A newly formed ASME Codes and Standards committee on steam surface condensers is seeking members to take part in a revision of a standard last issued in 1998.

The standard, PTC 12.2, has protocols for testing steam surface condensers. Jack Karian, ASME staff secretary to the committee, said the revision is intended to create "a user-friendly code for performing a test."

Current testing under the 1998 standard lays out the steps for a full-acceptance test, which involves carefully calibrated test instrumentation and repeated testing to verify the performance characteristics of a condenser. The condenser, a heat exchanger often the size of a small church, contains an enormous network of tubes not visible to the eye. It is a very thorough test, and very expensive, Karian said.

Routine performance monitoring over the useful life of the condenser relies on standard plant instrumentation. The intent of the next revision of the standard is to develop a test that will provide more information than routine monitoring, but will be less costly than the full-acceptance test.

The committee met at ASME offices in New York in June and will meet again in Madrid in October.

Jack Burns, an ASME Fellow and director of engineering at Burns Engineering Services Inc. in Topsfield, Mass., is the committee chair.

If carbon nanotubes are going to be the industrial material of the future—and many experts believe they will be—then engineers need to have a better handle on what, exactly, they can do and how, precisely, designers are going to work with them. Three recent pieces of research, all conducted coincidentally at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y., have uncovered new ways to take advantage of nanotubes.

Researchers have long been interested in measuring just how durable bundles of carbon nanotubes are. If nanotubes failed under repeated stress and strain, then their utility in flexible structures would be limited.

Researchers wetted a tuft of carbon nanotubes (left) with an organic solvent. When dried, the tubes clung to one another tightly (right).

In research reported in the July issue of Nature Nanotechnology, materials engineer Victor Pushparaj and colleagues placed a 2 millimeter square block of aligned carbon nanotubes in a vise and squeezed it repeatedly. Indeed, the apparatus crunched the block to one-quarter of its initial size some half a million times. And the effect? Nothing. The block retained its original size and properties, both mechanical and electrical.

The hope is to combine carbon nanotubes with other flexible material, such as polymers, that exhibit a strong shape memory to create a soft synthetic biomaterial. Not only would such a material be much stronger than naturally occurring tissues, but it also could conduct electricity, making it useful in sensors and instruments.

Another RPI group has accomplished almost the exact opposite: It found a way to scrunch together a bundle of loose nanotubes into a tightly packed bundle. The team started with tufts of nanotubes growing out of a silica substrate. As they are grown, individual tubes have considerable space between one another. But by wetting the tufts with alcohol and allowing them to dry, the team led by James Jiam-Qiang Lu found that the tubes undergo capillary forces and pull together, creating a column about one-fifth of the original diameter.

Carbon nanotubes, grown to different lengths on a silica substrate, were processed to make stalks. Longer stalks twisted together to form cables.

Bundling together carbon nanotubes in this way could one day create superwires. Individual nanotubes are better conductors than copper, but under normal conditions they are too loosely packed to carry much current. Although Lu's results are still far from the density needed to outperform copper wires, they point to a future in which nanotube-based wires could show up in computer chips and fuel cells.

Furthermore, engineers at RPI and the University of Akron in Ohio have used nanotubes to create a material that can stick to anything, including Teflon. The material is a polymer surface covered with bristly nanotube hairs. The material mimics the pads on the bottoms of gecko feet, from which microscopic hairs protrude; as the pad touches a surface, the hairs employ Van Der Waals forces to create a large, but reversible bond.

The researchers believe the nanotube-derived material, which is four times more adhesive than gecko feet, could have uses in, among other environments, outer space, where the vacuum degrades other forms of glue.

An ASME Fellow, Jan D. Achenbach, has received the National Medal of Science from the National Science Foundation and President Bush.

Achenbach holds two professorships in three departments at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. He is the Walter P. Murphy Professor and Distinguished McCormick School Professor of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics.

It is Achenbach's second national medal. He already holds the National Medal of Technology.

The National Medal of Science is bestowed in recognition of lifetime achievement in fields of scientific research, including physical, biological, mathematical, social, behavioral, and engineering sciences.

Achenbach is an honorary member of ASME and has been a Fellow since 1979. His latest honor recognizes his contributions to engineering research and education in the area of wave propagation in solids and his pioneering work in the field of quantitative non-destructive evaluation. He developed a method using ultrasound to detect cracks and corrosion in structures, including airplanes, bridges, and nuclear reactors.

His most recent award was presented in a ceremony at the White House on July 27. The National Science Foundation administers the award and recommends those to be honored. The medal was established by the Congress in 1959.

Southwest Research Institute has opened an office in Minnesota to enhance its computational capabilities in evaluating the dynamic response of materials and structures to impact and explosive loading.

The Computational Mechanics office is in Saint Louis Park, Minn., a suburb of Minneapolis. According to Charles Anderson, director of SwRI's Engineering Dynamics Department, the office has been formed there around the skills of four experts in the field. The office will be headed by Gordon R. Johnson, an internationally known expert in the field of computational modeling of materials. Johnson is joining the SwRI staff as a program director.

Other staff members at the Minnesota office are principal engineer Timothy J. Holmquist, senior research engineer Stephen R. Beissel, and research engineer Charles A. Gerlach.

SwRI expects that one of the clients to be served by the office will be the U.S. Army.

Sam Y. Zamrik, a 34-year member, became ASME's 126th president on July 1. A resident of State College, Pa., where he is a professor emeritus of engineering mechanics at The Pennsylvania State University, Zamrik is a recognized technical authority on pressure vessels and piping. He is an ASME Fellow and has held numerous leadership and editorial positions in the Society. Zamrik succeeds Terry Shoup.

DuPont has signed a Space Act Agreement with NASA to jointly develop urethane foam insulation reinforced with DuPont Kevlar fiber for use in a variety of future spacecraft, including the new launch vehicle being designed to replace the Space Shuttle.

DuPont, based in Wilmington, Del., and scientists at the NASA George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama will specifically seek to develop a process to incorporate Kevlar into the cell walls of the foam, thereby enhancing the performance of the thermal protection systems used in the Ares 1 crew launch vehicle.

There may be other uses for the material in future science and exploration applications, ranging from vehicle TPS to inflatable structures.

Tiger Truck LLC, a Dallas-based company, has announced its first assembly plant in the United States for vehicles designed by ChangAn Automobile Group, China's third largest vehicle manufacturer. The plant will be in Poteau, Okla., just across the Arkansas border.

Vehicles will be delivered from Poteau in early 2008 and will be marked "Made in U.S." Privately held Tiger Truck is the exclusive importer, distributor, and now U.S. manufacturer for ChangAn, which in China has manufacturing agreements with Suzuki, Ford, and Mazda. Initially, nearly 80 percent of the trucks manufactured in Oklahoma will be for export.

The Poteau facility will assemble two new truck platforms. The Champ, available in a 2-door or 4-door crew cab, is a full-size pickup truck with over 3,000 pounds capacity. It will be sold to the U.S. and Canadian off-road market.

Another version of this platform, for export only, is called the Leopard and will be configured with a diesel engine, dual rear wheels, and other features that make it suitable for on-road use in its export markets.

A Texas energy development company completing two 550-megawatt power plants has filed for permits to expand them both to produce another 275 MW each. The parent company, Navasota Holdings Texas Partners LP in Houston, said the plants operate on a natural gas-fired combined cycle and started generating electricity in June.

According to Dan Hudson, Navasota's chief financial officer, Navasota Holdings funded the plants and a subsidiary, North American Energy Services, will operate them. One of the plants, the Colorado Bend Energy Center, is in Wharton, Texas, and the other, the Quail Run Energy Center, is in Odessa, Texas.

Both plants are producing about 275 MW each from two gas turbines, whose heat exhaust is used to generate steam to run a third turbine. A second unit of the same configuration is under construction at each plant and the company expects them to enter service in the spring of 2008.

Navasota has applied for permits to add a third unit at each plant to bring nameplate capacity at each site to 825 MW. If that plan goes forward, the third units will be up and running in spring 2009.

Hudson said the company does not disclose the costs of its plants.

The Automotive Systems Division of international automotive supplier Continental AG plans to build a dedicated engineering center in Shanghai.

The new engineering center will be composed of two facilities: an office site with design and test labs in Yangpu District of Shanghai and a facility with large-scale equipment for bench testing as an extension of the existing Continental Automotive Systems Shanghai facility in Jiading. Both facilities— representing a total capital investment of 48 million euros—will be fully operational at the beginning of 2009 and provide employment for about 450 people with the potential to increase to 600 by 2011.

The facility in Yangpu will occupy approximately 7,400 square meters and serve as the Asian headquarters office for Continental Automotive Systems, ContiTech, and Continental Tires.

The Timken Co. will supply JSW Steel Ltd. of India with bearings for a new cold-rolling steel mill and will provide its Milltec rolling mill maintenance services after construction is completed. The contract for bearings is worth $1 million, with initial payment for services $200,000.

Ricardo plc of Van Buren Twp., Mich., has concluded an agreement with Sinotruk, China's biggest heavy-duty truck manufacturer, which will enable Ricardo to provide engineering support to Sinotruk. The signing ceremony took place at Sinotruk's offices in Jinan, coinciding with a celebration of the upgrade of the company's HAEP WD615 engine, which was carried out in collaboration with Ricardo.

Flowserve Corp. of Dallas has opened a research and development facility for valves, the Flow Control Engineering Center, in Bangalore, India. The company has two other engineering centers in India, one for pumps and one for seals.

Brammo Motorsports of Ashland, Ore., has announced the Enertia, which the company calls "the world's first production, zero-emissions, and battery-powered plug-in electric motorcycle." The Enertia, which can go 50 mph, has a range of 45 miles and a battery charge time of three hours to fully recharge. A carbon fiber chassis on a platform of 275 pounds uses six lithium-phosphate batteries.

Engineered Design Solutions of Rockford, Ill., has released DwgGrid for AutoCAD, a Windows Explorer-like browser for all AutoCAD type files.

MSC.Software Corp. of Santa Ana, Calif., has updated its core computer-aided engineering product suite, including Adams, MSC Nastran, Patran, Marc, and Dytran.

Houston-based Caspian International Oil Corp. announced its 2007 work plan for its northwest Zhetybai oil field. It is located in the Mangistau region of western Kazakhstan, and will include drilling a new 3,500-meter appraisal well upon the completion of a new 3-D seismic survey.

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