Engineering Sense

Heat pumps and spin

2010-06-30T04:09:00.000-07:00

I've deleted a few out of date posts. I'll stick to energy policy, software and analysis tips from now on; my specialties. Let the specialists in other fields be as self-reflective of their own profession as I am of mine. We outsiders will always remain skeptical of everyone, all the time in our quest for the unspun truth.

One comment I noticed on a recent telegraph story on green energy. I won't link to it because it's full of vitriol, bad conclusions and misinformation. However there is one interesting comment for me from person called rastech below. Interesting because i am looking for a new boiler and I want to be green and save money too - don't we all!
:
"Just found another blatant 'alternative energy' scam - expensive heatpumps.

Landlord at the local is doing up a house. Been offered a 11.9kw heatpump at 'quite a saving' of £1,199.99. Plus fitting.

This was going to be his main heat source for the house!

Was told it would work to -15 deg C!

Wasn't told about the progressive loss of heat output as the temperature fell, to the point he'd be burning more energy to get less heat out, and when he 'really needed it' wasn't aware that he wouldn't be getting any heat out of it at all!

So he's binned that idea, I've found him a 12kw multifuel stove for £299 (the same one dads got), and a 12,000 btu air conditioning unit that gives him a 4.5kw heatpump (should be enough to keep the place warm enough to the point losses really start), as well as cooling in the Summer (the heatpump didn't), a dehumidifier function (the heatpump didn't), and an outstanding air filtration system (the heatpump didn't), for £299 also (plus fitting he can do himself), all for a consumption of 1.25kw.

I told him how to do a cheap air mixing system to build in, using cheap rainwater downpipes and cheap computer fans too. How many suckers are being sold a lemon with these heatpumps, like this poor bloke nearly ended up with? I bet it's more than a few. What is this Country now? Scammers 'R Us?"

He then adds:
"Why the licenced housing efficiency and certification inspector imposed on us by the retard politicians in GOVERNMENT, of course! eta: this house is more than half way up a ruddy mountain too, and it's bleedin parky there for 10 months of the year pretty much. Whoever recommended that heat pump 'solution' should be done for deliberate and life threatening cruelty as well as dereliction of duty!"

Last things first. The pusher of these air source heat pumps is/was Dr. David McKay, the Oxford don who was put in charge of UK energy policy and who has written the book "...without the hot air". I won't link to that either because it's not as useful as it pretends. His main thesis however is that gas shouldn't be burnt in the home, we should make electricity from it, then use that electricity to extract heat from the air. There are flaws in that argument which I shouldn't even need to point out. Suffice to say, he seems to be letting a beautiful theory over-ride the reality. But it comes down to costs. If you believe the numbers from the manufacturer then - as it turns out by my calculations - the actual cost of the fuel to the consumer is around the same, so it's really only the installation cost that makes the difference. I''ll admit that there are a few people who appeared on TV in France who seemed to say they made a big cost saving - except they had installed geothermal pumps and the capital outlay was quite enormous. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul..

Well I'm not sure that 1200k is really that expensive - seems relatively cheap to me - but I had these salesmen in my house too and i showed them the door. I'm sure the geothermal heat pumps are a great idea but they are pretty difficult to install on old properties with small gardens. Reckon on 20k at least. For these cheaper air pumps, well we need proper trials rather than sales brochure spin, and McKay does point out that newer designs are better than older. However like rastech I remain extremely dubious that they are of any use whatsoever in a normally cold Winter. Of course if you had believed the Met office then cold Winters were supposed to be a thing of the past. Ha, ha indeed...the perils of prediction based on hubris. Of course last Winter was a one-off....except for the 2007 one-off.

I was stupidly tacitly subsuming that "milder winter then usual" Met office prediction when I drove to Disneyland in Winter on a sunny day in a car totally unsuited for snow. On the return trip a blizzard surprised us and I spun at an uncleared service station exit into a lorry that was inconveniently parked there: Otherwise the spin would have ended with entropy rather than collision. Happily the family was alright and even Bert the car has now recovered; his partly-repaired big rear end bash notwithstanding. Ok i could have stayed at the service station - if only it wasn't in the middle of bleeding nowhere, the exits from the motorway were even more dangerous than staying on it, and my wife hadn't been urging me not to think so negatively about the possibility of crashing. In any event my tolerance for unbridled hubris is even thinner nowadays. I resolve to continue to try to totally ignore all advice that sets off my BS detector.

Green angst

2010-06-01T06:24:00.001-07:00

Thanks to spam I'm reposting this and deleting the older one. Not because I want to write about climate issues any more - it's an issue full of single issue fanatics and poisonous pens on both sides. I'll stick to wanting green technology for it's own sake not because I think you can extrapolate a 0.6K rise from one century into 6K the next based on models with no real validation.

The best discussion of the current green angst that has yet been produced is here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/ethicalman/2010/01/the_problem_with_hidden_agendas.html

Everyone is remarkably honest and candid and huge praise to them for that. Finally greens are acknowledging that climate change is a hook to hang on their other societal concerns. And I have a great deal of sympathy for some of them. However we need to separate them out from carbon dioxide production if we are to judge them sensibly. I don't believe that greens are anti-humanist or anti-industrialist or statist in the least. Some of them clearly are but it's a tiny minority.

Is this rampant consumerism they worry about sensible? I don't believe it is but then you can't deny that it's worked out ok so far. Or has it?

Is the never-ending growth model of economics sensible? Well famed economist, Joe Stiglitz recently asked the same question and concluded it wasn't - but then he's a lefty :)

What are the aims of greens?
a) Let's avoid fouling our own nests.
b) Don't screw with nature. Nature usually knows best.
c) Recycle stuff.
d) Renewable energy.
e) Cradle to cradle technology.
f) Poverty reduction.

Now what's wrong with that? Let's not criticize them for the lying done by others and let's not paint our own prejudices over their faces please.

I'd like to think I was green too. For 5 years in Spain I didn't have a car. I used a taxi, bus or walked. The shopping was delivered to my door. When I needed a car I hired one. It worked ok. Now my electricity is from hydro, my heating is from sustainable forest wood - with a small bit of Diesel that i want to eliminate and my car is an efficient Diesel too - though I don't drive much. Hence my actual carbon footprint is low. I'm also getting a geothermal system installed this year if all goes well. Oh don't I sound self-righteous...well truth be told I'm hoping to save money too.

Buyers's perceptions of FEA Software:

2010-03-06T05:41:00.000-08:00

This was lifted from the forums of eng-tips. Seems people are looking for inexpensive FEA but there is only expensive or free. Their suspicion of any inexpensive software will largely be similar to these 3 points, most of which apply to free software, rather than inexpensive software. However it's all about perception in this game. I like to imagine a budget FEA market similar to the desktop publishers or CAD market. Might be possible!
///
"The main cost of a modern FEA package is split into three factors:
1) robustness of the algorithms. Everybody is able to self-program a valid FE code for solving 1-D elements in the linear domain. It's probably one of the easiest "things" to program in engineering. But when you begin to deal with non-linears, contact interactions, composite materials, multi-layer elements, birth-and-death, adaptive meshes, etc etc etc, and in addition all this "thing" must be optimized in order not to take millenia to solve, you can imagine the effort of the development people.
2) support. Have a problem with Ansys you can't get out of? No problem: apart from the fact that being one of the most known programs you can find a very huge users' comunity to help you, in "extreme" cases you have two levels of support: your reseller, and the main Company itself. You pay for it, but that makes a lot of difference wrt a "free" software (most of which is univ-born, so would you write e-mails directly to the teachers, researchers and students? Sometimes it may work, but usually...)
3) user interface. OK, this may not be a problem any more nowadays 'cause there are several pre- and post- already programmed and compiled by the "free comunity" which do a good (or at least acceptable) job.

Anyway, just because of the first two points you can not simply take a good free solver and claim that it would save the world instead of commercial packages such as Abaqus, Ansys and some others... It would save YOUR world and money UNTIL you run into one of their weaknesses (every program has some bug). Should this happen, good luck: it would be you and the program..." (plagiarised from cbrn on Eng-tips)
///
I disagree with some of that but it is the public perception that counts. Someone else on the same thread said you always get what you pay for. That's utter bilge of course. You get what you set out to get, or are persuaded to get, or what your neighbour has, and much of the time you end up with an expensive pig while if you look around you can manage to find a cheap jewel*. It's the 80/20 rule again though. Only 20% of the buying public know how to buy effectively. Meantime we sellers have to deal with the other 80% by using psychology,much as i described in a previous thread, and bearing in mind the 3 points above.

*On re-reading this I find it ironic that in our world a pig, which is useful, is worth less than a jewel, which isn't. Illogical! as Spock would say. Does our monetary system revolve around the adornments we hang on our body rather than what feeds us, clothes us or heats us? Well it used to. Nowadays it revolves around oil, which does do all of that! Food for thought.

Watts up

2010-03-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

Help I want to name my electric car but the Tesla, the Faraday, the Ohm, the Amp and the Volt have all been taken. Watt is the only SI unit left. The Edison maybe? He never did get a unit named after him did he?

Maybe it's time to go funky and call it the Juice!

Mist stack CO2 scrubber designed already!

2010-02-27T08:52:00.000-08:00

Further to my description of a stack CO2 capture device I discovered a mist trap for smoke stacks has actually been patented. Being in 1972 the patent is no longer active and it was mainly meant for other types of pollution - particularly particulates. However it would catch CO2 as well. I find it highly ironic that we care most about controlling the most benign item coming out of a smoke stack but never mind.

Anyway, it's pretty much the design I had in mind. I suppose none were ever actually built. Instead of simple mist it creates high density fog, presumably because of the temperature of the flue gas. You are helped of course by the fact that the flue gas contains a lot of water vapour too. All you have to do is supersaturate and drain the liquid. Shouldn't cost very much should it? It might even cost less than a traditional tall stack. All this fuss about a simple engineering problem!

11-Pollution-sensor; 12-Elbow; 13-Roof; 14-Building; 15-Legs; 16-Conical body; 17-Pollution sensor; 18-High pressure water line; 19-Multiple nozzles; 20-Catch basin; 21-Drain; 22-Short stack; 23-Pollution sensor; 24-Baffles

Looks nice!

Found here http://www.freepatentsonline.com/3668841.html.

Well done Howard R. Nunn of Napa California. You beat me by 40 years! I wonder if he's still alive? In homage I'm going to call it the "Nunn Foggy Scrubber".

Now I'll just get this into a 3d model when I have the time!

Selling a new product

2010-02-26T02:13:00.000-08:00

This is a short distillation of stuff I'm trying to ensure I do as I launch a new product.

How to Sell (adapted):
1. Know your customer. Understand his personal (secondary) buying motive. ie what he really seeks from the product or service. Ask questions and listen to the answers.
2. Sell the features, advantages and benefits that relate to what the customer wants.
3. Be aware of the psychological steps that buyers go through and how to deal with them.
4. You need a) Empathy, so that you can understand customer needs. b) Confidence, so that your can bring customers to the point of buying, and c) Resilience, so that you can use rejection and temporary setbacks as spurs that constantly move you forward
5. Be honest and available. Sales are about relationships and relationships are about trust.
6. Plan for the possible objections.
7. Make it easy to buy.

Some of this doesn't relate to me but perhaps more to the website or the product. I am a stickler for simplicity. When it's simple it's usable and has less trouble. For usability it needs to be lightweight, with few options all of which are labelled clearly. To some extent this is a carry over from designing tools offshore. I listened to the complaints about existing tools, agreed they were indeed correct, noticed where they could be designed a lot better and made sure my own products did not have the same defects. It's most gratifying when the users of the tools say something like "this tool is a heck of a lot better than the last one we had".

I'm aware of course that others like complications but I'm thinking they are the kind of people who will buy the big name products, where you might know what you want but you can't a) find it in the interface, b) use it after you found it because you didn't do 3 or 4 previous steps correctly. If you don't know what I'm talking about then you clearly haven't used Ansys Workbench!

Now the reason some buyers/users value complexity is presumably the assumption that they are getting more bang for their buck. So if the buck is less maybe that would overcome that difficulty.

Then of course you get into the canard of "you get what you pay for". Well there is no way around that other than to target your audience. People may criticize Alibre for price reductions, just like they criticize Ryanair for cheap flights but if the sales are there then clearly it's just snobs or vested interests who are worried about buying something cheaper. Most of us here in France just love Ryanair because they provide a service that is convenient, unique, quick and fair. Their separations of the charges are a pain but clearly they are used to bring customers in the door. I think that's what I'm aiming for. The pricing issue is a problem that will sort itself out only by testing, in the way that Alibre just did. Having added 10,000 users at 100 dollars a piece it was an interesting million dollar gain as well as an experiment.

It should also be robust. Two things I made sure of with FEMdesigner after bad experience with other FE software were a) Keep a readable text file because binaries get corrupted easily, and b) if it ever crashes make sure these files are not affected. Potential crashes can be found by beta testing. What I'm discovering - the biggest headache - is that these crashes come almost exclusively from 3rd party issues so I'm trying to keep it simple regarding using the graphics card, threading and the like. Anything too new or controversial will fail. Currently I'm sorting out a deadlocking problem because I need a worker thread to overlay my plots on the host viewport but if the user or the operating system causes a refresh message on the other thread then everything freezes. It took me a while to discover that one and I've still only half-fixed it.

Update - fixed it: Confucius he says "Use too many threads and deadlock is your downfall".

CO2 capture device

2010-02-24T12:09:00.000-08:00

Now I was just musing about the SO2 scrubbers that were used to prevent acid rain. We retrofitted them to power station stacks and now the problem is no more. Actually whether it was a problem in the first place is debatable - according to Bjorn Lomberg's book "the skeptical environmentalist" it wasn't - but let's gloss over that. Are we presuming that a similar thing can't be done with CO2? Because if we are then it doesn't make much sense to me. When air capture is mentioned at all then they always assume it should be in the form of artificial trees. See here for the most promising one of these:

http://www.earthinstitute.columbia.edu/articles/view/2523

Now Lackner got his idea first from a fishtank scrubber and then from a leaf. However he forgot the most efficient natural scrubber of the lot - rainwater. Yes CO2 indeed easily dissolves in rainwater to form carbonic acid. In fact though Lackners idea uses this mechanism to collect the CO2 from the ion-exchange mechanism. Why did he use an ion-exchange mechanism? - because he is simulating a tree. Why is he simulating a tree? - because he is capturing CO2 from the air. Why is he capturing CO2 from the air rather than from chimney stacks? - lord alone knows, it seems dumb to me!

So in summary - and if anyone wants to fund me in this planet saving mission my email is jg@femdesigner.com

a) skip the dumb tree idea and go straight to the power station stacks exactly as with the SO2 scrubbers,
b) put in a 90 degree bend and add a fine mist spray in the corner, like the type that sprays mist on lettuces in my local supermarket,
c) drain off the carbonic acid and the wet soot from the bend corner,
d) pipe the liquid to an algae farm or a greenhouse. Be sure to use gravity rather than a pump.

Now how much would that cost? Peanuts? A working prototype is worth 25 million from Richard Branson. Alas the idea is now officially out in the public domain (ie here) so you can't patent it! Ha ha!

unequivocal warming, but not unequivocally human

2010-02-23T05:33:00.000-08:00

Interesting quote from Andy Revkin buried deep in his comments section at dotearth:

////quote
There's utter logic in concluding that if there is, as the IPCC concluded, 90-percent confidence that more than half of recent warming is greenhouse-driven, that implies a substantially higher level of confidence (well up toward, if not precisely 100 percent) exists that some greenhouse warming is under way.

But the IPCC -- outside of the questionable line in this chapter -- never stated there was no doubt about human-driven warming. Again, that doesn't mean there's no doubt, given the breadth of evidence. It just means they never formally said it.

I actually had prolonged discussions with both Susan Solomon and Michael Oppenheimer of the IPCC about this after some IPCC authors expressed concern over that very phrase in an update we ran on the latest climate science just before Copenhagen. http://j.mp/noCO2doubt

Using that logic, I wrote that the panel “...concluded that no doubt remained that human-caused warming was under way and that, if unabated, it would pose rising risks.”

They both disagreed:

Dr. Oppenheimer: "The 'no doubt' or 'unequivocal' refers only to the warming part, not the human-caused part."

Dr. Solomon: "This could be true but it's not something that we said."

////endquote

Time they reminded some of their colleagues and disciples who regularly use that phrase cavalierly. The trouble is, the fact of warming does not suggest the cause of it. The warming of the last century though has been a linear trend with fluctuations. We think we know the fluctuations are down to ocean cycles but the trend is not so easy. It could be just another long term fluctuation - as suggested by Avery and Singer in their book "Unstoppable warming every 1500 years". Certainly if 50% of it was natural last century and the trend in the 2nd part is the same as in the first part then the rest of it has a good chance of being natural too, in the form of a natural recovery from the little ice age. The idea that it was manmade was based on a false assumption that we could tease out the natural component from 1985 to 2000 so what was left must be man-made warming. It was a ridiculously optimistic or misleading idea - no doubt entirely to influence policy. The significant pause in recent warming put paid to the idea that natural fluctuations were predictable on these shorter timescales. So to really answer the question of what caused the warming, we really need to first ask the questions a)- what caused the little ice age, and b) what caused the medieval warm period before it, because these were 100% natural and seem to have been global. When we know that long-term natural component then we can tease out the manmade contribution and not before.

Of course several solar theorists have said the long term trend seems to match solar activity. One that springs to mind was Scaffeta and West who compared solar reconstructions with Moberg's proxy reconstruction. A bit iffy mind you but interesting. The exchange between Scaffeta and Rasmus on realclimate.org was quite entertaining. To me Scaffetta won on points and Rasmus gave up. It didn't help that he got the Stefan-Boltzmann equation wrong; somewhat of a howler for a man in his position. Neither did it help that he was pretending that the now utterly discredited and even disowned hockey-stick reconstructions were better than Mobergs effort. Nor that his main defense for that was the utterly illogical canard that if natural variation proved large then that is even more reason to worry about CO2 rises.

Science as a blunt instrument

2010-02-06T05:36:00.000-08:00

No doubt anyone who's followed the debates on global warming that occur on the blogosphere have noticed the reference to tobacco industry scientific studies and in particular that S. Fred Singer and perhaps a few others were involved in downcrying the science that second hand smoke causes cancer. What I'm wondering though is why anyone needed a scientific report to call on any ban for smoking? As I just read a lawyer repeating, "my right to swing my fist ends just before it touches your nose". Well substitute blowing smoke for swinging fists and you have all the justification you need. For all the blather that selfish smokers make about society impinging on their liberties they don't ever consider for one second that us non-smokers find smoke offensive and that our right to not breath their pollution far outweighs their rights to do it. The case is this simple; you can smoke as much as you like as long as you don't blow any over anyone else. It doesn't even matter whether it causes cancer or not, the mere fact that it is disgusting is sufficient reason to send the buggers outside.

A similar report was recently released on the health effects of Diesel. Apparently long distance lorry drivers are showing certain signs of something or other. This is no doubt another effort to undermine fossil fuel use in some way. That I saw it on the green car congress blog confirms the audience for this stuff. But again it wasn't necessary because everyone agrees that diesel smoke and soot is particularly disgusting and I'd have thought pedestrians are more at risk than anyone. So who needs a report? Answer - absolutely nobody. People get bogged down arguing on scientific reports that show spurious correlations and talk about statistical significance (a phrase that should be outlawed in my opinion) in order to invoke some health law. Yet they don't need that - they can turn to civil liberties laws instead.

And of course the upshot is that even smokers prefer to be in a smoke free environment. This is why they blow it out so far in the first place. Now that discos have become smoke free zones, my smoking friends remark that it's much more pleasant and they are quite happy to go outside to prevent the inside getting smoky.

I guess I'm particularly cranky about smoke because one of these 2000 poisons gives me a migraine from time to time. It took me a while to narrow it down to smoke but then I narrowed it down even further to US cigarettes. Ah the US free market economy - allows you to consume all the junk you like and a lot more you didn't know about! Have some growth hormones with that steak won't you? By the way, did anybody ever tell you you're beginning to resemble a bullock? What happened to the science that investigated that anyway? Maybe the entire grant went towards investigating truckers lungs. Or maybe the fossil fuel industry is fair game but the food industry gets a free ride for some reason.

Insourcing; think about it!

2010-02-01T04:44:00.000-08:00

There was an interesting segment on French TV last night. Apparently some companies who had outsourced their labour to foreign countries were scuttling back after it all went wrong. Both companies featured complained about the lower quality costing them customers and the first explained that the cheap labour cost in Roumania wasn't all it seemed: ie Although the cost in France was 30 euros per hour versus 6, there were hidden costs, such as low productivity, transport, more management staff, etc that put the full Roumanian cost at 36 euros per worker. These were all things they just hadn't thought of. Meantime the manufacturer who'd gone to China complained about only having two colour options - both gray - and the hand-finishing causing fit-up problems. As Jeremy Clarkson would say, "hand-built is just another way of saying the door won't shut right", which is fair comment on metal objects at least. A 3rd businessman made an all-out effort to have a made in France label as a matter of pride. Let's face it a prestige manufacturer with a made in China label is just not possible. But in order to do that he needed to squeeze his suppliers. Well there's no better time than a crisis to try that. We need to take risks and make strong partnerships to survive. The Japanese though used to pay extra to ensure good suppliers but it's changed days now. I'll bet they are feeling the Chinese bite too.

Contrast this with the Ross Perot/Al Gore encounter about NAFTA where Perot correctly predicted all jobs would go South and Al disagreed. Well besides the jobs argument, just how much of the collapse of the US car industry is down to poor quality? Customers are difficult to get and even more difficult to get back when they've been let down. Short-termist thinking needs to be rooted out of managers heads. The best way to do that is probably to put engineers in charge :) like they do in France, Germany, Japan and China. France wavered a bit with US hire-em-fire-em ideas but the law stopped them and Germany had a short-lived experiment with US management but this crash has ended all that. Now they know they were right all this time.

The car industry is my benchmark for business generally and it seems that they survive due to protectionism, national pride in engineering, good management and single-union, no-strike deals. If Japanese manufacturers can manage to build and sell quality cars in the US and UK then clearly the idea that unions or workers were to blame for a car industry closure is a total red herring: It is perforce the management at fault. And that is from making decisions on a short-term quarterly return basis rather than thinking about long-term customer satisfaction. Blindly outsourcing your product is a perfect example that will come back to haunt many. Sadly on their return, one of the French manufacturers discovered that the workforce they'd abandoned had moved on and there was a shortage of skills necessary to run the machinery.

Finally I read a lot of whining from US and UK fund managers about European work hours and regulations that stop you firing people on a whim. But when it's easy to fire people, what kind of workers do you get? Answer: ones who won't tell you when you are wrong. And if it's easy to get people to work long hours routinely then are you getting the best work done in the best way - or are you getting a horses arse of a job produced by an overtired, overstressed worker? If you've ever worked in the oil industry you'll know the latter is the case.

There should be a compromise position and I for a while thought that the UK employment laws were best in that respect; reasonable protections, no impediments to startup. However for some reason it doesn't work as well as you'd think. Why? Well I've found that the worst problem in the UK is late payment. I'm pretty sure that's what kills most businesses and I'm also sure that's the intention of the accountants who keep this practice up. It goes like this; get the job done from small supplier on credit, refuse to pay, supplier goes out of business, ergo no need to pay. Even government departments practice this. My own uncle was forced out of business when after he'd done a lot of work for the local council, the Labour party decided to abolish county councils and replace them with regional councils instead. The old council couldn't pay and the new one said it was not their bill. Many, many businesses were lost in the same way because the only redress was via expensive court proceedings. Don't tell me that the Labour party is about workers. A whole bunch of accountants should be in jail for that scam. Of course any excuse works for late payment and if you've done the job already then you are shafted.

So if you are starting a small business in the UK the lesson is clear: NO CREDIT EVER. Personally I'm quite insulted when a company sends a purchase order. It's so second nature to them that they don't seem to even realize they are actually rudely assuming that I'll give them credit rather than politely asking for it. If someone ever tries that one on then send a pro-forma invoice and explain in clear terms that you don't ever give credit, because of bad experiences with late payers. That way they might actually realize that they've been begging for credit like a street urchin while pretending to be a world class company. They'll whine about their systems not being set up for that but it's all just toss. Be firm and you'll discover they can pay up front very easily when they feel like it!

Good news: The planet can cope!

2010-01-24T08:06:00.000-08:00

An update really to the previous post that mentioned the satellite data that shows that planet earth is undergoing reforestation rather than deforestation! Just to show that you can get anecdotal evidence for the greening of the planet when you actually look for it, the New York Times had ran this story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/30/science/earth/30forest.html

Containing the happy quotes:

"By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster."

“Biologists were ignoring these huge population trends and acting as if only original forest has conservation value, and that’s just wrong,” said Joe Wright, a senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute here, who set off a firestorm two years ago by suggesting that the new forests could substantially compensate for rain forest destruction."

"Globally, one-fifth of the world’s carbon emissions come from the destruction of rain forests, scientists say. It is unknown how much of that is being canceled out by forest that is in the process of regrowth. It is a crucial but scientifically controversial question, the answer to which may depend on where and when the forests are growing."

They sure don't act like that de/reforestation is unknown do they? But hey I've an idea....why not just look at the available satellite data? Then it won't be so "unknown" any more. Too easy? Or just no juicy research money in that approach? We know - good news doesn't seem to sell papers - not unless it's "causing a firestorm".

And as if that wasn't enough good news, there's a reality check for the Malthusians (population worriers) too:

"In Latin America and Asia, birthrates have dropped drastically; most people have two or three children. New jobs tied to global industry, as well as improved transportation, are luring a rural population to fast-growing cities. Better farming techniques and access to seed and fertilizer mean that marginal lands are no longer farmed because it takes fewer farmers to feed a growing population."

Alas we had the predictable negative responses from those scientists whose income depends on alarmism. After all what's a professional earth science pessimist to do when nature seems to know how to sort things out on it's own? Well, how about becoming an entrepreneur and being a net giver to society rather than a net taker! Too scared to leave academia and face making your own living? Yes we know - that's why you stayed on for the PhD in the first place. The rest of us didn't fancy the trade-off of working 3 years for nothing for the shiny kudos of someone calling you doctor. Sadly, too many find that their new PhD allows them to be easily rejected as "overqualified" in the real world. We need a PhD vocational re-education program. The first two items I'd put in the curriculum would be:

a) Look at all the data, not just the bits that fit your hypothesis.

b) Stop being so darn pessimistic. eg think seal cubs might be saved rather than polar bears might be lost!

And for all you people who say well it can't hurt making sure we stop deforestation then you clearly haven't seen this PBS documentary: I urge you to do so!
http://www.pbs.org.news-channel.org/frontlineworld/stories/carbonwatch/moneytree/

That comment from anonymous below the film clip was from me. Ignored completely of course by the self-righteous - in complete line with the Stiglitz think tank who I'd alerted about reality not being quite the same as the models, before they went and made an arse of themselves at Copenhagen. Seems like they've dropped off the radar anyway - still using up public cash though and producing flawed reports that nobody seems to read. Oddly though they'd asked for comments on their reports and supplied an email to do so which is why I bothered. I'd even harboured a notion that they might at least acknowledge me (they didn't) though I'd known beforehand that they wouldn't say "thanks we'll think about this". And of course when the Sunday Times gets around to investigating the deforestation fiasco then they'll say that nobody informed them. Frankly it's not up to me either - it's up to Dr Steve Running who did the fine satellite work. Funny that he hasn't received funding for it since 2003 when he reported the good news isn't it? Almost like they didn't really want to know that deforestation wasn't a problem!

Stiglitz of course is one of the few economists who predicted the current financial fiasco - a Keynesian, he was predisposed to be skeptical of the Washington Consensus version of free-market strategies, and has written fine words in condemnation of the world Bank and IMF policies in Latin America. He really should know what it's like to be against the crowd but correct and he should realize the vital value of using real data to validate hypotheses because he was that man; resigning his position at the World Bank when they failed to listen to him.

So we have the tyranny of good intentions, the herdlike nature of humans to believe exactly what they want to believe, the failure to appreciate unintended consequences and plain old follow-the-money. Sure the planet can obviously take it but it's the poorest humans that suffer. Can't we at least learn to listen to them this time around?

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler."

2010-01-22T05:13:00.000-08:00

I've discussed the first part of Einstein's famous phrase above in "Simple is Efficient" but the second part is just as important. If the recent meltdown of the financial markets is a guide to anything it's about how we search for ways to over-simplify something we truly don't understand, in order to make predictions that have no solid foundation. I'll use the dismal science as an example. I could have used engineering but that's too obvious: When a bridge falls down you are forced to do things better next time, but with economics they can just swap out one failed or untested theory with another.

The current economic dogmata owes much to the opposing Chicago School and Keynesian schools of thought. The Chicago school, of whom Milton Friedman is the most famous were a bunch of revisionists who reverted to a free market concept which they ascribed to the "invisible hand" metaphor of Adam Smith. Likely they hadn't even read Smith or they'd have known better. In truth Smith wasn't lecturing anyone, he was trying to understand the market and in several places he honestly admitted when he just didn't get it. The simplification made was that people are rational, markets work perfectly by themselves via the "invisible hand" and government regulation is therefore automatically bad. Of course the absurdity of the assumptions ridicule the conclusion - but only to a rational thinker. There's the rub; they thought they were rational people (rather than ivory-towered, hubristic chumps who couldn't run even a toffee shop) so their assumptions must perforce be correct.

Well the simple theory-confounding reality is that a truly free market is also free for the criminals. The only real test of the Chicago School theory was in Yeltsin's Russia, where all the economists straight from college suddenly became government advisors. Yeltsin naively assumed that what was being taught in US Universities was how America became rich. In truth America became rich thanks to staying out of the World War for long enough to sell vast amounts of arms and materiel to the combatants. No real secret there; but crucially the huge booms felt in the fifties in the West owed abolutely nothing to free market ideas either. It was Keynesianism apparently. But Keynes pretty much changed his mind all the time, so you might say it wasn't really his doctrine - it was his own savvy. Keynes of course knew how to run a business that made money and that is done by learning from mistakes, ie being adaptable, rather than sticking to ideas that have manifestly failed. Russia paid a heavy price for believing US academics by having a huge slump and being dominated by criminals. They only recovered when statism returned under Putin.

In the 70's Keynesianism, or rather the simplistic version of it invented by Samuelson, was blamed for the lack of growth and Friedman became the new guru. Thatcher then experimented with these Friedmanite free market ideas - basically changing taxation from income to consumption and removing state subsidies and regulations. Initially this lead to a massive recession in the UK but eventually - thanks to deregulation of the markets (and North Sea oil) the UK began to look lean and fit. It had certainly been shorn of much of it's manufacturing capability. But while the poorer 60% became poorer, the richer 40% became richer so it was all deemed a big success by the right-dominated newspapers. Everyone was in fact happy that the overly-powerful unions had been quietened, it was just a shame it took massive unemployment engendered* by a ruthless, bloody-minded, destructive and immoral harridan to achieve that end.

Reaganomics didn't really come from Reagan as he he didn't really bother himself much with government at all - or indeed with anything that required any thinking, or even with turning up for work. His puppeteers copied Thacherism, which in truth wasn't really like anything Friedman had advised (Thatcher had already abandoned monetarism as a proven failure) and renamed it the Washington Consensus. This doctrine was applied by the World Bank and IMF in a one-size-fits-all manner: Privatise everything, cut government spending, remove subsidies. The result - as reported by the economist Joseph Stiglitz and others - was a complete disaster for any country who asked for IMF or World Bank help. In effect these organisations who were supposed to be helping poor nations become less dependent on aid, had turned into tyrannical loan sharks, destroying economies for the profit of their friends on Wall street and various other corporate criminals based offshore.

Now Samuelson's Keynesianism is back but not in the manner Keynes would have liked. Keynes decried the idea of casino capitalism and that's almost exactly what is being tried now. There is no actual plan behind the massive spending except the vague idea that it worked before. But previously there had been the realization that to make money you have to add value to raw materials and sell the finished product at a profit. Somehow now, we have a strange mix of massive spending from that psuedo-Keynesianism combined with the sunny Chicago School optimism that markets, if left alone, will absorb this cash injection and magically produce economic growth. A double-whammy of stupidity! Only in the 3rd strand of economics; the Austrian school of Von Mises and Hayek, is there the realization that if too much debt caused the problem then more debt will make it worse. Of course the Austrian School followers have somewhat oversimplified beliefs too (stemming from Ayn Rand) but at least they were the ones who predicted this depression coming. Strangely this wasn't enough qualification to allow them to be employed by governments to fix the mess. Likely their fix - let the banks fail - was a bit too much for the revolving door mentality of politicos. After all that's their next job they'd be making disappear. Even Nouriel Roubini's softer ideas of mark-to-market mortgage reassessments were rejected. At any cost the huge mistakes made by the bankers seemingly had to be rewarded by the taxpayer. What are the chances then of this lot fixing anything? After all they are the same ones who broke it.

The point is that all strands of the original economic thought, have been over-simplified by others, removing all the important caveats and uncertainties of the originators, to the point where they do more harm than good. This is only one illustration of the process. One could mention the oversimplification of CO2 as the major climate driver, or of psychotherapists eager to blame parents for every misdeed done by their children, or indeed of any number of other social sciences that ignore the wondrously unpredictably chaotic nature of life on Earth. Good grief they've even over-simplified natural chaos into a chaos theory. Isn't that an oxymoron? If you ever need an illustration of the real, natural chaos that confounds us then you'll see it the next time you pick up a cable that seems to have tied itself in knots all by itself after you had neatly stacked it away. Now that's an allegory worth remembering!

*It was the late Paul Foot's theory that Sir Keith Joseph and Maggie had deliberately conspired to increase unemployment so as to reduce inflation. The swingometer of high unemployment=low inflation was a trendy concept at that time so it's possible. Conservatives truthfully didn't give a rats arse about anyone who had to dirty his hands to work so it's plausible too. After all how can you not realize that if Asia and Europe subsidize their industries and you remove your subsidies then you will lose your industries. It's not a difficult concept! So it's either gross stupidity, which is also plausible, or downright evil or the blinding dogma of the free-marketeers (which to be fair also goes in the stupidity box).

The science is worse than we thought!

2010-01-17T06:18:00.000-08:00

There was a link from a recent article in the Independent (about the met offices abysmal prediction record) that showed some of the arithmetic trickiness employed by the IPCC to present the case that climate change is worse than we thought.
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc

Now i'd noticed before the inability of the IPCC to properly add up error bounds, ie it is impossible for individual components to a total to have a larger error bound than the total. And I'd noticed the IPCC got the 20% deforestation number totally ass-backwards because the planet has actually been officially greening according to the peer-reviewed NASA satellite data http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/. It might very well be 20% REforestation. If that was included int he carbon sink summation then there is less missing sink to search for. The missing sink argument is that we stick roughly 7 Gt (Gigatonnes)) in the air, 1.5 Gt is added by deforestation, 3 Gt stays in the atmosphere and 2 Gt is removed by land and sea.The remainder is unaccounted for. Of course the error bars on these numbers are quite high. The numbers also vary according to who does the calculation.

Ref: IPCC + http://www.greencollar.org/employer/the-missing-carbon-sink-ads-7868.html
Values in gigatonnes:

Existing idea: 7 (fossil fuels) + 1.5 (deforestation) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 3.5 Gt missing sink.

More plausible idea?: 7 (fossil fuels) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 2 (reforestation).

Of course the whole sink/source argument is inexact science to say the least, as this report shows:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621140805.htm

They really don't in fact have a clue as to what is a sink and what is a source in nature. In fact the sea should be a net source too by Henry's law, since it is warming up. The reason it is treated as a sink is because then either the sea contributes to the total that we observe in the atmosphere which is politically incorrect (in my opinion) or there is an even greater missing sink, meaning our scientists are even more clueless about the carbon cycle. There isn't really a scientific justification for a warming sea being a net sink - there are some hand-waving arguments and iffy models but no real evidential numbers so it's mostly a politically convenient decision.

And I'd of course noticed that the 90% certainty figures in the summary was presented as scientific, ie based on evidence when in fact it was no more than a show of hands, ie 100% unscientific and misleading.

But it's even worse than I thought. Things are added after the reviews are complete. This is brought to light becuase the review comments were eventually - after much pressure - released in this "open process". And they reveal that Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones clearly thought the case wasn't strong enough so they just made things up and added them later - unreviewed.

The IPCC is always used as the yardstick to judge alarmism, eg by the UK judge who lorded it over the courtcase that identified 9 serious innaccuracies in "An inconvenient truth" and ordered schools to mention these when the film is shown. However, we no longer have that yardstick because the IPCC report was shaped by these two lead authors after everyone else had gone home. I'm reminded that several of the authors; Paul Reiter (malaria), Richard Lindzen (feedbacks), Chris Landsea (hurricanes), Roger Pielke Snr (land-changes) had of course resigned because of this post-review chicanery and had been summarily ignored by the press. In addition just about everyone has criticised the millenial reconstructions of temperature including Briffa the actual lead author of the report, who according to the "climategate" emails firmly believes that there was a medieval warm period as warm or warmer than today. Crazy! Science will recover because people have short memories but we really have to redefine peer-review procedures now that we have the chance.

Now some might think that it's all for the greater good. Wrong! Being honest is for the greater good! If you are dishonest in your summary of the science then you are more than likely dishonest in all of your science and you dishonour your profession. In engineering this type of chicanery would quite literally cost lives.

Update : some more links from a skeptic sight which you are free to peruse. The carbon cycle never really gets the discussion it deserves anywhere in the mainstream press or journals.

My argument beaten by 10 years and much more technically obtained - we get the same 30% fraction. Impressively this was 4 years before the satellite data confirmed the greening of the planet:

http://www.john-daly.com/bulletin/bull-111/bul111.htm

An alternative statistical conclusion to the IPCC:

http://www.john-daly.com/ahlbeck/ahlbeck.htm

http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/reviews.htm

An alternative bathtub model:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm

Other peoples money

2009-12-24T03:23:00.000-08:00

Disclaimer: I'm not socialist or conservative but I do defend both of these points of view. Obviously most systems in Europe are a strong mixture of both. But this post does deal with politics-led economics, concluding that it's all based on bad dogma.

Margaret Thatcher famously said, “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.” Now Thatcher was sometimes right and sometimes wrong but mostly she didn't have a clue what she was doing from one moment to the next. However that was actually an essential part of her credo. She like Reagan, believed that government can't possibly ever do anything right so we need to leave the free-market to try to solve everything by using a hands-off approach. She lived up to both parts of that credo. Let's reflect on what she achieved impartially:

Good parts;
.Reduced inflation to record lows,.
.Controlled the trade unions, who had previously been totally destructive.
.Deregulated the credit process. Eventually this led to cheap credit. The engine of economic recovery must start with cheap credit surely.
.She was right that the tax regime was barmy. By reducing the top tax she actually got more overall tax revenue.

Bad parts:
.Inflation reduction was achieved by massively increasing unemployment in a very bad recession where Britain lost virtually all of it's traditional manufacturing base; ie the thing that made Britain rich in the first place. Workers were too afraid of being out of work to strike. One might ponder which situation is better; the slow stagnation effect of the left or the rapid descent and start again effect of the right.
.Actually making things and selling them was replaced by the city of London selling reams of worthless paper. Boom and busts were made worse. The cheap credit led to a housing boom because flipping a house was more profitable than working and sometimes the only alternative in a job-free marketplace.
.Homelessness rocketed upwards.

Other stuff she did was probably a net zero. She didn't control public spending but in fact increased it largely because of all the extra unemployment benefit. Much of Britain's GDP recovered largely due to North Sea Oil revenues, most of which was squandered and which is now running out. Nuclear power was stopped but replaced by natural gas power. While she reduced the income tax, she massively increased VAT and introduced a whole slew of other taxes - a practice which Blair/Brown copied.

Blair of course used Thatcher as his role model, with no intention of moving back to an industrial Britain. The phrase "metal-bashing" came to replace the word "engineering" in governmental circles which illustrated the utter conptempt the political classes held for it. In Blair's government, most of them had never done a real job - they were politicians straight from college. John Major was a kind of stop gap middleman between these two larger personalities. So it's fair to say that what Britain has now is due to Thatcher rather than Blair - for better or worse, depending on your dogma.

But back to the original socialist put-down phrase "other peoples money". Now you might be thinking, like me, that it's capitalism that seems to rely on other peoples money rather more than socialism. And you might even notice that "eventually running out of other peoples money" is a perfect description of the current financial crisis. But it gets even odder than that. The US and the UK, the followers of Thatchers faith, grounded as it is in the utopian Chicago economics* of regulation-free markets and rational decision-makers, are the ones in deep debt and they got most of that debt from the most socialist regime on the planet who just happen to have all the money now: China. Oh irony of ironies! Another irony appears by realizing that China got all that wealth by building and selling things - just like Britain had! Lesson learned? Not yet it seems!

*You know the crowd - they used Smith's mere metaphor of an "invisible hand" as a godlike doctrine. One presumes this is a reflection of our soundbite world where a phrase has more meaning than an entire book. Clearly none of them actually even read Smiths book.

End qwerty domination!

2009-12-21T03:27:00.000-08:00

A perfect example of an innocent early design mistake becoming important later:-
The qwerty keyboard was originally introduced to slow down typists because they were too fast for the first typewriter mechanisms to keep up. Yet it's still with us, even for computers used largely by two-fingered typists. This is where standardization can lead us (except for the French who, always striving to be just a little different, chose to use an azerty* keyboard instead). Yet there was a chance to change it when mobile phones were used for texting. Nobody who uses their thumbs for typing would want to use anything other than an alphabetic system. Alas now we have full keyboards on our phones though we still need to use our thumbs and --aaaargh! ---they are all qwerty. The only remaining hope now is that we get an option to change the touch screen keyboard to alphabetic. That would be really easy to do I imagine. Is there one?

*I had to change my French azerty for a Spanish qwerty. It wasn't so much the qw/az confusion (bad enough) but the numbers at the top: The French use the shift key for typing numbers while the rest of the world can type a number with just one touch. So frustrating... The Spanish keyboard bridged the Franco/Anglo divide and gives me all the funny keys I need too like ñ and Ç. So Spanish is not only easier spelt and easier pronounced but also easier typed.

Climate model sensitivity

2009-12-07T08:23:00.000-08:00

Glad I am to report that at least one influential non-skeptic thinks that the accepted climate sensitvity to CO2 is very overblown. Skeptical in this case largely refers to Richard Lindzen, Roy Spencer, and other climatologists who think the IPCC is overly alarmist in it's projections. Oddly non-skeptical conventionally means that you accept the IPCC report. But a little known fact is that you can accept the IPCC report but prefer the lower projected increase in temperature of 1.1K per doubling of CO2. Yes that is allowed - it's called being a lukewarmer. And in that case to be skeptical is to reject the alarmism that appears only in the newspapers but not in the IPCC documents. A sensible position to take in other words.

Anyway, this next bit is lifted wholesale from another blog called MasterResource, run by Mssrs Bradley and Knappenberger and is here to remind me, or anyone else reading this, that mainstream users of climate models distrust them almost as much as the skeptics:

//////////////////////////////

"Jerry North (Texas A&M) Hints at the Problem

Eleven years ago, when I was director of public policy at Enron, I entered into a consulting agreement with Gerald North, Distinguished Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Oceanography at Texas A&M’s Department of Atmospheric Sciences, to tell me what was going on. North was as close as I could find to a ‘middle of the roader’ between climate alarmism and (ultra) skepticism. He is alsohighly decorated.

And this has not changed. North’s own intuitive estimate of climate sensitivity is now 50% below the IPCC’s best guess, and he has been critical of a number of the climate mini-alarms that would make headlines and then fade away (more hurricanes, disruption of the thermohaline circulation, etc.).

But I noticed a Malthusian streak in North, that unstated assumption that nature is optimal, and the human influence on climate cannot be good but only bad–and maybe even catastrophic. Still, North in his emails to me–then and now–was rather blunt about the shortcomings of climate modeling.

Here is a sampling of quotations over the last decade:

“There is no doubt a small ‘sociological convergence’ effect, that tends to work here (individuals and their managers hate to be the outlier). The biggest problem is that doubling CO2 leads to a 1 deg C warming (I think even Lindzen agrees). If water vapor doubles it, we are at 2.0 (Lindzen differs here, but I do not know of anyone else). Are there any other feedbacks? It is hard to dismiss ice feedback, but it might be small. Clouds are positive in most models — I have always taken them to be neutral, but with no substantial reason (it’s just easier that way).”

“I do not think there is enough thinking going on. Just plugging in the numbers or running the simulations. Dick [Lindzen] is clearly right on this one.”

“I believe the ocean simulations are very primitive and quite variable from one group to another. The underlying reason is this: How much of the deep layers of the ocean are really participating in the warming?”
“There are pitifully few ways to test climate models.”
“[Models] sort of fake it (we call it ‘parameterization’). They do it in very crude ways such as if the temperature profile of the atmosphere is unstable, they make the whole column overturn, etc.”
“[The models’ treatment of feedbacks] could also be sociological: getting the socially acceptable answer.”
“I go back to my old position: we need more time, maybe a decade to get a better grip on aerosols, water vapor feedback, cloud feedback, ocean participation.”
“We have only a very loose grip on aerosols.”
“[The models] treat the ocean differently. Somehow, they are fudging the parameters that govern ocean coupling so that they get the right ocean delay to agree with the data in spite of their differing sensitivities.”

But before you call North a radical or tattletale on the ‘consensus’, consider what the IPCC said in the back of their latest assessement of the physical science of climate change:

“The set of available models may share fundamental inadequacies, the effects of which cannot be quantified.”

- IPCC, Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis (Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 805.

Is this a trick? Satisfy the science by stating the science–but do so on page 805 rather than in the executive summary where it belongs. It is this sort of thing that Eric Berger–and other open-minded middle-of-the-roaders–are going to find out. And they just might feel a little duped."

///////////////////////////

So OK, North leans towards 1.5K as a likely number, rather than the "official" 3K. Actually the official stance is 1.1 to 6K but everyone just takes the middle of the range as if it was a Gaussian distribution (it isn't - all numbers higher than 1K are decreasingly scientifically plausible as North admits above - but of course the IPCC like the hoi polloi to assume it's a Gaussian). I've no problem believing that many more scientists think the same way as North but they just don't shout about it in the same way as Lindzen because it's just not politically correct to do so. Not everyones tenure is on such a sound footing as Lindzen, and Spencer actually had to resign from NASA in order to state his skeptical views.

I've noticed that Mathusian streak in a lot of the debate though - particularly on Andy Revkins blog. Overpopulation is a problem easily resolved by allowing 3rd world women some education, some independence and the right to work. All of which arrives with prosperity - which in turn is just possibly dependent on cheap, available energy. Ah...there's the rub. As they said on Spiked magazine though, Malthusians have always been wrong about the limits to growth and the real problem likely isn't too many people, it's too many Malthusians.

The car of the future

2009-12-07T05:07:00.000-08:00

A while back I wrote that I didn't rate the internal combustion engine much. Ever since I did a project on gas turbines I've been wondering why the gas turbine car was stillborn. The advantages are so numerous but mainly the idea of using rotary motion rather than converting reciprocating motion is the killer. It makes everything else so much simpler. The pistons in an IC engine are actually based on a cyclists legs.Why then, I've often asked myself, do we push down at top dead centre (TDC) rather than at 10 past the hour as we do on a bike. Actually the answer is probably because it was always done that way, or because of space. I did find out that the new air car by some French inventor does push down at 10 past the hour and increases the efficiency by about 40%. ie as we've seen so often, when you are limited then you are forced to find a solution. That may be the ethos of the idea behind carbon limitations too. After all, high fuel prices in Europe forced the development of small Diesel engines.

Anyway, rather than have minor improvements to fundamentally silly technologies, why not go back to the drawing board? And somebody has:

http://www.globenewswire.com/newsroom/news.html?d=179151

Sweet looking, fast series hybrid using a Diesel microturbine to charge batteries that run an electric motor. Actually it's not so new. Jay Leno has a car with similar technology in his garage from earlier this century. http://www.popularmechanics.com/automotive/jay_leno_garage/4215940.html

"The Owen Magnetic. First seen at the auto show in New York City in 1915 ...has a gas engine and an electric generator.

This drivetrain was the brainchild of George Westinghouse. The engine powers the generator, which creates a large magnetic force field be-tween the engine and drivewheels. There's no mechanical transmission. The driver moves a rheostat through four quadrants — a lot easier than shifting, and grinding, the straight-cut gears of the day — and the car moves ahead progressively, giving occupants that odd feeling you get when you try to push similar-pole magnets against each other. Both Enrico Caruso and John McCormack drove Owen Magnetics."

And of course electric trains use this drive concept too. However, microturbines weren't available recently. I don't know why; the microturbine is almost an exact replica of the Rover turbine that I tested in 1982 and which was made in 1953. I presume it's the air/foil bearings that make the big difference.

Anyway, "0-60 mph in 3.9 seconds, 150 mph top speed, and an unheard-of* driving range of up to 500 miles on a single tank of fuel, all with ultra-low exhaust emissions that rival any hybrid on the market today"

Somewhere I read about 500 mpg but maybe that's pushing it. A nice target though! We do know that the buses/coaches that use this technology are twice as economical as diesels - and a whole lot quieter, cleaner and smoother.

*Well it might be unheard of in the USA but the new Diesel Jaguar can achieve 1000miles on a single tank - as proven on Top Gear "Basle to Blackpool on a single tank" challenge.

Beware of fitness fashions; short term gain = long term pain

2009-12-06T08:43:00.000-08:00

Oh no, not another skepticism confirmed. It's a bit depressing realising that skepticism about any fashionable idea is usually always justified. Another one I've just read about is high impact aerobics and step aerobics. The unfortunates who did it in the 80's all have arthritis now:

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/08/27/earlyshow/contributors/emilysenay/main3207440.shtml

I'd had an inkling of this because a friend who was a radiologist in the 80's kept saying that joggers and marathon runners were causing a huge upsurge in knee problems. Funny how many people have knee problems isn't it? My own knee pain arose largely from playing football. Though I admit it was mainly people kicking me after I'd dribbled past them but I also have a suspicion I'd screwed my knees up by those ever-odd stretching exercises and the continuous impact pounding. Now that I've largely given up all exercise (apart from walking a fair amount that is) my knee has completely healed. It took a long time mind you, but finally, no longer do I get these sudden, excruciating pains when I put pressure on it.

Isn't it also odd the number of fitness freaks who succumb to heart attacks? My cyclist neighbour has just succumbed too. The conventional wisdom was that exercise was good for the heart. But the heart is a muscle and you can strain it. Good grief, the Queen mother lived to 100 without doing apparently any exercise at all.

The secret then to good health and a long life? Eating well and walking rather than running. Ask the French!

Green programming

2009-11-24T00:45:00.000-08:00

In my tradition of nabbing useful comments - largely as a diary. I've got one from "TheRegister". The original question is why do we need a full copy of Windows in every VMWare virtualization session, ie can't we just share the OS code because 40% of the server is being used up in dealing with this bloat. Well all the obvious answers were there; by using Solaris Zones or FreeBSD Jail then you can but then you don't have Windows. It goes back to the code bloat theme and someone called Captain Thyratron et al summed it up in a rant:

"Solaris Zones/Containers are pretty good (speaking as a self confessed Solaris fan). Though last time I looked they didn't support migration of a live VM from one machine to another. So pluses/minuses both ways.

Of course, the best thing is to have a self-clustering app that doesn't need something like VMWare to give it resiliance, etc. et. You could run such an app natively on a series of hosts in their nice multitasking operating systems. Now where would I get one of those...

I'm pretty sure that virtualisation is just an excuse for lazy developers to not think about their app design properly. I see developers at my employer doing all sorts of crazy things - e.g. a whole Windows VM just to serve up a 10 page website! Whatever happened to efficiency?

Dear Reg, please can you start a Campaign for Real Computing. Once upon a time programmers were skilled at developing efficient code that ran quick in small amounts of RAM. Now that resources are 'plentiful' the programming community has generally got lazy:

1. VMs where a native app would do.

2. Languages with bloated runtime environments that take forever to load just so you don't have to worry about errant pointers.

3. Apps running as crappy interpreted code in junk scripting languages in browsers just to save the effort of compiling the bloody thing.

4. New thin client technologies that consume vast amounts of bandwidth and give poor results instead of updating perfectly good things like X11.

5. An ever expanding array of app hosting environments (Silverlight, AIR, etc.) that are all 'indispensible' that make machines slow to boot and don't do anything that a carefully written native app couldn't do.

6. Data stored in man readable text when computers learnt to store things as binary a long time ago (come on, who EVER reads XML as the prime means of accessing the data within?).

I wonder how long it will be before data centre managers realise that lazy developers and vendors are costing them huge amounts in electricity, hardware and bandwidth costs?"

So there you have it - and it's true. Bloaty programming has a hardware and energy consumption cost. Ending code bloat is green. Do we really need items 1 to 6? I don't think so. This is why I'm anti code bloat and why someone telling me that throwing hardware at it is cheaper than doing the app right in the first place is plain crazy. It may be cheaper (debatable) but it's wasteful and short sighted.

Peak Oil Baloney

2009-11-16T02:39:00.000-08:00

Well there is a peak oil cult currently exemplified by the worriers at theoildrum.com and their latest post, relying pretty much on a correlation between dollar price and US GDP. Hence to them a high oil price equals low GDP. Hence it's basically yet another "doomsday from resource-limits" cult. Well my comment to that is below:

You may be mixing up cause and effect and oversimplifying. Yes GDP is correlated with oil price but that's partly because in a boom more oil is used and in a recession there is a cutback. While I'd accept that a price spike causes a cutback too, the short-term price spikes of 2007 were really caused by over-buying of futures contracts which then corrected the same year. But the reason everyone was buying into oil was because the debt level became unsustainable, the recession was coming, the stock market was diving and the pension fund managers stupidly thought that commodities were a safe haven. Inevitably the speculation corrected and the oil price dropped. The initial price rise from 2001 had of course been caused by the Iraq war and fears of supply.

Of course, we also have the reality that cheap oil allowed globalization by reducing shipping costs which then caused a slump in Western manufacture, so the Western GDP was then propped up only by rising house prices which were in turn based on cheap debt. And of course an economy that depends on house prices to continually rise is doomed to collapse, which is what happened. So it's all a bit more complex than your simple analysis allows for. In other words, correlation is not causation.

Indeed a higher price may actually be better for western economies because:
a) It makes cheap imports more expensive and allows local economies to redevelop their own manufacturing base, which gives real GDP growth from added value, rather than artificial growth from debt.
b) It encourages investments in extraction or gasification of shale oil and extraction of heavy oil, which are both hugely abundant, as even M. King Hubbert [the originator of the peak oil movement] noted, and which in turn ensures a future supply of oil.

Also perhaps a more important correlation is between the price of gold and the number of barrels it buys, which has hovered around 14 barrels per ounce for a century. So it's likely the variance in the price is more indicative of the value of the dollar than anything else.

Lastly, oil is largely used for transportation and plastics so a reduction in oil would not reduce electrical energy output hence it's not quite as drastic as you suggest. There is plenty of coal and gas to keep the lights on and there are also alternatives to plastics which could be used if plastics became expensive. So it's not all doom and gloom! It really depends on how you want to view things!

But there's yet one more aspect that I forgot to mention there. The fact that world oil is bought in dollars means that every country in the world has to keep a supply, so they buy more dollars as the oil price rises. This allows the US to print more dollars without incurring inflation. It's the petrodollar economy that has propped up the USA since the end of the Bretton-Woods agreement and it basically amounts to the rest of the world giving free money to the USA. This willingness for the rest of the world to soak up dollars is why the USA GDP looked so good and why the debt burden didn't seem to matter to all US administrations since Reagan. In their own words, the growing debt was a sign of confidence in the USA and indeed it was. However that confidence is lost if the dollar tanks. That of course would cause all these foreign dollars to be worthless. Hence the rest of the world are partly forced to keep propping up the dollar or lose the value of their reserves. What a dilemma! China, who hold the largest dollar stash, are coping with this dilemma by buying up all the commodities; metals, oil, uranium that they can get their hands on. Basically they will then not have to worry about any dollar crash and may even be the new hegemony in the world - ousting the USA. The Eastern politicians it seems are a lot more clever than their Western counterparts.

Its much more fascinating when you do real analysis rather than just plotting two curves, noting a correlation and dumbly assuming that A causes B or B causes A, rather than C causing both A and B. More false ideas are spread, and even wars happen, because of this fundamental error than by anything else.

UK Energy Policy

2009-11-14T06:34:00.000-08:00

I'm pretty sure that the UK energy policy is based on faith, hope and charity and very little real action. However, in some senses you can argue that a government with a total lack of engineering knowledge should just keep their nose out. Certainly Thatcher's dreams of a nuclear future were confounded by the reality of commissioning and decommissioning costs and it was largely good luck that natural gas came along at the right time. The gas plants though were not only better than coal and nuclear - simpler, more efficient, cheaper - they were pulled from industry rather than pushed by government. That's an important thing to note as it sort of vindicates the "free-market knows best" idea which has been knocked quite a bit. However the real problem with the free market is that it's too free for the criminals and they then gradually take control and ensure that it becomes less free for everyone else. That's where the regulation is needed. If the regulators are criminals too then there's no hope.

I'm convinced that the UK just doesn't have the money for the nuclear expansion they propose - they are massively in debt. Whatever the government says now they'll have to face that reality sooner or later. Sooner I hope.

So what is the real energy direction going to be? Well I'm increasingly finding that it's a lot easier recycling someone else's words when they agree with you. I thought I was such a contrarian that couldn't happen but apparently I'm not so alone. So I dug this out of the comments section of the oil drum. Again I assume it's public domain. I could have reworded it but that would have been pointless and dishonest. It's by the OMGbyWTF anonymous bot:

"The recession is keeping the lights on at the moment. There are a couple of unusual things happening in the UK electricity market at the moment.

The low price of natural gas and large number of CCGT's seem to to be undercutting the price of coal generated electricity, also there are net electricity exports to France as they seem to have a lot of nukes out of service for various reasons.

http://www.reuters.com/article/utilitiesSector/idUSLU26856720091030

http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm

The UK has wasted its North Sea reserves making cheap electricity with no long term investment in alternatives or storage. LNG import capacity has been built fairly quickly and it I don't see the 'gas glut' lasting for very long. I think the UK needs to get its act sorted on several key areas.

Build more natural gas storage facilities.

Improve thermal efficiency in buildings: insulation and move towards heat pumps starting with those on electric and oil fired heating. External insulation and solar water heating should also be considered.

Adopt the Danish model of multifuel CHP systems burning coal, rubbish, biomass and gas whilst providing district heating. Distributed generation running of gassified waste / coal / natural gas / biogas should provide good security and flexibility. Dump the CO2 and waste heat into greenhouses.

Accelerate construction of replacement nuclear reactors and grid upgrades to add more interconnectors with Europe and accomodate more wind power.

Expand and electrify existing railway services.

Look at potential for coal bed methane / gasification of the coal reserves under the North Sea, from a CO2 perspective this may not seem a good idea by this time there should be plenty of empty oil / gas fields to pump the CO2 into.

Build the Severn Barrage, and uprate and expand if possible existing pumped storage sites.

Roll out electric vehicles as they become available."

The only things I don't agree about are a) the nuclear expansion - on mainly cost grounds, and b) worrying about warming from CO2, which in my view is a very overblown hypothesis, though I accept it's politically correct. Using the CO2 for greenhouses or scavenging is however eminently sensible. However all this is cost but no sign of where the money might come from. Stopping the pointless wars would help. Perhaps a Tobin tax? Or just getting entrepreneurs to fund it rather than government. I'm not too happy about that because energy companies are natural monopolies - they really need strict overseers.

Western manufacture decline

2009-11-05T04:50:00.000-08:00

This might be a copyright theft but perhaps opinion on blogs are public domain. Anyway I reproduce verbatim a blog post from Dale R McIntyre, PhD on Andy Revkin's dotearth blog. A blog that seems to be frequented mostly nowadays by realists rather than the wooly-minded Malthusians who used to dominate. Several are admitting now that they don't have quite the same belief that scientists know any better than the rest of us about the state of the planet. However, enough about fantasy science, let's focus on real engineering. This post shows that the USA is now facing the same effects of neo-liberalist de-manufacturing that the UK faced in 1980's. It's difficult to say if it's avoidable or not but it's worth chronicling at least - especially the part about cheap and nasty Chinese cheese-like steel which we've all become accustomed to encountering in household items. When will a major engineering catastrophe occur because of that short-termist thinking?

"Those of us who have tried to manufacture anything here in the US over the last 20 years could explain it to you. The manufacturing skills and enterprizes which led America to prosperity for over two centuries are in a parlous state.

The causes are many but let me detail some of the high points.

In the mid-1990's, China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization with its currency, the renembi, pegged to the dollar and undervalued by about 30%. (For why this was done, you might enquire to the husband of our current Secretary of State, or to Al Gore.)

With an undervalued currency, labor paid at rates on the order of $1.50 PER DAY, no union work rules and no environmental rules worth mentioning, the leadership of China made mercantilism their national policy and export earnings were the order of the day.

American manufacturing firms were soon putting thousands of man-hours of engineering into their proposals, presenting their best, most finely-honed price, only to be told that they had to meet the "China price". That is, unless they cut their best price 30% to match what the Chinese, with their undervalued currency, could do the job for, the work would go overseas. (For documentation please see Business Week and Fortune articles all through the late 1990's and early 2000's)

US firms who met the China price, hoping to keep business and cash flowing in the door, ended up going bankrupt. I believe I am correct that every single major auto parts supplier in this country has been through bankruptcy.

This attack of the "China price" came on top of twenty years of steady erosion of profitability in the manufacturing sector, due to litigation costs, union work rules and the capital requirements of installing pollution control equipment. America led the world in mandating pollution control all through the 1970's and 1980's, at a time when our competitors faced no such requirements. It came at a price; the hollowing out of America's manufacturing infrastructure.

America's steel industry, once the world's strongest, is just a vestige of its former self. What happened? Steel mills had to put their capital into flue gas scrubbers; Asian mills did not. Union wages made America's steel workers the highest paid in the US, paid 47% more than comparable jobs in other US industries. Until the mills went bankrupt, that is.

Every one of those wind turbines will need a tall steel tower to hold it up in the breeze. The Chinese steel industry is now the world's largest, with huge over-capacity, so they sell their steel cheap. It's not very good steel, but boy is it cheap.

Little critical detail items stopped being made here because of high labor costs, the cost of legal liability and the cost of environmental compliance.

Take fasteners, for instance. Big deal, they're just bolts and nuts, right? Well, Boeing is losing customers for their 787 Dreamliner because there are no domestic suppliers of fasteners to hold the wings on, and the foreign suppliers didn't deliver on time.

Every single blade of every wind turbine will be held on by a circle of about 50 high-strength steel bolts. China makes tons and tons of bolts. They are not very good bolts, and a shocking number of them are of cheap low-strength steel but "decorated" with markings to make them look like high-strength steel bolts.

When cheap bolts are installed in a wind turbine they will fail by metal fatigue and their blades will fly off and impale whatever cow or coyote or farmer happens to be passing by. But you can buy Chinese bolts and you can't buy American bolts any more.

Literally thousands of small forges and foundries have shut down in the last 20-30 years. Zinc and chromium plating shops have been particularly hard hit because of the environmental costs of disposing of the chemical plating baths. All of those steel wind turbine towers will need to be coated or plated; otherwise the towers will buckle in 10 or 12 years due to corrosion damage. Where would we do that here in the US? The Chinese don't do a good job of zinc plating but they do it, and nobody cares much what gets dumped in the rivers.

Finally you will need three very long very stiff fiberglass blades for each turbine. (Dow Corning was a pioneer in glass fiber manufacture, but they were driven into bankruptcy here in the US, over the bogus silicone breast implant lawsuits.)

You need epoxy or polyamide resin to soak the glass fibers in to make fiberglass. The resins are petrochemicals. There has not been a new oil refinery built in this country since 1976, and only one new chemical plant in the same time. Oil and chemicals are bad, right? Lots of lawsuits, no building permits."

Dale R McIntyre, PhD

Perils of modelling: initial assumptions 1

2009-10-25T06:17:00.000-07:00

I just thought I'd nick this quote from solar scientist Douglas Hoyt on another blog as it is a succinct summary of what can go wrong with models that have too many adjustable and vague parameters and relying on hindcasts as validations - which I touched on before with respect to fatigue calculations.

"The climate modelers introduced a large upward trend in global aerosols because, without them, their models ran too hot, predicting a global warming of circa 2C in the 20th century, as opposed to the observed 0.6C warming.

As I have pointed out, there is no evidence that the claimed global trend in aerosols existed. At best there were a few regional aerosol clouds covering less than 1% of the globe.

The proper solution to their problem would have been to lower the climate sensitivity to 1C or less. In fact. Lindzen has a convincing paper out recently showing the climate sensitivity is about 0.6C for a CO2 doubling.

The scientific solution to the problem: No large global trend trend in aerosols and low climate sensitivity.

The political “solution” is: Unsupported claims of large aerosol increases which allows the fiction of a high climate sensitivity to be maintained, leading to alarming and false predictions of catastrophic future warming."

Douglas Hoyt

I added. "I wonder if a 3rd party review might have fixed it. There are times when you get a weird modeling result and you can't find the problem so you rationalize it or add a fiddle factor. Only later do you see where the mistake was. Also sometimes throwing money at a group to investigate a problem can fail due to an over-riding need to justify the money and claim more of it."

There's no conspiracy here - just hubris, group-think and self-preservation. Normal science in fact. Just to be fair I'll pick on a few other fields later.

Update: Here is a quote from Lindzen on modelling where he describes the 0.5 feedback:

////////beginning of extract

"IPCC ‘Consensus.’

It is likely that most of the warming over the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions.

How was this arrived at?

What was done, was to take a large number of models that could not reasonably simulate known patterns of natural behavior (such as ENSO, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation), claim that such models nonetheless accurately depicted natural internal climate variability, and use the fact that these models could not replicate the warming episode from the mid seventies through the mid nineties, to argue that forcing was necessary and that the forcing must have been due to man.

The argument makes arguments in support of intelligent design sound rigorous by comparison. It constitutes a rejection of scientific logic, while widely put forward as being ‘demanded’ by science. Equally ironic, the fact that the global mean temperature anomaly ceased increasing by the mid nineties is acknowledged by modeling groups as contradicting the main underlying assumption of the so-called attribution argument (Smith et al, 2007, Keenlyside et al, 2008, Lateef, 2009). Yet the iconic statement continues to be repeated as authoritative gospel, and as implying catastrophe.

Now, all projections of dangerous impacts hinge on climate sensitivity. (To be sure, the projections of catastrophe also depend on many factors besides warming itself.) Embarrassingly, the estimates of the equilibrium response to a doubling of CO2 have basically remained unchanged since 1979.

They are that models project a sensitivity of from 1.5-5C. Is simply running models the way to determine this? Why hasn’t the uncertainly diminished?

There follows a much more rigorous determination using physics and satellite data.

We have a 16-year (1985–1999) record of the earth radiation budget from the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE; Barkstrom 1984) nonscanner edition 3 dataset. This is the only stable long-term climate dataset based on broadband flux measurements and was recently altitude-corrected (Wong et al. 2006). Since 1999, the ERBE instrument has been replaced by the better CERES instrument. From the ERBE/CERES monthly data, we calculated anomalies of LW-emitted, SW-reflected, and the total outgoing fluxes.

We also have a record of sea surface temperature for the same period from the National Center for Environmental Prediction.

Finally, we have the IPCC model calculated radiation budget for models forced by observed sea surface temperature from the Atmospheric Model Intercomparison Program at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory of the DOE.

The idea now is to take fluxes observed by satellite and produced by models forced by observed sea surface temperatures, and see how these fluxes change with fluctuations in sea surface temperature. This allows us to evaluate the feedback factor.

Remember, we are ultimately talking about the greenhouse effect. It is generally agreed that doubling CO2 alone will cause about 1C warming due to the fact that it acts as a ‘blanket.’ Model projections of greater warming absolutely depend on positive feedbacks from water vapor and clouds that will add to the ‘blanket’ – reducing the net cooling of the climate system.

We see that for models, the uncertainty in radiative fluxes makes it impossible to pin down the precise sensitivity because they are so close to unstable ‘regeneration.’ This, however, is not the case for the actual climate system where the sensitivity is about 0.5C for a doubling of CO2 . From the brief SST record, we see that fluctuations of that magnitude occur all the time."

Richard Lindzen

Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, MIT

/////////////////////end of extract

Now just to summarise:

1) It is universally agreed that basic warming from a doubling of CO2 should theoretically be 1 degree C.

2) Model runs say it could be between 1 and 6 degrees C. The extra above the 1 degree number is from a supposed positive feedback where evaporated water vapour from the sea adds to the CO2.

3) This extra warming was needed to match up the recent warming in the Hadley temperature graph with Hadley model output.

4) For this match-up, Hadley modellers had assumed that natural variability had minimal warming effect over the period of study, hence any remaining anomaly must be manmade warming. However they couldn't actually model natural variability - they just pretended that they could.

5) Subsequent non-warming has been blamed on natural variability by those same Hadley scientists which is an admission that the previous assumption has zero foundation.

6) So Lindzen finds out if this supposed positive feedback from water vapour is present in the real, measured satellite data. He finds a sensitivity of 0.5 C from real data, indicating that there must be a negative feedback, not a positive one. One might postulate that this is due to formation of clouds (as Lindzen suggested and as Dr Roy Spencer has obs and published papers to back up).

That's what the real science tells us, ie comparison of the theory with observations - remember that? It's how science used to work. It's not true to say that the models couldn't achieve the same result. In fact they could - all they need to do is adjust the natural variation to reflect real world observations.

However, the latter number implicitly assumes that extra warming is from the CO2 and it is not actually another long-term natural trend. This is fair but not necessarily so because there is a well known descent into a "little ice age" at least in Northern Europe which has not been adequately explained. If that cooling was natural and we started from that natural low point then the heating can be natural too. That said, Northern europe is quite tiny so it's politically correct and probably sensible to assume that man is warming the planet by a small amount. In any event the planet has warmed by mostly natural 0.4 degrees since 1950, the IPCC cutoff date. So what are the implications? For a future post.

Where do we go from here?

2009-10-24T08:36:00.000-07:00

Let's not get melancholy about what should have been done or about the grave injustices of the system. The revolution isn't coming to replace the stupid with the wise so we need to learn to adapt to continued stupidity. In times like this we really need to know where things are going so we can plan ahead. My only qualifications for this are that I managed to predict the crash was coming (and warned everyone I possibly could, some of whom are even grateful) which puts me well ahead of the worlds PhD economists who praise the god of the invisible hand and also seriously well ahead of Alan Greenspan, that latter-day Oracle of Delphi whose inscrutable pronouncements were enough to move entire markets. Mind you, I didn't manage to see then how exactly to prepare for it, apart from moving to a country that didn't see the boom in the first place. The plan was to hold up in this safe haven until other real estate markets corrected to a sensible level and then pick up a bargain. I really didn't expect France to nosedive as well because they had laws to prevent bank speculations. Those sneaky bankers got around the laws that were meant to protect them. Never underestimate the stupidity of the greedy! Happily it was only the big few. Unhappily they still don't quite realize the first role of a bank is to lend money to small businesses, not to gamble with their savers money. Sarko needs to step in here. From the rather pathetic selection of world leaders, he's likely the best man for the job.

Unlike our inglorious leaders I don't expect the dumb suckers who got us into this mess will be to be able to get us out of it so I need to look for guidelines elsewhere. A simple barometer to economic health is to look around and see who still has healthy manufacturing sectors or a lot of natural resources but without too many mouths to feed. We come up with Japan, Germany, France for the first part, Australia, Canada, Brazil, Russia for the second. China and India will be catching up with the rest of the world for a while and then they'll have to deal with a population who'll want unions, social security, pensions etc. The USA is a tricky beast to judge because with that enormous level of debt they really should have tanked by now just like Argentina did. That they haven't is entirely due to the worlds central bankers continuing to buy up US debt and continuing to use dollars as a reserve currency. This doesn't really make any sense but then central bankers never did. Clearly the rest of the world still looks to the USA to bring us out of the depression.

Yet the USA does have a lot of natural resources, and it does have the most encouraging entrepreneurial spirit backed by the best venture capitalist culture by far. They don't mind losing money on most things as long as they gain enough money from the few things that do work. So maybe they can do it after all. France doesn't work that way more's the pity. It's odd but there could be jobs for everyone here - the place is crying out for tradesmen of all sorts. We just can't get them. Every school-leaver wants to be a bureaucrat it seems. Yet entrepreneurs will need to lead the recovery. That there aren't enough small businessmen is due to a double whammy: too much unnecessary burdens placed on them by the state and too many of those bloody bureaucrats. Better said, too much government. It is true that the best thing a government can do for a business is to get the hell out of the way. I'd dearly like to know how to get my hands on this zero rate of interest that the European banks think will crank up the economy. Instead it's being used by big banks to participate in yet more dumb speculation. It just doesn't get to the entrepreneurs. I'm not that much in favour of nationalised banks but if that's the only way for us entrepreneurs to get the stimulus then let's do it.

Anyway here's the plan. Whatever you are selling, make it cheaper. People just don't have the cash just now. Downsize your expenses, so get a smaller house and factory. Take advantage of any zero percent interest schemes you can eg by swapping your credit card and getting eco-loans for insulation, geothermal heating etc. While it's not smart getting in debt it's necessary to smooth things over. Find out what buzzwords are likely to unlock the purses of these government grant agencies and redirect your business plan that way; it doesn't matter if the whole idea is dumb - most business plans stink anyway - just get the money and adapt the idea to something that people will want or need. Do not invest in dollar holdings; instead hold still for now and buy land in about a year. I already see some very tempting real estate that is an absolute steal. There are certain places in the world that will recover. eg Think Florida, not New Mexico.

Technology is our saviour. Anything that gets us to do the job quicker or otherwise saves us money. So any services run through the internet are good. If you can invent something to get rid of spam or protect against internet fraudsters then you've got it made. Robotics will be big and so will long-life batteries to run them. Look for the software that really costs too much and undercut the bastards. They deserve it. Don't worry about losing a customer who says he pays more for whatever reason; if your quality is good then you don't need him. Find someone smarter instead. Entire sectors of expensive software will soon be ditched by government departments in order to save money. That means more Openoffice and less Microsoft Office, more Alibre, less Inventor (I hope anyway). More Linux, less Windows. Games are still to the fore and they'll become more immersive and real, so look for things that'll cater for that: Virtual objects will need to break more realistically than before for example. Virtual offices will proliferate with net-meetings being the norm rather than the exception. Our cars will get lighter so carbon fibre will be popular and cheaper.

Don't listen to the born-again eco-freaks that say the warming planet will cause this or that because a) they are mostly abject hypocrites, b) they are guessing on the pessimistic side, c) we've seen this catastrophism before many times and it always smells the same way, d) the politicians are only paying lip-service to them now, e) the science behind it is pathetically poor f) the real-world observations say the hypothesis is far too simplistic and too dismissive of natural changes, g) models without validation are useless - if you need an example then look at the financial models that predicted unlimited growth; these were actually much better models and were created by far smarter people than climate scientists (similar hubris though). Hence business-wise don't trust any green-tech unless it is actually a good idea and can make a profit without subsidy. Do not buy carbon credits - they are run by conmen. Solar panels will be good if you are in a hot place. Geothermal heating will rocket in popularity. Smart-looking electric cars will be popular whereas the ugly ones just won't - look at Renaults new electric cars, heck I really want one of them and I don't care about the 100 mile range because I just never go that far. What I really want too though is an electric driver so I can relax in the back. I wouldn't plan on nuclear power coming out of the cold - despite all the current green-washing the real problem with it always was it's huge costs. Governments don't have the money. Coal to gas technology will however be popular - natural gas power is far more efficient than coal and needs far fewer moving parts. Crucially though, it can be privately funded and the buildtime is quick.

Check those initial assumptions!

2008-04-21T07:20:00.000-07:00

I bought a science magazine (Science et Vie No. 102) last month with an article about a radical new ecofuel which would apparently incorporate the benefits of a Diesel engine but without running on Diesel fuel. It was being developed by engineers at Mercedes-Benz: the DiesOtto and Opel: the CAI engine. The idea? A fuel that can be compressed to ignite and so approach the efficiency of the Diesel engine, which - the journalist reported - is caused by better mixing, but without the attendant high-temperature and high-pressure which cause high NOx emissions. The new fuel could stand the higher pressures without pre-ignition but would not be as inert as the traditional Diesel fuel which needed much higher pressures to ignite.

At this point I hope I'm not alone in spotting the obvious error in thinking. The Diesel cycle is efficient because of those high pressures and temperatures, not because of better mixing. But remember this is Mercedes talking here - they made the first Diesel engine - so what was the result? A table was produced and this is the really good bit. They showed 15% reduction in fuel consumption, 15% reduction in hydrocarbon emissions, 80% reduction in CO2 emissions, and an almost complete elimination of NOx emissions. But wait, let's revise those numbers from an engineering perspective rather than a marketing one and point out the bits that weren't mentioned. They reduced fuel use by 15% compared to SI engines but their new engine is still less efficient than CI engines. This much was mentioned in the text but not in the headline graphic. So the laws of thermodynamics are safe after all. The hydrocarbon reduction would also obviously be less than those of the Diesel engine. With the emissions figures the marketing men were even trickier. The NOx reductions were impressive except that this time they were comparing emission levels against Diesel engines, not petrol, which would likely have the same level of NOx emissions. Worse still, the stated reduction in CO2 seems to be utterly incredible unless the laws of chemistry are to be broken too: The amount of CO2 out is totally related to the amount of fuel in, so they can't be comparing that result with either engine. The only way to reduce carbon dioxide for a given amount of fuel is to increase carbon monoxide - it's poisonous cousin - and soot. I doubt that is what they did though because that would be the very definition of an inefficient engine. So the number must be a convenient error in transcription or they are capturing carbon in some other unmentioned way.

So what we are left with after a spend of several million euros is a 15% reduction in fuel use but producing a new fuel which may very well cost more than 15% more to make and buy. Actually if they limited their top speed they could have achieved the same result for zero cost. Or they could have reduced their total weight like the Loremo car designers did to achieve 150 mpg. I find it difficult to know what to make of this saga. Did these auto engineers really know nothing about the meaning of the Diesel and Otto cycles? Are they just paying lip service to fuel efficiency, trying to falsely show us that it's not really that easy. Or is it just another demonstration of the many easy ways that dumb ideas can take root. Was it poor journalism and the actual aims of these companies were not really as high as reported?

Update: On second thoughts, despite falling well short on being as efficient as a Diesel engine I have to admit that getting rid of spark plugs etc. and removing throttle losses is after all a good idea. Since ignition problems are pretty much 80% of all IC engine problems they have made the engine more reliable while retaining the acceleration of petrol/gasoline and without the NOx emissions of Diesel. Nevertheless the PR men who advised the journalist concerned crossed well over the line of truthfulness - especially about the falseness of the extent of the CO2 savings.

Solid Modeling Software

2008-02-02T09:11:00.000-08:00

Updated 6th March 08 because the price of CADMAI has increased for the new version 3.

FEMdesigner works best via it's import iges command. The other model creation methods are a little out of date by now, though perhaps still ok for teaching purposes. So the next question you may ask is which solid modeler should I use? My own criterion is basically "power without the price" (as the old Atari slogan went). And the one I've been using for day to day work on prototypes is CADMAI which costs a very reasonable 499 euros which (so far) includes all upgrades and email user support. It is a very easy program to use. In fact I don't think I've needed to read the manual yet. My one regret is that the iges models produced from it don't seem to be very compatible with FEMdesigner. However very soon we will have fully integrated FEMdesigner with CADMAI so there will be no need for switching programs, the total package price will be around the same because CADMAI already has a FEM mesher. However I've discovered a better alternative called "Moment of Inspiration" or MOI for short, which has the most fantastic user interface and is even easier to use. Better still, the iges models import perfectly. Even better still it is only 138 euros which is well within anyones budget. Lastly there is the free solid modeler called Alibre Xpress, which I haven't used myself yet but one of my users reports that it's iges output works well with FEMdesigner. Of course if you have the thinkdesign software already then the Stressout plugin is clearly the way to go, since it is fully integrated into your thinkdesign environment.

Once you have your solid model tool you really won't want to do FE modeling any other way. Now assume you have tested your part in FEMdesigner and you want to alter a fillet or change a dimension then you just make the changes and re-import the model. If the changes haven't been too drastic then your old loads and restraints will still be valid for the new shape.

Simple is efficient

2008-01-25T14:36:00.000-08:00

This paradigm applies in many spheres. I've just read a blog rant from Steve Yegge about how he is among the small minority who think that code bloat is a major problem. So I'm not alone! Yes it's true, people actually boast about the number of lines of code they have written. I well remember a Southampton lecturer did that very thing when he was describing his Fortran monster of an optimising fluid-structure code. I really found it difficult to decide what expression to show him as a sneer would have been too impolite. However he must have been used to people falling over with delight when he described his code bloat so my passive face made him leave shortly after. I hadn't cooed over his baby I guess. Actually, maybe he was psychic because I was thinking at the time "if you can't even see the need to optimise your code, then what the heck do you know about optimisation"?

Though all engineers are really amateurs at code churning, the professional programmers are just as lame on this point. I remember being told that programmers used to be paid per line of code written so maybe it's the old survival instinct. Anyway if you went into any programmers forum a few years ago and said you want to use mainly C rather than C++ to avoid code bloat you were treated as a complete idiot. The standard responses were roughly:
a) programmers time is much more costly than that extra RAM or processing power,
b) Do you want to go back to using a Sinclair spectrum or a Citroen 2CV instead of using modern tools,
c) Don't you realise that object orientation, data-hiding, multiple inheritance, blah, blah,... pick your buzzword.. is essential to code readability, security, reuse, sharing, blah, blah, blah.
Of course it's funny that now the same people have brought their same arguments to bear, en masse, to C#. For example, you say; "I don't want my users to have to download 60 megs of crap just to use my software, I'll stick to C++ thank you" and these same guys who had previously hurled abuse at you for daring not to drink the wondrous elixir of C++, now apparently find that C++ is a veritable pile of steaming dung compared to the new religion of C#. Fashions eh!

In the same vein I lament the death of the Atari ST which started instantaneously just like in the films (but not real life). An operating system in ROM what a great idea. Like the QL, it was doomed by the rise of the Amstrad and other clones. Another triumph of mediocrity over elegance! There was even an alternative pre-emptive multitasking operating system called SMS2, based on Sinclair's QDOS, which actually fitted in a 250k pluggable ROM cartridge - I bet it would still give most operating systems a run for their money. And why can't we even now have our operating system in ROM or RAM. I have 1 Gig of fast RAM in my pocket, the size of a postage stamp and it even plugs into the computer, but I still cannot store an operating system on it to overide Windows. Too simple an idea?

Anyway the same paradigm applies to engineering design and this time I'm paying no heed to the fashionistas. Fewer parts mean less maintenance, less chance of a fault and more chance of the thing working in the first place. When applied to the motor car this obviously means the best engine is no engine at all. Well Ok, I've never liked the conventional IC engine: It's like one big collection of kludges and bad ideas wrapped together in a needlessly complex and self-defeating system. Controversial but I'll explain what I mean in a future blog article. The rise of the battery / fuel cell cars is at last coming - 100 years late but it's coming and unbelievably I'm involved in it. More of that later too.

Designing against fatigue failure

2008-01-04T05:00:00.000-08:00

I had a useful comment to my previous fatigue post to the effect that; regardless of how inadequate the traditional methods are, the commenter - an expert in failure analysis - had never seen failures from components which used these methods. Failures happen when no actual fatigue calculations are performed, or when over-reliance is placed on fatigue crack growth calculations. As a designer who has also used these methods extensively and not had any failures either, I can endorse that observation. And it is an important point to make. However, it begs the question, how did we get the right answer with poor methods? And that is worthy of a new post, especially since it's been over a year since the last:)

That the designer is aware that fatigue may be a problem is really half the battle. This may have been by accident - that is having had parts fail during testing - or by being better engineers in the first place. I have lamented that many design engineers actually don't have that much savvy. My experiences in industry indeed suggest that many engineers actively try to forget whatever they have learned in University and others seem to have gained a degree just by turning up, because they often don't demonstrate enough intelligence to design a box. However, and fortunately, most if not all, engineers are honest people and they are more than willing to admit their deficiencies. The ones who don't are usually pushed into management, where lying is considered a positive asset, or into paper-shuffling jobs where they cannot do any real harm. Those honest engineers will always go to more experienced or clever individuals for advice and guidance. That is indeed one of the really nice thing about engineers - they are never too proud to ask for help; because everyone is aware that being wrong can cost lives. So, getting back to the point, how do we produce good results - parts that don't break - from quite poor methods?

If you are aware that fatigue failure may be a problem, then you know that sharp discontinuities will be where it will occur, so you always use generous radii and long tapers. That insight saves many designs, especially in weaker materials like plastics. In fact, in cast parts you often have to do this anyway just to make manufacture possible. The next thing a savvy designer will do is to find out the local stresses by FE analysis. If the stresses are too high then you are immediately forced to redesign the component either by redistributing the load over a wider area or by stiffening up the area concerned. This is the second fallback. Hence, by the time you come around to doing the fatigue assessment, you have already eliminated many of the problems which would cause fatigue. Lastly, a savvy designer will always try to use steel. It isn't just that it is cheaper, it is also very forgiving of bad designs because it will plastically flow to redistribute the high stresses. Many engineering materials don't have that property so you will find a high proportion of unexpected failures occur in more exotic materials. Steel's plasticity automatically gives you a safety factor of up to 50%. Et voila, this is how so many parts fail to fail; not by the methods themselves but the savvy and experience of the lead design engineer.

The big fatigue problems usually stem from welded connections. Either there are fillet welds where the crack is inherent, or there are inclusions or porosity. The last two can be spotted by x-rays or ultrasound (and then repaired) and the first one has a well established fatigue analysis procedure originating from the UK Welding Institute and the US Welding Research Council. In these procedures every type of weld joint has been extensively tested and charts have been produced under different weld categories, steel types and heat treatment conditions. It is really a marvelous body of work which has undoubtedly saved many engineering structures from failing. If you follow these procedures you simply cannot go wrong. However, they are only for steel structures. Aluminium and it's alloys, which are being more frequently used need the same treatment but I believe they are on the case.

Great Design: Money versus Savvy

2006-09-28T05:32:00.000-07:00

I love to see great design. I love small and efficient design and I just hate waste in any form. One engineering concept that shows the striking difference between good design and bad design is in traditional manned space travel versus the new Virgin-backed concept. In the Saturn V rockets we had enormous rockets on a launch pad with a design based on dumping big chunks of metal in space, and expending huge quantities of fuel. These were necessary because of the problems of launch and re-entry. The launch idea was based on the launch of the unmanned V2 rockets in WW2, mainly because the designer of both was Werner von Braun. But manned spaceflight doesn't actually need a launchpad - it has people to guide it. Take away the launch pad and piggy back the rocket on a standard aircraft and much less fuel is needed and no parts need to be thrown away. The re-entry idea was even better! The amount of money NASA wasted on a badly designed reusable shuttle should be enough to disband NASA. Worse still, they actually blamed the shuttle disasters on a lack of funding. Eh? In fact the shuttle and the rockets before it were designed by an enormous complex of people with phd's but no imagination. The main problems with the shuttle are the enormous launch boosters and the heat of the re-entry on the fixed wing design. But we already knew that a dropped capsule worked just fine without all these hugely expensive thermal tiles so why not have a movable wing design and just drop back through the atmosphere and then glide again when we've dropped. Totally brilliant in its simplicity, and the result of just one inspired designer with a background in flight. What are the lessons learned here?
1. Unlimited money leads to an expensive design. Limiting money forces better design.
2. One person with savvy is worth more than several thousand Phd scientists.
3. You probably need experience of flight if you are going to design flying machines.

On a related note. You may have noticed that Western weapons technology is generally outperformed by Russian technology. In fact the West is usually playing catch-up in capability terms (Mig aircraft, T-34 tanks in WW2, Sunburn misssiles etc, etc.). Of course the Western stuff costs billions and the Russian stuff costs peanuts. Western companies are much better at marketing than technology it seems. A glaring example being the patriot missile, whose projected 99% success rate was discovered to be in reality about O%. There are many, many other examples of this type of unjustified hype! However, now that the cold war is over and the Russians are clearly our friends, perhaps someone should suggest that the West could save a fortune by buying it's weapons from Russia. Just a thought, in case someone was wondering how to fund all these retiring baby boomers.

Fatigue Stress Assessment

2006-09-26T09:44:00.000-07:00

Introduction

Resistance to fatigue was long thought to be a property of the metals because some metals react worse than others. Steel is good against fatigue, titanium is not. Titanium though is preferred by engineers because it is lighter and more exotic. So much for designing against fatigue failure! Lucky for us punters titanium is too scarce.

Total Life Fatigue Design

Fatigue we are constantly reminded is responsible for about 80% of failures. Straight from the department of guesswork or should I say from the sales dept. All we really know is that all structures are dynamic and undergo cycling so unexplained failures are probably caused by a fatigue mechanism. Just as well we have well-defined and long-standing techniques for calculation the onset of fatigue. Ho ho ho! Let us recap. Actually the reason that fatigue is blamed so often is that it is the most likely miscalculation in the design path. Yes I know the software salesmen tell you that their fatigue software can predict failure to an incredible accuracy. As you will see though, when you know the end result it's very easy to fiddle the in-between calculations to get there. In fact fatigue calculations are an endless series of fiddle factors.

Try this one Kf=Kt*Ks*Ke*Km*K.......

Kf is the fatigue strength reduction factor, introduced because the mathematics of the Kt calculation doesn't actually match with real life. So you need a material factor, an environment factor, a shape factor, a temperature factor etc. This equation alone is enough to invalidate your results.

Try this one too; Miner's cumulative damage rule:

n1/N1 + n2/N2 + n3/N3 ....... <=1.0

Where n is the number of cycles in each cyclic load condition and N is the corresponding number of cycles which it needs to fail. Simple and universally utilised but, unfortunately it doesn't compare well to real life situations. Instead of 1 you can substitute C. Wikipedia says "C is experimentally found to be between 0.7 and 2.2. Usually for design purposes, C is assumed to be 1", which Miner suggested on the basis of logic. I have seen data though which suggests C can be as low as 0.1. Ergo this calculation is thoroughly useless. Furthermore, N has to be adjusted for temperature by yet another fiddle factor. Why do we use this formula you may ask? Because no one has come up with anything better. There is really no mystery that it doesn't work because it ignores the effect of a previous cycle on the next cycle and it assumes uniaxial loading which only ever happens in a laboratory tensile test.

As if the level of guesswork wasn't enough we come across the "what you see is what you fiddled" miracle of rainflow counting in which you can manipulate the number of peaks and troughs of the load cycle by changing the sampling amount or "bucket size". Rainflow counting is not even logical because once you have opened a crack in one cycle, a further cycle which opens it half as much has no actual effect. So adjusting the bucket size is just a technique to magically reproduce already known results which is why those fatigue computer programs seem so accurate. It is a lot easier to predict failure when you already know what happened but we really want to predict failure before it happens.

Useless fatigue calculation summary; Find your SCF based on a fillet radius and thickness from Peterson's handbook of hopelessly limited 2D shapes, then multiply it by a variety of guess factors for environment, loading type, etc. Next reduce the factor by the fracture toughness factor which corrects for the fact that SCF's hopelessly overpredict the onset of fatigue in real life. Of course this value is only of use if the test was done on your actual structure, which it wasn't. Apply the final factor to your field stress, which is the general stress away from the discontinuity. The field stress concept is also based on simple 2D shapes and simple loading. It is not possible to obtain a field stress in any real situation unless you linearise the highly nonlinear stresses. A technique which is controversion and idiosyncratic, even impossible in a 3D situation. Finally find the expected life from a suitable endurance curve. This curve was produced for simple 1D specimens under simplistic loading and it had originally a phenomenal scatter which someone plotted on a logarithmic scale and drew a couple of straight lines through it: They could easily too have drawn a dancing bear through it. Of course you must further adjust the lines according to the extent of compression in the load cycle. For every cycle find a life fraction and add these fractions to get a total life value for the part using Miner's cumulative damage rule which has long been proven to be total nonsense. If you have a load history which is not conveniently sinusoidal then use rainflow counting to capture each mini-cycle within the larger cycles, then disregard the majority of these cycle "buckets" so as to not to be too conservative (because rainflow counting doesn't represent real life). Finally you will arrive at the conclusion you need. In this case, if it is someone elses design you must fail it by including for all eventualities, but if it is your design you must consider all the unnecessary assumptions until you manage to pass it.

Well that procedure was for high cycle, elastic stresses. There is a low-cycle, strain-based calculation for materials in the plastic regime. However it is currently carried out by using elastic stresses and assuming a Neuber plasticity curve. NAFEMS adroitly points out the inadequacy of this approach in a book on it's website, wherein it is pointed out that plastic computations would not only be possible but far more desirable. For me this approximation alone is enough of a fudge to render the calculation useless so I avoid discussing the remaining fiddle factors. However this technique is universally used in current Fatigue software. In fact the prostitution of several prominent academics in presenting this approximation technique as the last word in fatigue design is really quite disagreeable. I suggest you avoid said software and get instead the AFGROW program from the net. It's probably no better but it is well documented, well used and free. We may do a user interface for it one day.

Meantime, there is a module in FEMdesigner to plot the fatigue strength of the material but we use stress ratios instead of life predictions. Here there is only a maximum and minimum stress, an endurance strength (obtained with consideration of the design life) and a fatigue strength reduction factor. The software reads all the stresses in the current output file, calculates the maximum & minimum equivalent stresses, makes them tensile or compressive (+/-) according to the sign of the largest principal stress and applies the Goodman mean stress correction, then finds the endurance limit and adjusts for temperature of the material and presents the result as a red/green contour plot of Actual to Allowable stresses at each point in the model. It repeats this for every load step in this file and in selected other files presenting the worst values in all cycles. This test was developed and tested with performance forged pistons and it works well. Assuming only one maximum and one minimum stress for all cycles is a perfectly valid, well-used technique and avoids both the discredited rainflow-counting technique, Miner's rule and log-log plots. Goodmans stress correction has a lot of actual tests to back it up. The addition of the temperature correction is crucial as it seriously degrades fatigue life in many materials. In FEMdesigner that is made easy. In other fatigue codes it is not. In the nuclear engineering field we also used to prepare low-cycle, strain-based fatigue curves, for which this technique becomes usable. Fatigue tests are best done with the actual component under the actual loading of course. That may seem nonsensical since you may think you don't then need the computational test, but the key idea is to computationally replicate the actual results for the old design, identify the failure areas, modify the design to improve it, then compare the old design to the new one.

The alternative to total life calculation is fatigue from Fracture Mechanics considerations.

Fracture Mechanics and Fatigue

Fatigue it is now accepted is really just fracture in disguise. Hence fatigue is really the initiation of a crack from a material or geometric imperfection and propagation of that crack. This should have seemed obvious but for many years fatigue has been regarded as something that happens by repeated cycling of a body in an elastic state. Although it was material related, it was considered as load-controlled. Fracture mechanics grew up separately by looking at material behaviours at low temperature and then at what happens to notched specimens. We had realised that fatigue and fracture both happen at sharp corners so we invented Stress Concentration Factors for fatigue and Stress Intensity factors for Fracture. Still the penny never dropped because fatigue and fracture calculations were done separately. For both types of calculations we had so many assumptions so we still uultimately fall back on material testing of the actual component whenever possible.

There are two official stages Crack Initiation and Crack Growth. A crack growth calculation seems silly. You know there is a crack but instead of repairing it you calculate how long it will take before catastrophic failure occurs under a variable multiaxial load. When it does come, the crack apparently proceeds at 1/3 of the speed of sound, hence the term "catastrophic". Now I ask you, in all seriousness, would you get on an aircraft if you knew it had a crack in the wing? The answer is obvious, so a crack propagation calculation is largely an academic exercise. In practice if you see a crack you should stop using the component and repair it. Unfortunately, that was the easier calculation of the two. Crack growth calculations are summarised below:

Useless fracture calculation summary; You receive your NDT report which either shows you a crack in an X-ray from one angle, from which it is impossible to tell the real shape, or from an ultrasonic report which states that there is an "indication of size below 3mm". As you then don't know a crack shape you must do a "sensitivity analysis". That is, try every pertinent shape from the list of impossibly clean and mathematically perfect crack shapes to get your SIF. Ignore the extreme unlikelihood of not having an elliptically shaped crack. Then guess the positive residual stresses adjacent to the crack (because cracks in compression won't grow) assuming some fraction of yield. The final report will state that the crack will undoubtedly grow, and hence the structure will fail, under at least some of the fake scenarios you have been forced to use. Again you can happily pass your own design but fail someone elses depending on your assumptions and your degree of malevolence.

You can use your FE code to calculate the SIF and a certain Dr. Pook wrote a paper on it using FEMdesigner. For the future though we hope to consistently compute the crack path computationally.

Analyst or designer?

2006-09-25T06:50:00.000-07:00

You will find many people ready to say that novices should not be allowed near FEA software. "It's too easy to make a big mistake goes the argument". It is always left unsaid that it is much more easy to screw up using good old fashioned hand calculations. You remember those don't you? How to reduce your fancy design to a plain cantilever beam! Ignore holes, and fillets and anything else inconveniently stuck on your free body diagram. Remember to check the text of those 1933 reference papers in Roark with their quaint uneven and unreadable graphs conveniently converted to number format.

So why the big downer on FEA from academics? Well it's true that FEA is rubbish in, rubbish out. However, being able to actually see the mesh, the applied loads, the stress plots, the displacements, a reasonably capable supervisor system should be able to spot any howlers; Theres the rub! Your boss usually didn't get there by being good at design: He doesn't know a Von Mises Stress plot from a hole in the wall. In fact Stress= Force/Area is the sum total of his engineering knowledge. This is something many managers (and engineers) freely admit. Somehow knowledge is not trendy. Who wants to be a geek? Hence if a boss needs an FEA system he will choose the most expensive one on the planet, with fully comprehensive user support so that he doesn't have to be exposed on his lack of knowledge.

Well I have gone down the whole route. I learned about discontinuity analysis before I uised FEA and I was thrilled when the results matched up. However, i also noticed that FEA pointed out a few things that I hadn't thought about. This is the true value of FEA. Over the years I have seen many FEA-averse engineers make complete howlers because they used over-simplified hand calculations instead of building a computer model and looking at the results. Hence, the philosophy I have is that everyone becomes a better designer by using FEA. Ignore the naysayers, most of whom couldn't design a box, and get out there and use it. No you don't need to know all about the maths behind it, and the little you do need to know I will tell you - in plain English.

Let me be clear. To me there is no distinction between analysis and design. Analysis is an integral part of design and it should be used at the start, in the middle and at the end of the design process. Either you can do design by analysis or you shouldn't be in the design department. If you are FEA-averse then go find another job: Carry around bits of paper from office to office, attend pointless meetings, write quality specs. and stay away from our design area, where the real work is done.

As a postscript to this, I once showed the engineering manager an ANSYS contour plot of yield fronts in two different annular seal designs. I pointed at the bad design and said that the yield zone (showing a plastic hinge) was in orange. For the other design, the better one, I said that the yield zone was in red. He immediately said - "but you said that the yield zone was orange". There is no moral to this tale except that we soon parted company. I felt if I was going to work for an idiot I might as well be self-employed.

FEMdesigner

2006-09-25T05:48:00.000-07:00

It's about time to introduce some feedback to the website. So I'd like anyone with comments on the site or on the use of FEMdesigner to add them to this thread. Feel free to praise or condemn. All feedback is welcome, or at least until it starts to hurt sales :)