"Since you need a licensed engineer to create a licensed engineer, "
Um, no, not necessarily. Experience gained under a suitable non PE can be used in some states. If you are serious about getting your PE then go and talk to the board about your problem. I don't know where Texas, in particular, stands on this, but I KNOW some states understand the difficulties.
The requirements are hard, not obscene. You are taking on personal responsibility for your answers to/every/ engineering related question you are asked.
FWIW I work in Australia and I wish we had the Texan, or Canadian, attitude to the title of engineer.
1 3.1 3.11 3.5NT 95 4NT (still use it) 98SE (still use it) W2k (still use it) XP
1.0 was a joke. The only useful program was Excel, and at that point Quattro was a million times better.
3.11 was the killer, even I could put a network together - when we moved into our new factory I had all 8 PCs networked in a morning, much to the surprise of me and my boss. It wasn't perfect, but it did work.
I didn't really understand the hoopla with 95, but I could see the point of NT3.5. Since it wouldn't run games I got rid of it pretty damn quick, but the stability and basic useability was impressive, to me.
Oz is cheap for hardware, and most consumer electronics. Mind you software costs make up for that. I don't think you can really ignore the GST, that damn tax office is unlikely to recognise a PS2 as a business expense.
At least two of the systems mentioned are electrolytic.
Quote from main article " The Hydrogen-Boost System is a gas mileage enhancement system based on the main component, an on-board hydrogen gas generator. "
Quote from third article (the only one I read thoroughly, admittedly ) "There are a few minor drawbacks with the electrolysis unit."
Both of these systems are injecting hydrogen gas into the airstream upstream from the intake valve. They both sound like charlatans at best.
The SAE paper is talking about a rather different process. "for onboard generation of hydrogen-rich gas by partial oxidation of a wide range of fuels. These plasmaboosted microreformers are compact, rugged, and provide rapid response. With hydrogen supplement to the main fuel, SI engines can run very lean resulting in a large reduction in emissions from SI engines are possible by operation under lean conditions with the addition of hydrogen. Hydrogen increases flame speed and extends the lean limit of SI engine operation [1]. The combination of enhanced flame speed and wider flammability limits of hydrogen can thus stabilize"
The basic idea here is that hydrogen has better combustion properties than other fuels, so an admixture of hydrogen can improve the combustion process. Can't argue with that, check papers written under the guidance of Harry Watson in Melbourne, Australia.
Oh, here's a bit more analysis on the efficiency of elctrolysis
"I found a plating chart that shows Hydrogen is generated at the rate of 0.0373 gram/ampere-hour, and Oxygen is generated at the rate 0.2984 gram/ampere-hour, assuming 100% electrode efficiency. The 1:8 ratio corresponds to the H2:O weights of water. I.e., H2O will be electrolytically decomposed at the rate of (0.0373 + 0.2984) = 0.3357 grams/ampere-hour. http://www.finishing.com/GIFS/ crib.GIF
Now, for voltage needed. A table of 'The Standard emf Series' shows O2 + 4H+ + 4 e- = 2 H2O at +1.229 Volts, and 2H+ + 2 e- = H2 at 0.000 Volts. Subtracting 2x the 2nd rzn. from the first gives O2 + 2H2 = 2 H2O at +1.229 Volts However, due to polarization at the electrodes, to get the reaction to go at a reasonable rate requires an overvoltage. In this case, figure an extra 0.5 V at each electrode, for a total driving voltage of -2.229 Volts.
Now for an overall rate of 1000g H2O decomposed per hour, the current required is 1000/0.3359 = 2977 amp-hours. At 2.229 Volts, the power consumed is 6636 volt-amp-hr = 6.636 Kwatt-hr, or $0.796 worth of electricity at $0.12/Kwatt-hr.... Great stuff. 1 kg of water will electrolyse to give 111 g of H2. This has a calorific value of 142 MJ/kg, so in an 80% efficient fuel cell it will generate 0.111*.8*142*10^6/3600/1000 kWh
3.5 kWh
So you are putting in 6.6 kWh of electricity to generate 3.5 kWh of electricity (ie 53% efficient). Not, in most circumstances, a great idea. "
That particular discussion was concerning using electricity to create hydrogen to run a fuel cell. The numbers there will allow a more accurate estimate of the likely efficiency of the electrolysis based units. Looks like electrolysis is 66% efficient from those figures.
And thank you for doing that. I now (after your email) understand what was wrong with my bug report. It is interesting that a professional mechanical engineer (me) was unable to file a satisfactory bug report even though I followed the instructions closely.
By the way my initial post reads much too whingey - I use Mozilla as my browser and am very keen for the OS movement to succeed.
The energy required to break the water up into hydrogen and oxygen will be at least equal to, and in a practical electrolytic cell it will be greater than, the energy you get back by burning the hydrogen later on. Typical electrolytic processes are around 60% efficient, from memory. This energy comes from the battery, which is about 92% efficient, which comes from the alternator, which is about 60% efficient, which is driven by the engine. So I get a loop efficiency of about 30%.
However, there may be some subtle advantages in adding gaseous hydrogen and oxygen to the fuel mixture. I doubt they would compensate for the efficiencies in the first paragraph.
You should ignore this post, the oil companies are paying me $$$ to suppress these crazy inventions.
He's really solving a much more important problem - visual tracking and control of dumb vehicles. I like the red and blue idea, it is economical and fits the available technology. The advantage is that the vehicle does not know, or even need to know, where it is. What other contactless 3D positioning system could be built for a hundred bucks? This is great for expendable vehicles, or those with very limited payloads.
Hit a problem with the mail client - I wanted to be able to delete mouse selected text from a Usenet post that I was replying to.
Logged on to Mozilla
got an account
read the guidelines
searched for my problem
filled in bug report
(total elapsed time something like 20 minutes by now)
Smartass developer in USA posts comment that implies that I work for Microsoft and that I am wrong (ie that you should not be able to edit Usenet posts when replying to them). Bug report closed.
Outcome: Mozilla will not be getting any more bug reports from me.
Well that's a neat little story, but the users don't come from some land where there are no DEs to think about. The Windows DE has been carefully tested on all levels of user, and, apparently, what you get is deemed to be the most acceptable. Now, you can go off on some paranoid theory about Bill inflicting some horrible DE paradigm on the world, but that would be silly commercially, wouldn't it?
In other words, Windows is easy to use, and slick, because it makes commercial sense to be that way. If you start selling cars with the foot pedals in a different order to C B A (it has been done), let me know how you go, I'll gladly insure you. For a price.
I think all this fuss about DEs is overrated - most important work is done by typing text into boxes. Like this. (apologies in advance to any graphical people out there.)
Man, 150 US for that. The Australian equivalent costs about 30 US. It is a parallel port interface available from Dick Smith Electronics. Reputedly one has been part of the instrument package on Ausroc
Anyroad up, doesn't anybody remember the first soundcards? Strings of resistors off the parallel port.
...another half an hour spent exploring stuff I knew nothing about.
Interesting stuff, I wonder if there is any benefit in assigning values to (a) the length of replies, and (b) whether communication is one way or two way. The president of my company writes to me (well, and everyone else) once a week, but I don't reply! In a large organisation it would be useful, but not nice, to link email based analysis in with phone calls, meeting attendances, and so on.
Let's have a look at his history, these are his games that I have bought, pretty much in chronological order. I rarely play games through to the bitter end, if I get really stuck on a mission I chuck the game.
Populous-Innovative, playable, successful, fun
(early) Populous derivatives - nothing new here that mattered.
Syndicate - Innovative yada yada. Played this through three times at least. Quite possibly the single best game I have ever played.
Syndicate add on - Unplayably difficult. Couldn't finish first mission, as I remember.
Magic Carpet - Innovative, playable, successful, fun. Maybe it got too hard too quickly, but it was a truly astonishing game.
Magic Carpet follow on - too hard not fun.
Syndicate Wars - too hard, too ugly
Populous 3 - innovative, tedious, crashy. gave up on about mission 3
Black and White - innovative. tedious. Gave up on mission 1
I make that three good-great games but every sequel is a bust, and Black and White is just not my cup of tea. Maybe I prefer destroying things to building them.
Intersting, you pick Willow. I'd add Giles (like you ) and Spike. In other words one strength of the show partly was that the rest of the cast were actual characters in their own right (like Seinfeld I gueess) rather than just patsys for the lead to bounce witty remarks off.
I've used various versions since version 1, and the one thing it hasn't been is buggy. Irritating, yes. Inconsistent, occasionally. Buggy, no.
There are bugs, obviously, but most have work arounds, and I've never been stopped dead by one.
As a general purpose mathematical program for use by engineers (note emphasis) that non-users can understand (ie as a COMMUNICATION TOOL) it is unparalleled.
Switch 'regions' on and at least you can see why it is being so recalcitrant.
I've got to say that I've been using Mathcad since v1.0, and in my opinion it jumped the shark at v5.0 Plus, any later versions have been going backwards in usability faster than they have added more features. The best single step was going to Windows, purely because of the memory issues with the DOS versions.
Sometime around the 2001 edition they introduced a rather unpleasant looking programming language, which has solved its major weakness in my opinion. However, if I don't need loops, I use 5.0 Plus.
The big advantage to me in using MathCad (say comapred with Matlab, Octave etc) is that you can show someone a worksheet and even if they have never seen MathCad before they can check your working. Also everything is there on the screen, unlike Excel, so nasty little things like:
if answer is in (very small range) then substitute wrong answer
Because they were looking for new approaches, not refined versions of old technology. Hats off to Mazda for persevering and making it work, but Wankel engines made from present day materials are never going to be as efficient or as low in emissions as the equivalent technology used in a conventional piston engine.
The reason is that a Wankel has a large surface area in the combustion chamber, in proportion to its volume, so a lto of heat is drageed out through the walls, instead of being ud\sed to push the rotor round. The realatively cool chmaber walls also cause emissions problems because the fuel does not burn as efficiently when cold, so HC emissions in particular increase. Unburnt fuel=lost energy as well of course.
Re:GDI will probably put diesel out of passenger c
on
10 Techno-Cool Cars
·
· Score: 1
That's a good point, but the headline figure, mpg, won't quite match up. The reason is that diesel is significantly denser (5% off the top of my head) than gasoline, so the mpg of a diesel car will always look better than that of a similarly efficient GDI car.
I've driven one of the Orbital GDI supercharged two strokes, they are incredibly torquey - pulling smoothly in top gear from idle, and the fuel economy and emissions were excellent.
Unfortunately they had decided to use a 3 cylinder engine, which are very fdiifcult to mount successfully, so the car was fairly unrefined.
Orbital leased a hundred or so of these vehicles to government agencies and motoring organisations a few years back, but had durability problems, so I think they've all been withdrawn.
This is not an indictment of the GDI technology, which is excellent, just that Orbital haven't had much experience at developing reliable cars.
I think you'll find it difficult to eliminate the cold start smoke directly, as it is due to cold fuel hitting cold cylinder walls, and so not burning properly. Inevitably when the engine is cold this will happen, unless you have a pre-warmed block (which is feasible, but wastes energy). Since it is only once per journey I don't think a great deal of effort is justified in getting rid of it.
The other black smoke you see when (typically trucks or tractors) hit the throttle hard is a calibration issue. There's no reason why the mixture has to be set that rich, except that it makes more power. The maximum demand stop on the fuel rack (sorry I don't know the proper name for it) can be wound in, which will reduce or eliminate the black smoke, but it will reduce the maximum power of the engine.
All of this smoke is solvable downstream by fitting particulate traps, but at present these are either messy or expensive.
And apparently the piece's author wants that to happen again: "Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. "
Slashdot Mirror
"Since you need a licensed engineer to create a licensed engineer, "
/every/ engineering related question you are asked.
Um, no, not necessarily. Experience gained under a suitable non PE can be used in some states. If you are serious about getting your PE then go and talk to the board about your problem. I don't know where Texas, in particular, stands on this, but I KNOW some states understand the difficulties.
The requirements are hard, not obscene. You are taking on personal responsibility for your answers to
FWIW I work in Australia and I wish we had the Texan, or Canadian, attitude to the title of engineer.
Staw Dogs? overrated. Anyway, the rest are fine, but I wouldn't call them underrated.
Hmm, I used
1
3.1
3.11
3.5NT
95
4NT (still use it)
98SE (still use it)
W2k (still use it)
XP
1.0 was a joke. The only useful program was Excel, and at that point Quattro was a million times better.
3.11 was the killer, even I could put a network together - when we moved into our new factory I had all 8 PCs networked in a morning, much to the surprise of me and my boss. It wasn't perfect, but it did work.
I didn't really understand the hoopla with 95, but I could see the point of NT3.5. Since it wouldn't run games I got rid of it pretty damn quick, but the stability and basic useability was impressive, to me.
So I reckon they jumped the shark at 3.11
Oz is cheap for hardware, and most consumer electronics. Mind you software costs make up for that. I don't think you can really ignore the GST, that damn tax office is unlikely to recognise a PS2 as a business expense.
At least two of the systems mentioned are electrolytic.
/ crib.GIF
...
Quote from main article " The Hydrogen-Boost System is a gas mileage enhancement system based on the main component, an on-board hydrogen gas generator. "
Quote from third article (the only one I read thoroughly, admittedly ) "There are a few minor drawbacks with the electrolysis unit."
Both of these systems are injecting hydrogen gas into the airstream upstream from the intake valve. They both sound like charlatans at best.
The SAE paper is talking about a rather different process. "for onboard generation of hydrogen-rich gas by partial oxidation of a wide range of fuels. These plasmaboosted microreformers are compact, rugged, and provide rapid response. With hydrogen supplement to the main fuel, SI engines can run very lean resulting in a large reduction in emissions from SI engines are possible by operation under lean conditions with the addition of hydrogen. Hydrogen increases flame speed and extends the lean limit of SI engine operation [1]. The combination of enhanced flame speed and wider flammability limits of hydrogen can thus stabilize"
The basic idea here is that hydrogen has better combustion properties than other fuels, so an admixture of hydrogen can improve the combustion process. Can't argue with that, check papers written under the guidance of Harry Watson in Melbourne, Australia.
Oh, here's a bit more analysis on the efficiency of elctrolysis
"I found a plating chart that shows Hydrogen is generated at the rate of 0.0373 gram/ampere-hour, and Oxygen is generated at the rate 0.2984 gram/ampere-hour, assuming 100% electrode efficiency. The 1:8 ratio corresponds to the H2:O weights of water. I.e., H2O will be electrolytically decomposed at the rate of (0.0373 + 0.2984) = 0.3357 grams/ampere-hour.
http://www.finishing.com/GIFS
Now, for voltage needed. A table of 'The Standard emf Series' shows
O2 + 4H+ + 4 e- = 2 H2O at +1.229 Volts, and
2H+ + 2 e- = H2 at 0.000 Volts. Subtracting 2x the 2nd rzn. from the first gives
O2 + 2H2 = 2 H2O at +1.229 Volts
However, due to polarization at the electrodes, to get the reaction to go at a reasonable rate requires an overvoltage. In this case, figure an extra 0.5 V at each electrode, for a total driving voltage of -2.229 Volts.
Now for an overall rate of 1000g H2O decomposed per hour, the current required is 1000/0.3359 = 2977 amp-hours. At 2.229 Volts, the power consumed is 6636 volt-amp-hr = 6.636 Kwatt-hr, or $0.796 worth of electricity at $0.12/Kwatt-hr.
Great stuff. 1 kg of water will electrolyse to give 111 g of H2. This has a calorific value of 142 MJ/kg, so in an 80% efficient fuel cell it will generate 0.111*.8*142*10^6/3600/1000 kWh
3.5 kWh
So you are putting in 6.6 kWh of electricity to generate 3.5 kWh of electricity (ie 53% efficient). Not, in most circumstances, a great idea. "
That particular discussion was concerning using electricity to create hydrogen to run a fuel cell. The numbers there will allow a more accurate estimate of the likely efficiency of the electrolysis based units. Looks like electrolysis is 66% efficient from those figures.
And thank you for doing that. I now (after your email) understand what was wrong with my bug report. It is interesting that a professional mechanical engineer (me) was unable to file a satisfactory bug report even though I followed the instructions closely.
By the way my initial post reads much too whingey - I use Mozilla as my browser and am very keen for the OS movement to succeed.
The energy required to break the water up into hydrogen and oxygen will be at least equal to, and in a practical electrolytic cell it will be greater than, the energy you get back by burning the hydrogen later on. Typical electrolytic processes are around 60% efficient, from memory. This energy comes from the battery, which is about 92% efficient, which comes from the alternator, which is about 60% efficient, which is driven by the engine. So I get a loop efficiency of about 30%.
However, there may be some subtle advantages in adding gaseous hydrogen and oxygen to the fuel mixture. I doubt they would compensate for the efficiencies in the first paragraph.
You should ignore this post, the oil companies are paying me $$$ to suppress these crazy inventions.
OK, so delivering a PostIt note is no biggy.
He's really solving a much more important problem - visual tracking and control of dumb vehicles. I like the red and blue idea, it is economical and fits the available technology. The advantage is that the vehicle does not know, or even need to know, where it is. What other contactless 3D positioning system could be built for a hundred bucks? This is great for expendable vehicles, or those with very limited payloads.
Neat, fun, slightly daft, project, in my opinion.
I hope I was unlucky.
Hit a problem with the mail client - I wanted to be able to delete mouse selected text from a Usenet post that I was replying to.
Logged on to Mozilla
got an account
read the guidelines
searched for my problem
filled in bug report
(total elapsed time something like 20 minutes by now)
Smartass developer in USA posts comment that implies that I work for Microsoft and that I am wrong (ie that you should not be able to edit Usenet posts when replying to them). Bug report closed.
Outcome: Mozilla will not be getting any more bug reports from me.
Typed on an Athlon 400 with (OK) 64 M of memory that dual boots NT4 and Mandrake 8.2.
Well that's a neat little story, but the users don't come from some land where there are no DEs to think about. The Windows DE has been carefully tested on all levels of user, and, apparently, what you get is deemed to be the most acceptable. Now, you can go off on some paranoid theory about Bill inflicting some horrible DE paradigm on the world, but that would be silly commercially, wouldn't it?
In other words, Windows is easy to use, and slick, because it makes commercial sense to be that way. If you start selling cars with the foot pedals in a different order to C B A (it has been done), let me know how you go, I'll gladly insure you. For a price.
I think all this fuss about DEs is overrated - most important work is done by typing text into boxes. Like this. (apologies in advance to any graphical people out there.)
Anyroad up, doesn't anybody remember the first soundcards? Strings of resistors off the parallel port.
...another half an hour spent exploring stuff I knew nothing about.
Interesting stuff, I wonder if there is any benefit in assigning values to (a) the length of replies, and (b) whether communication is one way or two way. The president of my company writes to me (well, and everyone else) once a week, but I don't reply! In a large organisation it would be useful, but not nice, to link email based analysis in with phone calls, meeting attendances, and so on.
I think that the VAT applies to the $13, not an additional 16% on the whole computer (which probably has VAT already).
The relevant sentence can be read either way, but only a very silly journo would put the small number ($13) ahead of the big one ($hundreds).
Let's have a look at his history, these are his games that I have bought, pretty much in chronological order. I rarely play games through to the bitter end, if I get really stuck on a mission I chuck the game.
Populous-Innovative, playable, successful, fun
(early) Populous derivatives - nothing new here that mattered.
Syndicate - Innovative yada yada. Played this through three times at least. Quite possibly the single best game I have ever played.
Syndicate add on - Unplayably difficult. Couldn't finish first mission, as I remember.
Magic Carpet - Innovative, playable, successful, fun. Maybe it got too hard too quickly, but it was a truly astonishing game.
Magic Carpet follow on - too hard not fun.
Syndicate Wars - too hard, too ugly
Populous 3 - innovative, tedious, crashy. gave up on about mission 3
Black and White - innovative. tedious. Gave up on mission 1
I make that three good-great games but every sequel is a bust, and Black and White is just not my cup of tea. Maybe I prefer destroying things to building them.
I want to play.
Great article uber-parent, thanks for posting it.
How can they talk about this stuff and not mention Hamiltonians?
Intersting, you pick Willow. I'd add Giles (like you ) and Spike. In other words one strength of the show partly was that the rest of the cast were actual characters in their own right (like Seinfeld I gueess) rather than just patsys for the lead to bounce witty remarks off.
I've used various versions since version 1, and the one thing it hasn't been is buggy. Irritating, yes. Inconsistent, occasionally. Buggy, no.
There are bugs, obviously, but most have work arounds, and I've never been stopped dead by one.
As a general purpose mathematical program for use by engineers (note emphasis) that non-users can understand (ie as a COMMUNICATION TOOL) it is unparalleled.
Switch 'regions' on and at least you can see why it is being so recalcitrant.
I've got to say that I've been using Mathcad since v1.0, and in my opinion it jumped the shark at v5.0 Plus, any later versions have been going backwards in usability faster than they have added more features. The best single step was going to Windows, purely because of the memory issues with the DOS versions.
Sometime around the 2001 edition they introduced a rather unpleasant looking programming language, which has solved its major weakness in my opinion. However, if I don't need loops, I use 5.0 Plus.
The big advantage to me in using MathCad (say comapred with Matlab, Octave etc) is that you can show someone a worksheet and even if they have never seen MathCad before they can check your working. Also everything is there on the screen, unlike Excel, so nasty little things like:
if answer is in (very small range) then substitute wrong answer
are much more difficult to implement.
The drag /force/ varies as v^2. The power required to overcome this force is proportional to v^3, because power=F*v
This, of course, reinforces your argument.
That's a good idea on the engines.
Because they were looking for new approaches, not refined versions of old technology. Hats off to Mazda for persevering and making it work, but Wankel engines made from present day materials are never going to be as efficient or as low in emissions as the equivalent technology used in a conventional piston engine.
The reason is that a Wankel has a large surface area in the combustion chamber, in proportion to its volume, so a lto of heat is drageed out through the walls, instead of being ud\sed to push the rotor round. The realatively cool chmaber walls also cause emissions problems because the fuel does not burn as efficiently when cold, so HC emissions in particular increase. Unburnt fuel=lost energy as well of course.
That's a good point, but the headline figure, mpg, won't quite match up. The reason is that diesel is significantly denser (5% off the top of my head) than gasoline, so the mpg of a diesel car will always look better than that of a similarly efficient GDI car.
I've driven one of the Orbital GDI supercharged two strokes, they are incredibly torquey - pulling smoothly in top gear from idle, and the fuel economy and emissions were excellent.
Unfortunately they had decided to use a 3 cylinder engine, which are very fdiifcult to mount successfully, so the car was fairly unrefined.
Orbital leased a hundred or so of these vehicles to government agencies and motoring organisations a few years back, but had durability problems, so I think they've all been withdrawn.
This is not an indictment of the GDI technology, which is excellent, just that Orbital haven't had much experience at developing reliable cars.
I think you'll find it difficult to eliminate the cold start smoke directly, as it is due to cold fuel hitting cold cylinder walls, and so not burning properly. Inevitably when the engine is cold this will happen, unless you have a pre-warmed block (which is feasible, but wastes energy). Since it is only once per journey I don't think a great deal of effort is justified in getting rid of it.
The other black smoke you see when (typically trucks or tractors) hit the throttle hard is a calibration issue. There's no reason why the mixture has to be set that rich, except that it makes more power. The maximum demand stop on the fuel rack (sorry I don't know the proper name for it) can be wound in, which will reduce or eliminate the black smoke, but it will reduce the maximum power of the engine.
All of this smoke is solvable downstream by fitting particulate traps, but at present these are either messy or expensive.
The word "again" in the above post should be ignored.
Ack
the government will own the search engines.
And apparently the piece's author wants that to happen again: "Google is so important to the web these days, that it probably ought to be a public utility. "