There are about 7 billion people on the planet today, with just over 9 billion expected by the year 2050. Given that many of the poorest 1-2 billion people on Earth may not even have enough to eat today, can we really expect to adequately feed more than 9 billion people in less than 40 years time? Well, in fact, our agricultural capacity to produce food, clothing, and shelter at the standards of the western world can accommodate nearly 12 billion people. Read the rest of this entry »

Waste is a terrible thing. At best, it connotes something that has performed no good for anyone. At worst, it is something disgusting that we avoid at all costs. But, nonetheless our lives are filled with waste. It is the rare person or circumstances that allow one to go through a day without creating any unnecessary waste, or even limiting that waste to a small amount. We are so used to some forms of waste that we hardly recognize it.

But, waste should be seen as a failure of our system of doing things. Many of our activities are possible with little or no waste, we are just complacent towards it. As part 1 of this series, we will look at heat, how and why it is wasted and what we should do about it. Read the rest of this entry »

Introduction

Analyzing and controlling risk is one of the most important aspects of the engineering design process. These risks include health and safety, design robustness and reliability, maintainability, marketability, cost, schedule, and performance.

Yet, many of these risks are managed only by the intuition of the project manager or management team. While many are skilled enough to investigate and control most of these risks, the number of projects that fail to meet functional requirements, cost limits, scheduled deadlines, reliability expectations, or other thing, serves as testament to the fact that the complexity of risk management on modern projects is beyond the capabilities of our current system of doing things. Read the rest of this entry »

So much for the problems- what are some of the solutions?

A number of options exist or are being developed on the alternative energy front. Purely from an energy standpoint, renewable sources are more than capable of providing our energy needs; the issue at this point is refining our alternative energy technologies to the point where we can harness a significant fraction of that energy. Solar irradiance (the amount of solar energy that reaches the surface) is about 145 watts per square meter; when you take into account atmospheric variables, the usable amount of solar energy received for locations in the USA ranges from 4 to 7 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day for a flat-plate solar array. At the present, the maximum efficiency for solar power systems of any type is about 40%, though there are some technologies that promise even higher efficiencies. At 40%, that translates to 1.6 to 2.8 kilowatt-hours per square meter per day. Read the rest of this entry »

Thomas Malthus, an English economist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, is famous for prophesying doom in the form of excessive population growth and the resultant crash that would follow; though he’s been dead for the better part of two centuries, his ideas still inform a number of prominent figures to this day.  Originally, his premise was that population growth would place stresses on a finite food supply, causing multitudes to starve. While his particulars may be off, resource shortages, real and imagined, are definitely a concern at the moment, freshwater and fossil fuels being two of the most prominent. Where, exactly, do we stand in relation to catastrophic resource shortages, and what can be done about it? Read the rest of this entry »

Increasingly, green advertising has become much more important among manufacturers and retail businesses. It seems many consumers would prefer given many options to select a product that is less stressful on the environment than another equally functional product. While the degree to which this is influencing each person today varies widely, it is clear that these companies are responding to a real pressure they feel in the marketplace. The current result has been an almost obligatory series of advertisements and public claims regarding a product’s green-ness. However, as some of these claims may be contradictory, how can one know how to make the best choice? We’ll examine one case in this article. Read the rest of this entry »

Sustainability has become a buzzword- it’s used in reference to energy policy, abiotic natural resources, and cultural practices. It’s also being used in reference to agricultural practices. Though we’ve improved on crop yields through modern farming methods, there are still ways in which we can increase our efficiencies while simultaneously providing a place for nature to thrive. Read the rest of this entry »

Much of the transportation talk these days revolves around finding more efficient ways to fuel our vehicles, for obvious reasons. Eventually, fossil fuels will run out, and we need to have an alternative in place long before we reach that point. As Italian air marshal Giulio Douhet was quoted as saying back in 1928, “Victory shines upon those who anticipate the changes in the character of war, not upon those who wait to adapt themselves after the changes occur.” Read the rest of this entry »

This article recently brought up an excellent point on how some rates can be deceiving, and even reduce the likelihood that we will make the right decision. The example involved comparing impressions of fuel efficiency in miles per gallon versus gallons per mile, or gallons per ten thousand miles. While identifying the better of two options in either case is easy regardless of the rate, other types of evaluations can be much more complex if we end up using the wrong units. Read the rest of this entry »

Often as a reliability engineer, or anyone responsible for researching the reliability of an item, or calculating it, you will find oversimplified published data giving you the impression that reliability is an unchanging physical property like mass or volume, something intrinsic to the materials included in it. This is actually the common sense approach; we know an old thing is less reliable than a new copy of the same thing. But, this common sense gets argued out of us when we are faced with reconciling tables of MTBF (mean time between failures) values, nines (i.e. 0.99999, a measure of reliability), failure rates and other things. Let’s get back to the common sense approach, but with math. Read the rest of this entry »

Modern Compressible Flow with Historical Perspective by John D. Anderson provides an excellent resource for studies in advanced fluid mechanics. In a field where many texts provide useful content in an entirely unmemorable fashion, this text is an exception. Theory, History, Applications, and other interesting information and stories make this book a beneficial addition to any engineer’s library. Read the rest of this entry »

So, you’ve got a design that you want to prove is better than the existing design from your own or another company. What’s the most efficient, fastest way to get to that answer with a very small sample size? Whle there may be several options you have, including accelerated testing, they each can have their benefits and drawbacks. Here, I will advocate for zero-failure testing as a realistic and useful option, especially since it is something we often do anyways, but without the mathematical justification. Read the rest of this entry »

This review concerns a niche of mechanical engineering that involves heat transfer at very small scales. Understanding this phenomenon, which is considerably different from typical heat transfer and thermodynamics experienced in the everyday world, is critical to the advancement of nanotechnological machines and microelectromechanical systems (MEMS). Read the rest of this entry »

Energy efficiency is a wonderful investment both for businesses and consumers often paying far better returns than the stock and bond markets. If so, then why don’t we take advantage of it? Increases in efficiency can reduce energy consumption for the same or increasing amount of output. All the while, pollution is reduced and money is saved increasing the health and well being of our communities. Is all of this good news falling on deaf ears? Read the rest of this entry »

Getting answers before you are finished. Why are people always so impatient? Why can’t they just wait until testing is complete before they ask for answers? I suppose it is just human nature, as I have heard that question any time I have been involved in reliability testing programs. And, although we would know much more if we waited for more data to roll in, there are times that we can evaluate where our project stands on the basis of partial test results. Read the rest of this entry »

As a reliability analyst, sometimes none of your data matches the form you are interested in. It all comes in different collections of units, statistical distribution parameters, failure rates, environments, MTBF, MTTF, and on and on. In this article, let’s consider one common conversion for which my research found too little information available on the internet. Read the rest of this entry »

Onwards and Upwards

Do we know what we are doing? Maybe the right question is do we ever know what we are doing? What are the true consequences of our actions today and tomorrow and hundreds of years from now? Are we responsible for those consequences or should we never be concerned with them?

I believe that too often we accept not having the answers that we could have. We have chosen not to know whether our ways of “helping” each other really turn out to be help in the end. We have chosen to push the solutions to problems we have today off into the realm of tomorrow. While some of that may be rational (I am fairly certain that my computer will be faster in 5 years), not all of it is. Read the rest of this entry »

True-Progress.com is looking for writers to contribute to the mission of finding enduring solutions. If you or someone you know would like the opportunity to regularly publish articles on this site, please see the details here. Read the rest of this entry »