Category: Engineering

Fragility Has Its Costs

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It looks like manufacturers in general and the automobile industry in particular, are taking a few steps back from just-in-time manufacturing.  It appears that they have discovered that the system where they accumulate little or no inventory may save a few bucks, but when it breaks, it gets ugly fast:

Toyota Motor Corp. is stockpiling up to four months of some parts. Volkswagen AG is building six factories so it can get its own batteries. And, in shades of Henry Ford, Tesla Inc. is trying to lock up access to raw materials.

The hyperefficient auto supply chain symbolized by the words “just in time” is undergoing its biggest transformation in more than half a century, accelerated by the troubles car makers have suffered during the pandemic. After sudden swings in demand, freak weather and a series of accidents, they are reassessing their basic assumption that they could always get the parts they needed when they needed them.

“The just-in-time model is designed for supply-chain efficiencies and economies of scale,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan Motor Co.’s chief operating officer. “The repercussions of an unprecedented crisis like Covid highlight the fragility of our supply-chain model.”

………

The basic idea of just in time is avoiding waste. By having suppliers deliver parts to the assembly line a few hours or days before they go into a vehicle, auto makers don’t pay for what they don’t use. They save on warehouses and the people to manage them.

But as supply chains get more global and car makers increasingly rely on single suppliers, the system has grown brittle. The crises are more frequent.

………

A freak snowstorm in Texas in mid-February shut down a refinery that feeds production of 85% of resins produced in the U.S. Those resins go into components from car bumpers to steering wheels. They’re some of the least expensive raw materials in a car, but they go into seat foam, and dealers can’t sell a car without seats.

At the end of March, Toyota shut down production at several U.S. plants due to the shortage, according to a schedule seen by The Wall Street Journal, hitting production of some of its bestsellers, including the RAV4 sport-utility vehicle. 

Obviously, excessive inventory can be as much of a problem as not enough, but when you have inventory levels that are measured in hours, as opposed to weeks, when something goes wrong, you are completely f%$#ed.

More on That Zeppo Thing

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Basically, I was trying to come up with a way of holding two things together that would allow for simple installation and removal of a payload on top of a mast.

After coming up with a number of rather ugly potential solutions, I remembered that Zeppo (Herbert) Marx had developed a clamp in his post showbiz career as an Engineer and manufacturer, developing the Marman Clamp* (pictured), which found extensive use as a stage separation mechanism in space craft in addition to securing the “Fat Man” inside the B-29 “Bock’s Car” when it dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki.

The clamp, plus a couple of pins for alignment, and I had a solution that was clean, dirt cheap, robust, and nearly soldier proof.†

Needless to say, I am feeling rather smug about this.

*It appears that Zeppo did not invent the clamp, but rather he was the one to bring it to mass production.

†Nothing can be made soldier proof. It simply can be made somewhat soldier resistant.

Huh, Neat Tech

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It appears that machining titanium at cryogenic temperatures extends tool life:

Cryogenic titanium machining improves cutting-tool life by a factor of 10 with appropriate material removal processing speed. The Joint Program Office in coordination with the F-35 Fracture Control Board (FCB) approved the new process for standard roughing operations, impacting the most time-consuming and cost-intensive machining processes associated with manufacturing titanium parts. Broadly applied, this new technology could improve affordability and efficiency in the production of the F-35, which is approximately 25 percent titanium by weight.

My guess would that this generates smaller chips, that it might prevent material from adhering (galling, welding, etc.) to the tools, and it might slow the formation of an oxide coating, but I’d love to hear the theory behind it.

I would make an observation here:  If you have an aircraft that is 25% by weight titanium, you have a very expensive aircraft.

It’s Been a Weird Year for the Auto Industry

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Play them off, Jon Stewart

With the recall of more than 6½ million to repair a sticky accelerator pedal, Toyota’s sales fell by 47% from December, and 16% year over year, which was enough for both Ford and GM outsell to outsell the Japanese car firm.

Of course, we now know that it’s not just accelerator pedals, but also the brakes on its Prius hybrid, where it appears to be a software issue that creates unsteady breaking in the interplay between regenerative and mechanical braking.

It may not be any consolation to the Toyoda family, but Ford just rolled out a software update for its hybrid vehicles:

Ford Motor Co. announced Thursday that it will ask owners of its Ford Fusion Hybrid and Mercury Milan Hybrids sedan to bring their car into their Ford dealer to replace software that operates the car’s braking system.

While the cars maintain full braking ability, Ford said, drivers may occasionally experience a strange feeling in the brakes under certain circumstances.

So the latest problems may be an artifact of the move to “drive by wire” technologies for hybrid vehicles, you pretty much have to, because managing the battery/engine balance cannot be done manually by the driver.

In any case, the juxtaposxition of glitches in software and automotive hardware, it seems appropriate to invoke the proven to be false by Snopes joke:

At a computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated: “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon.”

In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release (by Mr. Welch himself) stating:

If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:

  1. For no reason at all, your car would crash twice a day.
  2. Every time they repainted the lines on the road, you would have to buy a new car.
  3. Occasionally, executing a manoeuver such as a left-turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, and you would have to reinstall the engine.
  4. When your car died on the freeway for no reason, you would just accept this, restart and drive on.
  5. Only one person at a time could use the car, unless you bought ‘Car95’ or ‘CarNT’, and then added more seats.
  6. Apple would make a car powered by the sun, reliable, five times as fast, and twice as easy to drive, but would run on only five per cent of the roads.
  7. Oil, water temperature and alternator warning lights would be replaced by a single ‘general car default’ warning light.
  8. New seats would force every-one to have the same size butt.
  9. The airbag would say ‘Are you sure?’ before going off.
  10. Occasionally, for no reason, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key, and grabbed the radio antenna.
  11. GM would require all car buyers to also purchase a deluxe set of road maps from Rand-McNally (a subsidiary of GM), even though they neither need them nor want them. Trying to delete this option would immediately cause the car’s performance to diminish by 50 per cent or more. Moreover, GM would become a target for investigation by the Justice Department.
  12. Every time GM introduced a new model, car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
  13. You would press the ‘start’ button to shut off the engine.

Everything old is weird again.

Bad Ideas: Combining Nuclear Power With Explosive Metals

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I understand that there advantages to Sodium cooled reactors, particularly the fact that, because of the small cross section of the nucleus of Sodium, you can get a much more complete burn with fewer waste products, but that the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Prototype Development, memorandum of understanding (MOU) will lead nowhere.

The U.S Department of Energy (DOE), the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) have expanded cooperation to coordinate Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor Prototype development through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU). The MOU establishes a collaborative framework with the ultimate goal of deploying sodium-cooled fast reactor prototypes. A sodium-cooled fast reactor uses liquid sodium to transfer heat, burning the plutonium and other transuranic elements in the process producing clean, safe nuclear power, less waste and increasing non-proliferation goals.

This makes the Hindenberg look like a cap gun.

Liquid Sodium explodes on contact with air.

This is Bullsh$#!

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Here is the problem: You want the most numerate students entering college to select a profession where pay is marginal, layoffs are rife, status is low (how many engineers have a secretary?), the positions are constantly under threat of outsourcing, and your bosses are technically and mathematically illiterate morons.

So you are saying, “Gee you have special and valuable skills, how about taking a low paying job for a career where you will be dumped for younger cheaper labor when you are in your 40s.

Had I thought more about the real world, I would not have gone into engineering school. I would have gone into business school, made my millions, spent my two years in a low security prison playing ping pong with Jack Abramhoff, and have gotten out with three homes, 5 cars, and my kids college education fully funded.

If you want more people to be engineers, pay them more and make their employment more stable.

Engineering Encouragement for Youth(Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/11/2007, page 13

Edited by Patricia J. Parmalee

Printed headline: Engineering Future Talent

A New Jersey fifth-grader will get a taste of the future this summer as winner of a Lockheed Martin-sponsored essay competition, a part of its national Space Day initiative. Victoria Geyer’s entry earned her a spot at Space Camp at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center in Huntsville, Ala. See http://www.spaceday.org. And BAE Systems has launched a nationwide competition offering a team of students the chance to be ‘test pilots for a day’ at their Military Air Solutions site in the U.K. where they will fly the Typhoon simulator. See http://www.baesystemseducationprogramme.com