letters...
The Title of Engineer Revisited
Francisco Andrade Guayaquil, Ecuador 		To the Editor: Among the letters to the editor replying to Merle C. Potter's letter, "Protecting the Title of Engineer" (March 1997), the one that attracted my attention most was Henry Wasserstrom's letter in the October 1997 issue on the competence of nongraduate engineers. I agree that experience is necessary to be a good engineer; however, I don't understand how a nongraduate engineer could even be considered as something like an engineer, much less be considered a good one. I wonder if anybody is willing to allow a nongraduate doctor with experience to perform surgery. Only when physical laws are understood well enough to quantify them can an engineer achieve designs that resolve problems with efficiency and at reasonable cost. A nongraduate engineer can hardly make it, even with all the experience he could possibly get.

Douglas L. Marriott South Lebanon, Ohio To the Editor: I am in favor of a truly representative P.E. qualification, but I do not believe that the current system necessarily provides one. The P.E. examination per se does not bother me, but the hoops candidates must jump through if they have not graduated via the conventional U.S. engineering college system certainly do. As someone who has practiced engineering skills for 30 years but who received all his qualifications in countries other than the United States, I object quite strongly to the notion that I should be required to take the basic Competence Examination as a precursor to even being allowed to attempt the P.E. exam proper.

It is not that I am unable to cope with the subject matter; I taught at one of the Big Ten colleges for 12 years, covering most of the material of the Competence Examination daily. My objection is more fundamental, that the P.E. governing structure, at least in some states, appears to be so parochial that it is unable to accept evidence of basic competence from any source other than its own examinations, even when that evidence includes postgraduate degrees from such institutions as Cambridge University and verifiable evidence of service in responsible positions in the engineering organizations of countries that stand on an equal footing with the United States as regards technical expertise. Would a graduate of a medical school in the United Kingdom be called on by the American Medical Association to repeat freshman year before applying for a medical license?

Richard C. Biel, P.E. Houston To the Editor: While I am in favor of high standards for licensing and continuing professional competency in principle, the lofty goal of recognition as a learned profession is seriously limited by the "industry exemption" and other exemptions contained in the licensing laws of most states. The industry exemption generally permits unlicensed people to practice, so long as they do not offer engineering services to the public. Many qualified individuals have no incentive to become licensed, since they can practice for an entire career without the trouble and expense of formal licensing. Moreover, there is a higher probability that engineering may be practiced by unqualified people.

ASME reflects the ambivalence of its members. On one hand, ASME policy encourages all engineers to be licensed. On the other hand, ASME has not taken a position concerning the exemptions. I think it is time for ASME to take a firm stand on this issue. Simply put, ASME should expand its licensing policy to eliminate the exemptions from engineering licensing laws. Licensing should encompass all engineers, regardless of areas of practice or employment status.

Out of Control
Peter F. Stanley, P.E. Appleton, Wis. 		To the Editor: In the February 1998 Technology Focus, the article "Better Boiler Performance" caught my attention. The claim that boiler efficiency improvements of 5 percent can be realized by installing a new control system is unreal and beyond the laws of physics. Boiler efficiency, assuming negligible unburned carbon loss, is a function of excess air and flue-gas temperature exiting the unit to the stack. A good rule of thumb is that every 100°F drop in exit flue-gas temperature results in a 2.5-percent boiler efficiency increase. There is no way a new control system can trim the combustion system to lower the flue-gas temperature 200°F, assuming the boiler controls are not out of whack so badly as to produce smoke on gas or oil fuel. A couple of efficiency calculation iterations using the ASME PTC 4.1-b standard would result in an efficiency increase of about 3.5 percent on gas fuel by lowering the excess air from 83 to 5 percent. It would be unlikely a boiler could even operate a full load at 83 percent excess air due to fan capacity limitations.

Such claims on the part of manufacturers mislead boiler operators into signing up for fancy control systems they don't need, and make it harder for me to tell them the real story.

The Limits of Solar Power
Richard Hill Old Town, Maine 		To the Editor: The letter from Michael Stern, "Solar Power Deserves More Respect" (April), continues the important dialogue on the appropriateness of photovoltaic energy. A 100-square-mile array will indeed deliver 30,000 megawatts to an electric grid (clear day, high noon). The next question: What does one do with this energy? What does the rest of the system look like? How is the rest of the system dispatched? A significant use of solar electricity would imply that the rest of the system must "follow the load." Large combined-cycle coal or gas plants would not be appropriate. Small gas turbines (with high heat rates) could bounce on and off the line in response to the unpredictable sunshine. The economics of the total system would be poor.

Solar II, a solar thermal-electric system near Barstow, Calif., uses two tanks with 3.3 million lbs. of special salt. The stored energy in the molten salt can be "dispatched" to a heat exchanger, and used to make steam and generate electricity. (Mechanical Engineering should do a piece on this.) Or do we make hydrogen for subsequent use in fuel cells?

One thing is sure: If we simply set up photovoltaic arrays and dump the energy onto the grid when the sun shines, the contribution of solar-electric energy will remain small.

Walter R. Stewart Huntington Beach, Calif. To the Editor: Regarding Michael Stern's letter, I must reluctantly snap at the bait and point out some realities he has chosen to ignore.

Paraphrasing one of his statements, "There should be no doubt in any good engineer's mind that solar and wind technologies are the way to go"; should it be inferred, therefore, that those who disagree with his sales pitch are bad engineers? I would also like to point out that "technologically sound" does not mean an idea is, or has the potential to be, economically sound.

Let us examine Stern's optimistic figure of 30,000 megawatts per 100 square miles of collectors. Of course, only one-third of this energy would be collected during daylight hours in a 24-hour period. Of the 10,000 remaining megawatts, possibly as much as 35 percent would be unavailable because of overcast conditions. Further, during the energy transfer to storage batteries, another 30 to 40 percent would be lost. Other losses would be incurred in converting from low-voltage direct current to high-voltage alternating current. And we must not forget power-line transmission losses. Considering such factors as these, 2,000 megawatts per 100 square miles of collectors seems a realistic figure.

Moving on to the matter of recycling lead acid batteries, recycling is not a free ride. Where would Stern propose the recycling plants be set up to handle the thousands of tons of spent storage batteriesÑout in the desert, next to the solar-panel collector fields? What would he propose to do with the thousands of tons of toxic by-product wasteÑdump it out in the desert? Why do I get the feeling all this would not find favor with the environmentalists? Finally, where would he propose we get the vast quantities of energy required for the recycling process? More solar power?

No More School
Robert J. Wright, P.E. Salem, Ohio 		To the Editor: I would like to express my concern about falling into the continuing-education trap.

I am a P.E. I learn every day at a pace required to meet my job-specific requirements. I do not wish to take an approved course in re-engineering broken balloons or the equivalent to maintain my license. I am learning through phone calls and e-mail today the things I need to know for the next two weeks. I would not have time to find classes or courses that would meet my end-of-the-month deadline.




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