Low-emission vehicles like the Toyota Prius can emit 90 percent fewer emissions than the average new car, say the automobiles' manufacturers. One reason is the hydrocarbon trap, which keeps stray hydrocarbons from moving out of the engine after it's turned off, said Mark Van de Bogert, product design manager at Miniature Precision Components Inc. of Walworth, Wis.

Van de Bogert knows all about hydrocarbon traps, particularly about the challenges inherent in their design. His company makes injection-molded emission control components. The devices have to trap nearly all hydrocarbons without an increase in backpressure in the air entering the engine. Increased backpressure would lower fuel efficiency and performance, Van de Bogert said.

An automotive client recently asked Van de Bogert and his colleagues to optimize a trap for a vehicle that would meet California's partial zero emission standards. Those standards require very low emissions and thus have a highly refined hydrocarbon trap.

To ensure that the trap they designed met specifications, they simulated their design digitally in a computational fluid dynamics flow-simulation software package, Van de Bogert said.

They ran through about a dozen iterations of a five-spoke trap design. The analysis results for each design showed the flow rate, direction, and pressure at each point in the trap.

To evaluate his options, he used EFD.Lab fluid flow analysis software from Nika GmbH of Frankfurt, Germany, which is part of the Flomerics group.

Based on the simulations, Van de Bogert changed the spoke geometry and the spacing of the carbon elements to minimize backpressure across the trap and achieve the required level of hydrocarbon absorption.

"By the end of this process, I had beaten the target for backpressure," he said.

China's economy is speeding up these days and so, it seems, are the engineering methods that are being used.

Changchun Railway Vehicle Co. of Changchun City, China, has already made more than 27,000 freight railcars and 1,700 urban rail vehicles, which include monorail and magnetic levitation vehicles. And production continues.

With that kind of volume, any way the company can find to save time counts toward the bottom line, said Xuedong Yan, chief information officer at the company.

Changchun Railway recently started using a new finite-element analysis preprocessor to reduce the time spent on meshing models prior to analysis, he said.

The new meshing software cut preprocessing time from six weeks spent readying a passenger railcar model for FEA to three weeks, he added. The railway company now uses HyperMesh from Altair Engineering Inc. of Troy, Mich., which is compatible with all its FEA software.

When it comes to a big change, like a major software and hardware overhaul, sometimes it's best just to do it in one fell swoop.

That's what executives at Meerecompany of Seoul thought. The firm manufactures semiconductor equipment and recently implemented software that incorporates both computer-aided design and product data management.

Before the company brought in the system, it hadn't organized data in any one set way. The haphazard method was inefficient and caused product delays, said Jae Yun Yoo, vice president of Meerecompany. As the company had recently moved from 2-D to 3-D CAD, executives thought the time was ripe to bring in a PDM system. They chose one that was already integrated with their new CAD system.

The company is using Solid Edge for CAD and Teamcenter Express for PDM, both from UGS Corp. of Plano, Texas. The systems are integrated as part of the vendor's Velocity Series portfolio.

Sometimes you go for speed, but you also get polish. Take Ingersoll Machine Tools Inc. of Rockford, Ill., which makes machine tools for the metalworking industry.

Bob Ponikvar, a project manager there, said he and his colleagues realized a few years ago that, in order to stay competitive, the division had to move from conventional machining to high-speed machining. They implemented a computer-aided machining software product that generates computer numerically controlled toolpaths from 3-D CAD models.

To machine parts quicker than ever, Ingersoll Machine Tools brought in CAM software that generates CNC toolpaths from 3-D models like this one.

Recently, Ponikvar and his staff made a series of vacuum-form molds machined in aluminum. The molds are used to make clear plastic food containers like those on any grocery store shelf.

The molds required a lot of machining with very small, detailed surfaces, he said. His company used the CAM software to produce a surface finish that needed very little polishing (their customers aren't always keen on polishing machine surfaces themselves) and to reduce the time it took to machine the molds. The software is Machining Strategist from Vero International Software of Wixom, Mich.

The Internet's quick rise has created the greatest storehouse of information ever seen. Yet the very speed of this growth has brought its own problems. Which content is the wheat, and which the chaff?

The Metokis project aims to help, according to Wernher Behrendt of Salzburg Research in Austria. He coordinates the project, which investigates semantic Web technologies.

To a computer, words or pictures on a page are just the 1s and 0s of binary language, Behrendt said. The meaning, context, purpose, and authority of the words are completely lost in the binary field. Computers cannot flush the semantic, or meaningful, from the binary chaff, Behrendt said.

"Right now, there are many initiatives to develop a semantic Web, where computers understand the meaning of information contained on a Web page," Behrendt said.

The Metokis approach is based on knowledge-content objects, known as KCOs, and on an open-exchange platform.

KCOs are discrete units of information, typically representing a Web page or even a complex multimedia presentation, Behrendt said. The Metokis model identifies KCO information, such as the data's owner, the data's purpose, and the licensing information. The open platform provides the infrastructure that allows KCOs to find, identify, and interact with each other.

"In some ways, the KCO is comparable to books," Behrendt said. "What you put in between the covers is up to the author, but once it is in the shape of a book, you can store it, sell it, look up what it is about, check whether it belongs to you, and, of course, read it. The good thing about KCOs is that they enable the computer to do the same."

By using 3-D software, manufacturers can get to market 99 days earlier and pay $50,637 less in product-development costs than their 2-D counterparts, according to a report from the Aberdeen Group Inc., a research firm in Boston.

Because digital prototypes made from 3-D designs reveal many design issues right away—before physical prototypes are made—manufacturers with 3-D software typically require 1.4 fewer physical prototypes than their counterparts and 6.1 fewer change orders, which results in reduced product-development time and cost savings, according to Chad Jackson, service director of Aberdeen's product innovation and engineering practice, who authored the report.

His report also discusses the current pressures and challenges in the marketplace that make migration from 2-D to 3-D difficult.

"To remain competitive, manufacturers migrating from 2-D drafting must maintain user productivity in the face of increasing demand for more products, more complex products, and in shorter time-to-market windows," Jackson said. "This represents a challenge due to need for end-user training, 3-D application performance, and the conversion of legacy designs."

Some Olympic swimmers execute their dolphin kicks nearly as well as dolphins themselves. Is that the reason behind their competitive edge?

To find out, George Washington University's flow simulation analysis group is studying the fluid dynamics behind elite swimmers' dolphin kicks, said Rajat Mittal, who heads the team in Washington.

Swimmers execute the strategically crucial underwater dolphin kick at the start and the turn of each lap. The undulating, rhythmic underwater swimming action closely mimics a dolphin's movement and is now understood to be more efficient than swimming actions made on the surface, Mittal said.

Researchers at George Washington University matched body scans from elite swimmers with animations of Olympic swimmers' dolphin kicks, then analyzed the results in fluid-flow software to find the mechanically perfect kick.

But some swimmers are better dolphin kickers than others. Understanding why might help researchers come up with computer-calculated instructions for the mechanically perfect dolphin kick—the action that would produce the lowest turbulence, the optimal arrangement of invisible eddies, and the swiftest route through the water.

Mittal and his team worked with the competitive swimming governing board, USA Swimming of Colorado Springs, Colo. The organization provided three-dimensional body scans of two elite swimmers, Lenny Krayzelburg and Gabrielle Rose.

The researchers created an animation that matches the 3-D body scans frame-by-frame to the dolphin kicks of two Olympic swimmers, Natalie Coughlin and Michael Phelps.

Both swimmers are considered excellent dolphin swimmers, a skill that has given them an advantage over competitors, said Alfred von Loebbecke, a graduate student in the research group. To make the animation, he used Maya software from Alias of Toronto.

"The goal of the project is to understand what makes swimmers like Phelps and Coughlin such great dolphin kickers," Mittal said. "Both of them get a significant advantage during the dolphin kick phase. They usually come out of the water about half a body length or more ahead of the competition. We're trying to understand the fluid dynamics behind this."

The researchers used the animation to simulate fluid flow with their own fluid analysis software. Then, they plotted and analyzed the results in the graphical plotting software from Tecplot of Bellevue, Wash. Work is ongoing, as they look for pressure contours on the body to find the high- and low-pressure zones that create thrust.

"Is it the legs?" Mittal said. "Is it the toes? Or the thighs?"

Could a PlayStation stand in for a supercomputer?

Yes, say researchers at the University of Manchester in England, where computer hardware made for game consoles like the PlayStation 3 will soon power research software just as a supercomputer does.

Although IBM developed the BladeCenter QS20 for game consoles, the hardware's architecture and high-speed communications capabilities give it a supercomputer-like performance, according to Terry Hewitt, director of research computing at the school. And the system, built to speed up 3-D animation, had already been shown to work for other simulation software, such as medical imaging. So, Hewitt thought, why not use the hardware as a supercomputer?

"We're currently looking at migrating a range of our scientific applications, including bio-informatics, molecular modeling, and engineering applications, onto the systems to dramatically improve their performance and reduce the costs of supercomputing," Hewitt said.

"It has the potential to give us significantly improved performance, take up less space, and consume less power," he added.

A program being developed in Germany would let you scroll through a document simply by looking at it rather than relying on your mouse.

The Eye-Controlled Interaction system was developed by researchers at the Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering in Stuttgart, Germany. The system tracks a user's eye movement and transmits it to the mouse pointer displayed on the monitor, according to Wolfgang Beinhauer and Fabian Hermann, the project managers.

The system could be useful to people who don't have use of their hands, or those doing other tasks, such as assembling or operating industrial equipment, while following instructions on their computer.

A camera observes the movement of the pupils from a distance of up to one meter; a software program calculates and transfers the coordinates of the area viewed. It all happens so quickly that the mouse pointer moves smoothly.

Calculating the motion is comparatively easy, but clicking a button by looking at it presents a real challenge, Hermann said. To help, the researchers have developed areas of the screen that users can activate by fixing their eyes on them for a certain length of time. The button changes color twice to signify that it has been clicked. Users can thus tell whether or not the computer has understood their commands.

Another design problem the research team faced was the miniature jerk-like movements, or microsaccades, that the eye constantly makes. If the pupil movements were transmitted to the monitor without first being filtered, the pointer would dash around all over the monitor. The software first suppresses these microsaccades by means of a filter function, then determines the main direction of movement, Hermann said.

The entire portfolio of 3-D software development systems from Spatial Corp. of Westminster, Colo., now supports Intel-based Macintosh hardware. Spatial's product line includes ACIS Modeler, ACIS Extensions, and InterOp Translators.

Capvidia of Leuven, Belgium, has released FormatWorks 2007 for SolidWorks, which translates Catia information to and from SolidWorks. The release supports all Catia five versions, to version 17.

A maker of FEA software, Abaqus of Providence, R.I., has released the Abaqus student edition, version 6.6.

Centric Software of San Jose, Calif., has released Centric InSight 6.0, a search application that discovers and classifies structured and unstructured product information in disparate, enterprise-wide systems.

Intergraph Corp. of Huntsville, Ala., has released IntelliShip version 6.1, the foundation of Intergraph Marine Enterprise, a program for streamlining shipbuilding design.

Schott Systeme GmbH of Gilching, Germany, now includes a free suite of drilling-feature recognition tools within its standard design and machining software, Pictures by PC.

Metris of Welcome, N.C., has released the K-Scan MMZ handheld laser scanner, a portable, walk-around scanner for on-site 3-D digitizing.

ParallelGraphics of Dublin, Ireland, is shipping Cortona VRML Client 5.0, a 3-D visualization tool now incorporated in all ParallelGraphics authoring tools.

CAD Schroer Group of Milan, Italy, has released version 2.2 of its Medusa4 design automation suite.

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