it falls short by even 10,000 it would still be 20% more than last years production According to General Motors India Vice-President, Mr P. Balendran, the market share of GM cars in Indian market would grow to 10 % by 2010 from the current market share of 4%.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 01:53 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Bob Smith
Oracle has been in the PLM business since 1995. The company is distinguished by its industry-specific PLM solutions for industries including electronics and high technology, semiconductor, life sciences, consumer packaged goods, automotive, industrial manufacturing, and aerospace and defense.
The main changes we have seen over the years in the PLM market are driven by the evolution of our customers’ business models. There is an increased reliance on global design, manufacturing and supply infrastructure, creating a need for a holistic view into product portfolios and product success drivers. This means PLM solutions should allow for enterprise-wide collaboration around product-level data and processes throughout the product lifecycle.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 07:42 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Susan Decker
There's little room for error if your company decides to make the transition from a provider of on-premise solutions to a service provider via cloud computing. If you don't take the time to develop reliable services that match the reliability World Class Managed Hosting from PEER 1, Just $299. Click here. of your on-premise offerings, your credibility will suffer -- and customers will lose faith in your ability to deliver on your service promises.
However, done methodically and carefully, cloud computing allows you to bring products and services to market faster, using a delivery method that customers will increasingly demand. (They have their own reasons for preferring the Software as a Service model -- among them, faster implementation times and easy, cost-effective upgrades.) In the traditional packaged software model, you typically reach time to value in six months to one year; in the cloud computing model, time to value is reached in as little as one to six months.
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Monday 3 November, 2008 02:52 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Wake Forest University School of Medicine is searching for six real-life, wreck-test dummies.
Researchers are not planning to substitute local residents' flesh and blood for the dummies' plastic limbs and metal rods, but they do want real people to serve as body doubles for computer models to better measure the injuries to bones, muscles, organs and tendons caused by automobile wrecks.
The computer images are being designed for the Global Human Body Models Consortium.
The goal of the consortium is to improve vehicle safety for drivers and passengers according to their specific height, weight, size, shape and age. The members are Chrysler LLC, Ford Motor Co., General Motors Corp., Honda R&D Co., Hyundai Motor Co., Nissan Motor Corp. Ltd., PSA Peugeot-Citroën, Renault s.a.s., Takata Corp., Toyota Motor Corp. and TRW Automotive.
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Sunday 2 November, 2008 11:51 PM |
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Environmental and Life Cycle
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Ali Hamoud
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As a sustainable response to the rising water shortage in Saudi Arabia, the District Cooling plants for Bay La Sun Village, Emaar’s prestigious residential project in King Abdullah Economic City, will use the naturally abundant resource of sea water via beach wells to cool buildings in the residential complex.
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Sunday 2 November, 2008 05:44 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Free-electron lasers consist of two fundamental components: an accelerator that produces high-energy electrons, and so-called ‘undulators' that send these electrons on a periodically curved path. The wiggling of the electrons along the path causes the emission of high-energy laser radiation through electro-magnetic interaction between the electrons and the radiation field.
Currently, x-ray FELs require large-scale electron accelerators of a few kilometers in length. It is important to reduce this length to enable the fabrication of cheaper FEL systems. The project team's compact FEL design of 55 m has produced a high-quality laser beam at the RIKEN Harima Institute.
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Saturday 1 November, 2008 12:34 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
A combination of innovation, economic and environmental benefits as well as commercial success led to the Shell Global Solutions OMEGA (Only MEG Advantage) Technology team winning the prestigious SELLAFIELD LTD AWARD FOR ENGINEERING EXCELLENCE at the IChemE awards ceremony in Birmingham, UK, last night.
The annual IChemE Awards recognise and promote organisations that have made an outstanding contribution to innovation and excellence in the fields of safety, the environment or sustainable development in process industries.
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Saturday 1 November, 2008 08:32 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Administrator
Delcam will take design software to a new level with the launch later this year of a new version of its CopyCAD reverse engineering package . CopyCAD Pro will be the first product development system to offer “Tribrid Modeling”, by adding triangle modeling to the combination of surface and solid modeling that is currently offered in many existing CAD packages as “hybrid modeling”. The extended range of functionality is ideal for the re-engineering of existing products into improved or bespoke designs.
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Saturday 1 November, 2008 04:31 AM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by David Singh
LearnSigma blogger and Six Sigma black-belt Rob Thompson offers an insight into Kansei Engineering including the process behind it and to what it can be applied. He also provides a case study on Mazda from the QFD Institute
Kansei is a Japanese term where the syllable kan means sensitivity and sei means sensibility, together it addresses the psychological feeling or image of a product. It is used to express the quality of an object for producing pleasure through its use taking into account subjective issues (emotion, affect, perceptions, sensations…) in user experience. It is sometimes referred to as “sensory engineering” or even “emotional usability.”
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Friday 31 October, 2008 11:29 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by George Tan
The next new Boeing Co. airplanes will be designed, developed and produced with less reliance on outsourcing than the long-delayed 787 passenger jet, a key executive says.
Even the next derivative of the 787 will rely more on in-house design, said Michael J. Denton, vice president of engineering and the top technical executive of Boeing Commercial Airplanes.
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Friday 31 October, 2008 08:27 PM |
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Clipped to the Drawing Board by Yan Chu
For the design of the seismic support system inside L.A. Live’s 56-story hotel and condo tower, Nabih Youssef looked to a place one might not suspect. “It all comes from battleship engineering,” he told the crowd today at a well-attended event put on by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC).
Youssef, president of structural engineering firm Nabih Youssef Associates , was speaking of the choice to use steel-plate sheer walls to provide the tower’s strength.
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Thursday 30 October, 2008 11:41 PM |
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