How big to build Keeping chips IGTI Global Gas

power plants cooler Turbine News

the magazine of ASME

Drones for
Peace Working in teams to
fight fires or find
lost children

Vol.133/No.4 APRIL 2011 | www.memagazine.org

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 04 11
features
26 Airborne,
Autonomous, and

on the cover
Collaborative
Volume 133/No.4 Unmanned aerial vehicles can do even
more when they fly in flocks.
Focus on Power & Energy By Brandon Basso, Joshua Love,
and J. Karl Hedrick
 42 The Sky’s the Limit
Thermodynamics puts limits on the
efficiency of thermal power plants. Cleverly
32 Mass Customization’s
reconfiguring cooling towers can lead to a
Missing Link
Companies have to know how to build
way of recapturing some of that waste heat.
mass-customized products on demand.
By Louis Michaud and Nilton Renno
By David M. Anderson
44 Scale Matters
It’s time to reevaluate the way we 38 Cooling the
think about the size of power plants. Electronic Brain
By Marc Goldsmith It will take advances in microfluidics to make
much denser number crunching practical.
48 Power Window: By Avram Bar-Cohen and Karl J.L. Geisler
Crunch Time
By Jeffrey Winters
6 Editorial
departments
57 Securing Critical 8 Letters
Energy Materials 12 News & Notes
By Alan Brown
16 Computing
72 Input Output 20 Software Exchange
Scrubbing the NOX out of Biogas
By Joyce Laird 22 Tech Focus
FLUID HANDLING
& FLUID POWER

Volume 51,
No. 2 • April
2011
58 ME Bookshelf
E INSTIT UTE

59 New Products
ATIONA L GAS TURBIN
/// ASME INTERN
GEORG IA USA
ATLAN TA, o Expo 2011
y for ASME Turb
Register Toda
2011 in
for Turbo Expo
reservations n discount ends
May 9.
and housing
registration, Early registratio
program, event oexpo.org!
The advance online at www.turb
are now available
Vancouver

In this issue
2011
Turbo Expo

66 Resource File
49
t needs
the Chair current developmen
View From highlight
50 S ANNOUNand CED industry will for Future Low
Carbon Economies”
power generation
Members
KEYNOTE SPEAKER
from the aeroengine & Efficient Turbomachin
ery Technologies
Business Unit
New Board Three leaders theme “Clean Fischer, CEO , GE
50 addressing the Canada; Roland in Engineering
and trends by in Vancouver. Pratt & Whitney Senior General Manager
Engineering,
Events at Turbo Expo Vice President
eo, and Gary Mercer,
Sector;
Calendar of Walter DiBartolom Siemens Energy Monday, June
6.
51 Power Generation, at the opening keynote on EXPO EVENTS:
Products, Fossil THESE TURBO
DON’T MISS
speak
Energy, will all
Infrastructure
Charles Brush’s NT COURSES our
CAREER DEVELOPME conference begins, l
just before the
Windmill Generator
fundamenta
Taking place courses provide focused,
51 Turbo Expo
short
from several
courses to be
held Saturday
for more details
training. Choose 4-5, 2011. See page 54

In This Issue:
Natural Gas

68 Standards &
June
and Sunday, xpo.org to register.
52 and visit www.turboe
DINNER nery industry
DOE-Spons
ored ANNUAL WOMEN’S in the turbomachi to attend our
Women working Expo are eligible
University Research E for for Turbo dinner. The
dinner
TECHNICAL CONFERENC
Program reputation who register and
has a well-earned experts from reception evening,
53 Turbo Expo the best and brightest women’s networkingTurbo Expo on Tuesday speakers
in gas turbine will be held
during
dinner will feature Future
bringing together to share the latest This year the Turbine
Professional around the
world t, and application. June 7, 2011. head of the Siemens Gas of
and developmen its leadership Director
nt technology, research Susan Scofield,
Developme community
is enhancing
program scope t and Lisa Burgarella,
54 Now, the IGTI it broadens the steam turbine Frames Departmen Pratt & Whitney.
machinery as Technology,
YOUNG ENGINEERS

special
role in turbo wind and Information

Certification
topics from and the Solar G EVENT FOR engineers
As the Turbine
Turns... to include related and blowers SPECIAL NETWORKINTurbo Expo 2011, young
and as well as fans The 2011
Technical on Wed.,
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Erupting Volcanos Brayton and , alone, 1,000 peer-
miss
won’t want to engineers. This special networking a
proceedings contain over nity to meet
55 Conference
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turbomachinery
admission, as ! will give young ves from the
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IGTI: Serving & reviewed publications variety of representati of IGTI’s
and seek
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inery is known services, Come Turbo
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56 CD-adapco, in the more details

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Daily lunches are included discounted registration.
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2012
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56 registration package 49

News
Global Gas Turbine

69 Positions Open
April 2011

IGTI’s Global 71 Ad Index

Gas Turbine News
49-56 Cover ILlustration: marc Tobin

2 mechanical engineering | April 2011

me.hotims.com/34752-05 or circle 05
www.memagazine.org Project Crowdsourcing enters Phase II
W e’ve received numerous insightful ideas for articles from readers around
the world, reaching us through postings on MEmagazineBlog.org, e-mail,
and even old-school letters written on paper.
Talk to
me!
Below is a compilation of readers’ recommendations. We have examined the
suggestions and comments, and have come up with 15 ideas for articles—five
each relating to ASME’s strategic initiative areas of energy, engineering
workforce development, and global impact.
In this second phase of Project Crowdsourcing, we would like you to vote for the
ideas that you believe would make the most interesting topics for articles. Please
rank the ideas—#1 being the most favorable; #5 the least—from each of the
three categories. At the end of April, we will tally your votes and post the results. project:
 ENERGY
crowdsourcing
1. Compare lifecycle costs and relative merits of leading renewable energy technologies.
2. Explore U.S. energy independence. How do we formulate a comprehensive plan?
3. Examine the pros and cons of nuclear fuel reprocessing.
4. Present an overview of advanced reactor technologies.
5. Look at the benefits and challenges of advanced vehicles, including the economic
and environmental impact of electric vehicles.

 ENGINEERING WORKFORCE DEVELOPMENT

1. Look at ways to give engineering graduates the necessary practical skills to succeed
in tomorrow’s workplace, which may see increasing emphasis on sustainability.
2. Examine the notion that engineering training in our educational system should begin much earlier
than it does right now, and review ways to expose youngsters to various facets of innovation.
3. Address the importance of removing the growing conception that engineering sciences
can be treated as a commodity.
4. Discuss why the world is becoming increasingly software and computer driven, and report on ways
to effectively educate the engineering workforce on computer software and programming.
5. Explore how contemporary managers and scholars address the multiple dimensions of
human behavior and organization.

 GLOBAL IMPACT
1. Discuss how bioengineering and biomedical systems can be geared toward the developing world.
2. Explore what engineers need to know in order to succeed in the global economy, and
discuss global opportunities available to them.
3. Consider how ASME can provide leadership for improving risk management and resilience
for complex systems.
4. Discuss the reasons why U.S. industry generally has resisted adopting the metric system.
5. Look at the factors that can maintain job performance and reduce stress when engineers
relocate to a new country.

Please visit MEmagazineBlog.org to make your selections on your favorite ideas—

and feel free to add comments.

read Asme news online www.asmenews.org | www.asme.org

Mechanical Engineering (ISSN 0025-6501) is published monthly by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, Three Park Avenue, New York, NY 10016-5990. Periodicals postage paid at New York, N.Y., and additional mailing offices. POST-
MASTER: Send address changes to Mechanical Engineering, c/o The American Society of Mechanical Engineers, 22 Law Drive, Box 2300, Fairfield, NJ 07007-2300. Return Canadian undeliverable addresses to P.O. BOX 1051, Fort Erie, On, L2A
6C7. PRICES: To members, annually $32 for initial membership subscription, single copy $7; subscription price to nonmembers available upon request. COPYRIGHT © 2011 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers. Canadian Goods &
Services Tax Registration #126148048. Printed in U.S.A. Authorization to photocopy material for internal or personal use under circumstances not falling within the fair use provisions of the Copyright Act is granted by ASME to libraries and other
users registered with the Copyright Clearance Center Transactional Reporting Service, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. Request for special permission or bulk c­ opying should be addressed to Reprints/Permissions D ­ epartment.

4 mechanical engineering | April 2011

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me.hotims.com/34752-06 or circle 06
 FLYING BEYOND CONFLICT
editorial
SOME WEEKS AGO The Washington
Post reported that attacks in Paki-
stan by CIA drones killed at least 581
militants in 2010, but only two of
those militants appeared on a U.S. list
of most-wanted terrorists.
The CIA carried out a record 118
drone strikes last year, costing more
than $1 million each. Because of the
large cost and the low rate of “high-
value target” hits, many in Wash-
ington are raising questions over the
CIA’s drone campaign. But even as the
value of these CIA fighters is argued
at the highest levels of government, a
fleet of different types of drones may
soon begin roaming areas in New
York and other states.
Come late summer, the sight of an
unmanned aerial vehicle resembling
a bird may be more common for
campers hiking the High Peaks of
New York’s Adirondack Mountains
than spotting a black bear. A federal
initiative to increase the number
of drone training and testing sites
across the country to 10, from four,
is nearing approval. Local legisla-
tors are pushing for this initiative as
they see the financial benefits of the
program to local areas.
Most U.S. drones today are deployed
by the military and the CIA, and
operate in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Some are also said to fly missions in
Yemen, Somalia, and regions around
the Horn of Africa. Because laws pro-
hibit the military and CIA from flying
drones within the United States,
National Guard units and civilian
contractors would fly the UAV testing
missions. The drones that would fly
in places like New York would not
carry weapons, but be equipped with
day and night cameras focusing on
random vehicles and locations for
training purposes.
6 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | April 2011
The New York Air National Guard
is expecting to launch drone surveil-
lance flights to train drone crews
from command centers at Fort Drum
and the Hancock Field Air National
Guard Base in Syracuse.
As technology for autonomous
unmanned aerial vehicles grows, so
does the number of potential applica-
tions. In our revealing cover story
this month, mechanical engineering
researchers from the University of
California at Berkeley tell us that it
is now possible to build autonomous
UAVs that can fly without human
guidance for less than $500, using
open-source hardware and software.
Technical advances and lower cost
open up opportunities for using
teams of drones flying together for
purposes beyond the military, such
as fighting forest fires. But research
challenges remain, especially in the
area of human-robot interaction,
which is where much of the research
is now focusing.
The good news is that federal educa-
tion and stimulus money is now being
used to create nonmilitary drone
education programs. The aviation
department at the University of North
Dakota, for example, and the operator
of the test and training site at Grand
Forks AFB, now offers the first Bach-
elor of Science program in unmanned
aircraft systems operations.
As control systems get better, faster,
cheaper, and smarter, the authors
of the article say, “We may then be
able to see flocks of UAVs fulfill their
greatest potential as a means to
extend human capability and meet
human needs.”
John G. Falcioni, Editor-in-Chief
falcionij@asme.org
twitter.com/johnfalcioni
Editor-in-Chief
John G. Falcioni
Executive Editor
Harry Hutchinson
Associate Editors
Alan S. Brown, Jean Thilmany,
Jeffrey Winters
Electronic Publishing Editor
Benedict Bahner
Art & Production Designer
Teresa M. Carboni
Director, Advertising Sales
and Publishing Development
Nicholas J. Ferrari
Marketing and Promotion Manager
Anthony Asiaghi
Classified and Mailing List Manager
John Panza
Production and Manufacturing Supervisor
Micheline D. Turturro
Circulation Coordinator
Marni A. Rice
Managing Director, Publishing & Unit Support
Philip V. DiVietro
Online
www.memagazine.org
(212) 591-7783; fax (212) 591-7841
E-mail: memag@asme.org
The American Society of Mechanical Engineers
President Robert T. Simmons
President-Elect Victoria A. Rockwell
Past President Amos E. Holt
Governors Richard C. Benson, Shlomo Carmi,
Said Jahanmir, Madiha Kotb, Robert N. Pangborn,
Thomas D. Pestorius, K. Keith Roe, Edmund J. Seiders,
J. Robert Sims Jr.
Executive Director
Thomas G. Loughlin
Deputy Executive Director
Michael K. Weis
Secretary and Treasurer
Wilbur J. Marner
Assistant Secretary
Warren R. Leonard
Senior Vice Presidents
Centers Clark McCarrell
Standards & Certification Bernard E. Hrubala
Institutes Dilip R. Ballal
Knowledge & Community Thomas G. Libertiny
Strategic Management Stacey Swisher Harnetty
ME Editorial Advisory Board
Robert E. Nickell, Chairman; Harry Armen;
Leroy S. Fletcher; Richard J. Goldstein;
Thomas G. Libertiny
For reprints, contact
Edward Kane, (866) 879-9144, ext.131
Opinions expressed in Mechanical Engineering
magazine do not necessarily reflect the views of ASME.
 ©2010 The MathWorks, Inc.


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me.hotims.com/34752-07 or circle 07
 Headquarters
ASME
Three Park Avenue

letters New York, NY 10016-5990

(212) 591-7722
fax: (212) 591-7674

Energy Choices
www.asme.org

MYTHv.FACT
The Future of Energy
Before we can embrace appropriate
The way we power our homes and Before examining the different possibilities for future
cars and factories is one of the most important energy supply, we need to understand just how much
policies, we have to sort out the hard choices our society faces. Perhaps it’s the push
truths of alternative energy technolo- energy the world will demand in the future. Using the MIT
of climate change, air pollution, resource deple-
gies from the debilitating myths. EPPA model, researchers can project future global energy
tion, and national security. Or maybe it’s the pull

Information Central
of new technologies and newfound energy sup-
demand under a business-as-usual scenario. This scenario
assumes that global activities continue without policy

To the Editor: The article “Myth v. Fact” (January)

nergy choices plies that may be cheap and clean. Either way,
most experts expect that we are heading toward measures that could raise the price of fossil fuels.

>>
a virtual revolution in the power and energy
industries over the next few decades. Under business as usual,

Service Center
But whether we can revolutionize our energy TRUTH: Without model projections show
rote:
infrastructure—and how, exactly, we would do significantly higher global primary energy use
he idea of it—is not simply a question of technology. Eco- energy prices, energy more than doubling by 2100,
heme of the

was on the whole a welcome analysis of energy eco-

nomics will play a deciding role in what unfolds. demand will continue from around 480 exajoules
e could have
gle looks Before we can embrace For alternative technologies to be chosen among
the mix of energy sources, they must be able to
to grow—especially in in 2010 to 1,100 EJ by 2100.
developing countries. Energy use is closely related

ASME
ground. And
and renew- appropriate energy compete in the energy market. The future costs
of energy technologies and the ever-changing
to income, and the rapid
economic expansion of developing countries such as China
Or something
d deck are
policies, we have to price of conventional energy sources will deter-
mine the success of alternatives over conven- and India will drive the steep increase in energy use.

nomics, addressing the constraints imposed by both

That economic growth will exceed anticipated efficiency
"Dispelling face the hard truths tional, fossil fuel-powered technologies.
To better understand competition among improvements in end-use energy technology. The effect
PM >>> The

22 Law Drive
ers we have about the technologies conventional and alternative energy technolo-
gies and their implications for the environment,
is so strong that even with policy measures that would
increase energy prices, and thus provide enough incentive
hs and facts,
why I sug- available to us. researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology are using a comprehensive frame-
for conservation and efficiency to reduce projected energy
use by as much as one third, the world would still need a 50

limited supplies of fossil fuels and global warming

and deck: work to model climate response and analyze pol- percent increase in energy supply by 2100.
ate energy BY JOHN REILLY AND ALLISON CRIMMINS icy proposals. The Joint Program on the Science

echnologies and Policy of Global Change developed the MIT
eader that Integrated Global System Modeling framework,
which integrates natural and social science to
ess: In an
simulate global change and to assess the effects
w method of
of policy proposals—like the one regarding
Fairfield, NJ 07007
Of the supply needed to meet that increased demand,
what portion of the future energy mix will be made up of
alternative technologies, and what portion will continue
to be made up by fossil fuels? A common myth is that the
world is running out of fossil fuels and thus a shift to a fuel

produced by their excessive consumption.

hard truths
alternative energy technology policy. mix dominated by cleaner alternatives is inevitable.

(973) 882-1170; fax: (973) 882-1717

k? I don't
What makes the research at the MIT Joint
strator come Program unique is the systemic approach of According to the MIT projections,
I lean toward combining economics, science, and policy to look MYTH: The world conventional technology sup-
PM, Jessica at the probabilities, risks, and impacts of climate is running out of ported by fossil fuels will continue
he flask. Talk- change. The IGSM models the interactions and
fossil fuels. to dominate under a business-as-

However, the authors’ delegation of the statement

out what the feedbacks between the Earth systems, such as

In U.S., toll-free (800) THE-ASME;

. I'm afraid the ocean, atmosphere, and land, and human
st doesn't activities such as economic development and
emissions. The modeling of human activities,
Art and Pro-
using a component of the IGSM called the Emis-
zine
sions Prediction and Policy Analysis model, is
of particular use to representing future global
usual scenario. In fact, absent cli-
mate policies that would impact energy prices, fossil fuels
will supply nearly 80 percent of global primary energy
demand in 2100. Alternative energy technologies will
expand rapidly. Non-fossil fuel use grows from 13 percent
to 20 percent by 2100, with renewable electricity produc-

“The world is running out of fossil fuels” to the
energy resources and the economics of alterna-
tive energy technologies.
These tools can shed light on the economic fac-
tors determining the role of renewables and other
alternatives in the future energy market. Though
international (973) 882-1167
tion expanding nearly tenfold and nuclear energy increas-
ing by a factor of 8.5. But those sources currently provide
such a small share of the world’s energy that even rapid
growth is not enough to significantly displace fossil fuels.
In spite of the growth in renewables, the projections indi-

e-mail: infocentral@asme.org
these issues are complex, several consistent
cate that coal will remain among the least expensive fuel

status of an unfounded myth is unacceptable. It is

John Reilly is a senior lecturer at the Sloan School
of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology in Cambridge, and co-director of the
Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global
Change. Allison Crimmins is a communications
officer with the Joint Program.
themes have emerged from MIT’s results, some of
which confirm some long-held truths and others
that expose some damaging myths. The bottom
line is that while existing technologies can get
us started on a path of emissions reductions, it’s
vitally important to select cost-effective policies
to ensure a brighter, cleaner energy future.
sources. Non-fossil fuel alternatives, such as renewable
energy and nuclear energy, will be between 40 percent and
80 percent more expensive than coal. Some renewables
may be even more expensive, as the intermittent nature of
energy technologies like wind and solar require back-up
capacity or storage to address variability of supply.

obvious to all of us that the question is not whether

24 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | January 2011 January 2011 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 25

the Earth will run out of fossil fuels, but when. Indeed, it may not happen ASME Washington Center
1828 L St., N.W., Suite 906
significantly within the next 100 years, but what about the next 500? Imagine
Washington, DC 20036-5104
planet Earth without significant fossil fuel resources! Highly likely 500 years (202) 785-3756
from now. fax: (202) 429-9417
Five hundred years is a short time, even within human history. We just www.asme.org/NewsPublicPolicy/
celebrated the birth of Jesus, about 2010 years ago. The ancient Greek GovRelations
civilization was at its height about 2,500 years ago. The Roman Republic
lasted about 500 years, as did the Roman Empire which followed. Will our ASME International
institutions last that long? Gas Turbine Institute
Fossilized carbon and carbon compounds took tens of millions of years to 6525 The Corners Parkway, Suite 115
Norcross, GA 30092-3349
accumulate. They are not only high-energy-density fuels, but also valuable
(404) 419-1646
raw materials for petrochemical fertilizers and various plastics. They are a fax: (404) 847-0151
one-time gift from nature. Currently, we are squandering them: we used up http://igti.asme.org/
half the oil resources in little over 100 years. People living in the future would
surely wonder why we simply burned them. ASME International
Statements denying running out of “fossil fuels” (as well as denying human- Petroleum Technology
caused global warming) are, unfortunately, common in the media these days. Institute
But I am very disappointed to see such a thing within Mechanical Engineering. 11757 Katy Freeway, Suite 865
ANDRES PEEKNA, WATERFORD, WIS.
Houston, TX 77079-1733
(281) 493-3491
fax: (281) 493-3493
To the Editor: I was disappointed to find a political policy article “Myth v. www.asme-ipti.org
Fact” in what I have always looked on as a technology magazine. Advocating
government policies to control or bias markets is not the purview of ASME. ASME Europe Field Office
The “Greenhouse Gamble” graphs are a grossly biased presentation of Avenue De Tervueren, 300
the potential effects, considering that the theories on positive vs. negative 1150 Brussels, Belgium
feedbacks in the climate system are not understood. There are theories that phone: (32-2) 743-1543
indicate significant temperature changes and also competing theories that fax: (32-2) 743-1550
indicate little change. The science is only “settled” for the political advocates
ASME Asia Pacific LLC
that have usurped the science to drive policy directives they find appealing.
Unit 09A, EF Floor, East Tower of Twin Towers
Stay out of the political opinion business. Don’t legitimize Mr. Reilly’s No. B12, Jianguomenwai Avenue, Chaoyang District
advocacy. Don’t use the ASME magazine to advocate for the editor’s personal Beijing, 100022 Peoples Republic of China
political thoughts. (86-10) 5109-6032
Present articles that cover technology advancements, engineering methods, fax: (86-10) 5109-6039
tools, materials, and engineering achievement.
STEVEN PUSTAY, P.E, CANONSBURG, PA. India Office
c/o Tecnova India Pvt.Ltd.
To the Editor: I am concerned with the accuracy of “Myth v. Fact.” This arti- 335, Udyog Vihar, Phase IV,
Gurgaon 122 015 (Haryana)
cle states, with no reference, that the cost of renewables and nuclear energy is
(91-124) 430-8413
40-80 percent more than coal. This may be true for renewables (particularly Fax (91-124) 430-8207
saxenas@asme.org
8 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | April 2011
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without subsidies), but is clearly not
true for nuclear.
I spent only a few minutes with Google
searches to turn up several sources
which indicate nuclear and coal are very
competitive in price of the electricity
they produce. At www.nucleartourist.
com/basics/costs.htm you can find a
table summarizing their comparison.
I am not stating I believe it is precisely
accurate, but my point is that it shows
costs of $30/MWh for nuclear and
$29.1/MWh for coal. The same article
shows a fuel cost for nuclear of $5/
MWh versus $11/MWh for coal.
Another key variable is capital cost.
Capital costs for current nuclear
construction is estimated at $1,500-
3,500/kW. In an article by Synapse
Energy Economics Inc., they state
that current coal costs are $3,500/
kW. If that is true, and current nuclear
construction is close to its goals, there is
no way for coal to even be competitive.
Fuel cost will always favor nuclear.
The true cost of coal versus nuclear
depends on a lot of assumptions
including what pollution control
equipment is installed on the coal
plant. It is irresponsible for ASME
to publish an unsubstantiated 40-80
percent benefit for coal.
Jim Dwight, Lexington, S.C.
To the Editor: The article “Myth v.
Fact” addresses a vital topic, but needs
a heavy dose of fact-checking. The
authors begin by extrapolating GWP
growth for the next 90 years without
considering the boundary condition
of resource limitations on our finite
planet.
The flow rate from every oil field
peaks as it depletes; the aggregate effect
was a peaking of oil supply from U.S.
fields in 1970, exactly as engineers had
forecasted. Since then the domestic
oil supply has declined to about half
the 1970 rate and the U.S. now imports
60 percent of its oil (about 10 million
barrels per day).
Even the wildly optimistic
International Energy Agency recently
admitted that worldwide conventional
oil supplies peaked in 2006 and warned
10 mechanical engineering | April 2011
to expect continually higher oil prices
in the future—which of course is the
opposite of the authors’ first myth
claim, “The world is running out of
fossil fuels.”
I agree that economics will strongly
interact with energy supplies and
technologies. Historically, there
is a strong correlation between oil
shortages and recessions (including
2008). As worldwide oil supplies decline
we will soon be in uncharted crisis
territory. The authors’ modeling would
be much more believable if they could
show that their model predicted the
2008 peaking of oil prices and near-
collapse of our financial infrastructure.
Instead of modeling business-as-
usual scenarios, engineers need to
be ringing alarm bells to wake up
economists and policy-makers to the
physical constraints of the planet;
the costs and lead time (decades) of
developing and deploying renewable
energy systems, technologies, and
materials; and the need to massively
retool our infrastructure to be much
more energy-efficient.
Eric Strid, Portland, Ore.
To the Editor: The January 2011
editorial says a goal of this magazine
is to stimulate thinking beyond how
technology works and get to why
technology works. “Myth v. Fact,” a
discussion of the intersection between
energy policy and technology, is held up
as an example.
Apparently the “why” of energy
technology and policy must be one of
justifying taxation. The title should
+
have been, “Why we must have a
carbon tax.” The authors’ conclusion is
letters to
the editor
Mechanical Engineering welcomes
comments from our readers.
Letters can be typewritten or
e-mailed, and must include the
author’s full name, address, and
telephone number. Address your
submission to:
that the only hope for the planet is for
governments to “pursue broad pollution
taxes or cap-and-trade systems” to
make energy less affordable. This is
based upon speculative computer
models like the MIT IGSM framework.
So far global warming models have
had a dismal forecasting success rate.
Not surprising, given the use of tainted
input data and models that include
“fudge factors” and other complex
adjustments. Now MIT has included
economic development, technological
change, and social policy in the IGSM
models. Hopefully, their economic
models are better than those that failed
to forecast the current recession.
Bottom line is that GIGO (garbage in,
garbage out) models will forecast any
result that you want to see.
Peter Staats, Loveland, Ohio
To the Editor: The article “Myth v.
Fact” correctly stated, “Energy use is
closely related to income…” meaning
that as poorer countries dig out of
poverty, their use of energy rises. But to
some degree, perhaps a large degree, the
availability of affordable energy may be
a catalyst to enabling poorer countries
to dig out of poverty.
However, the converse is true also.
Artificially inflating the price of
energy (e.g. carbon tax) in an effort to
retard its demand growth, especially
in developing countries, may have the
unintended outcome of causing “forced
poverty.” Lack of affordable energy may
cause the poor to remain poor.
Policy makers need to consider this
as well.
Timothy J. Bruggeman, P.E.
Johannesburg, South Africa
Letters to the Editor
Mechanical Engineering
Three Park Avenue
New York, NY 10016-5990
fax: (212) 591-7841
e-mail: memag@asme.org
The editors reserve the right to edit letters for clarity,
style, and length. We regret that unpublished letters
cannot be acknowledged or returned.
© 2010 Swagelok Company
We don’t have a department
dedicated to quality. We have
a company dedicated to it.
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Simulated computer modeling, dimensional testing, and electron scanning
of raw materials – you name it, we’ll go to any lengths to ensure that if it’s
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 news&notes
Clear Skies to Cool
the Planet
In some quarters, it’s fashionable—even politically correct—
to pretend that the problem of global climate change has gone
away. But data from a variety of sources, including satellite
temperature measurements curated by the University of
Alabama at Huntsville, indicate that 2010 was virtually tied
with 1998 as the warmest year on record. For all the attention
to snowstorms in the U.S., the world isn’t getting any cooler.
But the world isn’t getting any closer to controlling carbon
dioxide emissions, which have been tied to global warm-
ing. Which makes the conclusions of a February report by
the World Meteorological Organization, headquartered in
Geneva, and the Nairobi-based United Nations Environ-
ment Program worth noting: Cutting black carbon, rather
than CO2 , might make the most immediate impact on global
temperatures.
Black carbon is the scientific name for the sooty particles
that form when carbon-rich fuels, such as coal, petroleum,
or wood, undergo incomplete combustion. As these particles
remain suspended in the atmosphere or lie on Arctic ice and
snow, they absorb sunlight and heat up. Pound for pound,
black carbon is estimated to have a heating impact between
100 and 2,000 times greater than that of carbon dioxide.
And unlike CO2 emissions, there isn’t much of a constituen-
cy in favor of black carbon. Indeed, black carbon has adverse
health effects right at the source; black carbon and other par-
ticulate pollution are implicated in 2 million deaths a year.
Around 60 percent of these emissions are due to biomass
burning, either in forest and grass fires or in wood-fueled
cooking and heating.
According to the report, a small number of measures—from
the use of clean-burning wood stoves for residential cook-
ing and the banning of slash-and-burn agriculture to the
use of particle filters in diesel-powered vehicles—could cut
black carbon emissions substantially. And unlike measures
to control CO2 , most of these steps can be made relatively
cheaply without too great an impact on the world economy.
When combined with efforts to reduce ozone in the lower
atmosphere, which is also a significant contributor to global
warming, controlling black carbon could cut the expected
warming between now and 2050 in half.
The report makes clear that sweeping black carbon from
the skies won’t eliminate global warming altogether, but it
will provide some breathing room while the world figures out
what to do about CO2 emissions.
Jeffrey Winters

Jets’ Smaller Vortices Save 2.5 Billion Gallons B ri e f ly N o t e d

T
Hexagon Metrology Inc. has
he developers of Blended aircraft at the factory or retrofitted to
opened a factory and R&D center in
Winglet technology, the jets in service. By altering the airflow Oceanside, Calif., which will serve
upturned wingtips that can be as it leaves the wingtip, the extensions as the North American manufactur-
added to jet aircraft to reduce reduce wingtip vortices and induced ing headquarters for the company’s
drag, calculate that their invention has drag. Aviation Partners estimates that, Romer brand of portable coordinate
saved more than 2.5 billion gallons of jet depending on the aircraft, the reduction measuring machines. Romer’s
fuel in the past five years and that total in drag can increase fuel efficiency by North American base had been in
Wixom, Mich. /// Valeo has agreed to
fuel savings may climb as much as 7 percent.
acquire Niles, a Japanese automo-
to 7 billion gallons over A winglet reduces The technology was tive supplier, from RHJ International
the next five years. a jet’s wingtip introduced five years
vortices. SA and Nissan. The deal is valued at
The original ago. Aviation Partners 320 million euros. Valeo said Niles
developer, Aviation estimated that on Feb. will become part of its Comfort and
Partners Inc., and a 9 of this year, at 4:47 Driving Assistance Systems Business
joint venture, Aviation a.m. to be exact, the Group and will strengthen Valeo’s
position in Asia. Niles manufactures
Partners Boeing, which winglets in service had
switches of various kinds and sen-
was formed to develop collectively saved 2.5
sors for automobile systems. ///CAD
winglets specifically for billion gallons of jet developer progeCAD of Como, Italy,
Boeing Co. jets, issued fuel, worth about $7.5 has released iCADMac, a 2-D and
a statement that said the technology billion at current prices. 3-D drawing-native CAD application
was being flown on 21 different According to Joe Clark, chairman and for the Macintosh operating system.
models of aircraft totaling more than CEO of Aviation Partners, the company ///SolidWorks of Concord, Mass.,
is delivering winglets to commercial has added a tutorial page on its Web
4,000 airplanes.
site for users new to the company’s
The winglets are upturning airline and private jet owners at a rate
software and to 3-D CAD engineering
extensions that can be added to jets’ to equip more than 500 aircraft a year. design in general.
wings. Winglets can be applied to new Harry Hutchinson

12 mechanical engineering | April 2011

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 NEWS&NOTES
Computer Modeling Ancient
And Future Siting Issues

S
eparately, they’re powerful and unexpected results via the com-
techniques to examine the bined techniques used to analyze past
past and model the future. land use, he said.
But the latest computer Among the project’s expected fi nd-
modeling techniques combined with ings were that repeatedly moving, or
archaeological techniques can create shifting, cultivated fields produced
a more detailed picture of the past more erosion than farming and fertil-
to inform land-use decisions of the izing the same field repeatedly. Also,
future, according to an Arizona State larger settlements had a greater im-
University researcher. pact on the land than smaller ones.
Archaeology is way to understand
the long-term consequences of human
impact on the environment; compu-
tational modeling can refi ne that un-
derstanding, said C. Michael Barton.
He’s a professor in the university’s
School of Human Evolution and Social
Change.
But it takes archaeological thought
and computing models combined to
chart the best course for future land
development, he said.
Barton heads the Mediterranean
Landscape Dynamics project, which
uses the past to develop computer
models that analyze how land should
best be used now and in the future.
“We have lots of information in the
archaeological record, but it actu-
ally represents a tiny fraction of what
▲ A model tracks land-cover changes in the
people used, which represents a small southern Levant from 1973 through 2007.
portion of how people lived,” Barton
said. “We have artifacts from this Unexpectedly, the team found that
point in time and that point in time, in smaller communities, shifting
but we don’t know what people used cultivation and grazing increased
or how they lived in the interim. So we productivity because soil lost due to
are left with connecting the dots and erosion from grazing accumulated in
making inferences.” farmed areas.
Computer models can help fi ll in But when those communities grow,
those gaps by taking into account the same practices can cause soil loss
what is known about people based on throughout the land used by a village,
sociology, economics, anthropology, leading to a significant drop in pro-
and other fields, he said. ductivity.
“When computational modeling is In fact, the archaeological record of
used to experimentally simulate hu- northern Jordan shows the earliest
man socioecological dynamics, the farming communities experienced
empirical archaeological record can the kinds of impacts predicted by the
be used to validate and improve dy- modeling experiments, he said.
namic models of long-term change,” Land-use developers can call upon
Barton said. that information when planning fu-
The Mediterranean Landscape Dy- ture farming settlements, Barton said.
namics project yielded both expected JEAN THILMANY

me.hotims.com/34752-11 or circle 11
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Other product and company names listed are trademarks or trade names of their respective companies. 2805
 computing This section was written by
Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

V
Girls and Video Games: Playing For Mental Health...
ideo games can get a bad
rap, but kids and parents
playing together can actu-
ally be beneficial for girls.
A study by researchers
at Brigham Young Univer-
sity in Provo, Utah, suggests that playing
video games is good for girls, but only if
they play with a parent.
Researchers in the university’s School
of Family Life interviewed 287 families,
each with a child between 11 and 16 years
old. They collected information on the
gender of the kids and which video games
were played, and compared that with a
number of measures, such as behavior,
family connection, and mental well-be-
ing, said Sarah Coyne, lead author of the
study. Coyne is a professor in the School
of Family Life.
The study’s biggest finding came with
the girls who played age-appropriate
m A study suggests that playing age-
appropriate video games with a parent gives
girls a psychological boost.
games with a parent. For them, the posi-
tive indicators—better behavior, feeling
more connected to their families, and
stronger mental health—got a 20 percent
bump in the outcomes. Boys didn’t see
that effect, nor did girls who played more
mature games, Coyne said.
Boys in the study most often played Call
of Duty, Wii Sports, and Halo. The most
popular games for girls were Mario Kart,
Mario Brothers, Wii Sports, Rock Band,
and Guitar Hero.
Though girls didn’t play as often, the
time spent playing with a parent is the
same as boys’ time spent playing with a
parent.
“Any face-to-face time you have with
your child can be a positive thing,” said
co-author Laura Padilla-Walker. “Espe-
cially if the activity is something the child
is interested in.”
Padilla-Walker is also a professor in
the School of Family Life.
The studied appeared in the February
2011 issue of Journal of Adolescent Health.

...And For Science
Researchers at the University of Alberta in Edmonton
have found a way to pique girls’ interest in a computing
career: video games. They’re calling for change in the cur-
riculum used to introduce teenage girls to computer science.
Educators throughout North America are having a hard
time interesting girls in pursuing a postsecondary degree in
computer science, said Duane
Szafron, a computing science
professor at the university. In
response, researchers at the
university conceived of a joint
project between the educa-
tion and computer science
departments to determine how
“We thought we should have female students create games
and see if they are just as excited about making games as
male students,” he said.
His team discovered girls enjoyed creating games just as
much as boys do. Further, they preferred game construction
to activities such as story writing.
“The female students built games that were every bit as
good as those the male students made, even though the male
students had more experience with playing games,” Szafron
said. “In terms of the quality of the games developed and
the abstraction skills that the students learned, which could
translate to knowledge of computing science—and in terms
of the amount of fun that they had—there was no difference
between the two groups.”
Szafron worked with Mike Carbonaro, professor of educa-
tional psychology; Jonathan Schaeffer, computing professor;
University of Alberta

to increase girls’ interest in and Maria Cutumisu, computing graduate student.

computers. Computer science teachers need to look at redesigning the
The university team intro- types of projects and content they use in class to make them
duced a group of local tenth of interest to girls, Carbonaro said.
m ScriptEase at work.
graders to a program called “If you want more females in computing science, you need
ScriptEase, which allowed them to design their own games. to radically change the curriculum,” he said. “You need
Asking a student to design something helps her investigate to provide activities that are more gender neutral so that
the creative aspect of computer science, Szafron said. they'll be attracted to the discipline.”

16 mechanical engineering | April 2011

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computing
Bikes In The Right Place ability of bikes.” Paris boasts 1,700 pick-up and drop-off stations,

R
making the management of bike availability an extremely daunting
ide and return. That’s the motto of the 400 environmen- task, he said.
tally friendly municipal bike-sharing projects worldwide. The researchers’ mathematical model predicts which bike sta-
A rider borrows a bike from one of hundreds of loca- tions should be refilled or emptied and when that needs to happen.
tions in the city, uses it, and returns it to another loca- “Our research involves devising methods and algorithms to
tion at the end of the journey. solve the routing and scheduling problems of the trucks that move
But while the idea continues to gain speed, riders have met
problems. About seven percent of the time, users can’t return
a bike because a station is full. Likewise, sometimes stations
are short of bikes, said Tal Raviv, a professor in Tel Aviv Uni-
versity’s department of industrial engineering in Israel.
Raviv teamed with another industrial engineering professor,
Michal Tzur, in an effort to solve the bike distribution problem.
The two are now at work on a mathematical model they
hope will lead to a software solution to manage bike flow.
“These stations are managed imperfectly, based on what the fleets, as well as other operational and design challenges within
station managers see. They use their best guesses to move bikes this system,” Raviv said.
to different locations around the city using trucks,” Raviv said. The software that results from their model will be used in a pilot
“There’s no system for more scientifically managing the avail- bike-sharing program within Tel Aviv, he added.

The Mechanics of Human Mobility for a specific patient.

For instance, many children with
Scientists working in a new Stan- muscle, and skeletal systems of the cerebral palsy walk in a crouch-like pose,
ford University research center human body, said Scott Delp, a professor with their knees excessively bent. The
aim to improve the lives of people with of bioengineering at the university. cause of the crouched gait, which can be
reduced mobility, including those Simulating a patient’s movement in a exhausting, painful, and debilitating,
with cerebral palsy. The scientists use three-dimensional computer model can varies from patient to patient, Delp said.
computer-generated simulations to bet- help uncover the source of the problem, In some patients, the hamstring
ter understand the mechanical basis of whether the problem is the size of a muscles are very tight and short and pull
human movement. particular muscle or bone, or the way the knees bent. If the hamstrings are
The source of a person’s physical the muscle and bone perform, he said. surgically lengthened, these patients
impairment is often hidden among the The model can also be used to determine may be able to straighten their legs and
complex interactions of the nervous, whether surgery would improve mobility walk more easily. But if that surgery is
used on a patient who walks in a crouch
gait for a different reason, the procedure
B r ie f ly N ot ed
could be ineffective or, worse, harmful,
Genus Software of Solon, Ohio, has released Genus Designer 2011, an add-on to the
he added.
SolidWorks CAD system. The software generates proposals, quotes, CAD models, “It’s a big challenge to figure out ways
drawings, and reports. /// Luxion of Irvine, Calif., is now shipping KeyShot 2.2 to cre- to maintain mobility as people age and
ate photographic images from 3-D CAD models. /// Mastercam of Tolland, Conn., has restore mobility when people have physi-
introduced Mastercam QuickPart for Students, which takes those new to CAM step-by- cal disabilities,” Delp said.
step through the CAD and CAM process. /// Dorner Manufacturing of Hartland, Wis., Two years ago, Delp and his team intro-
has upgraded its 3-D CAD software that allows engineers to draw conveyor systems. duced a free software program called
The upgrade includes the capability to draw conveyor lengths in 1/8-inch increments. OpenSim, a biomechanical research
///Cobham of Oxford, England, has upgraded its Opera electromagnetic design software platform that simulates biological
to version 14, which extended the flexibility of the program’s finite element analysis movement. OpenSim combines data on
meshing capabilities. /// Autodesk Inc. of San Rafael, Calif., has introduced its AutoCAD
muscle size and strength, joint motion,
for Mac software in Australia and New Zealand. /// The provider of computer-aided
engineering pre- and post-processing software, Beta CAE Systems S.A. of Thessalo-
and recorded movements of a subject to
niki, Greece, has released µETA version 6.6.3, with enhancements and code corrections. simulate a person’s movement.
/// Siemens PLM Software of Plano, Texas, is now shipping version 43.0 of the 3-D The new research center will use
D-Cubed software components. OpenSim to focus on understanding and
treating movement disorders, Delp said.

18 mechanical engineering | April 2011

 Virtual Space
Engineers in Colorado immersed in
3-D technology aren’t playing Space
Invaders; they’re working on space
exploration vehicles.
Lockheed Martin Space Systems
recently opened a virtual reality labora-
tory at company headquarters in Little-
ton, where all this immersive activity
takes place.
The Collaborative Human Immersive
m The new Lockheed Martin Space Systems
Laboratory, or CHIL, is outfitted with virtual reality lab, called the Collaborative
the virtual reality software and hard- and money when it comes to developing
Lockheed Martin Space Systems

Human Immersive Laboratory, allows

ware needed for engineers to test and
better understand the systems they’re
working on, said Jeff Smith, the com-
pany’s director of special projects.
Software and hardware include
motion-capture and immersive tech-
nologies. And they should help save time
space systems, Smith said.
Engineers will use CHIL for a number of
systems now under development, includ-
ing the U.S. Air Force’s Global Positioning
System, known as GPS III, and NASA’s
Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle.
The laboratory tools will be called
engineers who are developing space
systems to immerse themselves in 3-D
design technology via many tools.
upon to help develop a range of space
systems, including satellites, exploration
spacecraft, launch vehicles and missile-
defence systems, Smith added.

B
Soar Free
irds do it, bees do it, but so far unmanned aircraft
can’t do it. University of Arizona aerospace and
mechanical engineers are studying bird and bee flight
to develop unmanned vehicles that stay aloft longer
and cope with sudden and severe changes in airflow.
The Hybrid Dynamics and Control Laboratory in
the university’s College of Engineering is developing mathematical
analysis and design methods that could advance unmanned
aircraft, ground vehicles, and other systems that
need to make autonomous decisions.
Ricardo Sanfelice, an assistant professor
of aerospace and mechanical engineering,
directs the lab in Tucson. “What we do
here in our lab is mainly theory,” Sanfe-
lice said. “We model dynamical systems,
analyze them mathematically, devise ways
to control them, test them in simulations, and
when possible, validate them in our test-bed.”
He and his students currently are studying ways to
extract energy from wind gusts and thermals to gain altitude with-
out using power, just as birds do when soaring to greater altitudes.
“This is very different from traditional control system design,
where you want to nullify the effects of perturbations. Here, we’re
exploiting them,” he said. One project involves autonomous soaring
in which the computer pilot actively searches for thermals, which
are areas of rapidly rising air, that might occur when sunlight
warms a plowed field or stretch of asphalt, Sanfelice said.
In the lab, fans and wind tunnels generate mock thermals and
wind gusts. According to Sanfelice, “If the plane detects a change
in altitude that wasn’t created by the navigation system, the com-
puter begins to explore that area to find the thermal.”
If the lift occurs off the left wing, for example, the computer will
turn the plane to the left, but if it doesn’t find the thermal during
this turn, it will change direction and try at a different angle.
Another project involves flying a model airplane through a win-
dow from outdoors to indoors. Bees do this when flying back into a
hive, and Sanfelice is recording their motions to see how they do it.
“From a control point of view, we may want to mimic the maneu-
vers the bees are executing; in particular, the maneuvers they use
to cope with the discontinuity in the airflow,” he said.
The hybrid control system theory is about 20
years old. Thus, researchers in the field don’t
have a great deal of targeted software at
their disposal, Sanfelice said. Theoretical
tools for analysis, design, and simulation
of hybrid control systems—such as those
being worked on at the university—are in
the early stages of development.
Some researchers who work in hybrid
controls focus on theory, while others work
on the experimental side. “I feel like our group can
contribute to theory and practice,” Sanfelice said. “We can
develop theoretical tools, and, at the same time, make sense of
the theory experimentally.”
The lab will help develop pertinent software for the relatively
new and growing field, he added.
“We are developing a toolbox for hybrid systems, to make them
more designer and user friendly,” he said. “ We hope that our simu-
lation software for these systems will eventually become part of a
commercial simulation product.”
>> Research at Berkeley strives for fleets of UAVs. Page 26. <<
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 19
 software exchange
Tinkerbox is an educational game based
on physics and mechanics.
Student Tinkers
Capability: Autodesk TinkerBox is an
education app for the iPad designed to
spark interest in engineering. Players
must solve mechanical puzzles and
physics problems by sketching tools,
inserting gadgets, and assembling
components to invent contraptions
to conquer each level of a game. After
completing a level, players must create
increasingly complex innovations to
conquer the next level. Contraptions can
be shared with friends.
Hardware: iPad.
Developer: Autodesk, 111 McInnis
Parkway, San Rafael, CA 94903; (800)
964-6432; http://usa.autodesk.com/.
Cost: Free; downloaded from the
Appstore at www.itunes.com/appstore
or via the iPad.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-70 or circle 70
Automatic Calculation
Capability: GrafiCalc Elements 2011
software promises to streamline
mathematical calculations and
equation solving in the engineering
design process. It combines parametric
sketching and automated graphical
calculations in one application that
allows users to solve design and
engineering problems. The application
can be used on its own or with popular
CAD applications. It supports the
dynamic data exchange protocol that
enables users to create graphical
calculation macros for Excel-based
engineering calculations. But that works
20 mechanical engineering | April 2011
the opposite way as well. Users can
create Excel calculations for GrafiCalc.
Hardware: PC running the Windows or
Vista operating system.
Developers: Geomate Co., 3474 Nova
Scotia Ave., San Jose, CA 95124; (408)
371-6095; www.inventbetter.com.
Price: $129.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-71 or circle 71
FEA for All
Capability: MD Nastran Desktop give
suppliers and small-to-medium-size
manufacturers low-cost access to
MD Nastran’s multiphysics analysis
capabilities. Engineers can start with
the MD Nastran capabilities that fit
their current FEA needs and then scale
up to greater functionality. Tailored
solutions for the desktop application
are: MD Nastran Desktop Structures,
MD Nastran Desktop Structures
and Motion, MD Nastran Desktop
Advanced Dynamics, MD Nastran
Desktop Advanced Structures, MD
Nastran Desktop Advanced Explicit,
and MD Nastran Desktop Advanced
Structures and Motion.
Hardware: PC running the Windows
or Linux operating system.
Developer: MSC.Software Corp.,
2 MacArthur Place, Santa Ana,
CA 92707; (714) 540-8900; www.
mscsoftware.com.
Cost: $20,000 to $42,000, depending
on package.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-72 or circle 72
Translate Ideas
Capability: IronCAD Design
Collaboration Suite 2011 Translator
Bundles help users communicate with
outside partners and collaborators
during the design process. The product
translates designs made within
the developer’s IronCAD Design
Collaboration Suite into most CAD
formats, which can then be sent to
suppliers and others cooperating in the
design process.
Hardware: PC running the Windows
operating system and IronCAD Design
Collaboration Suite.
Developer: IronCAD, 700 Galleria
Pkwy, Ste. 330, Atlanta, GA 30339;
(800) 339-7304; www.ironcad.com.
Cost: $500.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-73 or circle 73
Open Design
Capability: The Teigha Viewer allows
viewing of .dwg files and .dgn files.
(The latter is the software library
developed by the Open Design Alliance,
or ODA.) The viewer is based on Teigha
3.4, a technology platform that allows
ODA members to develop a range of
technical graphics applications. Teigha
Viewer is available for download by the
general public as an executable file, and
ODA members get additional access
to the source code. The ODA is an
association of software companies and
software developers that exchanges
open industry-standard CAD data. The
viewer is available to users who are
building Teigha Extension modules via
the ODA’s TX SDK application.
Hardware: PC running the Windows,
Linux, or Mac OS operating systems.
Developer: Open Design Alliance,
10645 N. Tatum Blvd., Ste. 200-644,
Phoenix, AZ 85028; (602) 263-7666;
www.opendwg.org.
+
www.me.hotims.com/34752-74 or circle 74
submissions
for software
exchange
Describe the software program in
detail, following the format shown
here. You may include artwork.
Send your submissions to:
Software Exchange
Mechanical Engineering
Three Park Avenue
New York, NY 10016-5990
fax: (212) 591-7841
e-mail: memag@asme.org
ME does not test or endorse any software program
described in this section.
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me.hotims.com/34751-12 or circle 12
me.hotims.com/34752-14 or circle 14
 techfocus Fluid Handling & Fluid Power
This section was edited by
Executive Editor Harry Hutchinson

Online Troubleshooting

I
Finding and fixing oil whirl when you can’t shut the turbine down
By Ali Shallwani and zeeshan ahmed aziz

n an agricultural economy fertilizer and the lube oil film turbulence causes lubrication temperature will change
is always in demand. The demand
in Pakistan is so great that, when
the Engro Fertilizers Ltd. plant in
Daharki was shut down for mainte-
nance in April 2009, management
decided the outage should last
only 13 days instead of the original
schedule of 18 days.
Maintenance included some work
on the plant’s lifeline, the centrifugal
air compressor, which is driven by
12 MW gas turbine. So it came as a
disturbing surprise that sum-
mer, when vibration values
on two proximity probes
on the compressor rose and
reached their alarm limits,
only two months after bear-
ing replacement and startup.
These two proximity
probes, designated V-143 and
V-144, are installed on the
high-pressure casing out-
board bearings. After startup
a skip at a rate of about one-half the
speed of the shaft.
Engineers brainstormed strategies
to deal with the problem without hav-
ing to take the compressor offline. As
the shaft rotates, the lube-oil film that
develops between the shaft and the
bearings is under two forces, tangen-
tial and radial. The radial force sup-
ports the dynamic loading of the shaft. tion amplitude on the outboard bear-
The tangential force is the function
of speed of the shaft and the pressure
the viscous behaviour of the oil and
will improve its damping behaviour.
In the case of the Engro plant’s
compressor, the pressure relief control
of the lube oil pump was inside the
console and was inapproachable.
A process of elimination was applied
to learn if the process load contributed
to the increase in vibration. The vibra-
ing was compared against the ambient
temperature, lube oil pressure, and the
compressor's discharge pres-
sure, discharge temperature
and discharge flow.
The vibration amplitude was
found independent of these
factors. It was established that
the increase in the vibration
amplitude was not primarily
due to the process load.
All evidence pointed to oil
whirl as the source of the
problem. As a temporary

Engro Fertilizers Ltd.

in April ’09, the vibration on measure, the engineering
these two probes was 3.0 mils team decided to reduce the
and 1.5 mils, respectively, lube oil supply temperature
but it eventually increased to m The Engro plant’s compressor showed an alarming increase in to improve the load bearing
4.0 mils and 2.2 mils under vibration. Spectrum analysis pointed to oil whirl as the cause. characteristics of the oil film.
steady-state condition. After the lube oil exchange
The operating speed of this high- profile of the oil inside the bearing was back-flushed to improve its
pressure case two-stage machine is housing. In the case of a properly cooling characteristics, the lube oil
10,500 rpm. The discharge pressure of loaded bearing, the component of temperature dropped by 8 °F. The
the compressor is 650 psig. tangential force is relatively small. A temperature drop resulted in reduc-
Vibration spectrum analysis gave the change in speed will vary the loading tions of 0.5 mil in the vibration
engineering team its first hint at the characteristics of the machine, and amplitude detected by V-143 and 0.4
cause. The spectrum data revealed a based upon the load condition of the mil on V-144.
vibration amplitude between 0.2 and bearing, the machine is expected to The company will eventually
0.8 mils at a rate of almost 0.5 times respond. It is difficult, however, to pre- inspect and replace the outboard
the component’s rate of rotation. dict whether a fluid-induced instabil- bearings of the high-pressure casing
The subsynchronous frequency cor- ity can be controlled by increasing or compressor.
responded to the increase in vibration. decreasing the speed of the machine.
The frequency is consistent with oil The profile of the lube oil film can be Ali Shallwani is machinery engineer and
whirl, a phenomenon in which the oil varied by adjusting the oil’s tem- Zeeshan Ahmed Aziz is maintenance section
wedge under the shaft gets disturbed perature and pressure. Reducing the head for Engro Fertilizers Ltd., Pakistan.

22 mechanical engineering | April 2011

 Plug-and-Play for Medical Implants

N
An integrated contact and seal is intended to reduce waste
By Sean Madanipour
o manufacturer wants to throw away with correspondingly
products because they aren’t up to small tolerances. The
spec. It doesn’t matter what busi- procedure carried a high
ness you’re in: rejects cost money. In risk of compromising
some businesses waste hurts more contacts or seals, and this
CCC Medical Devices

than others. In the world of active was a cause of product

implantable medical devices, for
example, every discarded unit can
represent thousands of dollars in
lost materials, labor, and revenue.
It’s one of the issues Bal Seal Engineering Inc. wanted to
address when it began developing its SYGNUS implant-
able contact system. The company makes a diverse range of
products, from seals used in oil fields to medical connectors.
A common feature of Bal Seal’s products is a spring design
that the company markets under the trademarked descrip-
tion “Canted-Coil.”
In early 2007, the company looked into the area of
implantable pulse generators, or “IPGs.” These are battery-
powered body implants that generate electrical impulses
used to control chronic back pain, manage cardiac rhythm
and stimulate brain activity, among other applications.
Interviews with CCC Medical Devices, an IPG manufac-
turer in Uruguay, uncovered a weak point in the production
process—inserting multiple contacts into the devices.
The insertion required manipulation of very small parts
Sean Madanipour is the medical applications engineer at Bal
Seal Engineering Inc. in Foothill Ranch, Calif. He led the SYG-
NUS project. More information about SYGNUS is available at
www.sygnus.com.
rejection that hurt pro-
ductivity and boosted
manufacturing costs.
Bal Seal’s answer
consisted of contacts m An IPG using the SYGNUS
system was developed by CCC
and integrated seals
Medical Devices of Uruguay.
that could be assembled
together in stacks. With the new integrated system, the
company reasoned, OEMs could assemble the whole con-
nector unit and mold over it, instead of inserting contacts
and seals individually into pre-molded cavities.
The solution didn’t happen overnight. First, the company
researched nascent ISO standards for four-pole cardia-
cleads. Although the standards, which defined dimensional
and functional requirements, weren’t yet ratified, the
company knew that the medical community had long been
demanding new guidelines for leads used to connect cardiac
IPGs within the body. It also knew that neuromodulation
device makers were seeking similar contact/seal solutions.
Next, the development team examined the fundamental
design of the company’s Bal Conn electrical contact, a com-
ponent first used in active implantables in 1995. The team
adapted the Bal Conn contact, which consists of a Canted-
Coil spring retained in a metal housing, so it could be inte-
grated with seals made from precision-molded silicone. 

Flow Service Lab Opens in Mid-East

The new Emerson Middle East Flow
Service Center, which opened for
business in Abu Dhabi in February, is
planning to expand its services over
the next 12 months.
Emerson Process Management, which
operates the center, said it represents an
investment of $3 million and is intended
to provide flow meter calibration services
for customers in the Middle East and
Africa. The company believes it is the first
internationally certified calibration facility
in the region.
The Middle East Flow Service Center is in
the Mussafah Industrial Area in Abu Dhabi.
According to Rock Tanner, director of
the center: “The flow service center can expect to expand these capabilities in the
calibrate Emerson Micro Motion corio- next 12 months.”
lis and Rosemount magnetic and vortex The lab is certified under ISO 9001:2008,
flow meters with 0.25- to 4-inch process and VSL, the Dutch Metrology Institute,
connections. The flow has certified the calibra-
calibration equipment tion and measurement
is capable of calibration capability of the center’s
used for liquid and gas equipment with an uncer-
applications, the flow tainty of 0.03 percent.
calibration equipment Services include flow
use water to calibrate the meter calibration, diag-
m Invitation to new service center.
flow meters. nostics, and evaluation;
Emerson plans to expand the size range meter repair, and factory-designed train-
and types of flow meters that are cali- ing in the operation of Emerson products
brated at the center. “We do not have exact and in the theory of operation and flow
dates for this expansion,” Tanner said, “but measurement principles.

April 2011 | mechanical engineering 23

 techfocus

CCC Medical Devices agreed in 2009
to test the SYGNUS system in its new
designs. The company was searching for
a way to reduce scrap, as well as shrink
overall device volume, so it pre-assem-
bled the system in one stack with the
correct number of contacts, an
end cap and a connec-
tor block with
a set screw for mechanical fixation of
the lead. Then, it welded the contacts
to the device using lead wires and put
the assembly through the epoxy header
casting process. CCC reported a “sig-
nificant improvement” in
product yield as a result,
stating that SYGNUS
not only ensured electri-
cal insulation between
seal/contact system was introduced to
the medical electronics market in Octo-
ber 2010. It is designed to be a “plug-
and-play” solution for lead interfaces
in implantable devices used for cardiac
rhythm management therapies (resyn-
chronization, defibrillation) and neu-
romodulation (spinal cord stimulation,
deep brain stimulation, and functional
electrical stimulation). Due to its small

Bal-Seal Engineering Inc.

each pair of contacts,
but also helped eliminate
epoxy leakage that
m SYGNUS integrates seal could occur during
and electrical contacts, using header casting.
BalSeal’s Canted-Coil spring.
The SYGNUS
size, low insertion force requirements,
and its current-carrying and electri-
cal isolation properties, the system is
also being considered for use in devices
designed to treat obesity, hearing loss,
and sleep apnea.

A
Remote Corrosion Monitoring
company called Permasense, with its roots to the sensors through the other strip. Wall-thickness informa-
in Imperial College London, is marketing tion travels by radio transmission to a gateway and is stored on the
a new corrosion monitoring system devel- user’s computer. The Permasense software contains an application
oped for refineries. The company says that lets users visualize the data.
the technology is not limited to petroleum The frequency of measurement is adjustable and can be as often
applications, but can be used on any metal as every few minutes.
infrastructure, where there is a need for A company can install networks of thousands of sensors through-
monitoring wall thickness. out a plant and control them remotely through the gateways.
The system was developed in cooperation According to Collins, the principal developers of the system were
with BP, which has placed it in 11 refiner- Peter Cawley, who leads the U.K. Research Centre in Non-Destruc-
ies in Europe, Australia, and the United tive Evaluation at Imperial College; Fred
States, and in a half-dozen other facili- Cegla, who teaches in the college’s
ties. Permasense is now offering the Department of Mechanical Engineering,
technology on the open market. and Jon Allin, who holds a Ph.D. from
The system combines a number of fea- Imperial College. Collins also has a
tures, including ultrasonic sensors, radio Ph.D. from the college.
transmission, proprietary software, and Cawley is Permasense’s chairman.
steel offsets called waveguides. The Allin is its chief technology officer, and
waveguides consist of a pair of steel Cegla is a director. Permasense was
strips 30 cm long that attach to the pipe formed by a technology transfer com-
wall. The sensors and transmitters pany, Imperial Innovations.
mount at the far end of the waveguides. Because the system requires no
The waveguides were designed to be cabling and the sensor units need little
poor heat conductors, to provide thermal maintenance, it is suitable for mount-
isolation for the sensors. Peter Collins, ing in places difficult or costly to reach.
Permasense’s CEO, compared the design Collins said the system “is especially
m The unit holding Permasense
to the handle of a saucepan. The system corrosion monitoring sensors
valuable where the environment is
can operate with pipe wall temperatures and transmitters stands off the harsh or inaccessible: in addition to oil
ranging from -30 °C to +600 °C. pipe wall on two waveguides, and gas facilities, this includes nuclear
which protect instrumentation
An ultrasonic wave is transmitted and other power generation, petro-
Permasense

from extreme temperatures

through one of the steel strips, interacts and carry ultrasonic waves to chemical plants, and many defense
and from the pipe.
with the pipe wall, and is reflected back environments.”

24 mechanical engineering | April 2011

 New marvels for
engineering from Wiley!
Thermal
Design
Heat Sinks,
Thermoelectrics,
Heat Pipes,
Compact Heat Exchangers,
and Solar Cells

HoSung Lee

    s     s

This updated Third Edition provides fresh Thermal Design employs tools such as
coverage on elasticity theory and related example problems, mathematical modeling,
technologies, increasing its value as a core text and software to aid students and professionals
FORBOTHUNDERGRADUATESANDGRADUATES INGRASPINGCOMPLEXDESIGNCONCEPTS

ADVANCED
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ZONGJIN LI

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This new Fourth Edition offers a complete This text takes an insightful view of the
overview of all aspects of vertical latest developments advancing concrete
transportation, including unconventional technologies through coverage of new
APPLICATIONSANDTHELATESTTRENDS THEORIESMODELSANDTESTINGTECHNIQUES

For more information please visit www.wiley.com

me.hotims.com/34752-15 or circle 15
FOCUS ON DYNAMIC CONTROL FEATURE

Unmanned aerial vehicles have

changed the face of warfare,
but UAVs can do even more
when they fly in flocks.

Airborne,
Autonomous
& Collaborative By Brandon Basso, Joshua Love, and J. Karl Hedrick.

Brandon Basso and Joshua Love are Ph.D. candidates in mechanical engineering at the University
of California at Berkeley. J. Karl Hedrick is the James Marshall Wells Professor of Mechanical Engineering
at Berkeley, specializing in nonlinear control, automotive control systems, and aircraft control.
26 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | Month 2011
 A
utonomous aircraft have
always had a certain allure
for control system design-
ers. Unstable dynamics, six
degrees of freedom, GPS,
gyroscopes, and acceler-
ometers: control doesn’t get
much more challenging than
that. And the payoff—unprec-
edented high-definition and
persistent aerial imagery, human-free operation, long-
duration missions—drove early development in the field
of aircraft autonomy.
The military was the initial customer for unmanned
aerial vehicles, beginning with target drones in the early
1900s. Inexpensive commercial autopilots expanded
the field to include the commercial, private, and hobby-
ist sectors. It is now possible to build an autonomous
UAV that can fly without human guidance for less than
$500 with open-source hardware and software. In 2011,
simple UAVs are practically out-of-the box for anyone
with a soldering iron, some epoxy, and a free weekend.
With UAVs becoming both cheap and easy to build, the
field’s leading edge is now systems—squadrons of two
or five or ten aircraft, collaborating to achieve a com-
mon goal. The ambition is to use teams of flying robots
to develop vision-based maps of large areas, track mov-
ing objects, fuse information from multiple aircraft and
multiple sensors, and perform high-level task planning.
While military applications have focused on fully
integrated, single-UAV solutions, recent research in
multi-agent autonomous systems has underscored
several benefits of collaboration among robots. A team
can possess heterogeneous capabilities, enabling
division of labor and efficient task execution. Flight
tests performed in the Center for Collaborative Control
of Unmanned Vehicles at the University of California
at Berkeley, where we work, have demonstrated the
benefits of heterogeneity. In a 2010 demonstration,
researchers tasked two UAVs, one with a low-resolution
broad field of view, and one with a high-resolution nar-
row field of view, with identifying and tracking a per-
son leaving a building while keeping the building under
surveillance. The two UAVs were able to dynamically
allocate themselves to the live task list based on their
individual sensing capabilities and the requirements of
the task themselves.
ILUSTRATION BY MARC TOBIN

That is real team-level autonomy. We have found

that multiple, smaller, specialized UAVs often can be
less expensive to design and operate than larger more
capable aircraft. The keys to their success are small
sensors, fast signal processing, and intelligent multi-
agent decentralized control systems. 

April 2011 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 27

U
nmanned aerial vehicles present several
unique sensing challenges. The relative
velocity between aircraft and targets on the
ground is typically large, and the distances
separating them can range between hun-
dreds of meters and several kilometers. And
while all aircraft are limited in payload capacity—meaning
smaller sensors, smaller computers, and limited energy
supply—most small UAVs weigh less than 100 kilograms
and must operate right on the margin, scrupulously trad-
ing off grams of computers and sensors for more battery
and more endurance.
When sensors
must pack a lot of
power in a small pack-
age, certain sensing options such as the
sort of lasers popular in many ground robot-
ics applications, are not possible. Even larger
aircraft that fly farther from their targets do not
employ lasers because of their limited range.
For UAVs and autonomous robotics in general, vision
remains one of the most prevalent sensing options. Even
with a low-cost webcam, autonomous aircraft can identify
and track humans, cars, and physical landmarks. Higher
quality sensors increase resolution and frame rate; our
center (which goes by the short form C3UV) uses a high-
definition camera that images at 112 frames per second.
Low-cost and hacker-friendly stereo cameras have
spurred a wave of development in stereo vision processing.
Thanks to open-source drivers and a healthy developer
community, sensors of these types will no doubt make
their way into the UAV domain soon.
There are as many types of UAVs as there are sensor
options. Most people have become familiar with the com-
mon military UAVs, from the 2 kg Raven to the 3,800 kg
Global Hawk. But commercially available autopilots such
as Piccolo and Kestrel can be combined with virtually any
hobbyist radio-controlled fixed-wing aircraft or rotorcraft
to make an autonomous aircraft, and open-source hard-
ware options can do a comparable job at a tenth the cost.
The C3UV lab maintains a fleet of several fixed-wing air-
28 mechanical engineering | April 2011
craft, ranging from the MLB Co.’s 40 kg Bat IV that can fly
for eight hours to the 3 kg Zagi that can fly for 30 minutes.
The Zagi was the result of searching for the sweet spot
between capability and simplicity. While larger aircraft
generally return more in terms of sensing quality, oper-
ating larger aircraft requires exponentially more man-
hours and ground-support equipment than are needed for
smaller vehicles. Additionally and perhaps more impor-
tant, for university research it is highly desirable to have
a more modifiable and versatile aircraft that doesn’t shy
away from a rapid development cycle.
The resulting Zagi platform is a delta wing aircraft that
costs less than $1,000. What it lacks in endurance and
capacity, the Zagi makes up for in cost and operational
simplicity. What’s more, these durable foam aircraft can be
prepped and launched in a matter of minutes, unlike their
larger brethren. Rapid deployment allows for less ground
support and more vehicles in the air. The key ingredient is
an intelligent collaborative control system that makes
operating one aircraft as easy as ten.
To control a complex system, such as a collabora-
tive team of UAVs, engineers often separate the
overall control system into several simpler prob-
lems. That enables the system
designers to view pieces of
the whole
from different
perspectives
and to apply the
most appropriate
control tools and
techniques for each
individual piece. The C3UV system is designed
to allow a single user to command a fleet of UAVs. To do so
we solve simpler control problems for path following, path
planning, sensing and estimation, collaboration, high-level
mission definitions, and system integration.
The path-following problem addresses how a UAV can be
controlled to follow a desired path. The UAV’s rigid body
motion is typically modeled using ordinary differential
equations to represent the position and orientation of
the vehicle. A control strategy is then found that makes
the position closely follow the desired path. If the UAV’s
dynamics are linear, and if the desired path is simply
moving to a static point, linear control techniques, such as
 proportional–integral–derivative control and pole place-
ment, may be used. That may be the case for the approxi-
mated dynamics of quad-rotors or helicopters.
However, simple models for fi xed-wing aircraft are often
non-linear. Additionally, if the desired path is more com-
plex than a fi xed point (such as a spline connecting mul-
tiple points or tasks) the resulting controller will likely be
based on non-linear techniques. These two factors result
in real UAVs often using non-linear control techniques like
feedback linearization or sliding-mode control to generate
state-space based control laws that track the desired paths.
One step up in the control hierarchy, path planning deter-
mines how to generate a path that the UAV should fol-
low to accomplish a goal—image an area, say, or patrol
a border. The path-planning problem is more abstract
than the path-following problem and assumes that
an adequate path-following controller exists. There
are many different methods of generating
the paths. Sometimes
the goal’s specification
is itself a path, such as
searching along a line.
Other times the goal
requires creating space-
filling curves to search
Consider a “search-then-track” task where a UAV must
search for, identify, and track a person. The system must
have some way of representing an estimate of where the
person is; then it must plan UAV paths based on changes
in that estimate. As a UAV flies over an area where it does
not sense the person, the estimate of the person’s location
should change, and so too should the path planned for the
UAV: it should look elsewhere.
Once the person is identified (assuming the UAV has com-
puter vision algorithms that can identify people), we would
like to keep him in the field of view while relaying the
location information to a human search party. The search
problem becomes a tracking problem, and
as the pedestrian
leaves the field of
view, their posi-
tion and likely
future position

This sequence shows the path of a

UAV during an autonomous search
experiment. The search algorithm
directs the UAV toward the most
probable target location, shown
by certainty gradient lines. After must be predicted forward
the first pass found nothing, the in time. Appropriate paths are
UAV plotted a course through the continually re-planned based
remaining unsearched area. on the updated estimates and
an area or generating future predictions.
paths that search an area Combining multiple ways of represent-
as quickly as possible. ing uncertain information, including Gaussian
Even more abstract goals can be distributions and non-Gaussian probabilistic density func-
defined, such as optimal imaging, or tions, with various path planning methods—from mini-
explicit control of the sensor footprint mizing variance or entropy to flying towards the mean or
so as to maximize image quality. In such the maximum—provides different options for translating

T
a case, the path-planning algorithms determine where the objectives with uncertainty into paths for a UAV to follow.
C3UV LAB

sensor footprint should be and computes a path that will

put the UAV there.
When a UAV is given a goal such as to map an area, track
a car, or search for lost campers, the desired behavior
depends on what it is currently looking for and what it
has already found, and where everything might be in the
future. That predictive layer, often simply referred to as
estimation, is essential for planning in the uncertain envi-
ronments in which UAVs operate. Sensing and estimation
should affect the paths planned.
he collaborative tasking system is the next
highest layer in the control system. It decides
the objective in the first place. One form of
collaboration consists of enabling teams of
UAVs to work together on a task that would be
impossible with only one UAV. An example of
tight collaboration would be fighting forest fires, where one
UAV locates hotspots and the others drop fire retardant.
Path planning for these types of behaviors may be either

April 2011 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 29


centralized or decentralized. In a centralized approach, one
computer would take in the estimates and task parameters
and generate the desired paths for all UAVs. In a decentral-
ized alternative, each individual UAV decides what it will do
based on some set of information communicated to it. Cen-
tralized algorithms tend to be conceptually simpler, easier
to optimize, but less robust to failures.
The next obvious extension of UAV collaboration is to
enable the vehicles to work together on several tasks at
the same time. It is possible to have a human user manu-
ally assign individual UAVs to specific tasks, but this
is very taxing on the operator, who is unlikely to guess
the best allocations. Automated allocation can be done
through heuristic algorithms, such as the nearest-neigh-
bor approach, which assigns the UAV closest to the task.
The heuristics produce simple rules that behave predict-
ably, but not necessarily optimally.
An alternative lies in optimization-based methods,
which can be applied in either a centralized or decentral-
ized manner and can enable the system to determine
which allocation is best according to some criterion:
speed, fuel economy, average proximity to the runway,
and so on. With collaboration through task allocation,
the human user can specify a set of tasks for the system
to work on and not worry about which UAV is working on
which task at any given moment. System intelligence of
this variety is absolutely necessary to enable one operator
to control many aircraft.
Indeed, once a system of UAVs has a notion of task assign-
ment, the human operator can begin to think abstractly
about how he wants the system as a whole to behave. To
make the process easier, researchers can develop mission
definition languages, which contain pre-defined types of
tasks. Different types of tasks have different behaviors,
such as searching an area or patrolling a border. Individual
tasks are created from these predefined types by filling in
the desired parameters, such as an identifier for an object of
interest or the GPS points defining the patrol border.
30 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | April 2011
An advanced UAV will be able to search
for and identify a person of interest. But to
track the person successfully, the control
systems must also possess a predictive
layer, that will estimate not only where
the person is, but where he may go within
a certain period of time. As shown in the
image, the person of interest, positively
identified in the red rectangle, is likely to
remain in the white shaded area in the inset
for a certain period of time.
The human user will likely never type any code
in these languages, but instead will interact with
a front-end graphical user interface that enables
the operator to create tasks defined and stored in
the mission definition language. The GUI allows
the user to use graphics to understand the state of
the system, such as which UAV is where and what
it is doing. The interface should also be simple
and intuitive enough to enable the user to draw new tasks
to be accomplished by the system. The human user should
focus on what the system is doing and what information is
being streamed back, not on how to operate the GUI.
Designing controllers for such a large and intercon-
nected system is a daunting challenge, necessitating a
structured approach and a system architecture. The field
of system architecture seeks to simplify the process of
designing, implementing, and deploying a controller on a
network of UAVs and other similar systems. Much work
in C3UV and other robotics labs has focused on designing
the tools for addressing the challenges of writing reliable,
maintainable, portable, and scalable software.
Object-oriented programming has inspired one popular
approach: component-based software design. The prin-
ciple is simple—separate individual functions into self-
contained executables and modularize on multiple levels
of hierarchy. (For instance, subsystems are a higher-level
modularization than components.) Commercially avail-
able tools that aim to organize large software projects
typical in multi-agent systems, combined with commer-
cial middleware for brokering communication, go a long
U
way to making large-scale systems more attainable.
AVs are at the dawn of a new era, but some
hard problems still remain. Low-level
control and basic sensing may be largely
solved, but teams of highly autonomous
vehicles require reasoning about situa-
tions with near-human decision-making
capability. The new control systems, unlike lower level
single-agent motion control systems, must be able to deal
with abstract and varied goals from multiple sources, a
myriad of equally abstract outputs, and no clear notion
of “system dynamics” now that the system is a cloud
decision-making entity.
In perhaps the largest departure from classical control-
lers, humans must be considered in the loop for high-level
 decision-making control systems. Research into human-
robot interaction has focused on modeling and translat-
ing between human objectives and robot objectives.
The often stated but little understood topic of “adjustable
autonomy” is at the heart of the human-robot interaction
problem. In the ideal case, human operators would have
access to a dial: on one side, complete human control over a
network of UAVs, for example, performing a complex mis-
sion of many tasks; on the other “all-computer” side of the
dial, the system would perform all tasking and high-level
reasoning about the state of the mission. Both of these
options exist independently today. But what happens in
the middle of the adjustable autonomy dial? What does a
part-human, part-automated solution look like? Who does
what, and who overrides whom?
Many of these questions are yet to be answered.
Likely, the autonomous system will have to learn
from humans how to reason like humans if there
is any hope for a collaborative human-machine
system to work. Unlike lower levels of controls,
where objectives, inputs, and outputs are clearly
C3UV LAB
defined, reasoning about high-level decision problems can
involve multiple and vague objectives, inputs, and outputs.
One potential solution would be to adopt methods such as
apprenticeship learning and supervised learning that have
been developed in the artificial intelligence community.
We hope that, in the future, control systems will be
better, faster, cheaper, and smarter to deal with human
interaction and collaborative control problems inherent
in teams of UAVs. We may then be able to see flocks of
UAVs fulfi ll their greatest potential as a means to extend
human capability and meet human needs. ■
The authors would like to acknowledge the students, post-
docs, and faculty who have worked at C3UV over the years, as
well as the support of the Office of Naval Research.
The many flavors of UAVs, clockwise
from top left: a lightweight Zagi
being readied for a test flight; a Sig
Rascal, propelled by a two-stroke
engine, can have a small camera
(inset) mounted on its wing; another
view of the Rascal; the MLB Bat IV
has a 4-meter wingspan; a package
of cameras and sensors can be
installed in the Bat’s nose.
April 2011 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 31

Mass
Customization’s
Missing Link
By David M. Anderson
M
ass customization has been talked up for
years at the wouldn’t-it-be-nice level. And
everyone agrees: yes, it would be nice.
Many manufacturers can benefit from it.
Those that could gain the most are com-
panies with challenges involving product
variety, volatile markets, unreliable forecasts, inventory
problems, and response time. But mass customization
hasn’t really caught on yet because of a missing link—that
is, knowing how to actually design and build mass-custom-
ized products.
The solution is concurrently engineering product families
and flexible processes so any product variation within a
family can be built on-demand using common parts that are
always available. Accomplishing this will require new and
different strategies:
Production strategy aims to build any variation in a
product family on demand economically, which requires
versatile flexible processes without expensive setup
charges or delays.
David M. Anderson, a licensed Professional
Engineer and ASME Fellow, is a consultant in
mass customization and design for manufactur-
ability. He holds a Doctor of Engineering degree
from the University of California at Berkeley. He
can be reached at anderson@build-to-order-
consulting.com.
32 mechanical engineering | APRIL 2011
The demand is there, but to fill it,
companies have to know how to build
mass-customized products on demand.
Supply chain strategy assures that all parts, modules,
and materials be must be always nearby and spontane-
ously resupplied by the techniques presented below.
Design strategy concurrently engineers the design of
the product families and their flexible processes to build
customized products on-demand from common parts and
materials.
Marketing strategy identifies product families that have
a need for mass-customized products and can be econom-
ically built on demand.
Grouping Products Into Families
Companies can start the transition of mass customization by
analyzing current product offerings and potential relevant
variations. These companies can initially base their sce-
narios on their installed computer numerically controlled
(CNC) machine tools, even if they are currently used in a
batch mode.
Product families are not the same as product lines, which
are a marketing or management convenience. Product fam-
ily grouping must be determined by design, manufacturing,
and supply chain criteria, not adjacent pages in catalogs or
Web site structure.
The marketing department can offer information about the
range of potential customizations that would be of value to
potential customers.
Companies should not limit their thinking to current
offerings or current customers or even current distribution
and sales channels. One of Dell’s innovations was to sell
assembled-to-order computers directly to customers.
As it considers customization opportunities, a company
should avoid extremes—that is, wanting to offer every
possible customization or limiting the selection too strin-
gently.
The next step is to group products and potential varia-
tions into candidate product families that could be built
on demand.
The goal is to create product families that are compatible
with on-demand manufacturing principles.
Not all product variations are feasible for mass customi-
zation, so a company must focus on the product families
and variations that are compatible with mass customi-
zation principles. Products that don’t fit into any group
should be moved out of the mass customization operation.
They can be outsourced, or just dropped.
The marketing department will help rank the relative
opportunities of various product families. If marketing
opportunities don’t match well with product families that
can be made on equipment already in the plant, the com-
pany must restructure product family groupings or make
production processes flexible enough to accommodate
market needs.
Standardization
Mass customization depends on aggressive standardization,
which standardizes on “the best” parts, materials, and mod-
ules that are needed for the most demanding application.
These versatile parts are then used in all relevant products
in the family, even if some products get a “better” part than
they need. The illustrated example, to be discussed later in
this article, shows several instances of standardizing on the
single best material.
This principle may appear to raise the part cost for simpler
products. However, there will be a net cost saving for the
company because higher order quantities will benefit from
economies of scale. There will be more savings in material
overhead from fewer parts to purchase, less inventory to
pay for, less expediting, and lower quality costs from better
qualifications of part and suppliers.
Spontaneous Supply Chain
Standard parts and materials can be made available sponta-
neously as they are needed for on-demand production with-
out internal purchasing, IT system, or inventory expenses,
through a variety of means.
Steady flows can be arranged for aggressively standard-
ized parts or materials. If there is only one type of part or
material needed, then forecasting many types would be
avoided. “Ordering” becomes as simple as matching the
tonnage in to the tonnage out. In other words, the incom-
ing flow would be equal to the monthly consumption of
the plant.
Min/max techniques can be used for raw materials like
sheet metal, which is consumed until the stack reaches a
minimum level, usually marked on the rack or wall. This
triggers an automatic reorder of the material to bring it up
the maximum level without the usual purchasing costs. The
reordering process could be manual (where someone calls
in another predetermined order) or a person or a sensor
notifies purchasing or a computer to place another predeter-
mined order. In supermarkets, computerized reorders are
triggered by the bar-code entry at the check-out counter.
Linear cut-off can greatly reduce raw material variety by
cutting linear materials on demand at the points of use. A
cut-off machine could be fully programmable or a worker
could position the material up against a programmable or a
manual stop. Linear materials include all forms of bar stock,
extrusions, strips, tubing, hose, wire, rope, cable, chain, and
so forth.
Breadtruck delivery (sometimes called “free stock”) is an
easy way to resupply small, inexpensive parts, like fasteners.
Instead of depending on forecasts to trigger a manufactur-
ing resource planning system to generate purchase orders,
all the jellybean parts can always be available in bins at all
the points of use. This eliminates all the tasks involved in
receiving and internal part distribution. A local supplier is
contracted to keep the bins full, and it bills the company
monthly for what has been used, much like the way bread is
resupplied by a breadtruck to a market.
Kanban is an effective way to automatically resupply parts
that can even be made in batches. In the two-bin kanban
Synergy With Build-to-Order
A new initiative for just mass customization may not
have enough critical mass to justify all the necessary
changes or to set up a new plant to do this. Fortunately,
there is a natural synergy between mass customization
and build-to-order (BTO) of standard products. They
share the same flexible operations and spontaneous
supply chain.
The main difference would be that BTO product orders
would be specified by a predetermined product code in
a published catalog or Web site. In contrast, mass-cus-
tomized product orders would include unique informa-
tion and/or customized dimensions.
This synergy can push the combined volume over the
critical mass threshold necessary to justify implement-
ing mass customization and enable the company to
apply mass customization benefits to BTO products also.
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 33
resupply system, as each bin of parts is consumed, it goes
back to its source for a refill. Another full bin is used until
the first bin is resupplied. The lower right of the schematic
illustration shows two rows of kanban bins. The front row
is used until a bin is emptied, in which case a full bin slides
forward and the empty bin goes back to its source to be filled
and returned before the active bin runs out. Kanban works
best for semi-standard parts without too much variety,
which would increase work-in-process inventory and clutter
assembly stations with too many part bins. Alternatively,
kanbans can be used for two pallets, two piles of parts, two
squares on the floor, or two truck trailers.
Flexible Processing
A prerequisite to flexible processing needed for mass cus-
tomization is the elimination of setup. Spontaneous resupply
techniques, for instance, eliminate the setup time for getting
parts to the assembly area, because parts are always nearby.
Standardizing parts and materials eliminates the need to
change the raw materials at workstations.
You can eliminate machine programming delays by
instantly downloading prewritten programs from a program
library or generating unique programs on demand.
You can eliminate part/material loading setups with flex-
ible fixturing and locating geometries for the whole product
family. For instance, a flexible fixture for a family of rectan-
gular parts would position all parts on a machine tool table
against a common rear edge and a common side edge, with all
dimensions referenced from each datum. A family of printed
circuit boards could all be located by standard tooling holes
that mount to the machine’s standard tooling pins.
Displaying instructions at each workstation can eliminate
the setup time to find and understand manual instructions.
The following example shows a flexible line that can
spontaneously fabricate and assemble products that need
any combination of laser or plasma cutting, bending, milling,
turning, programmable cut-off, manual subassembly, and
final assembly.
The model can also include many other processes. Hoff-
To Explore More
The author goes into more detail about many of the prin-
ciples and practices of mass customization in two books:
Design for Manufacturability & Concurrent Engineering
(CIM Press, 2010) and Build-to-Order & Mass Customi-
zation (CIM Press, 2008)
For more on kanban and breadtruck resupply systems,
see www.build-to-order-consulting.com/kanban.htm.
A case study of Hoffman Engineering’s model is avail-
able online at www.build-to-order-consulting.com/hoff-
man.htm.
34 mechanical engineering | April 2011
man Engineering, which makes electrical enclosures, used
the model when building a $30 million plant near Lexington,
Ky., to mass-customize large sheet metal enclosures.
The schematic illustration shows the flow of parts (indi-
cated by solid lines) and information (dashed lines). Boldface
words refer to labels on the illustration.
The process starts with a dialog between manufacturer and
customer. The customer’s questions are quickly explored
and a valid customization is determined from predetermined
rules. Various “what if” scenarios can be explored, complete
with price and availability quotes, by using configuration
software, or configurators.
When the configuration has been optimized and approved
by the customer, the order information is sent by modem
to the factory’s order entry database. The order informa-
tion is converted into various data packets that go to on-line
assembly instruction monitors, which tell workers how to
assemble each product, and to a CAD/CAM workstation.
The workstation is an automatic or semiautomatic com-
puter that enters customer-order data into CAD drawings.
The drawings are created with floating dimensions that
accept the customer’s dimensions and then adjust all the
part drawings. Finally, this station automatically converts
each customized drawing into unique CNC programs for
the production equipment.
The actual production starts when sheet metal from the
standard sheet stack is fed into the laser cutter. Left-over
material can be used for parts, if they can be designed to use
the same standard material.
If the manufacturer uses enough of a single type of sheet
metal, the metal could be procured in bulk and fed from a
coil, which would incur lower costs and eliminate the waste
that occurs on the ends of sheets.
Using a laser cutter or plasma cutter lets all the sheet metal
cutting—including the outside shape and all holes, slots, and
other features—be performed by one machine tool. Alterna-
tively, a CNC shear could do the shearing and a CNC punch
press could punch the holes and slots.
The output is a set of cut sheets for each product. Some
may go through the CNC press brake for bending, and
the rest may go to other processes or straight through to
final assembly.
Milled parts are made from a standard blank (ideally only
one, as shown) in the CNC mill, which machines any varia-
tions for this product family. Similarly, the CNC lathe (or
CNC screw-machine) makes all the turned parts for the fam-
ily, ideally from a single size of bar stock.
Many factories use several CNC cut-off machines, which
can be programmed to cut off bars, tubes, extrusions, coiled
strip, or any long part that also has shorter versions. Hoff-
man’s plant uses several of them. Each time they’re used,
they may reduce part variety from several types to one,
which should save more overhead cost than the value of any
material waste.
Mass-customized assembly does not need automation,
From Build-to-Order & Mass Customization , ©2008 by David M. Anderson
which can be expensive and take a long time to imple-
ment. Manual techniques can mass-customize assembly
on demand.
In the subassembly station, parts supplied by the kanban
system are assembled according to instructions displayed
on the monitor for each product. One standard fastener,
dispensed through an autofeed screwdriver, accomplishes
all fastening. Final assembly is also directed by a computer
monitor that gives appropriate instructions for each product.
The Mass Customization Business Model
As a business model, mass customization offers an unbeat-
able combination of responsiveness and cost to deliver what
customers want when they want it. Companies can achieve
substantial cost advantages, by eliminating the costs of
inventory, forecasting, purchase orders, expediting, kitting,
setup, and inefficient fire-drill efforts.
Mass customization practices can substantially simplify
supply chains—not just manage them—to the point where
parts and materials can be pulled into production spontane-
ously without forecasts, manufacturing resource planning,
purchasing approvals, waiting, or warehousing.
Mass customization enables manufacturers to be the
first to market with new technologies and to efficiently
mass-customize products for niche markets, countries,
regions, industries, and individual customers. They’ll
also see sales and profits grow by bringing in new sales for
standard BTO products as well as for customized, deriva-
tive, and niche market products, while expanding sales to
current customers. n
APRIL 2011 | mechanical engineering 35
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April 2011 | mechanical engineering 37

 Stacking processing chips
can make for more compact
computers. But it will take
advances in microfluidics to
make such dense number
BY AVRAM BAR-COHEN AND KARL J. L. GEISLER crunching practical.
38 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | Month 2011
T
he inexorable march towards smaller,
faster, and more capable electronic
systems has been breathtaking. In
1946, ENIAC, the first programmable
computer, housed 50,000 vacuum
tubes in 80 feet of cabinetry, drew 150
kilowatts of power, and performed
5,000 operations per second. Today’s
off-the-shelf Pentium microprocessor jams 2 billion
transistors onto a 2.2 square centimeter sliver of silicon
roughly 0.3-to-0.7-millimeter thick, draws 80 watts of
power, and can perform 3.2 billion operations per second.
The development of the integrated circuit, independently
invented by Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert
Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor, in the late 1950s placed
the information industry on this torrid pace of innova-
tion. For the past 35 years, the number of transistors on
integrated circuits has doubled approximately every two
years. This doubling effect is the so-called Moore’s Law,
named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore.
These thousands, then millions, and now billions
of transistors switching on and off generate heat. In
today’s most advanced systems, silicon chips—called
dies by their manufacturers—operating at 85 °C can
generate average heat fluxes of more than 100 W/cm 2
and produce localized, submillimeter
hot spots often exceeding 1 kW/cm 2 .
This is within an order of magnitude
H CONVECTION
of the heat released into space by
the surface of the sun. Without our
ability to remove ever-greater heat
fluxes from the surfaces of integrated
L can take advantage
circuits and other electronic compo-
nents, we would never realize the ben-
efits of their prodigious computational
capability.
Engineers often specify air-cooled
heat sinks or liquid-cooled cold plates
to stabilize high-flux chips thermally.
δ t
They are attached by successive layers
of heat spreaders (usually copper plates
that diffuse heat over a greater area)
and thermal interface materials (often
thermally conductive particle-filled silicones or greases).
CHIP STACKS
As the performance of microprocessors has begun to
approach the complexity of the human brain, the three-
dimensional architecture of nature’s most powerful
biological computer has inspired new ways to organize
dies. One promising approach is the three-dimensional
chip stack. Here, adjacent chips are piled directly above
one another, typically separated by 10 to 50 microm-
eters, rather than located next to one another and
separated laterally by 10 to 50 millimeters on a printed
circuit board.
There are several reasons why chip stacks will help us
maintain the cadence of Moore’s Law far into the future.
The vertical placement of one chip on top of the other
provides a third dimension of interconnected transis-
tors and functional electronic macrocells. Such close
proximity—micrometers rather than millimeters—
nearly eliminates significant time delays as signals travel
between chips.
Equally important, fusing chips with different func-
tional capabilities—processing, memory, power, commu-
nications, and environmental sensing—into a single chip
stack could lead to compact microsystems of unrivaled
capability and truly ubiquitous computing.
Engineers have already begun to design products to
leverage those advantages. Stacks of memory chips have
been in commercial use for more than ten years. Yet
rudimentary stacks of two or three low-power logic dies
are just now beginning to find application in portable
computers and high-end cell phones.
Until now, however, thermal problems have stymied
attempts to commercialize high-performance chip
stacks. Such future chip stacks will require cooling sys-
tems that can handle heat densities above 1,000 W/cm 3
and heat fluxes above 100 W/cm2 while maintaining chip
operating temperatures below 100 °C at ambient tem-
peratures of 40° C.
STACKED FOR
W Vertically
oriented stacks of
semiconductor dies
of natural convention
for liquid cooling.
g Left, a conceptual
diagram of a chip
stack. Right, a
possible stacking
arrangement of
chips separated by
solder balls.
COOLING OPTIONS
Today’s baseline thermal packaging approach for three-
dimensional chip stacks involves conduction through
solids. Conduction carries heat generated by various chip
and interconnect layers either up to the top of the pack-
age and its heat sink or down to the underlying printed
circuit board and a supporting cold plate.
A more advanced approach to thermal packaging might
add solid silicon carbide or diamond thermal conduc-
Avram Bar-Cohen is Distinguished University Professor of
Mechanical Engineering at the University of Maryland in
College Park. Karl J. L. Geisler is a research scientist/engineer
with 3M in Maplewood, Minn.
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 39
 tors, or interposers, between the bare dies. The inter- convection to a liquid.
posers facilitate lateral transport of dissipated heat to Despite their relatively primitive implementation,
the package periphery. Unfortunately, thermal contact liquid cooling technology enabled engineers to signifi-
resistance, which limits conduction between the chip cantly improve heat removal capacity and create denser,
and interposer, together with limitations to effective more efficient circuits. The barrier-busting performance
cooling of the interposer at its edges or the outside sur- achieved by aggressive cooling made these computers
faces of a chip stack package, erodes the performance of successful in the marketplace. It also set the stage for the
this approach. development of more advanced thermal control tech-
The thermal management of the human brain, the niques that could overcome the inefficiencies associated
body’s most concentrated heat source, offers a potential with conduction through solids and multiple interfaces.
alternative. The brain’s thermal management relies on Like indirect cooling, direct cooling of bare chips has a
blood flow through the extensive multiscalar network substantial history. Starting in 1985, four supercomputers
of blood vessels to stabilize its employed dielectric liquids to cool
temperature. One near-term way the external surface of bare high-
to mimic this system would be to
NO GUTS, NO GLORY performance chips. Cray engineers
direct cool liquid from manifolds used immersion in a perfluorinated
into microchannels machined liquid on the Cray-2, and gas-assisted
or etched into the interposers. evaporation of a perfluorinated liquid
This solution overcomes edge- on the Cray-3. Control Data relied
cooling limitations, but remains on immersion in liquid nitrogen for
constrained by the resistance its ETA-10. Supercomputer Systems’
to thermal conduction between SS-1 used submerged, impinging liq-
the chip and the solid body of the uid jets to remove close to 100 W/cm2
interposer. Moreover, engineers from the chip surface.
would need to drill hundreds or Thermal control of avionic com-
even thousands of through holes, AVRAM BAR-COHEN discusses issues ponents by direct immersion in low-
of electronics, thermal management,
or vias, into the interposers to and global competitiveness. A video
boiling-point fluids dates back to the
accommodate electrical inter- recording of Bar-Cohen’s address open cycle, pool evaporators devel-
connections between chips. to a plenary session of the 2010 ASME oped in the late 1940s. Such systems
A more elegant implementa- International Mechanical Engineering can dissipate large amounts of heat
tion involves immersing the chip Congress & Exposition, in Vancouver, over long operating periods, though
is available at www.memagazine.org.
stack in a dielectric liquid, which they must condense and recirculate
is electrically insulating. This the vapor they generate. They can do
exploits the gaps between the chips and other naturally this with a remote condenser connected to the immer-
occurring passages as channels for fluid flow through the sion module; condensing surfaces placed directly in the
three-dimensional package. It also provides high heat vapor space above the boiling liquid; or a submerged heat
transfer rates directly at the chip surfaces, and avoids the exchanger in the liquid.
detrimental effects of the contact resistance encountered Researchers are now applying the experience gained
with interposers. with direct liquid cooling of macro-sized systems to the
That sort of embedded microfluidic cooling should small, new, 1 cm 3 stacks of bare chips.
prove very efficient in dissipating high rates of volumet-
ric heat generation. It would eliminate hot spots, hold COOLING CAPACITY
all silicon layers to a nearly uniform temperature, and In a paper presented at the August 2010 International
accommodate Joule heating in high current-density Heat Transfer Conference (IHTC-14), organized by
interconnects. It could also eliminate detrimental flow ASME on behalf of the Assembly for International Heat
instabilities, such as flow maldistributions, oscillations, Transfer Conferences in Washington, D.C., we sum-
and reversals, caused when momentary temperature marized the results of several of our distinct immersion
spikes in one microchannel increase the heat dissipated cooling studies to define the potential of direct liquid
into neighboring channels. cooling of three-dimensional chip stacks. The paper
demonstrated that immersion cooling with dielectric
IMMERSION COOLING liquids could become the cooling technique of choice for
Cooling microelectronic components with liquids began this emerging packaging paradigm.
to attract serious attention in the mid-1980s, when IBM, We assessed four possible immersion cooling strategies.
Honeywell, Sperry-Univac, Control Data, and Hitachi all Two are passive: natural convection and pool boiling.
introduced indirectly water-cooled mainframe comput- Passive immersion cooling relies on natural circulation
ers. These indirect techniques involved removing heat caused when a heated fluid rises to the top of a channel,
conductively from a chip or chip package, followed by sucking in cooler fluid behind it. Pool boiling is a two-

40 mechanical engineering | APRIL 2011

phase process that occurs when surfaces get hot enough to
vaporize the coolant. The phase change from liquid to gas MANY WAYS OF STACKING
absorbs more heat than convection alone, and the resulting Chip stacks combine semiconductor dies and come
vapor bubbles vigorously pump the liquid coolant through in many possible configurations: (a) wire bonded die
the channels and enclosure. stacks; (b) wire bonded package stacks; (c) flip chip
We also considered two active cooling strategies that aug- die stacks; (d) solder ball package stacks; and (e)
ment natural circulation with a pumping mechanism to substrate and solder ball folded stacks. As dies grow
more powerful, they generate heat that is difficult to
produce forced flow. This boosts flow rates, thus increasing dissipate without liquid cooling.
the performance of both convective and ebullient (pool boil-
ing) cooling methods.
a
In the study, we determined the cooling densities for all
four immersion cooling techniques, assuming the use of
Fluorinert FC-72, a commonly used perfluorinated dielec-
tric liquid. For passive systems, the cooling densities ranged
from 25 W/cm3 for natural convection to 200 to 400 W/
cm3 for pool boiling. For active technologies, the densities
were 100 to 300 W/cm3 for forced convection and more than
2,000 W/cm3 for flow boiling. We found the optimum die
H
spacings for both single and two-phase direct cooling to be
in the range of 0.2 mm to 0.6 mm for typical microelectron-
W
ics geometries, though substantial cooling densities could be
b
achieved at less-than-optimum spacings.
Immersion cooling’s combination of thin die gaps and high
(and often very high) cooling densities will make it possible
to build full-powered g stacks and three-dimensional packag-
es comprising many different chips. Passive natural convec-
tion and/or pool boiling could provide the thermal manage-
ment capability needed for the stacks of chips anticipated
for use in smart phones, laptop and notebook computers,
and many other types of portable equipment. Alternatively,
t c
the pumped flow of dielectric liquids through microgaps
in three-dimensional stacks could meet many of the most
extreme thermal management requirements for high-per-
formance 3-D microsystems.
The continuing miniaturization of semiconductor transis-
tors and the growing importance of three-dimensional pack-
aging necessitate the parallel development of a new thermal d
management paradigm—embedded microfluidic cooling—
that mimics the temperature stabilization technique of the
mammalian brain. The first implementations of this new
paradigm will likely involve microchanneled interposers,
since the wiring in interposes lets engineers connect chips
whose inputs and outputs would not ordinarily match up.
Eventually, those inputs and outputs will align. Then chip
stack immersion in dielectric liquid, which exploits the gaps
between chips created by microfabrication and assembly
methods in addition to other passages in the three-dimen- e
sional package, can be expected to emerge as the thermal
management technique of choice for three-dimensional
microsystems.
The inherent advantages of direct liquid cooling are well
established: It provides high heat transfer rates directly at
the chip surface while avoiding the detrimental effects of
contact resistance encountered with interposers. Neverthe-
less, additional research and development will be required
to support the detailed design and optimization of such two-
phase microfluidic cooling systems. n

April 2011 | mechanical engineering 41

FOCUS ON POWER & ENERGY
the sky’s the limit
t
By Louis Michaud and Nilton Renno
he red-and-white 600-foot tower rose up from the
fields near Manzanares in south-central Spain,
looking like an industrial smokestack lost in a rural
landscape. The tower, now long demolished, wasn’t
sending smoke into the atmosphere, but instead was
a chimney for air heated under plastic and glass pan-
els at its base. The goal was to see if the draft created
by rising air could be harnessed to generate clean electricity.
The experimental plant, constructed in 1982, had a maxi-
mum output of 50 kW and could generate electricity without
fuel. But the costs of construction and land acquisition have
been a stumbling block for groups trying to replicate this
design on a commercial level.
We believe the key to making this sort of technology practi-
cal is to rely not on simple updraft confined by physical
towers, but on rising air that twists to form a vortex. Such
vortices can confine the updraft, enabling them to rise undi-
luted many miles into the sky.
By building what we call an atmospheric vortex engine,
one could capture the mechanical energy produced during
upward heat convection when warm or humid air is admitted
tangentially at the base of a cylindrical enclosure. Essentially,
Louis Michaud is the president of AVEtec Energy Corp. in Sarnia, Ontario. He
retired from Exxon Mobil Corp. after 25 years as a process control engineer.
Nilton Renno is a professor in the Department of Atmospheric, Oceanograph-
ic, and Space Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
42 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | APRIL 2011
Thermodynamics puts limits on the
efficiency of thermal power plants.
Cleverly reconfiguring cooling towers
can lead to a way of recapturing
some of that waste heat.
it’s the same source of power that drives hurricanes, torna-
does, and waterspouts. The feasibility of the concept has been
demonstrated theoretically and with small scale models, but
not yet in an installation large enough to power turbines.
In a natural draft chimney, like the one at Manzanares,
the draft at the bottom is proportional to the difference in
temperature between the rising warm air and the surround-
ing cooler ambient air, as well as to the height of the chimney.
In a vortex, the centripetal force in the rotating column of air
replaces the physical chimney and prevents cooler ambient
air from entering the rising warm air stream. This happens
because, when rotating air is forced inward, its tangential
velocity increases to conserve angular momentum, resulting
in an increase in centrifugal force which in turn pushes the
air back outward as evidenced by the smooth appearance of
dust devils, waterspouts, and tornadoes.
The diameter of the vortex is self-regulating and adjusts
itself until centrifugal force balances radial pressure differ-
ential. The rising air in the vortex chimney is continuously
replaced by moist or warm air at its bottom. The chimney and
the rising air column are essentially the same.
Thermodynamically, the rising of air in this way entails
work, equal to the reduction in the enthalpy of the volume
of air minus the increase in its potential energy. Because the
sun warms the lower atmosphere during the day, the heat
content of oceanic tropical surface air is usually sufficient to
produce work of between 1,000 and 2,000 J/kg. (A kilogram
of air occupies about a cubic meter.) A temperature increase
of just 3 °C increases the work of convection by 1,000 J/kg.
Indeed, sea surface temperatures of 26 °C are sufficient to
sustain a hurricane; tropical sea surface temperatures can be
as high as 31 °C.
By comparison, the temperature of power plant waste heat
can be as high as 50 °C.
As the heated air rises, it will cool, but moisture-saturated
air cools more slowly than dry air because the heat of con-
densation reduces the cooling rate of the rising air. Heat of
condensation comes into play once the condensation level has
been reached; that’s usually at elevations of between 1,500
and 10,000 feet.
The heat source in a solar chimney, which cannot extend
high enough to reach the condensation level, is sensible heat.
The heat source in a vortex engine, where the vortex can
extend well past the condensation level, can be either latent
heat or sensible heat. The heat source in an atmospheric vor-
tex engine can have a lower temperature than the heat source
in a conventional solar chimney because evaporation into
unsaturated air can occur at lower temperature than sensible
heat flux. Reduced pressure at the base of the vortex also
further enhances the heat transfer from water to air thereby
increasing the enthalpy of the air and the power production.
An atmospheric vortex engine would increase the thermo-
dynamic efficiency of a thermal plant in other ways. Cooling
towers transfer waste heat to the atmosphere, which gener-
ally has an ambient temperature of between, say, 0 °C and
30 °C in temperate regions. A vortex that rises tens of thou-
sands feet effectively dumps the waste heat at the tropopause,
which is the boundary between the lower atmosphere and the
stratosphere. Dumping waste heat at the tropopause makes
the effective temperature of the heat sink much colder—in
the neighborhood of -60 °C. By our calculations, rejecting
1,000 MW of waste heat from a 1,500 MW thermal plant
to the upper atmosphere instead of doing it at ground level
can generate an additional 200 MW of electrical energy. In
addition, an AVE would reduce the cooled water temperature,
a
thereby improving the efficiency of the conventional part of
the power plant.
n atmospheric vortex engine would look like a
natural draft cooling tower with a controlled vortex
emerging from its open top. An AVE tower could
have a diameter of 300 feet and stand 10 to 20 stories
tall. Inside, the structure might be reminiscent of an open-
air stadium, except for the presence of a vortex, some 100
feet across, anchored at the center and extending as far as 10
miles into the air.
The vortex would be generated when warm air enters the
area within a cylindrical wall via tangential entry ducts,
thereby filling it with spinning warm air. An annular roof
with a central circular opening forces the air to converge. As
the air escapes through the roof, a vortex with a diameter
somewhat smaller than the opening would form.
Once the vortex is established, the pressure difference
between the surrounding ambient air and the base of the
vortex draws in air through the tangential ducts with enough
force to turn turbines. Thus, the vortex engine could extract
energy in two ways: indirectly, by increasing the efficiency of
the attached thermal power plant, and via the direct action of
wind turbines situated in the ducts.
Unlike naturally occurring vortices in hurricanes and tor-
nados, the airflow in the vortex engine can be controlled—or
even cut off—by adjustable restrictors either upstream of the
heat exchangers or within the tangential entry ducts. This
means that while the vortex may possess great power, it can-
not become destructive.
We have tested the atmo-
spheric vortex engine concept
in small-scale models. The
larger of the models was some
12 feet in diameter. Four 20
kW propane heaters located
upstream of the tangential
entry ducts were used to
warm the air. As expected,
the warm air spiraled out of
the top of the model to create
a vortex between one and two
Heated air fed tangentially into
feet wide and extending up to this cylinder created a whirl-
60 feet in the air. The vortex, wind during an experiment.
which looked like a small dust
devil, was rendered visible with saltpeter smoke emitters.
To fully demonstrate the AVE concept, however, it’s likely
necessary to build and test a prototype at an existing thermal
power plant. Building the prototypes at existing thermal
power plants would be advantageous because of the avail-
ability of a controlled heat source of relatively high tempera-
ture. Possessing some 20 or 30 percent of the capacity of the
existing cooling tower, the prototype would be able to accept
a fraction of the waste heat from the plant. A small gas-fired
power plant in a rural location with a dry cooling tower that
is considering adding cooling capacity would be a good can-
didate site for an AVE prototype, since it could be developed
without risk to existing plant operation.
As a minimum, the prototype would add valuable cooling
capacity and would reduce cooled water temperature for the
plant. But once vortex control has been demonstrated under
low-heat and low-airflow conditions, turbines could be added
to the air ducts. Eventually, the prototype could be replaced
with a full-scale vortex engine capable of handling the com-
plete plant-cooling load while also producing power.
Although the atmospheric vortex engine offers many
advantages for thermal power plant cooling, it should be
noted that man-made heat sources are not required for
the AVE to generate power. Air that has been warmed
over sun-drenched land or warm seawater can be the heat
source. Thanks to the vortex’s ability to reach miles into the
atmosphere, it doesn’t take a high temperature to drive the
built-in turbines.
While the atmospheric vortex engine promises to draw a
great deal of energy from the waste heat of fossil fuel-burning
power plants, they have the potential to generate electricity
using no fuel at all. n
APRIL 2011 | mechanical engineering 43
44 mechanical engineering | February 2011

cale
S atters
M IT’S TIME
T O RE E VALUATE
THE WAY W E
By Marc
T HINK ABO
Goldsmit
F
or electric utilities, this is how
the planning process has always
worked: you see that the load is
increasing, you project what the
demand will be 10 years down the
road, and then you raise capital to
build a plant large enough—in the
1,000 MWe range—to address that
needed capacity.
These days, however, things are not always so
straightforward. For instance, ask a utility’s power
supply team, and they will tell you that it’s much
harder to project demand, what with the uncertain
economy and the new technologies coming on
line that may either increase the load or reduce it.
Ask the board of directors, and you’ll find they are
worried about betting the company on a large new
capital project. Investors have indicated that they
have little appetite for “risky” projects.
I’ve seen utilities stuck in this bind, with uncer-
tainties in demand projection making it too risky to
build the plants to meet it. The way out, I believe, is
to reassess the third part of the process: the scale
at which utilities build their plants.
Marc Goldsmith is a past governor of ASME and head of Marc Goldsmith & Associates LLC, a consulting group in Newton, Mass.
focus on POWER & ENERGY
UT
T
h
HE SIZ E OF POW
ER PL ANTS.
For decades, the common wisdom has been that
increasing the scale of new electric generating
units would lead to declining electricity costs. But
now several new factors—from changing technol-
ogy to the rising investment cost of large-scale
generation and political difficulties in siting large
generators and transmission networks—point
toward a nexus where smaller generation may
actually create more value, especially when used
in conjunction with programmable load shaping.
It’s a new world, and the sooner utilities embrace
it, the better it will be for their bottom lines.
The case for building large power plants used to
be self-evident. When you build at a large scale,
you reduce the impact of capital transaction costs,
which are often similar whether you are building
a 70 MW plant or a 700 MW one, and increase
construction and staffing efficiency. You also
reduce your exposure to the harrowing process of
siting the plants, since you can concentrate your
resources on moving through as few regulatory
and community relations thickets as possible.
From an engineering perspective, larger units
generally run with greater fuel efficiency. Today’s
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 45
primary generators are natural gas-fired turbines in either
a combined cycle or combustion turbine configuration. As
these units have gotten larger, the heat rates have declined,
meaning they use less fuel per kilowatt-hour produced
across a broader range of operating states, making them
more flexible and efficient when operating.
Since the economic crisis of 2008, however, load growth
has declined with the declining economy, large capital
investments have become more rare and difficult, the public
is angry, and power technology is becoming smaller, smarter,
and more efficient. The elements that argue for greater scale
have become less important and new factors have arisen that
may reduce or mitigate the advantages of scale.
First, the rate of growth in electric demand has become
much less predictable. Usage will presumably increase
with economic recovery, but at a pace that is very difficult
to anticipate. What if the growth rate remains at only 1
percent, instead of the 3 percent rate that had been custom-
ary? At a 1 percent growth rate, the New England market
(run by Independent System Operator New England) would
add approximately 260 MW per year. Four years of steady
growth is necessary to support a new large 1,000
MW plant, assuming no one
TO READ MORE
Building the New Electric Grid
� Utilities are slowly—and not without difficulty—
making the smart grid a reality. Mechanical Engineering
reported on their progress in December 2009.
Campus Heat
and Power
� A gas-fired cogene-
ration plant at the Uni-
versity of Connecticut
is a small-scale power
system featured in the
December 2006 issue.
else is building in the
market. In today’s uncertain and competitive market-
place, it would be risky to assume that when the plant comes
online the load will be there. But since it is very hard to turn
those large-scale investments off, the result could be exces-
sive capacity, which is another way of saying a lot of wasted
dollars and unhappy stakeholders.
In larger markets, the risk is smaller but is still present for
both a merchant plant (one funded by investors to sell elec-
tricity in the competitive wholesale power market) and for a
rate-making body that needs to match reliability with cost.
It is also becoming more difficult to raise capital for large
plants. The high cost of large new generations of baseload
46 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | APRIL
February
2011
2011
renewable, nuclear, or carbon-free power plants is difficult
to support in today’s investment environment. For example,
earlier this year Constellation Energy withdrew its plan to
develop a new 1,600 MWe nuclear plant in Maryland due
to an inability to raise the needed capital without stronger
federal loan guarantees.
Smaller plants, conversely, have much less uncertainty
attached to their financing. Gary Krellenstein, manag-
ing director of the tax-exempt capital markets group at JP
Morgan Chase, testified last year to the United States House
Committee on Science and Technology about the advantages
of funding small modular reactors over traditional designs.
“First, the construction of SMRs requires less capital,”
Krellenstein said, “due to their size and other attributes,
than conventional nuclear power plants. Second, the smaller
capital requirements would allow a single company to build
an SMR as opposed to the large and diverse consortium that
can greatly complicate investors’ required due diligence as
well as their analysis of the management structure of what is
already a complex undertaking. Third, the financing for large
conventional nuclear plants requires utilities to bear signifi-
cant default risk such that the construction of each plant is
essentially a ‘bet the company’ event.”
It’s not just financial risk; there’s growing a political risk
involved in proposing a large power plant. It is increas-
ingly difficult to obtain permits
for power plants that require
large land areas and are near
electrical loads. This occurs
for many reasons. NIMBYism
and NIMTOOism (a neologism
for Not In My Term Of Office)
are frequently cited, but no less
important is the increased price
for land or rights of way and the
difficulty in air quality permit-
ting, which is a higher bar in
more congested areas.
Recent protests, including
opposition from political lead-
ers and government agencies,
against recertification of existing
plants such as Indian Point in
New York and Vermont Yankee
demonstrate a high level of sus-
picion regarding large-scale gen-
eration on both environmental and safety grounds. There’s
no reason to think this will diminish going forward.
Some of this will be true of power plants of any size, but
a smaller unit that seems less disruptive to the neighbors
and fits more with the community’s self-image may have an
advantage when it comes to obtaining permits and land—and
avoiding protesters.
The arguments for building smaller-scale power plants
aren’t simply financial and political. I’ve seen the technology
of power production change in recent years so as to reduce
many of the disadvantages that once dogged smaller plants.
Smaller plants today are both more efficient and more
economical to operate than past designs—and thus offer the
possibility of overcoming many of the advantages of scale.
And progress in this area is continuing, both at the grid level
and at the distributed or community level.
Smaller combined-cycle gas turbines, such as those from
Caterpillar’s Solar Turbines subsidiary, are already in wide-
spread use. CCGTs recapture waste heat to increase power
output over older gas generator designs. Combined with
better control systems, this offers a 15 percent or greater
improvement in efficiency over previous designs, substan-
tially reducing the usual deficiency in heat rate of smaller-
scale options.
Smaller generation can be factory-built rather than con-
structed on site, and created as modular, repeated designs
rather than one-offs, thus reducing cost, improving quality,
minimizing regulatory requirements, and avoiding weather
risk during the construction phase. And as smaller plants
become more automated, fewer people are needed to run
them, and the advantage of scale in the staffing dimension
decreases. For instance, it is possible to start and run small
diesels of up to 10 MW remotely from a network operation
center, so that one or two people per shift could manage
well over 50 MW.
It’s not just gas and diesel where these savings are pos-
sible. On the nuclear side, firms such as Babcock & Wilcox
and Bechtel are moving aggressively to design practical,
commercial small modular reactors that have many of the
same advantages.
For all the changes in generation, I think some of the most
important developments have been in the transmission and
distribution end of the business. “Smart grid” initiatives and
other advanced technologies are making transmission and
distribution systems more receptive to small-scale distrib-
uted generation and microgrids by reducing interconnection
and other costs.
Traditionally, generation and the smart grid have been
separated—funded by different sources and managed by
different entities—often with suboptimal results. I think it
makes better sense to integrate the two into a whole-system
solution. The result could be smaller increments of genera-
tion, leading to lower-cost solutions by virtue of risk reduc-
tion, less dislocation as new generation comes on-line, and
better use of existing infrastructure. How and when this
will happen is a matter of conjecture, but it is important to
look for the leading indicators as well as to monitor the cost
curves for the points of strategic crossover and change that
could create competitive advantage.
Additionally, I believe utilities will be looking not just to
meet demand growth with new generation going forward,
but also to control or offset growth. After all, the key deter-
minant of the need for additional generation is not total
power usage over the year but highest usage on the busiest
days of the year: the “peak.” That is, the power grid needs
enough capacity to handle the hottest summer days and
coldest winter days, with an ample margin for error. If those
“peaks” can be flattened, the need to build new large-scale
power plants may be avoided.
A trend I’ve increasingly seen in the industry is the
development and marketing of special rates and rebates for
customers who are willing to shift or shed their usage away
from the peaks. One of the major benefits of smart grid and
greater energy management sophistication among business-
es and residential customers is that usage-shifting can be
accomplished with far greater repeatability than ever before,
due to the enormous increase in, and accuracy of, usage data.
Time-of-use rates, rebates, and the like enable custom-
ers to receive a significant
TO READ MORE
Nuclear’s Model T
� Modular, factory-built, and self-contained, a
scheme for a small modular reactor was profiled
in July 2009.
benefit for their changes in behav-
ior, and such changes will mitigate the impact of future load
increases, perhaps significantly. Load shaping and ultimately
“programmable loads” via smart grid technologies will flat-
ten peaks and thus reduce the need for new generation even
if total usage does not go down.
One example of this is load control requests made to
customers. In the PJM interconnection area, which covers
a major area of the eastern U.S., customers supplied over
10,000 MWe of demand response in 2010, the equivalent
of operating ten 1,000 MWe power plants. That response
included many small generators ramping up and down
quickly, in addition to reduced loads through lighting and
other programs. The sort of load control response shown by
these flexibly managed small generators is difficult or impos-
sible to perform with baseload plants.
Many utility executives are comfortable with the tradi-
tional way of meeting demand by adding capacity in 1,000
MWe chunks. But the new technologies offer an alternative:
address capacity shortages by reducing peaks and using
smaller-scale distributed sources of energy. The challenge
for utility companies in this new world is to find the point
at which such technologies are reliable and cost-effective
enough—or the issues around large-scale generation become
difficult enough—that this new approach becomes the better
option in terms of feasibility and cost.
The point where the paradigm on scale shifts may be closer
than most people think. ■
� A small-scale NO x reduction system
fits a cow-gas plant. Input Output, page 72.
April 2011 | MECHANICAL ENGINEERING 47
focus on POWER & ENERGY

crunch
time

t
By Jeffrey Winters, Associate Editor

he first two months of the year were a time of revolt what was seen in the rest of the world. In fact, the consump-
in North Africa and the Middle East. First Tuni- tion curve can rise so steeply that it will inevitably intersect
sia overthrew its long-time dictator. Then unrest with the production curve.
moved to Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, and That’s what happened in Egypt, which went from an export-
elsewhere. At the time the magazine went to press, er of more than 300,000 barrels of oil a day in 1999 to a net
the protestors in Cairo had successfully ousted importer beginning in 2009. And as a consequence, the prices
the Egyptian president and gun battles were being for gasoline in Egypt went from below the raw material cost as
waged across several cities in Libya. recently as 2006 to being comparable to those in the U.S.
Also, the spot price for Brent crude on the New York Mer- The charts on this page show petroleum production (includ-
cantile Exchange shot past $110 a barrel. That was 30 percent ing natural gas liquids) and consumption for six countries,
higher than the level at using the most recent
Egypt Tunisia Bahrain
the start of December. 1,000,000 barrels a day 150,000 barrels a day 100,000 barrels a day
data from the Energy
While many in Production Information Agency.
Europe and especially The charts all start at
North America might Surplus
zero, but are on dif-
grumble (some, to the ferent scales to better
Consumption
point of suggesting a show detail. Tuni-
conspiracy of sorts) sia shifted from an
about the effect that exporter to an import-
the revolutions in the er in 2000, and thanks
1990 2009 1990 2009 1990 2009
Arab world have on to strong consumption
gasoline prices, petro- Yemen Libya Saudi Arabia growth Bahrain has
500,000 barrels a day 2,000,000 barrels a day 15,000,000 barrels a day
leum can be listed as seen its exports plum-
a contributor to the met from more than
uprisings as well. Some 30,000 barrels a day
of the countries under- in the 1990s to around
going upheaval are 3,500 today.
experiencing some- Now, it would be
thing of an energy reductive to the point
identity crisis. of insult to pin the
While not every 1990 2009 1990 2009 1990 2009 turmoil in the Arab
Middle Eastern and North African country has large oil fields, world entirely on oil exports petering out. Other factors—from
most have enough to be self-sufficient. That independence has food prices rising due to drought-withered harvests around
enabled the governments there to insulate their people from the world to inability of a generation steeped in modern com-
the full price of oil. According to figures published by the Ger- munications technology to put up with Cold War era autocrats
man Federal Ministry for Development and Economic Coop- and monarchs—were likely more responsible. And Yemen and
eration, the retail price for gasoline in countries such as Libya, Libya, which have seen uprisings, still have large oil surpluses.
Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Yemen was at or below the cost on As does Saudi Arabia, which produces so much oil that the
the world market of the petroleum needed to produce it. scale of its chart had to be reduced to a ridiculous extent. But
That kind of subsidy encourages consumption. Indeed, the Saudi consumption curve is climbing at about 4 percent
as was mentioned in this magazine back in October 2007 per year, and unless the country can raise production above
(“Squeeze Play”) the rate of growth in oil consumption from 11 million barrels a day, its exports will disappear by 2050.
1980 to 2004 among the 12 members of OPEC far outstripped When that happens, there may be revolutions everywhere. n

48 mechanical engineering | APRIL 2011

 Volume 51, No. 2 • April 2011

ATLANTA, GEORGIA USA /// ASME INTERNATIONAL GAS TURBINE INSTITUTE

Register Today for ASME Turbo Expo 2011

The advance program, event registration, and housing reservations for Turbo Expo 2011 in
Vancouver are now available online at www.turboexpo.org! Early registration discount ends May 9.

In this issue
Turbo Expo 2011
49
View From the Chair
50 Walter DiBartolomeo Roland Fischer Gary Mercer

New Board Members KEYNOTE SPEAKERS ANNOUNCED

50 Three leaders from the aeroengine and power generation industry will highlight current development needs
and trends by addressing the theme “Clean & Efficient Turbomachinery Technologies for Future Low Carbon Economies”
Calendar of Events at Turbo Expo in Vancouver.
Walter DiBartolomeo,Vice President Engineering, Pratt & Whitney Canada; Roland Fischer, CEO Business Unit
51 Products, Fossil Power Generation, Siemens Energy Sector; and Gary Mercer, Senior General Manager in Engineering, GE
Charles Brush’s Infrastructure Energy, will all speak at the opening keynote on Monday, June 6.
Windmill Generator
DON’T MISS THESE TURBO EXPO EVENTS:
51
CAREER DEVELOPMENT COURSES
Natural Gas Taking place just before the conference begins, our
52 Turbo Expo short courses provide focused, fundamental
training. Choose from several courses to be held Saturday
DOE-Sponsored and Sunday, June 4-5, 2011. See page 54 for more details
University Research and visit www.turboexpo.org to register.
Program
TECHNICAL CONFERENCE ANNUAL WOMEN’S DINNER
53 Turbo Expo has a well-earned reputation for Women working in the turbomachinery industry
Professional bringing together the best and brightest experts from who register for Turbo Expo are eligible to attend our
Development around the world to share the latest in gas turbine women’s networking reception and dinner. The dinner
technology, research and development, and application. will be held during Turbo Expo on Tuesday evening,
54 Now, the IGTI community is enhancing its leadership June 7, 2011. This year the dinner will feature speakers
As the Turbine Turns... role in turbomachinery as it broadens the program scope Susan Scofield, head of the Siemens Gas Turbine Future
Jet Engines and to include related topics from wind and steam turbine Frames Department and Lisa Burgarella, Director of
Erupting Volcanos technology as well as fans and blowers and the Solar Information Technology, Pratt & Whitney.
Brayton and Rankine Cycle. The 2011 Technical SPECIAL NETWORKING EVENT FOR YOUNG ENGINEERS
55 Conference proceedings, alone, are worth the price of While attending Turbo Expo 2011, young engineers
IGTI: Serving Gas admission, as the DVD will contain over 1,000 peer- won’t want to miss a special networking event on Wed.,
Turbine & reviewed publications! June 8, for rising engineers. This special networking event
Turbomachinery EXPOSITION will give young engineers the opportunity to meet a
Professionals Turbo Expo is known for its high-quality, 3-day variety of representatives from the turbomachinery
Worldwide for 57 Years exhibition of gas turbine products and services, industry as well as members of IGTI’s technical
56 supported by prestigious companies such as ANSYS, committees. Come and meet potential mentors and seek
CD-adapco, GE, Pratt & Whitney, Sulzer Metco, and advice from industry experts during Turbo Expo in
Turbo Expo 2012 many more! Daily lunches plus afternoon networking Vancouver! Visit www.turbo.expo.org today for
receptions in the Expo Hall are included in the more details and to register. Students qualify for
56 registration package for delegates and exhibitors. discounted registration.
...CONTINUED ON PAGE 52

April 2011 Global Gas Turbine News 49

A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

View From The Chair

By Ron S. Bunker, Ph.D., Chairman of the IGTI Board

Ron is a Principal Engineer in the Energy & Propulsion Technology Labs of the GE Global Research
Center in Niskayuna, New York. bunker@ge.com.

This issue of the Global Gas Turbine News (GGTN), the quarterly news and
events letter of the ASME International Gas Turbine Institute, is my fourth
and final View from the Chair coming just prior to Turbo Expo 2011 in
Vancouver, British Columbia. It seems as though I started these articles just
yesterday. In the last three Views, I have discussed the ASME Energy Challenge and its
relationship to IGTI, Turbo Expo growth and diversity, paper quality, the new no-
show author policy, the Institute Sector Board within ASME, and the current
Institutes (IGTI and IPTI) as role models for ASME growth. In short, the focus has
been on maintaining IGTI as the premier organization for the development and
dissemination of gas turbine educational and technological information, and on the
growth of IGTI to meet new challenges globally with our typical high quality. In this
View, I will continue the discussion by addressing two more subjects in the same vein.
First, IGTI has an array of Technical Committees (TC) that individually and
collectively represent the best minds and talent from around the world in their
respective specialties. Many of these TC’s could, if they desired, organize and conduct
well-attended technical symposiums separate from Turbo Expo. Such symposiums
would be of a more intimate nature with perhaps 200 to 300 persons and limited to
either one or two parallel technical presentation sessions. Indeed, many of you will
know of similar symposiums organized by other associations and international centers.
I recently issued a proposal to the IGTI TC chairs and vice-chairs to take up the
challenge of creating technical symposiums under the auspices of IGTI, and with the
event planning support of the very experienced and talented IGTI staff. Several “key”
IGTI technical committees, or perhaps two or three in concert, will take the lead in
organizing a specialty symposium in their field, or some subset of their area. Attendees
may participate in most or all presentations, so the available interactions amongst
attendees can be far greater than, for example, at Turbo Expo. Given at least six “key”
technical areas as already delineated by the largest TC’s, the symposiums may be held
on a rotating basis, though a strict schedule is not required. In other words, each key
area would hold a symposium to update progress roughly once every six years, though
some may be more frequent and others less so. Because of this rotating schedule, these
events should not draw away too much from Turbo Expo, yet they can serve to provide
more intimate focus meetings for our members.There is no minimum requirement to
be a key committee or topical area, simply an identified set of volunteers willing to
make an event successful, and a topic, general or specific, that addresses a need. So for
example, the 2004 Aero Engine Life Management Symposium was an effort of several
committees. IGTI staff and the IGTI Board will aid in identifying and communicating
with potential symposium sponsors and supporting
organizations, including industry and government.
Means will be found to extract the archival manuscripts
for inclusion in our supporting ASME journals, and
perhaps even to form special issues of journals or
electronic book publications. If this proposal strikes a
chord with you, please take up the discussion within
your TC’s to get things rolling.
Second, in keeping with our commitment to
excellence and quality, it gives me great pleasure to
announce that our next IGTI Scholar will be Dr. Om
Sharma of Pratt & Whitney Canada. Om has been a
major contributor to the advancement of gas turbine
technology for 40 years with expertise in turbines,
compressors, fans, unsteady flows, heat transfer, transi-
tional flows, experimental methods, and computational
fluid dynamics. Om was responsible for developing loss
and heat load prediction methods for P&W, contributed
greatly to the design of high and low pressure turbines at
P&W since 1977, introduced the use of 3-D airfoils for
turbines and compressors within P&W, and initiated the
use of unsteady flow calculation methods in the turbine
design process. He highlighted the impact of airfoil
clocking and hot streak migration in turbines, and
developed technology to detect precursor to stall and
active stall avoidance technology for aero engines. At
Turbo Expo 2011 in Vancouver BC, Om will be
presenting his scholar lecture “The Role of Physical and
Numerical Experiments in the Development of High
Performance Axial Flow Turbines”. I hope many of you
will be able to attend what is surely to be an educational
and entertaining lecture. I will certainly not miss it. R

IGTI Welcomes New Board Members

The International Gas Turbine Institute is pleased to announce the appointment of two new Board members.
Starting July 1, Dr. Howard Hodson will become Incoming Member and Dr. Allan Volponi will serve as Member-at-Large.

Hodson is Professor of Aerothermal Technology and Director of the Whittle Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. His
current research is mainly concerned with the flow and heat transfer in turbomachines, and in particular with the
measurement and prediction of unsteady flow and its effects on performance, tip leakage phenomena in shrouded and
unshrouded machines and real geometry effects in axial compressors and turbines. Hodson has received the ASME Gas
Turbine Award, the ASME Melville Medal, and Best Paper Awards from the Heat Transfer and Turbomachinery Committees
of IGTI. He is a Fellow of the ASME, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Aeronautical Society. Hodson is also
past chair of the IGTI Turbomachinery Committee and a member of the Heat Transfer Committee.

Volponi is Discipline Chief and Senior Fellow for Diagnostics, Prognostics and Health Management at Pratt & Whitney. His
Dr. Howard Hodson interests are in the area of propulsion health management, where he is active in the development of engine performance Dr. Allan Volponi
diagnostic systems. He is a key developer of both P&W's Advanced Diagnostics and Engine Management (ADEM) ground-
based system and the enhanced Self Tuning On-board Real-time Model (eSTORM) diagnostic system. Volponi is the
recipient of the 1992 Manly Memorial Medal by the SAE, the 2006 IGTI Aircraft Engine Technology Award, and the Silver
Specialist and Sir Roy Fedden Awards from the Royal Aeronautical Society. He is past chair of the IGTI Controls,
Diagnostics and Instrumentation Committee and an ASME Fellow. R

50 Global Gas Turbine News April 2011

 A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

CALENDAR OF EVENTS AUGUST 1-3, 2011

MAY 2011
Gas Turbine Courses at Cranfield University,
Bedfordshire, UK
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/soe/shortcourses/gte/
May 9-13: Mechanical Integrity of Gas Turbines
May 16-20: Gas Turbine Performance
May 16-20: Gas Turbine Transient Performance:
May 16-27: Gas Turbine Component Technology
AIAA/ASME/SAE/ASEE Joint Propulsion Conference & Exhibit
San Diego Convention Center | San Diego, CA
The objective for JPC 2011 is to identify and highlight how innovative aerospace propulsion
technologies powering both new and evolving systems are being designed, tested, and flown.
Visit www.aiaa.org for more details
SEPTEMBER 12-15, 2011
40th Turbomachinery Symposium
George R. Brown Convention Center | Houston, TX
The Symposium, which features technical sessions and an exposition, focuses on users concerned with
maintenance, performance, troubleshooting, operation, and purchase of rotating equipment

JUNE 4-5, 2011 OCTOBER 10-14, 2011

ASME Turbo Expo Courses
Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre | Vancouver, BC, Canada
Saturday, Gas Turbine Operation & Maintenance
June 4: Technology & Applications of Turbine Coatings
Sat. & Sun., Advances in Turbines Aero-Thermo-Mechanical Design & Analysis
June 4 & 5: Gas Turbine Aerothermodynamics & Performance Calculations
Sunday, Basic Gas Turbine Metallurgy & Repair Technology
June 5: Introduction to Optimization Methods & Tools for
Multi-Disciplinary Design in Turbomachinery
For more info and to register, visit www.turboexpo.org
Combined Heat & Power Course
Cranfield University | Bedfordshire, UK
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/soe/shortcourses/gte/
NOVEMBER 13-18, 2011
International Gas Turbine Congress 2011
Osaka, Japan
The IGTC'11 promises to continue the tradition of nine previous congresses held in Japan, bringing
together people from academia, industry, and government to share in the latest information on
developments in the field of gas turbines, turbochargers, steam turbines, and their applications.
For more info, visit: http://www.gtsj.org/english/igtc/IGTC11/index.html

NOVEMBER 21-25, 2011

JUNE 6-10, 2011 Gas Turbine Technology for Operations and Maintenance Engineers Course
ASME Turbo Expo 2011 Cranfield University | Bedfordshire, UK
Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre | Vancouver, BC, Canada http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/soe/shortcourses/gte/
IGTI’s flagship event comprises a major turbine technical conference and
exposition. Visit www.turboexpo.org for more details. JUNE 11-15, 2012
ASME Turbo Expo 2012
JUNE/JULY 2011 Bella Center | Copenhagen, Denmark
IGTI’s flagship event comprises a major turbine technical conference and exposition.
Gas Turbine Courses at Cranfield University,
Bedfordshire, UK
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/soe/shortcourses/gte/ JUNE 3-7, 2013
June 20-24: Combined Cycle Gas Turbines Course ASME Turbo Expo 2013
June 27 – July 1: Gas Turbine Combustion San Antonio Convention Center | San Antonio, TX, USA
IGTI’s flagship event comprises a major turbine technical conference and exposition.

1888 WIND ENERGY TECHNOLOGY

Charles Brush’s Windmill Scientific American wrote in December

1890, “The reader must not suppose

Generator 120 Years Ago! that electric lighting by means of

power supplied in this way is cheap,
because wind costs nothing. On the
By Derek King, BRUSH Turbogenerators Inc., www.brush.eu
contrary, the cost of the plant is so
great as to more than offset the
C apturing the power of the wind is trumpeted around the world as a
renewable energy source that can provide more and more of our electric
power. Way back at the beginning of the electrical industry an engineering
cheapness of the motive power.
However, there is a great satisfaction
in making use of one of nature’s most
pioneer was already capturing the wind’s energy. unruly motive agents. . . . . It has been
Charles Francis Brush’s “Colossal Windmill” was set with a 56 ft. diameter sail in continuous operation more than
area and stood in the back yard of his Cleveland family mansion. As Mr. Brush two years and has proved in every
was also working and patenting plate compounds which became the standard respect a complete success.”
for storage batteries, the generator power was stored in 408 batteries in the
The windmill was improved in
house’s basement.
successive years but eventually more
After being started up in 1888, all of the Brush mansion’s energy needs were modern equipment became available,
taken care of including an extensive laboratory, 350 incandescent lights, 2 arc including the connection of the Brush
lamps, and 3 electric motors. property to the local electric utility.
The windmill fell into disuse and was
The main wheel was mounted on 20 ft. long, 6½ inch diameter shaft set in two
eventually dismantled around 1925.
26 inch long self oiling bearing boxes at the top of the 60 ft. tall rectangular Derek King – 10/11/2010
tower. Gear ratio from the 144 blade sail to dynamo was 1:50 with 32 inch wide
belt/pulleys connecting the main shaft to the double ended dynamo. The Brush Post Script: This is the same Charles Brush (Born Ohio 1849: died 1929) who
dynamo used to create the battery charging power was of the design already founded the Brush Electric Company (Cleveland) and Anglo American Brush Electric
being supplied for lighting around the world. Company (London) in 1879. He also was a founder (1905) of the Linde Air Products
What was probably the world’s first “automatic voltage regulator”, maintained Co. which became part of Union Carbide in 1917, and with his son Charles Brush II the
the field controls to ensure the voltage never exceeded 90 volts. On start up Brush Laboratories in Cleveland which became Brush Wellman the specialized
dynamo output was automatically switched to charge the batteries above 75 manufacturer of beryllium metal products. The Brush name also lives on in the Brush
volts plus or minus 5 volts, and limit no load voltage to below 90 volts. Electric companies (large motors, turbogenerators, switchgear & transformers and railway
Generator power output was measured at 12 kW at 500 rpm and was fed to the loco) based in Loughborough UK.
mansion via underground conductors.

April 2011 Global Gas Turbine News 51

A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

Natural Gas
By Dr. Rainer Kurz, Manager, Systems Analysis, Solar Turbines Incorporated, www.solarturbines.com

In a recent article in Mechanical Engineering (Vol. 133,
No.1, Jan 2011), John Reilly and Allison Crimmins discuss
the future of energy supply in the light of economic,
political and technological reality. Primary energy use, closely
related to income, may more than double by the end of the
century. And, it has to be asked how much of that increase will be
from alternative energies, and how much from fossil fuels. It is a
common misunderstanding that we are running out of fossil fuel
(and I remember learning that in high school in the 70’s, with
clearly defined dates for the end of oil reserves in the early 2000’s),
but that is not the case. A study by MIT concludes that, absent
climate policies that would impact energy prices, 80% of primary
energy in 2100 will be supplied by fossil fuels, despite a ten fold
increase in renewable energy and a 8.5 fold increase in nuclear
energy. And just recently, in the latest State of the Union address,
President Obama mentioned the importance of natural gas for the
future energy mix in the United States.
The authors also point out that renewable energy sources are
not free of environmental risks, either:
Wind turbines, deployed on a scale to meet 10% of the energy
demand, could result in the stagnation of surface air, with potential
impact on local warming and large-scale precipitation patterns. Bio
fuels may create large indirect emissions and have indirect effects
on water use and food supply.
While advanced new technologies will be needed in later years,
significant emissions reductions can be achieved now, with current
technologies. Due to the composition of natural gas, as well as the
very high efficiency of modern gas turbines, electricity from
natural gas causes much lower greenhouse gas emissions, as well as
other emissions, than electricity from coal or oil fired power plants.
Natural gas is found in reservoirs in many parts of the world. Lately,
huge additional gas reservoirs have been exploited in the United
States and elsewhere in the world.
This article intends to highlight the importance of gas turbines,
centrifugal compressors and pumps, and other turbomachines in
processes that bring natural gas to the end users.
To be useful, the natural gas coming from a large number of small wells
has to be gathered. This process requires compression of the gas in several
stages, before it is processed in a gas plant, where contaminants and heavier
hydrocarbons are stripped from the gas. From the gas plant, the gas is
recompressed and fed into a pipeline. In all these compression processes,
centrifugal gas compressors driven by industrial gas turbines or electric
motors play an important role.
Natural gas is also produced as a by-product of oil production: so-called
associated gas. Turbomachines are used in a variety of applications for the
production of oil and associated gas. For example, gas turbine generator sets
often provide electrical power for offshore platforms or remote oil and gas
fields. Offshore platforms, or FPSO’s, have a large electrical demand, often
requiring multiple large gas turbine generator sets. The natural gas is
separated from the oil and cleaned before being used as a fuel for these gas
turbines. Gas turbines are also used to drive compressors that re-inject gas
into the well or the reservoir to maximize oil recovery.
The remaining gas is pumped via gas turbine driven export compressors
to an onshore gas plant. Since oil production is often conducted off shore,
these export pipelines run sub-sea.
Centrifugal gas compressors, driven by gas turbines or by electric motors
are the benchmark products to pump gas through pipelines, anywhere in
the world. Many developing countries with booming economies, such as
China, India and Brazil, invest heavily in the expansion of their gas pipeline
infrastructure. The pipelines transport gas from the oil and gas fields to gas
fired power plants, industrial and residential users, sometimes thousands of
miles away from the gas reservoir. Gas is also transported to large LNG
plants, where the gas is liquefied to be shipped on tankers around the world.
Along the way, gas may be stored in large underground cavities to balance
supply and demand – and for this duty we also find many opportunities for
gas turbine or electric motor driven centrifugal compressors.
Innovation in this key application of industrial turbomachinery will
further increase efficiency, safety and reliability in the operation, and reduce
the environmental impact. Many of these developments, including the
integration of turbomachinery in the users’ process, are possible by close
cooperation between manufacturers and users of these machines. R

ASME Turbo Expo 2011 . . . CONTINUED FROM PAGE 49 A Special Thank You to Our
Turbo Expo 2011 Sponsors!
FACILITY TOURS
Turbo 2011 will offer a variety of facility tours on Friday, June 10: PLATINUM
GE • Rolls Royce
National Research Council Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation Located in the GOLD
heart of the Vancouver fuel cell technology cluster, the NRC Institute for Fuel Cell Innovation
Pratt & Whitney
(NRC-IFCI) supports Canadian leadership in clean energy technology by addressing industry-
defined R&D and commercialization priorities. SILVER
ANSYS
MTU – Turbine Engine Overhaul Facility The Vancouver facility holds all OEM licenses BRONZE
required to repair and overhaul GE CF6-50 and CFMI CFM56-3 engines. Apart from accessory
CD Adapco • Numeca
repairs in its own shop, the company also offers LRU (Line Replaceable Units) management services,
which play an increasing role in MTU’s service offerings.
Solar Turbines
Additional Sponsors
Terasen Gas Terasen Gas develops and delivers alternative energy solutions, including district Alstom • Karalit srl
energy and geoexchange. They deliver energy to 96 per cent of the province’s natural gas customers. NRC Institute for Aerospace Research
For more detailed tour descriptions, visit www.turboexpo.org. Olympus • Parker Hannifin • Siemens
*Space is limited for all tours. All tours are conducted at the discretion of the host company and under the Southwest Research Institute
conditions the company establishes, including restrictions and pre-screening of participants. All tours are subject to IGTI Bronze
cancellation.R
Southwest Research Institute

52 Global Gas Turbine News April 2011

 A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

DOE-Sponsored University Research

Program Develops Technology and People
for the Gas Turbine Industry
By William H. Day, Ph. D., Leonardo Technologies, Inc. (LTI), Contractor for the US Department of Energy / NETL

The US Department of Energy’s University Turbine Systems Research

(UTSR) Program provides funding to universities to develop key
technologies for advanced gas turbines operating cleanly and efficiently
using coal-derived synthetic gas, hydrogen fuels, and other fossil fuels.
This research focuses on the areas of combustion, aerodynamics, heat transfer, and
materials in support of the Advanced Turbine Program goals of DOE’s Office of Fossil
Energy. The research is done by an informal network of universities, the collaborating
companies in the gas turbine industry, and DOE’s Advanced Turbine Program.
The UTSR Program includes a Gas Turbine Industrial Fellowship, funded by
sponsoring GT manufacturers. This fellowship of work assignments at the
manufacturers’ facilities helps facilitate the transition of the best students from
academia to the GT industry, thereby helping to maintain U.S. leadership in this
important technology area.
UTSR projects are established through an annual competitive solicitation open to
all U.S. universities.The solicitation’s R&D topics are established in response to overall
program goals and given specific focus through communications with the GT
industry. An annual UTSR workshop is held to facilitate technical communications
between the GT industry, academia, and the DOE and to provide a critical peer
review of UTSR projects.

UTSR Projects: Following are examples of the topic areas currently being worked
on by the universities.
Aero-Heat Transfer Designing turbine endwalls for deposition resistance, endwall
contouring and leading edge film cooling for improved aerodynamics, deposition and
film cooling effects, trenched film cooling and contoured endwalls and cooling of
vane leading edges.
Combustion Combustion stability, combustion flashback, validation of H2-CO-air
combustion kinetics, turbulent flame speed measurements and modeling,
experimental and numerical modeling of mixing processes, high pressure kinetics,
multi nozzle combustor dynamics, flame speeds and NOX kinetics with contaminants
and dilution.
Materials Degradation of thermal barrier coatings (TBC) by deposition, materials for
oxy-fuel turbo machinery, effects of hafnia-based nanostructure on TBC,
understanding protective oxide and TBC degradation, computational designed for
new TBC.
UTSR Industry Committee: The GT industry provides leadership to define the
thrust of the research program solicitation consistent with DOE goals and technical
experts to evaluate the university research proposals. In many ways, the GT industry is
the customer for this government-funded, university-performed research; this
relationship drives R&D excellence. Industry involvement includes the following:
recommend research topic areas, evaluate university proposals, review and
collaborative support of ongoing university research, provide funding to the
Fellowship Program, host UTSR Fellows, participate in the annual UTSR work-
shops. Industry committee members are as follows: Clean Energy Systems, Duke
Energy, Electric Power Research Institute, General Electric Company, Ingersoll Rand
Energy Systems, Parker Hannifin Corporation, Pratt & Whitney/United Technologies
Research Center, Precision Combustion, Inc., Siemens Energy, Inc., Solar Turbines
Inc., Southern Company Services, and Woodward FST.
Gas Turbine Industrial Fellowship The Gas Turbine
Industrial Fellowship (GTIF) Program, implemented by
Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), is a key part of
the UTSR effort. GTIF provides undergraduate and
graduate level science and engineering students with
the opportunity to conduct research, engineering, and
design projects with leading GT industry sponsors who
are members of the UTSR industry committee. Under
the guidance of industry experts, selected students
complete a 10–12 week summer project in a variety of
areas that include heat transfer, aerodynamics,
combustion, thermodynamics, advanced materials and
coatings, design, manufacturing, and test and evaluation.
Students prepare a final report and presentation on their
project for distribution to the industry sponsors and
posting on the UTSR website. Historically, over 70% of
the GTIF students have taken employment in the gas
turbine industry following their graduation.
In sum, the close collaboration of government,
industry and academia is providing an important
contribution to the continued advancement of the state
of the art in gas turbines.
For more details on the UTSR Program and the
annual workshop please visit the following websites:
http://www.netl.doe.gov/technologies/coalpower/
turbines/projects.html and http://www.netl.doe.gov/
events/index.html. R

April 2011 Global Gas Turbine News 53

A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE
ASME IGTI Professional &
Member Development
By Shirley Barton, IGTI Professional & Member Development Manager
Professional Development:
n IGTI partnered with Southwest Research Institute to offer four hands-
on training workshops in February at the SwRI facility in San Antonio
and attendance continues to grow each year. Thirty percent of the
attendees were Early Career Engineers!
n IGTI continues its successful partnership with the von Karman
Institute (VKI) to offer two NEW workshops: Advances in Turbines
Aero-thermo-mechanical Design and Analysis and Introduction to
Optimization Methods and Tools for Multi-disciplinary Design
June 4 & 5 prior to Turbo Expo 2011 in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
n Turbo Expo 2011 in Vancouver will also be the venue for four other
workshops. Two are new this year, Gas Turbine Operation and
Maintenance and Technology and Applications of Turbine Coatings.
Back by popular demand, IGTI will offer Gas Turbine Aerothermo-
dynamics & Performance Calculations and Basic Gas Turbine
Metallurgy and Repair Technology.
If you have a topic you think will be of value to the turbine
industry and would like to present it in a webinar format or a “face-
to-face” format, please contact Shirley at bartons@asme.org.
For detailed information on upcoming training events and webinars for the
turbomachinery industry, please visit the IGTI web site at http://igti.asme.org/
Member Development:
Please contact Shirley Barton (bartons@asme.org) regarding information on:
n Navigating the IGTI “Who’s Who” directory
n Committee member updates
n Volunteer opportunities
n IGTI Awards and Scholarships
New! The International Gas Turbine Institute Student
Scholarship:
IGTI will award 10 scholarships of $2,000 each, to students who
submit all the required documentation and meet the qualifications.
Applications will be accepted through May 15, 2011. Applications will
be reviewed in June/July and the award winners will be notified
in September and receive their scholarship in October. For
application and requirements, please visit the following web page:
http://igti.asme.org/Honors/
Make Plans Now to Attend!
54 Global Gas Turbine News
2011 ASME International Gas Turbine Institute
Award Winners!
Congratulations to the following ASME International Gas Turbine
Institute Award Winners who will be recognized for their
contributions to the industry at the 2011 Turbo Expo at the
Vancouver Convention & Exhibition Centre in Vancouver, BC,
Canada, the week of June 6-10.
n ASME Gas Turbine Award recipients are Eric M. Curtis, John
D. Denton, John P. Longley, Budimir Rosic - Whittle Laboratory,
Department of Engineering, Cambridge University for their paper
presented at Turbo Expo 2009, Controlling Tip Leakage Flow over a
Shrouded Turbine Rotor using an Air-Curtain, which presents the
results of a systematic study on the use of an air-curtain seal to
control leakage flow in shrouded turbine rotors.
n The Industrial Gas Turbine Technology Award: The 2011
recipient of this award is Donald Brandt, General Electric. This
award recognizes sustained personal creative scientific or
technological contributions unique to electric power or
mechanical drive industrial gas turbine technology.
n The John P. Davis Award: The recipients are Ernst Schneider,
Saba Demircioglu, Susana Franco, Dirk Therkorn ALSTOM
(Switzerland) Ltd., for their paper presented at Turbo Expo
2009, Analysis Of Compressor On-Line Washing To Optimize Gas
Turbine Power Plant Performance.
n The R. Tom Sawyer Award: The 2011 recipient of this award is
Professor Dilip R. Ballal, University of Dayton, for pioneering
combustion and fuels research that has advanced the design and
development of gas turbine combustors and fuels; and for
enthusiastic efforts in advancing and promoting the International
Gas Turbine Institute.
n IGTI Scholar: The 2011 recipient of this honor is Dr. Om
Sharma Ph.D., United Technologies Research Center. Dr. Sharma
will give a lecture on, “The Role of Physical and Numerical
Experiments in the Development of High Performance Axial Flow
Turbines”. The focus of his lecture is to describe concepts and
criteria developed to design high performance axial flow turbines
over the last forty years. R
April 2011

Featured Column: As the Turbine Turns...
Jet Engines and Erupting Volcanoes
By Dr. Lee S. Langston, Professor Emeritus of Mechanical Engineering, University of Connecticut
It is one year ago when the largest European
airspace shutdown since World War II occurred. On
April 14, 2010 a volcano on the southern coast of Iceland
erupted directly under the ice cap, Eyjafjallajökull, whose
hard-to-pronounce name translates in English to “island
mountain’s ice cap.” Although the eruption was not massive,
water from the melted ice interacted with magma to throw
clouds of fine volcanic ash as high as 30,000 feet into the
atmosphere, and directly into the eastward flowing jet
stream, on its way over the Atlantic and across Northern
European airspace.
Clouds of volcanic ash pose real and substantial dangers
for aircraft and their jet engines. The so-called ash is not the
soft powdery form from a wood fire but is composed of bits
of pulverized rock ranging typically from millimeter size (like
sand) down to the micrometer range (like clay particles).
Ingestion of this ash ablates jet engine blades and vanes and
the ash can melt to a molten glassy state, causing blockages
which can lead to compressor surge and possible flameout.
Boeing reports that in the last 30 years more than 90 jet-
powered commercial airplanes have encountered volcanic ash
clouds leading to significant damage. So far there have been
no fatalities reported – but plenty of close calls.
The Northern European airspace ash cloud shutdown
lasted from April 15 to April 23, and then intermittently in
different areas (e.g. Ireland and Scotland) until the middle of
May. It is estimated that airlines collectively lost over
$200M/day, with almost 100,000 flights and 8 million
passengers affected. At the September 15-16, 2010 Atlantic
Conference on Eyjafjallajökull and Aviation, held at Keflavik
Airport, Iceland, Stephen Perkins, an official of OECD (the
European Organisation for Economic Cooperation and
Development), gave an economic assessment of the
shutdown cost. He estimated losses to all concerned as high
as $5B. At the conference one Iceland volcanologist stated
that this episode could be just a training exercise compared
to the impact of a bigger eruption.
I can attest to some of the volcano costs to travelers. On
April 15, 2010, my wife Liz and I, along with fellow
passengers disembarked in Cape Town, South Africa upon
completion of an Indian Ocean cruise. At the airport we
learned that our flight back to the United States, via
London’s Heathrow Airport was cancelled due to the distant
Eyjafjallajökull induced air space shutdown. We spent
another night in Cape Town (at our expense) and
fortunately managed to get a flight back to the US through
Dakar, Senegal, far south of Iceland’s eastward flowing
volcanic ash clouds. Many of our fellow cruise passengers
weren’t as fortunate, becoming volcano refugees for many
days in Cape Town at their expense, until able to secure
alternate flights back to the northern hemisphere.
Fortunately the ash clouds cleared well before our IGTI
June 14-18 TURBO EXPO ‘10 in Glasgow. When leaving
the meeting and making connecting flights in Heathrow, I
asked a taxi driver if the April shutdown had hurt his
business. He said business was great – he and other drivers
April 2011 Global Gas Turbine News 55
A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE
were charging stranded Heathrow passengers ₤2000
to drive them (via the Chunnel or ferry) to the
European continent.
Given the huge worldwide costs and delays the shutdown incurred, one must ask
just what danger does the ingestion of volcanic ash pose for aircraft gas turbines? Last
year I wrote an article “Asking for Trouble”[1] in which I highlighted the 1980-1996
research on jet engine volcanic ash ingestion by Michael Dunn and his colleagues at
Calspan. Mike, now a professor and director of the Gas Turbine Laboratory at Ohio
State University is a past chair of IGTI’s Heat Transfer Committee.
The experimental work of Mike Dunn and his associates showed that there are
five dominant ash ingestion factors of immediate concern to a flight crew.These are
ash material deposition occurring on the high turbine inlet guide vanes, blocking of
turbine vane or blade cooling holes, erosion of the fan and compressor blades,
degradation of the engine fuel control system, and deposition of carbon-like
material in the fuel nozzles.
These revealing findings lead one to the consideration of research and
development for ways to mitigate the effects of ash ingestion. One scheme that
comes to my mind centers around the observation that ash particles can be
electrically charged, as evidenced by displays of St. Elmo’s fire in engine inlets.
Might it be possible to apply a magnetic field at an engine inlet, to use the resulting
Lorentz forces to divert the charged ash into the bypass air, where it would do less
damage than passing through the engine’s core gas path?
However, the most pressing concerns of volcanic ash ingestion flight dangers have
to do with the actual measurement of atmospheric ash levels and the regulatory
guidelines on acceptable ash levels in which jet powered aircraft can safely fly.
For instance, another Eyjafjallajökull volcano refugee, Vincent Brannigan,
professor emeritus of jurisprudence in engineering at the University of Maryland has
written the following[2] on regulatory aspects of the April 2010 airspace shutdown:
“European air traffic authorities, following well established and widely published
safety protocols, began shutting down the air transport system due to the well
known hazard of volcano ash. The shut-down lasted 6 days and soon became an
unequal political contest between airline money and regulatory science. In a classic
case of shooting the messenger the responsible airline parties tried to shift the blame
for shutdown to the regulators, while nervous governments quailed before the
bullying of the airline executives. Demands for compensation and accusations of
regulatory incompetence filled the media.”
If you want to learn more about jet engines and erupting volcanoes, I invite you
to attend a panel session that Turbomachinery Committee past chair Aspi Wadia
of GE Aviation and I will be co-chairing at TURBO EXPO ’11 in Vancouver on
June 7, 2011, for the Aircraft Engine Committee.We hope to see you there. R
References
1. Langston, Lee S., 2010, “Asking for Trouble”,
Mechanical Engineering Magazine, July,
pp. 28-30.
2. Brannigan, Vincent M., 2010, “Alice’s
Adventures in Volcano Land: The Use
and Abuse of Expert Knowledge
in Safety Regulation”, European
Journal of Risk Regulation”
2, June 23, pp. 9-15.
A SUPPLEMENT TO MECHANICAL ENGINEERING MAGAZINE

IGTI: Serving Gas Turbine & Turbomachinery

Professionals Worldwide for 57 Years!
Mission & Vision
IGTI is dedicated to supporting the international exchange
and development of information to improve the design,
application, manufacture, operation and maintenance, and
environmental impact of all types of gas turbines, turbo-
machinery and related equipment. Our vision is to be the
world’s foremost vehicle for the development and dissemination
of all gas turbine educational and technological information and
to serve all professionals involved in the turbomachinery industry.
Operation, Membership & Governance
IGTI is one of two ASME Institutes and is governed by a
ten-member international Board of ASME volunteers. Our
volunteers represent a mix of academia, industry and
government. We have 17 Technical Committees, 16 of which
are organized according to individual fields of interest within
turbomachinery technology. The 17th Committee, Wind
Energy, represents our expanding scope.
Key Activities
Two of IGTI’s key offerings to members are professional
conferences and professional development.
Our flagship conference is Turbo Expo, which alternates
between Europe and North America. See more details about
Turbo Expo 2011 on page 49. And for a list of upcoming
dates and locations for Turbo Expo, please check the calendar
on page 51.
Our professional development department offers basic and
intermediate training programs on a variety of platforms:
Webinars, CDs, classroom training, and hands-on training. See
page 54 for more information on our upcoming opportunities.
Awards and Scholarships
As mentioned in the last issue of the GGTN, IGTI offers a variety of
awards of scholarships for those making outstanding contributions to the
turbomachinery industry. Awards are presented annually at Turbo Expo.
Scholarship applications are available each January.
Visit http://igti.asme.org for more details.
Publications and Networking
ASME publishes two journals related to the turbomachinery industry,
The Journal of Turbomachinery and The Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines
and Power. If you are interested in submitting your work to either of these
journals, please visit: http://journaltool.asme.org.
IGTI has an extensive library of technical papers and conference
proceedings. If you are looking for a paper presented during a previous IGTI
conference, please visit http://igti.asme.org to download an order form.
Be sure and keep in touch with IGTI throughout the year! In addition to
our web site, regular IGTI updates are posted via Facebook, Twitter, and
LinkedIn. Join our networks on these sites today! Also, IGTI committee
members can contact each other via our Who’s Who online member
directory at: http://igti.asme.org/Networking.
Opportunities for YOU
IGTI appreciates our volunteers and is here to serve you! Here are some
ways you can stay involved with IGTI:
n ASME Turbo Expo Exhibition and Sponsorship
n Publishing technical work in world-renowned forums and journals
n IGTI Sponsorship
n Honors, Awards, Scholarships and Travel Assistance
n Leadership within ASME and IGTI Structure
n Assistance with specialty conferences
n Continuing Education/Professional Development R

ASME TURBO EXPO 2012 SET FOR COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

Plan now to join 3,000 turbomachinery colleagues from around the world at TURBO EXPO,
ASME’s premier turbine technical conference and exposition, set for June 11-15, 2012, in
Copenhagen, Denmark, at the Bella Center.
Turbo Expo 2012 highlights include:
• A FIVE-day Technical Conference that sets the world standard for turbomachinery
technology events
• A three-day, premium exhibition of turbine products and services supported by leading
companies in the industry
• A dynamic keynote session featuring prominent industry leaders
• A value-packed registration package that includes proceedings, access to all activities
and abundant networking opportunities, including receptions and daily lunches
• In-depth workshops providing fundamental study on career development subjects
Leadership
Leading the organization of Turbo Expo 2012 are Executive Conference Chair Lennart Nilsson,
Conference Chair Dr. Karen Thole and Technical Program Chair Dr. Jaroslaw Szwedowicz.
• Nilsson is CEO of Siemens Gas Turbine Systems in Sweden. Over the course of his career
in power generation, he has also worked in Germany, the U.S., China, Japan and Poland.
• Dr. Thole is head of the Department of Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering at
Pennsylvania State University. She is an ASME Fellow and also serves as the Associate
Editor of the Journal of Turbomachinery. In 2008 she received the ASME Distinguished
Service Award. In addition, she is a founder and integral leader of the IGTI Women’s
Networking Dinner, which is held annually during ASME Turbo Expo.
• Dr. Szwedowicz is Program Manager, Technology & Methods with Alstom, Switzerland. He
chairs the ASME IGTI Structures and Dynamics Committee and previously served as
committee vice chair, vanguard, and session organizer. Dr. Szwedowicz is an associate
editor of the ASME Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power. He also serves as
a board member of the Swiss Section of the ASME in Switzerland.
Technical Conference
The ASME Turbo Expo Technical Conference is globally recognized as
the most important annual, international event for gas turbine
technology. It is highly respected for presenting cutting edge, state
of the art gas turbine technology from around the world, including
contributions from academia and industry. The program scope has
also been expanded to include related topics in solar, fans and
blowers, and wind and steam turbine technology. To offer your work
for publication in 2012, please note that abstracts are due by
September 12, 2011 with drafts due November 14, 2011.
Exposition
When you exhibit at Turbo Expo, you will be among other key
industry players. Turbo Expo brings together the top players in the
turbomachinery industry and academia - attracting a key audience
from aerospace, power generation and other prime mover-related
industries. Exhibiting at Turbo Expo will maximize your ROI by placing
your company in front of a focused target market, enabling you to
generate high-quality leads to achieve your marketing objectives.
Exciting brand-enhancing sponsorship packages are also available!
Packages are designed around your particular corporate goals and
are an extremely effective way for your company to really stand out
from the crowd – before, during and after the Show.
To insure your company’s participation in the 2012 exposition,
contact IGTI at +1-404-847-0072 x1646 or via e-mail at igtiexpo
@asme.org. R

56 Global Gas Turbine News April 2011

focus on Power & Energy
securing critical
energy materials
By Alan Brown,
Associate Editor
new report from the American Physical Society
and the Materials Research Society calls for the
United States to take steps to secure supplies of
materials critical to future energy technologies.
The report, Energy Critical Elements: Securing Materials
for Emerging Technologies, considers rare earth metals and
other materials used in solar cells, magnets, superconductors,
batteries, wind turbines, fluorescent lights, and catalytic
reactions.
The report follows one issued in December on clean energy
materials by the U.S. Department of Energy, which found
risks of shortages within five years in the rare earths, dyspro-
sium, neodymium, terbium, yttrium, europium, and indium.
The new report covers more materials used in a broader
range of energy technologies. They include:
■ Solar cell elements, such as gal-
lium, germanium, indium, selenium,
silver, and tellurium.
■ Magnetic materials used in
motors, hybrid cars, and wind tur-
bines, including cobalt and such rare
earths as dysprosium, neodymium,
praseodymium, and samarium.
■ Battery materials including
lithium and lanthanum.
■ Energy research elements, such
as helium for fusion and manufac-
turing.
■ Catalyst materials, such as plati-
num, palladium, and cerium.
■ Alloying elements for high-tem-
perature turbines, such as rhenium.
■ Functional materials, including
gadolinium for paramagnetic applica-
tions, europium and terbium for phosphors, and yttrium for
solid state lighting and high-temperature superconductors.
Most of these materials are rare, are not found in economic
concentrations, or are refined as minor by-products of com-
modity metals. Some materials are readily available only in a
single country. China, for example, accounts for 97 percent of
rare earth production, and has cut back on exports in order to
use these materials internally.
While nearly all the materials in question are easily avail-
able today, demand for new and potentially game-changing
energy technologies could overwhelm existing supplies.
Tellurium is an example. Used for cadmium-tellurium
thin-film solar cells, it is coproduced with copper. Tellurium
does not currently sell in great quantity. World production
in 2009 was 200 metric tons, derived from 16 million metric
tons of copper. Because it constitutes so small a fraction of
copper output, there is little economic incentive to increase
tellurium production even though it sells for nearly 30 times
the price of copper.
The report estimates that it will take 400 metric tons of
tellurium, twice 2009’s total output, to make enough solar
cells to generate 1 gigawatt of electrical power. The report
sees potential production issues with lithium; notes that
germanium is not rare but also is not found in easily refined
concentrated deposits; and warns that platinum, palladium,
and rare earths are concentrated in countries where political
stability and trade policy might be a concern.
The joint report makes several recommendations, start-
ing with better collection of data on the global availability of
materials. “The U.S. Geological Survey has been under-fund-
ed for the past decade,” said Robert
Jaffe, a Massachusetts Institute of
Technology physicist who chaired the
report committee.
The report also calls for more fund-
ing for research and development. It
points to General Electric’s research
program to improve the use of rhe-
nium, an important alloying element
in high-temperature turbines, by
A new report recom- developing low-rhenium alloys and
mends steps that
may be taken to recycling existing supplies. Govern-
assure the continued ment research programs could help
availability of key the many small and medium-size
elements that go into companies that could not support
energy-related prod- such expensive R&D efforts.
ucts ranging from
fluorescent lamps to The report also supports research
photovoltaic cells. in post-consumer recycling. While
many products contain only infini-
tesimal amounts of critical energy materials, developing a
program now will enable recycling of larger products, such
as wind turbine magnets and solar cells, when they reach the
end of their useful lives in 20 or 30 years.
The report does not propose government stockpiles except
in the case of helium, which must be captured during natural
gas extraction or lost to the atmosphere. Instead, the report
calls for reliance on market forces. Tom Graedel, a professor
of industrial ecology at Yale University, noted that China’s
domination of rare earth metals sparked the development of
two significant mines in Australia.
Many of these recommendations are embodied in a bill,
the “Critical Minerals and Materials Promotion Act of 2011,”
introduced by Senator Mark Udall about the same time that
the report was released. n
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 57

Natural Negotiation for
Engineers and Technical
Professionals.
James S. Jetton and Brian E.
Porter. ASME Press, Three
Park Avenue, New York, NY
10016-5990. 2010. 130 pages.
$39; ASME Members, $31.
ISBN: 978-0-7918-5965-0.
Negotiation is a part of life,
whether one is looking for a job
or a home. In a job interview a
potential employer may ask a
candidate how much he or she
would like to earn. According to
the authors, the right answer
is, “I’d like to understand the
position better and get a clear
picture of the entire compensa-
tion package before determining
what an appropriate salary may
be.” A buyer needs to decide on
a maximum limit in price, terms,
and other criteria before getting
to the negotiation part. This is a
how-to guide to help engineers
and technical professionals
prepare for and get through the
negotiation process from start
to finish. It is based upon thirty
years of research, experience,
and a wide array of information
from deductive and inductive
reasoning, personality theory,
psychology, physiology, and
neuroscience. Both authors have
a wide range of experience in
business functions that include
the areas of engineering, sales,
production control, procurement,
research and product develop-
ment, and project management.
58 mechanical engineering | APRIL 2011
mebookshelf
Solar Thermal and Biomass
Energy. Giulio Lorenzini, Cesare
Biserni, and Giuseppe Flacco.
WIT Press, C/O Computational
Mechanics Inc., 25 Bridge St.,
Billerica, MA 01821. February
2010. 224 pages. $170. ISBN: 978-
1-84564-147-4.
The future of renewable energy is
the subject of this book, written by
three authors from the University
of Bologna in Italy. (Lorenzini is
an ASME member.) The authors
designed this university-level book
to be used in the rapidly expanding
field of alternative and renewable
energy studies. Solar Thermal and
Biomass Energy is divided into two
parts, the first of which covers solar
thermal energy. Solar energy, the
authors point out, is the basis for all
other types of energy. Applications
that harness solar thermal energy
can be as simple as flat-plate water
heaters or as advanced as steam-
generating parabolic concentrators,
and the authors discuss the state of
the art in both. Biomass energy is
dealt with in the second part, and
the various forms of biomass—from
burning plant matter directly to
converting it to liquid or gaseous
fuels—are discussed before the
authors move on to the energy that
can be derived from it.
MATLAB Primer, Eighth
Edition. Timothy A. Davis. CRC
Press, Taylor & Francis Group,
6000 Broken Sound Parkway NW,
Suite 3000, Boca Raton, FL 33487.
2011. 248 pages. $21.99. ISBN:
978-1-4398-2862-5.
This edition covers the new features
of the latest version of the popular
software platform and shows the
reader how to use the program to
solve problems in math, science,
and engineering. There is an
added chapter on object-oriented
programming and a new discus-
sion of the file exchange window
that provides access to more than
10,000 user submissions. The
author also includes a synopsis of
the most often used mathematical
functions, operators, and special
characters. Large changes were
made to the MATLAB Editor, and
the integration of a code analyzer
is covered in the book. The book
can either be read start to finish or
used as a reference by flipping to
various sections as needed. To that
end, the book has a highly detailed
table of contents that enables the
reader to find an answer about most
MATLAB issues. The appendix is
equally extensive allowing for quick
reference.
Structural Composite Materi-
als. F.C. Campbell. ASM Inter-
national, 9639 Kinsman Road,
Materials Park, OH 44073-0002.
2010. 630 pages. $150; ASM Inter-
national members, $120. ISBN:
978-1-61503-037-8.
Composite materials consist of a
reinforcement and a matrix, two
materials that in combination
perform better than either one used
alone. Unlike metal alloys, each
material retains its separate prop-
erties. As F.C. Campbell points out
in his preface, composites are not
all synthetic. Wood, for instance, is
a composite of cellulose fibers in a
matrix of lignin. Nor are man-made
composites necessarily new: mud
bricks reinforced by straw fit the
definition and date to antiquity.
Given their history and the ad-
vances in materials and fabrication
techniques in the past decades,
composites are pervasive in the
modern world. The author spent 38
years working for the Boeing Co.
and retired as a senior technical fel-
low in the field of structural materi-
als and manufacturing technology.
It is his aim, he tells us, to write a
comprehensive discussion of “ad-
vanced composite materials: what
they are, where they are used, how
they are made, their properties, how
they are designed and analyzed,
and how they perform in service.”
He also points out the advantages of
composites and disadvantages. Be-
sides weight savings, they are useful
because, in the words of a U.S. Navy
engineer, “They don’t rot and they
don’t get tired.” The primary disad-
vantage, it seems, is that they can be
costlier than alternatives for some
applications.
Engineering Money: Financial
Engineering for Engineers.
Richard Hill and George Solt. John
Wiley & Sons Inc., 111 River Street,
Hoboken, NJ, 07030. 2010. 194.
39.95. ISBN: 978-0-470-54601-7.
Fools and their money are soon
parted, but what about engineers?
Engineering Money is intended to
teach the business side of the engi-
neering profession to early-career
engineers. The authors contend that
the financial elements of a success-
ful project are just as important as
the actual nuts-and-bolts engineer-
ing—and closely related. The book
starts from the premise that these
topics are frequently ignored in en-
gineering education and is therefore
structured as a primer. Twenty-nine
short chapters lay out the basics of
such fundamental topics as what a
contract is and how to get paid for
your work. In addition to summaries
that highlight key points, each chap-
ter features text boxes providing
real-world examples or anecdotes to
help illustrate the main points. It’s
an easy read, and the text is laced
with humor intended to keep the
reader engaged.
Physical Ultrasonics of Com-
posites. Stanislav I. Rokhlink,
Dale E. Chimenti, and Peter B.
Nagy. Oxford University Press
Inc., 198 Madison Ave., New York,
NY 10016. 2011. 367 pages. $84.68.
ISBN: 978-0-19-507960-9.
This book is an introduction to
the characterization of composite
materials and ultrasonic waves.
It consists of two major themes:
mechanics and elasticity of com-
posites are treated first, followed
by their ultrasonic behavior and
applications. The basics of physical
properties of composites and their
elastic behavior as homogeneous,
anisotropic materials are followed
by a discussion of wave mechan-
ics in anisotropic media. In the
second part, ultrasonic waves in
bulk composites are explored with
emphasis on solutions of the elastic
wave equation in anisotropic
media, ways of visualizing those
solutions, and the relationships
among the field variables of wave
motion. The last chapter is devoted
to a discussion of the emerging
field of air-coupled ultrasonics.
The main purpose of the book is
to help students and researchers
interested in learning ultrasonics
as applied to the characterization
of composites. It also is intended to
serve as a reference guide for work-
ers in the field.
 newproducts
Conductive epoxy
Master Bond Inc., HACKENSACK,
N.J. EP21TDCS-LO is an electrically
conductive silver-filled epoxy that
passes ASTM 595 for NASA low outgas-
sing specifications. It is widely used for
demanding applications in the electron-
ic, electrical, computer, semiconductor,
aerospace, and optical industries. The
adhesive cures at room temperature in
24 to 48 hours and in one to two hours
at 200 ºF. It has a tensile shear strength
of more than 1,800 psi, a T-peel of great-
er than 5 pli, and outstanding adhesion
to similar and dissimilar substrates.
The volume resistivity of the system is
less than 0.001 ohm-centimeter. The
epoxy is suitable for cryogenic applica-
tions. It withstands thermal cycling
and is resistant to chemicals, including
water, oil, and most organic solvents.
The epoxy offers a simple 1:1 mixing
ratio by weight or volume. With its low
drip formula, EP21TDCS-LO can be
applied with a syringe, knife, spatula, or
trowel to vertical surfaces without sag-
ging, and contact pressure is required
for curing. Syringes have a three-month
shelf life and glass jars have a six-month
shelf life, if stored at room temperature.
EP21TDCS-LO is available in premixed
and frozen syringes, as well as in metal
containers.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-40 or circle 40
Hydrocarbon
remote controller
Emerson Process Management,
Houston. The ROC800L liquid
hydrocarbon remote controller is
designed to measure and control liquid
hydrocarbons including crude oil,
refined products, specialty products,
lubricating oils, and light hydrocarbons.
The controller is suitable for applica-
tions from oil well testing and net oil
computations to custody transfer and
leak detection. The unit has a variety of
applications, and the remote control-
ler can be configured using Emerson’s
Roclink 800 software. The device
can also be programmed to perform
many PLC functions using function
sequence tables or Emerson’s DS800
programming tool. The DS800 uses IEC
Standard 61131-3 languages, including
ladder logic, structured text, function
block diagrams, instruction list, or
sequential function chart language. The
ROC800L can be connected to Emer-
son’s DeltaV digital automation system
to enable remote device diagnostics
using Emerson’s AMS Suite predictive
maintenance software. The ROC800L
meets the requirements of the Norwe-
gian Petroleum Directorate for liquid
flow computers.  designed to provide high-reliability
www.me.hotims.com/34752-41 or circle 41
Thermocouple connector
Omega Engineering, Stamford,
Conn. A new UTC-USB universal
thermocouple connector accepts
signals from 9 thermocouple types
(J, K, T, E, R, S, B, C, and N). Through
the USB port, the UTC-USB displays
actual temperature readings on a PC.
Free software for display, data logging,
and chart recording is provided. The
software permits selection of the ther-
mocouple type and units, and the use of
a PC as a meter, chart recorder, or data
logger. UTC-USB accepts both standard
and miniature connectors. It features
a built-in cold junction compensation
and linearization. Applications include
PC-based temperature monitoring and
data logging for laboratory work, indus-
trial ovens, hydraulic pumps, fluids and
motors, extreme temperature monitor-
ing, and HVAC. Price starts at $59.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-42 or circle 42
Piezoelectric accelerometer
Meggitt Sensing Systems, San
Juan Capistrano, Calif.
The Endevco model 2228C, is a
rugged low-mass triaxial piezo-
electric accelerometer, designed to
suit a variety of general vibration
testing requirements. The versatility
and performance characteristics of the
model 2228C allow it to be used in R&D,
metrology, lighting systems, wireless
equipment, solid rocket booster elec-
tronics assemblies, helicopter engines,
combustion turbines, and vacuum
pump, among other applications . With
a sensitivity of 2.8 pC/g, the 2228C is
vibration measurements on three
orthogonal axes with 10-32 receptacles
to allow data collection from three
separate output connections. These
connections also offer a visual reference
for the orthogonal axes being measured.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-43 or circle 43
Hydraulic rod clamp
Advanced Machine & Engineering,
Rockford, Ill. The Amlok Hydraulic
Series RCH rod clamp has been devel-
oped to provide power-off clamping
of rods and shafts. The rod clamps are
actuated by a spring/collet mechanism
and unclamped by hydraulic pres-
sure. The rod clamps are designed to
clamp components after the motion
has stopped and to hold the position
securely as long as forces do not exceed
table values. Versions for braking and
pneumatic applications are also avail-
able. The mountings of the RCH Amlok
rod clamp have been designed to apply
to standard heavy-duty NFPA-style MF1
cylinders. The standard housing can be
mounted to any machine structure or be
custom-designed to suit an application.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-44 or circle 44
APRIL 2011 | mechanical engineering 59
 newproducts

Push-in terminals pressure to maintain a secure connec-

EAO Switch Corp., Milford, Conn.
The Series 04 PIT push-in features
a Phoenix Contact spring terminal
connection, which reduces assembly
time compared to traditional screw
terminals. No additional equipment is
needed for assembly. The Series 04 PIT
offers a secure connection and high
resistanceLBP-016
to vibration. The cable con-
(4.625 X 7.5).ai 1 2/3/2011 8:24:58 AM
nection is accomplished without any
tools. To assemble, one needs to push
the stripped wire-end into the spring
terminal; this will apply the correct
tion over the lifetime of the switch.
EAO’s PIT accepts wire sizes from 16 to
26AWG, offers protection against con-
tact according to the IP 20 standard,
and has a mechanical lifetime rating of
up to 3 million operations.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-45 or circle 45
PCB connectors
Amphenol Industrial Operations,
Sidney, N.Y. These three compact,
high-amperage, ROHS-compliant Rad-

sok PCB connectors are for a variety

of power bus applications, including
high-power bus assembly utilities,
power-to-board servers, power-to-box
servers, and battery power/chargers for
electric vehicles. Amphenol’s proprie-
C
tary Radsok technology uses a hyper-
bolic, stamped grid configuration that
ensures a large, coaxial, face-to-face
M

Y
surface area engagement to maximize
CM heat dissipation and reduce failures.
MY
The Radsert, PowerBlok, and PGY con-
nectors not only feature dependable
operation, but also offer more surface
CY

CMY
space within a circuit board design and
K eliminate threaded connection fail-
ures. They are suitable for use in high-
current, single-point connections.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-46 or circle 46

CPU board
B&R USA,
Roswell, Ga.
The new CPU
board with
an Intel Core
2 Duo P8400
processor now
provides an even more powerful plat-
form for Automation PC 810 and Panel
PC 800 devices. The combination of
the 2.26 GHz processor and the GM45
chipset provides high levels of perfor-
me.hotims.com/34752-16 or circle 16

60 mechanical engineering | April 2011

mance. Both processor cores share
a 3 MB level 2 cache, which allows
efficient multitasking. The 1.066 MHz
front side bus is combined with DDR3
RAM modules. Variants of the APC810
with one or two slots, larger types with
three slots, and the PC with five slots
are available to fit various applications.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-47 or circle 47
for resistance welders, slurry pump
seal water, machine coolant, and steam
boiler feed water. The meters have
no moving parts, and so require little
maintenance. The no-moving-part
design makes the products suited to
monitor media with small particulates.
The meters operate with NPT ports
ranging from ¼ to 2 inches and can
handle flows from 4 to 200 gpm, with
occasional over-ranging up to 125 per-
cent of capacity without being damaged.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-49 or circle 49
Direct-current motor
The Bosch i-Business Group ,
Broadview, Ill. The GPA motor (part
number 0 130 302 014) features the
power and design attributes that are

Encapsulated transformers
AutomationDirect, Cumming, Ga.
The Hammond line of HPS Fortress
commercial encapsulated power
transformers has been expanded. Sin-
gle phase units are now available in
100 VA up to 25 kVA ratings and input
voltage ranges of 120 to 480 V ac. All A World Apart
units are encapsulated with electri-
cal grade silica sand and resin com- A World
In a World Apart
of Parts!
pounds to protect the core and coils,
sealing out moisture and airborne
contaminants and eliminating cor-
In a World of Parts!
Precision Chemical Etching
Our process of photochemical etching
rosion and deterioration. The NEMA Precision Chemical
offers Etching
speed, flexibility and
3R enclo- Ourprecision
process of photochemical
unmatched etching
by traditional
sures meet offers speed, flexibility
manufacturing and
methods.
or exceed precision unmatched by traditional
NEMA manufacturing
• Part to print in 1 day... yes, we’remethods.
that fast!
and ANSI
standards • Part to print in 1 day...
• Our yes, we’re
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www.me.hotims.com/34752-48 or circle 48 Just tell us what you need!

Flow meters
Parker Fluid Control Division,
NEW BRITAIN, Conn. Rugged inline
flow meters are suitable for applications
using water, water/glycol coolant, and
other low-viscosity fluids. The meters
You’ll see the difference as soon as you
can monitor the flow of cooling fluid
talk to us. Contact our sales staff or request
You’llfree
your seesample
the difference as soonguide
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at
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your free sample kit and design guide at
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773.463.6211 3758 W. Belmont Avenue
FAX.463.3387 Chicago, IL 60618
sales@fotofab.com
773.463.6211 USA
3758 W. Belmont Avenue
FAX.463.3387 Chicago, IL 60618
sales@fotofab.com
me.hotims.com/34752-17 or circle 17
USA

me.hotims.com/34752-17 or circle 17

bottom trim
newproducts
important for powering the posi-
tioning arms of mobile and sta-
tionary stacking machines. It is
one of several different 12 V – 24
V motors without transmissions
that are featured in the Bosch
GPA family of dc electric motors.
Bosch GPA motors can be installed
horizontally or vertically. They are available with a choice of
shaft configurations, which offer product design engineers
flexibility in addressing motor installation preferences. The
Bosch i-Business team offers consultation and engineering
support, which developers of stacking machines and other
industrial products and systems may find helpful when
developing prototype and next-generation equipment.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-50 or circle 50
Pump control
Toshiba America Inc., New York. The P9 is a new drive
that can optimize pumps and pump systems to reduce
pressure buildup and energy consumption, thereby maxi-
mizing efficiency, energy savings, and the life of pumping
equipment. By incorporating Toshiba’s proprietary, Virtual
Linear Pump (VLP) technology, the P9 directly controls
pressure or flow. The manufacturer describes the P9 as
Six-Axis
Force/Torque
Sensors
Standard Features: Six Axes of Force/Torque Sensing
(Fx Fy Fz Tx Ty Tz) • High Overload Protection • Interfaces
for Ethernet, PCI, USB, EtherNet/IP, CAN, and more • Sizes
from 17 mm - 250 mm diameter • Custom sensors available
Applications: Product Testing • Biomedical Research •
Finger Force Research • Rehabilitation Research • Robotics
Over 20 Years of Robotic End-Effector Innovation
www.ati-ia.com/mes
me.hotims.com/34752-18 or circle 18
62 mechanical engineering | April 2011
“user-friendly.” It linearizes a traditional non-linear pumps
curve, and allows for load-balancing over several pumps.
The user can configure the system in five steps.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-51 or circle 51
Programmable controller
Galil Motion Control , Rocklin, Calif. The new RIO-
47202 provides 400 lines of program memory and 254
symbolic variables, twice as many as the standard RIO.
It offers six programmable PID loops. Each RIO unit con-
tains 8 analog inputs, 16 optically isolated inputs, and 16
optically isolated outputs. Multiple RIO units can be
networked together for I/O
expansion. The RIO has
a 32-bit processor and
non-volatile memory for
storing user programs.
Features include arithme-
tic and logical processing,
process control loops, data logging, counters, and
timers. The RIO allows communication via both Ethernet
and RS232. It also supports Modbus TCP/IP as master and
slave, a Web interface, and the ability to send e-mail alerts.
The RIO-47202 controller measures 7.19 x 3.52 inches, and
includes a metal cover and DIN rail mounting tray. The RIO
receives power from Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) or from an
external supply of 18 V – 36 V dc.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-52 or circle 52
Strain sensor
COLUMBIA RESEARCH LABORATORIES INC., WOODLYN, PA.
The Series DT3747 sensor measures circumferential strain
around the diameter of the surface to which it is mounted.
Models are available for use with materials commonly used
in aircraft structural fabrication. Similar devices have
been used to moni-
tor rocket motor
expansion. They
can also be used in
many industrial and
military applica-
tions involving pipe
expansion measurements, explosive body applications, air-
craft surface load, and engine monitoring. The sensors are
temperature compensating and offer a choice of cylindrical
mounting radius. The specified mounting radius is custom
molded into the body of the sensor providing a method of
controlling operator alignment during mounting.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-53 or circle 53
Metal-hazard detectors
Hilti Inc., TULSA, Okla. The new Hilti PS 30 and 35 Fer-
rodetectors locate hazards lurking in concrete and masonry.
The PS 30 can determine whether a reinforcing bar, or a
 copper or alumi-
num pipe is located
beneath a concrete
surface before
drilling in order
to avoid destroy-
ing expensive bits
or tools or cutting
through structur-
ally-relevant rein-
forcement. The
PS 35 indicates
the depth of the
detected object before damage is done
to concealed pipes or cables.
The PS 30 and PS 35 Ferrodetectors
are capable of locating reinforcing bars
in concrete to a depth of 4 ¾ inches,
and can find copper or aluminum pipes
to a depth of 3 inches. Accuracy is
within 3/8 inch. The PS 35’s maximum
detection range can be set so that the
tool only detects these objects within
a certain distance, helpful for setting
anchors at a specific depth. The PS 35
is also designed to locate rebar, copper,
and EMT in concrete, CMU, or brick.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-54 or circle 54
Conformal coating machine
Advanced Coating Robotics,
Barnsley, United Kingdom. A
new conformal coating machine is a
multi-axis system based on Baldor
Electric motion control products, with
three axes making use of the company’s
Ethernet-compatible PowerLink servo
drives. The machine provides a fast
means of selectively applying protective
conformal coatings to printed circuit
board mounted components, and can
accommodate both inline and batch
processing operations. It can coat PCBs
as large as 500 x 480 mm with on-board
components as high as 90 mm. The pro-
grammable machine uses an advanced
five-axis motion control system to com-
bine high-speed throughput capabilities
with spray head positioning accuracy of
25 micrometers.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-55 or circle 55
Modular safety brake
Mayr Corp. , Waldwick, N.J. ROBA-
topstop is a modular safety brake
system for A-bearing-side servomo- coupling, with an additional safety
tor attachment. It is designed to hold clutch for torque limiting, or with two
heavy loads on the vertical axis, even individual brakes. Using a ROBA-
when the servo motor is disconnected topstop brake system with a hollow
for maintenance. The brakes can be shaft and an integrated, insertable
integrated into pre-existing construc- shaft coupling eliminates the need for
tions between the servomotor and the separate compensation coupling and
counter flange. The modular assembly coupling housing. A drive line with
allows many designs—for example, this brake system is only minimally
with a hollow shaft, with a flexible longer than the usual axis with servo-
At Forest City, We Always
Have Gears On Our Minds...
Some folks might think a diametral pitch is a roundabout way of selling
something, but we know better at Forest City Gear.
Our gearheads live with the math and physics of gears on their minds, every
day. Plus, they bring an unmatched knowledge of materials and CNC machine
tool functionalities to the difficult task of making the world's very best gears, to
exacting customer specifications, time after time after time. In our world, you
see, consistency is not the hobgoblin of little minds, with all apologies to Mr.
Emerson (the essayist, not the electric motor magnate). Doing something right
"most" of the time simply isn't good enough at Forest City Gear, as it isn't for
our customers.
They demand we make it right, every time, as our products help their products
perform better. As a result, their reputation rides, in part, on ours. This is a very
special trust and we do our best to preserve it, all the while trying to improve the
products we deliver. We do this by maintaining a machine shop that's the envy
of the gear world, from the first drawing to every step in the machining process
to the final inspection in our state-of-the-industry QC department and finally, to
the careful product handling and packaging.
For a sample of how good a gear company can be, when they maintain such
"top of mind awareness" for customers, check out www.forestcitygear.com.
We'll be thinking about you.
Gearheads? You Betcha.
11715 Main Street, Roscoe, IL 61073 815-623-2168
me.hotims.com/34752-19 or circle 19
Forest City Gear Ad4806 Island “GearHeads” Mechanical Engineering—Bernard
April 2011 | mechanical & Company 12/14/10
engineering 63
newproducts

motor and shaft coupling for connection to a spindle or to a Software key keeper
gearbox shaft. Dongle Lockbox Co.,
www.me.hotims.com/34752-56 or circle 56 Rancho Santa Marga-
rita, Calif. This new device
helps secure USB software dongles (software keys)
Optical data couplers from theft, loss, and damage. The product, which
Pepperl+Fuchs, TWINSBURG, OHio. With speeds from has a list price of $99, is designed for use with a single
33 to 50 times faster than competitive models, the LS680 is USB software key. It offers a combination lock that securely
capable of transmitting signals, such as live video and other houses the software dongle. A detachable metal cable is used
communication informa- to secure the lock box to a stationary device while the male
tion, in material handling end of a six-foot USB 2.0 cable is connected to a computer.
applications. The LS680 www.me.hotims.com/34752-58 or circle 58
has no operating controls
such as pushbuttons,
switches, or potentiom- Arc welding robot
eters, and requires no ABB Robotics, Auburn Hills, Mich. The new IRB 2600
programming, making it ID model, especially
a tamper-proof, plug-and- designed for arc weld-
play solution. The LS680 ing, features a flexible
optical data transmitter transmits protocol-free, so various conduit in its upper
industrial Ethernet topologies such as Ethernet IP, Profinet, arm for routing cables
and TCP/IP can all be transmitted. It transmits data consis- and hoses to integrate the
tently at a rate of 100 Mbit/s via a 100 Base-TX interface. The process equipment with the robot. The inte-
LS680 optical data coupler acts a “virtual cable” that replaces grated design provides a number of benefits
a physical Ethernet cable. including 15 percent shorter cycle times,
www.me.hotims.com/34752-57 or circle 57 lower operational costs, and easier program-
ming. ABB is one of the few robot suppliers
that offer a mid-size robot in both standard
www.cd-adapco.com/engineeringsuccess STAR-CCM+ STAR-CD
and ID models. With the internally routed dress pack the
movement of the hoses and cables is completely predictable,
allowing the IRB 2600ID to operate at maximum speeds
Engineering Success and simplifying off-line programming. Without needing to
account for swinging cables when simulating robot systems,
...simulation software for a new frontier the time required for fine-tuning programs is minimized,
in engineering innovation enabling faster transitions from weld to weld. The ID design
also reduces the exposure of cables and hoses to weld splat-
ter and other sources of wear.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-59 or circle 59

Load sensor
Saelig Co. Inc., Pittsford,
N.Y. LoadSense is a load sensor
that can be integrated with a
crane hook, fork lift, or other
handling device for intelligent
feedback of loading events. It
has an on-board single-chip
computer for recording, analyzing, and archiving readings,
and wireless communications to transfer data in real time to
a host computer. All live data is captured in real time and can
be transferred to a database, stored, totaled, and analyzed
on the spot. It is internally battery powered and requires no
wires. The sensor automatically begins transmitting data
when used, and no special training is required to install or
operate the unit.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-60 or circle 60
me.hotims.com/34752-20 or circle 20

64 mechanical engineering | April 2011

Coastal security system thickness of 0.047 inch (1.2 mm).
HALO Maritime Defense Systems They are manufactured from 300
Inc., Andover, Mass. The HALO Series stainless steel for corrosion
barrier is a waterborne security sys- resistance and can be used in sheets of
tem employing advanced composite any hardness. The studs are available
materials to provide stable floating in thread sizes #2-56 through ¼-20
walls in the water capable of with- and M2.5 through M6. Lengths range
standing multiple vessel impacts. from 0.312 inch through 1.50 inches
The materials used in the barrier and 8 mm through 35 mm.
are ecologically friendly and require www.me.hotims.com/34752-63 or circle 63
low maintenance. Composite plastic
materials are used throughout HALO;
they do not pollute the environment
and are not susceptible to constant
degradation in the marine environ-
ment. Valuable coastal assets left
unguarded are potentially soft targets
to adversaries. It is applicable to a
variety of coastal assets that require
robust protection, including ships and
ports, oil and gas terminals, nuclear
or conventional power stations, off-
shore oil and gas rigs, shoreline build-
ings, and population centers.
www.me.hotims.com/34752-61 or circle 61

Pressure transducer
Ashcroft Inc., Stratford, Conn.
The Ashcroft G2 pressure transducer
is now available with a larger selection
of electrical and pressure connections.

Experience Matters
Deutsch DT and DTM along with the
AMP Superseal 1.5 connection provide
moisture resistance along with proven
latch designs that prevent inadvertent
• OEM pump & compressor experience with years of medical,
disconnection. The  transducer offers
stability along with 1 percent TEB accu- environmental and lab applications
racy over a broad temperature range. • Oil-less technology offerings including WOB-L® and articulated
www.me.hotims.com/34752-62 or circle 62 piston, diaphragm, rotary, linear, and liquid pumps
• Engineered designs with maximized size to performance ratio and
optimized efficiency
Swaging collar studs
PennEngineering, Medford, N.J. • Worldwide manufacturing, sales and distribution
PEM Type SGPC swaging collar studs
For more information call 920-457-4891 or go to gd-thomas.com
attach dissimilar panel materials and
multiple panels. They can accom-
modate most panel materials, includ-
ing stainless steel, and will exhibit
strong torque-out resistance. Their
design additionally allows for close
centerline-to-edge distance to suit
limited-space applications. The swag-
ing collar studs can install into sheets
as thin as 0.024 inch (0.6 mm) and in
multiple panels whose total thickness PUMP AND COMPRESSOR SO
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 ASME STANDARDS & CERTIFICATION
ASME and Standards Web site at whom any comments should be provided.
Standards & Certification http://cstools.asme.org/staff. Some proposed standards actions may be
Three Park Ave., New York, NY 10016-5990 available directly from the Web site; hard
(212) 591-8500 Fax: (212) 591-8501 SCHEDULE OF MEETINGS: Meetings of Codes copies of any proposed standards action
e-mail: cs@asme.org and Standards Development Committees (excluding BPV) may be obtained from:
If you are looking for information regarding are held periodically to consider the devel- Mayra Santiago
an ASME code or standard committee, confor- opment of new standards and the mainte- Secretary A
mity assessment program, training program, nance of existing standards. To search for E-mail: ansibox@asme.org
staff contact, or schedule of meetings, please scheduled meetings of Codes and Standards ASME
visit our Web site: www.asme.org/codes. Development Committees, by date or by Standards & Certification
keyword, visit the Standards and Certifica- Three Park Ave., M/S 23E2
COMMITTEE LISTING: For a listing of ASME tion Web site at http://calendar.asme.org/ New York, NY 10016
Codes and Standards Development Com- home. cfm?CategoryID=1.
mittees and their charters, visit the Stan- ASME maintains approximately 500 codes
dards and Certification Web site at http:// PUBLIC REVIEW DRAFTS and standards. A general categorization of
cstools. asme.org/charters.cfm. An important element of ASME’s accredited the subject matter addressed by ASME codes
standards development procedures is the and standards is as follows:
CONFORMITY ASSESSMENT: For a listing and requirement that all proposed standards Authorized Inspections
description of ASME Conformity Assess- actions (new codes and standards, revisions Automotive
ment (accreditation, registration, and to existing codes and standards, and reaf- Bioprocessing Equipment
certification) programs, visit the Standards firmations of existing codes and standards) Boilers
and Certification Web site at www. asme. be made available for public review and Certification and Accreditation
org/Codes/CertifAccred. comment. The proposed standards actions Chains
currently available for public review are Controls
TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT: For a listing and announced on ASME’s Web site, located at Conveyors
description of ASME Training & Develop- http://cstools.asme.org/csconnect/ Cranes and Hoists
ment educational opportunities, visit the PublicReviewpage.cfm. Cutting, Hand, and Machine Tools
ASME Education Web site at www.asme. Dimensions
org/Education/Courses The Web site announcements will provide Drawings, Terminology, and Graphic Symbols
information on the scope of the proposed Elevators and Escalators
STAFF CONTACTS: To obtain the ASME staff standards action, the price of a standard Energy Assessment
contact information for a Codes and Stan- when being proposed for reaffirmation or Fasteners
dards Development Committee or a Confor- withdrawal, the deadline for submittal of Fitness-For-Service
mity Assessment program, visit the Codes comments, and the ASME staff contact to Gauges/Gaging
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68 MECHANICAL ENGINEERING | April 2011

positionsopen
Bilkent university faculty of engineering Mechanical En-
gineering Faculty Position Announcement The Mechanical Engineering
Department at Bilkent University is in the process of hiring additional fac-
ulty members and seeks candidates for multiple positions to start Fall
2011 and later. Appointments may be made at Assistant Professor, as well
as at Associate Professor or Full Professor rank for candidates with com-
mensurate experiences and accomplishments. Development of first-class
research and education laboratories are underway to enable the new fac-
ulty to immediately start and continue their research without interruption.
Faculty duties include teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels,
research, and supervision of theses. The department will consider candi-
dates with backgrounds and interests in all areas mechanical engineering.
Nominations and applications should describe the professional interests
and goals of the candidate in both teaching and research. Each appli-
cation should include a resume and the names and contact information
of three or more individuals who will provide letters of recommendation.
Please send all nominations and applications to: Professor Levent Onural,
Dean of Engineering, Bilkent University, Bilkent, Ankara TR-06800, Tur-
key. Email: onural@bilkent.edu.tr Information about the university and the
department can be found at http://www.me.bilkent.edu.tr/index.html and
http://www.bilkent.edu.tr
Aerospace Engineering Sciences University of Colo-
rado at boulder The Department of Aerospace Engineering Sci-
ences at the University of Colorado at Boulder invites applications for a
tenure-track faculty position. Applicants are sought with an expertise in
experimental fluid dynamics with a strong grasp of fundamental theory
and an active interest in applications including, but not limited to, unsteady
aerodynamics, flow control, unmanned air vehicles, and wind energy. The
position is targeted at the assistant professor level, but experienced can-
didates with outstanding credentials will be considered for associate or
full professor. Applicants should demonstrate the potential to establish
a vigorous research program and to excel at undergraduate and gradu-
ate teaching. A Ph.D. degree in an appropriate engineering or science
field is required. For more information please visit http://www.colorado.
edu/aerospace Applicants should electronically submit their application
to job posting #81288 on www.jobsatcu.com, including a curriculum vi-
tae, statements of research and teaching interests, and the names of four
references, addressing the cover letter to Prof. Kenneth Jansen, Search
Committee Chair, Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences, Uni-
versity of Colorado. Applications will be considered starting April 15, 2011.
The University of Colorado is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed
to building a diverse workforce. We encourage applications from women,
racial and ethnic minorities, persons with disabilities, and veterans.
SENIOR ENGINEER: Community Environmental Center, NYS’s largest
provider of energy efficiency services and approved auditor of green build-
ing technical assistance, is looking to hire a Senior Engineer.  Candidate
will oversee the energy auditing of existing buildings, primarily residen-
tial, and the energy modeling for new facilities.  Candidate will provide
technical leadership and supervision to junior engineers and other staff
involved with CEC’s auditing/modeling work, among other responsibilities. 
Minimum Education: Graduate degree in mechanical engineering with
strong preference for PE/CEM.  Strong background in energy-related tech-
nologies, with knowledge of TREAT, EA-QUIP, EQuest modeling, HVAC
design/specifications and project implementation.  Salary Range: $85K -
$110K, based on experience. Fax: resumes to 718.784.5506, ATTN: Tech
Services.  of mechanics of materials and mechanical design.
IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering, THE UNIVERSITY OF
IOWA, has an immediate opening for a Postdoctoral Research Scholar
in the area of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). Candidates must have
earned a doctorate in mechanical or aerospace engineering, or a closely
related discipline, and have interests in CFD modeling and numerical
methods for code development and practical applications. Current fo-
cus areas include high order discretization schemes on non-orthogonal
curvilinear grid; multi-grid and local-grid refinement methods; two-phase
interface tracking and modeling; turbulence simulation and modeling; and
ship hydrodynamics applications. Strong coding experience and skills
using HPC with MPI and programming languages (Fortran or C) are
required. Excellent written and oral communication skills are essential.
Knowledge of multi-block structured grid, overset grid, and grid genera-
tion technologies is a plus. Salary will be commensurate with qualifica-
tions and experience. Applicants should submit a resume with a list of at
least three references and copies of selected publications, if appropriate,
to Teresa Gaffey, IIHR—Hydroscience & Engineering, The University of
Iowa, Iowa City, IA 52242-1585 or by e-mail to teresa-gaffey@uiowa.edu
with the subject header CFD/PD. Applications will be screened as they are
received and accepted until the position is filled. Information about IIHR is
available on the web at: http://www.iihr.uiowa.edu. Information regarding
the Office of Postdoctoral Scholars can be found at http://postdoc.grad.
uiowa.edu. The University of Iowa prohibits discrimination in employment
or in its educational programs and activities on the basis of race, national
origin, color, creed, religion, sex, age, disability, veteran status, sexual ori-
entation, gender identity, or associational preference. The University also
affirms its commitment to providing equal opportunities and equal access
to University facilities. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply for
all employment vacancies. For additional information on nondiscrimina-
tion policies, contact the Coordinator of Title IX and Section 504, and the
ADA in the The Office of Equal Opportunity and Diversity, 319-335-0705
(voice) or 319-335-0697 (text), The University of Iowa, 202 Jessup Hall,
Iowa City, Iowa, 52242-1316. Prospective employees may review the Uni-
positionsopen
versity Campus Security Policy and the latest annual crime statistics by
contacting the Department of Public Safety at 319-335-5022.
Senior Faculty Chair in Energy for the Built Environ-
ment The MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), started in 2006, is an Institute-
wide initiative designed to help transform the global energy system to
meet the needs of the future and to help improve today’s energy sys-
tems. The MIT Energy initiative is undertaking a search for a senior fac-
ulty member in the field of energy for the built environment. The faculty
member will have the opportunity to work with the expanding MIT energy
research and educational programs in architecture, building technology,
city planning and design, and engineering applied to the built environ-
ment. Programs range from those focused on cities and regions, to the
neighborhood and district scale, to, individual buildings and building com-
ponents. The emphasis of the search is on candidates who will provide
leadership for new initiatives in energy that will integrate and build on ex-
isting programs at MIT and initiate new research directions. The success-
ful candidate could be appointed in the School of Architecture and Plan-
ning or in the School of Engineering, or could have a joint appointment
in more than one department. The candidate should have an outstanding
record of research and teaching and should thrive in a multidisciplinary
environment. Research could address a number of areas related to the
built environment such as urban design and energy performance, devel-
opment policy and infrastructure planning and implementation to achieve
major energy objectives, as well as research creating passive and active
designs of energy efficient buildings and urban environments involving
advanced technologies. Interested candidates should provide a curricu-
lum vitae, a three to five page statement outlining energy related scholar-
ship, research, teaching, professional and institutional service, three to
five sample publications, along with the names of five or more references.
Other media can be submitted where appropriate. This information must
be entered electronically via https://school-of-engineering-faculty-search.
mit.edu/mitei/.   It is anticipated that candidate interviews will take place in
early spring 2011 with the successful candidate appointed and in place as
early as fall 2011. MIT is a culturally diverse faculty and strongly encour-
ages applications from women and minority candidates. All application
materials should be submitted directly via https://school-of-engineering-
faculty-search.mit.edu/mitei/. Thank you very much for your cooperation!
Search for Chair of the Department of Mechanical & In-
dustrial Engineering (MIE) Northeastern University, Boston, MA
Colorado School of Mines
Division of Engineering
Assistant Professors –
Mechanical Engineering
Colorado School of Mines invites applications for two
anticipated tenure-track Assistant Professor positions
in Mechanical Engineering with specialties in the areas
Candidates must have earned a doctoral degree in
mechanical engineering or a closely-related discipline
by August 2011. The successful candidates must
demonstrate the potential for scholarship, service, and
successful teaching of interdisciplinary engineering
education at both the undergraduate and graduate
levels. Candidates must demonstrate the potential to
develop a self-sustaining research program in one of
the following two areas:
Mechanics of materials for energy conversion systems
(e.g., nondestructive evaluation, real-time fault
detection, degradation analysis and modeling).
Mechanical or electro-mechanical design for robotics
and automation or bioengineering applications.
More information about the school and division can be
found at www.mines.edu or http://engineering.mines.
edu/
For a complete job announcement and the procedures
for applying, see the complete announcement at: http://
inside.mines.edu/HR-Academic-Faculty
April 2011 | mechanical engineering 69
positionsopen positionsopen positionsopen
The College of Engineering (www.coe.neu. mechanical and industrial engineering fields the careers of women in engineering and sci-
edu) at Northeastern University invites applica- is beneficial. Previous experience managing a ence. A doctorate in mechanical engineering or
tions and nominations for the position of Chair large federally-funded research group or center in a closely related field is required.
of the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering is desirable. Applicants should submit a detailed Northeastern University is an equal opportunity/
Department. The Mechanical and Industrial curriculum vitae, three professional references, affirmative action/Title IX employer. All persons
Engineering Department (www.mie.neu.edu) at and a strategic vision statement. Nominations are invited to apply regardless of race, color,
Northeastern University is a vibrant academic for the position should be sent to the address gender, national origin, religion, disability, or
enterprise which is growing in both size and provided below or emailed directly to j.ruberti@ sexual orientation. For More Information contact
stature. The department comprises 33 full- neu.edu. The target starting date is July 1, Professor George G. Adams (adams@coe.neu.
time faculty with $10 million in annual research 2011, but the position will remain open until edu) To apply: Go to http://www.coe.neu.edu
funding, 100 Ph.D. students, 400 MS students, filled. Northeastern University is an equal op- and click on Faculty Positions, then Full-Time
and a total combined graduate/undergraduate portunity/affirmative action/Title IX employer. All and Requisition Number: 113722.
student population of over 1200. At the core of persons are invited to apply regardless of race,
the Northeastern engineering education experi- color, gender, national origin, religion, disability, Faculty Position in Mechanical En-
ence is our top ranked cooperative education or sexual orientation. To apply go to http://www. gineering – Texas Tech University The De-
program which contributes significantly to the coe.neu.edu and click on Faculty Positions, partment of Mechanical Engineering at Texas
integrated learning model of the College of Full-Time, and Requisition Number 113685. For Tech University is seeking candidates for a
Engineering. In addition, the Mechanical and more information contact Prof. Jeffrey Ruberti at tenure-track position at the Assistant Professor
Industrial Engineering Department is home j.ruberti@neu.edu or 617-373- 2740. MIE Chair level. The scope of the search is broad and we
to multiple federally-funded research centers Faculty Recruitment Committee, Department of are interested in candidates with expertise in
(of the eight federal centers in the College of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, North- emerging technologies in areas such as, but not
Engineering): 1) The NSF Nanoscale Science eastern University, 360 Huntington Ave., 334 limited to, energy, nanotechnology and MEMS,
and Engineering Center for High-rate Nano- Snell Engineering Center, Boston, MA 02115, bioengineering, biological and soft materials
manufacturing, 2) The NSF IUCRC on Micro- USA and other advanced materials, computational
contamination and Control, 3) The NSF Center methods, and multi-agent control. Candidates
for Health Organization Transformation and 4) Assistant Professor - Northeastern need to demonstrate strong potential in scholar-
The VA New England Healthcare Engineering University The Department of Mechanical and ship and in securing extramural funding. A PhD
Partnership. Given recently announced plans Industrial Engineering at Northeastern Univer- in Mechanical Engineering or a PhD in a related
to dramatically expand the number of faculty sity invites applications and nominations for a field is required. Experience in a Mechanical
hires across the University, the next Chair of tenure-track faculty position beginning in Sep- Engineering curriculum is preferred. Excellent
MIE has a unique opportunity to significantly tember 2011 at the Assistant Professor level. Ap- written and oral communication skills as well
impact the direction and trajectory of an already plicants at the senior level with well-established, as the ability to work with a diverse body of
strong, vibrant department. Applicants are ex- well-funded, and internationally recognized re- students and colleagues are necessities. Du-
pected to have demonstrated strategic vision search programs will also be considered. Can- ties will include teaching and developing ME
in their research enterprises which should be didates are sought to expand the department’s undergraduate and graduate courses in areas
well-established, well-funded and internation- research efforts in any area of mechanical en- of expertise, maintaining an externally funded
ally recognized. Successful candidates will gineering, but preferably in the field of applied research program with extensive involvement of
also have demonstrated excellence and have mechanics. Excellence in teaching is also ex- graduate and undergraduate students, and per-
significant experience in teaching at both the pected. Applications will be reviewed until the forming service to the department, college, and
undergraduate and graduate level. Research, position is filled. Northeastern is the recipient of university. Presently, there are 26 faculty mem-
teaching or collaborative experience that spans an NSF-funded ADVANCE grant for promoting bers conducting research funded by Federal,
State, and Local government agencies, industry
and institutes. The ME department has 1100 un-
dergraduate and graduate students. In addition
Careers with Mass Appeal to our ample research and teaching facilities,
the off-campus Reese Technology Center is
available to increase research laboratory space.
Texas Tech University, with an enrollment of
30,000 students, offers 12 academic colleges/
schools and is a part of the comprehensive
Tenure-Track Assistant/Associate/Full state-supported Texas Tech University System,
Professors Mechanical Engineering which includes the Texas Tech University Health
The University of Massachusetts Lowell is a comprehensive university with a national reputation in science, Sciences Center on the same campus. Texas
engineering and technology, committed to educating students for lifelong success in a diverse world and Tech also houses a state-of-the-art High Per-
conducting research and outreach activities that sustain the economic, environmental and social health of the formance Computing Center. Lubbock is a com-
region. In February 2009, a campus-wide strategic planning initiative was launched to reposition UMass munity of 230,000 people, with a cost of living
Lowell as a world-class institution over the next decade. A major component of that initiative is to ensure that index that has historically been low compared to
diversity and inclusion are in every aspect of our strategic plan. We seek a diverse talented candidate pool to national norms. The city hosts frequent musical,
be part of our mission and achievements. UMass Lowell is a comprehensive four-year university, strategically theatrical, and sporting events. Outdoor activi-
located in northeast Massachusetts’ high-tech region, 25 miles from Boston. The department has over 400 ties, including snow and water skiing, are easily
undergraduate students and over 50 graduate students. The undergraduate engineering program is based on a accessible by car. Texas Tech University is sup-
design-build-test methodology, and is ABET accredited. portive of multidisciplinary research. Applica-
Assistant/Associate/Full Professor - Composites tions must be submitted on–line at http://jobs.
texastech.edu. Refer to Requisition No. 83141.
Full-time tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant/Associate/Full Professor. In exceptional cases, The complete application package should con-
candidates will be considered for the higher ranks. The successful candidate will possess a strong sist of 1) a detailed CV, 2) a letter of application
background in Mechanical Engineering and will develop and teach courses at the graduate and
undergraduate levels in Mechanical Engineering. The successful candidate will collaborate with existing that includes teaching and research philosophy,
faculty to develop sustainable external research funding in Composite Materials. Expertise is desired in solid and 3) contact information for at least three ref-
mechanics, structural application of composites, nano-composites, fiber-reinforced composite materials, erences. Applications will be evaluated as they
woven-fabric reinforced composites and experimental methods for composites testing and composites are received; review will continue until the posi-
manufacturing. tion is filled. Requests for further information
should be addressed to Ms. Linda Whitebread
Assistant/Associate/Full Professor - Renewable Energy via e-mail at linda.whitebread@ttu.edu. Texas
Full-time tenure-track position at the rank of Assistant/Associate/Full Professor. In exceptional cases, Tech University is an Affirmative Action/Equal
candidates will be considered for the higher ranks. The successful candidate will possess a strong Opportunity Employer. We strongly encourage
background in Mechanical Engineering and will develop and teach courses at the graduate and applications from women, minorities, and veter-
undergraduate levels in Mechanical Engineering as well as in the interdisciplinary Renewable Energy ans, and we consider the needs of dual-career
Engineering graduate program. The successful candidate will collaborate with existing faculty to develop couples.
sustainable external research funding in Renewable Energy, including the following areas: design
optimization, stochastic process irradiation/load models, PV, fuel cells, biomass (non-food) applications in ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, MECHANICAL EN-
developing countries and wind/hydro energy. Interest in service-learning is desirable. GINEER Applications are invited for an assis-
Qualifications for Both Positions: Candidates must have an earned Bachelor and Doctoral degree in tant professor position in the area of mechani-
Mechanical Engineering, Mechanics, or closely related discipline. Relevant academic experience including cal system design. The successful candidate
teaching at undergraduate and graduate levels; developing and sustaining externally funded research preferred. must have an earned Ph.D. in mechanical engi-
How to apply: Interested applicants should apply online at https://jobs.uml.edu. Thank you for considering neering or equivalent and a strong commitment
the University of Massachusetts Lowell as an employer of choice. We look forward to receiving your to undergraduate teaching and undergraduate
application. instructional laboratories. Visit www.bradley.
The University of Massachusetts Lowell is committed to increasing diversity in its faculty, staff, and student edu/humanresources/oppor tunities/faculty.
populations, as well as curriculum and support programs, while promoting an inclusive environment. We shtml for full position description, qualifications
seek candidates who can contribute to that goal and encourage you to apply and to identify your strengths and application process. Bradley University is
in this area. an Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action
Employer.

70 mechanical engineering | April 2011

 s_07_10_v2Q6 7/30/08
Advertising Sales Offices
1:45 PM
East Coast Michael Reier
900-A South Main St., Suite 103
Bel Air, MD 21014
(410) 893-8003; fax (410) 893-8004
reierm@asme.org
itions open Southeast Bob Doran
hould be addressed to Dr. Samuel
Committee, Department ofdoranb@asme.org
eering, Braude College, POB 78,
sgazit@braude.ac.il. East Central Thomas S. Bednar
ITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA,
OF MECHANICAL ENGINEER-
ing applications for faculty bednart@asme.org
tructor, Assistant, Associate, and
evels. Applicants must possess a
nical Engineering West or Central
closelyThomas relat- McNulty
ence will be given to candidates
in areas that fill current needs
t (fuel cells, photovoltaic power,
uclear engineering, and biomedi-
g), but outstanding applicants
be given full consideration. Nom-
lications shouldSouthwest be submitted
nemc@engr.sc.edu. Application
e form of a single PDF document,
1) vitae, 2) statement of research
ment of teaching interests, and
ation for three references.
s_07_10_v2Q6 7/30/08
s will begin on October 1, 2008,
nue until the positions are filled.
of South Carolina West is Coast
an Equal
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 inputoutput
Scrubbing the NOx out of Biogas
J
(B)
ohn Fiscalini, owner of Fiscalini Farms and
Fiscalini Cheese Co. in Modesto, Calif., saw
the writing on the wall. The San Joaquin Air
Pollution Control Board had been looking
at greenhouse gas emissions emanating
from dairy farms, and there was talk that
methane digesters might be mandatory
within the next decade.
He decided not to wait, and hired Biogas Energy
Systems of Seattle to build digesters. Martin Machinery
of Missouri supplied the engine and generator. Cal Coast
Manufacturing, a local builder, handled construction. Total
cost was $3,750,000
2 2
3 3
A Compact SCR system (right) keeps John Fiscalini’s
biogas digester and cogeneration plant (above) within
the emissions guidelines laid down by the local air pol-
lution control board.
Construction was under way when a problem
arose with the air quality permit. The local air
pollution control district based its requirements
on what it considered “best available control
4
technology,” which would require 4 selective
catalytic reduction. Because of the variability in
fuel composition, SCR had not been successfully
applied to biogas engines.
Fiscalini turned to Engine, Fuel, and Emissions
Engineering in Rancho Cordova, Calif. The company
markets a system it calls Compact SCR, which is designed to
control emissions of small-scale power plants.
Christopher Weaver, president of EF&EE, said the
company had to modify the Compact SCR control system
to deal with the variability of biogas. “We have to adjust the
amount of reductant we are injecting to match the amount
of oxides of nitrogen that’s coming down the pipe,” he said.
“With diesel, the NOx numbers are very stable, so we are able
72 mechanical engineering | APRIL 2011
to do that on a once-only basis—measure the NOx emission
as a function of some load variable.”
In Fiscalini’s system, EF&EE found that the NOx
concentrations at the same load could vary by a factor of
four, depending on the air-fuel ratio of the engine and the
biogas composition. EF&EE added solid state NOx sensors
upstream and downstream. The final cost to integrate the
modified SCR unit into the system was $250,000.
Continually informed by the sensors, the system is
self-tuning. The upstream sensor measures changes in
exhaust composition, and by confirming results, the sensor
downstream helps the system find the optimum level
of treatment. Weaver said the system has reduced NOx
emissions below the level mandated by the air pollution
control district.
The digester itself consists of two circular insulated
concrete tanks. Each tank is 86 feet in diameter, and 26 feet
high. Heating tubes keep the mixture inside the tanks at
100 °F. The tanks were constructed according to California
seismic regulations, using 500 cubic yards of concrete,
and 50 tons of reinforcing steel each. Inside each tank are
four agitators which stir the mixture to a homogenous
combination. Each tank holds approximately 860,000
gallons of effluent.
Bacteria produce
methane, which rises
to the top of the tank
and is trapped inside
a rubber bladder.
The gas is piped to
Engine, Fuel, and Emissions Engineering
holding tanks, cooled,
and dried, before it
is driven by blowers
through a pipeline to
the plant, which heats
water and generates
electricity.
“This is an
extraordinary
device,” Fiscalini
said. “It runs on waste materials and produces 99 percent
clean electrical power and heat.” According to Fiscalini,
the system produces about 500 kW of electricity, of which
the farm uses 200 kW. He sells the balance to the grid and
so powers a lot of homes in the area. He said the system
produces enough heat for itself, the barns, and the cheese
plant, “and we still have heat left over.”
Joyce Laird
The author is a freelance business and technical writer
based in Arleta, Calif.
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