How can dolphins swim on and on at speeds of up to 33 feet per second? Researchers didn't really know. The conundrum is known as Gray's Paradox after Sir James Gray, who first pointed it out 70 years ago.

Today's standard engineering calculations say that the dolphin's muscles would have to be seven times more powerful than they actually are to achieve that speed. Therefore, some researchers theorized that the dolphin somehow reduces frictional drag on its skin to a much lower level than other bodies in water. Such reduction might be possible if the dolphin were able to maintain laminar flow as opposed to the turbulent flow that would be expected to occur at dolphin-swimming speeds. Laminar flow generates much less drag and so could account for the dolphin's extraordinary speed, said research scientist V.V. Pavlov at the Crimean State Medical University in Simferopol, Ukraine.

Fluid paradox: For dolphins to swim as fast as they do their muscles would have to be seven times stronger than they are. A Ukrainian researcher simulated flow around a dorsal fin to uncover why dolphins can swim so fast.

Pavlov recently called upon computational fluid dynamics software to help solve the mystery of the quick-swimming dolphin. He used the technology to simulate the detailed hydrodynamics of the flow around the dolphin's dorsal fin.

By studying the relationship of the flow around the dolphin's fin to the structure of its skin, he found that the skin acts as almost a compliant wall to reduce turbulent flow around the animal's body. Pavlov said his finding might help engineers design similar compliant walls for ships and airplanes, which could increase the vehicles' speed and reduce fuel consumption.

Pavlov used CosmosFlowWorks from SolidWorks of Concord, Mass., for CFD simulation. Flomerics of Marlborough, Mass., originally developed this product.

Computers are lazy. They work only when they have to and almost all of them spend most of their time loafing.

The hardware at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind., however, has developed a hard-work ethic. The university's computers are in almost continuous use, thanks to a distributed computing approach that sends work to the computers day and night, according to Gerry McCartney, Purdue's interim vice president for information technology and chief information officer.

"A corporation's CFO sees that computers are 1,000 times more powerful than they were 15 years ago and wonders, 'Why aren't we producing more with them?' If you think about it for more than 90 seconds it doesn't make sense," McCartney said.

So Purdue officials decided to put computer downtime to good use.

Today at the university, more than 4,300 computers of all sizes—from desktop machines used by students to large research computers—are linked in what's known as a pool. If a computer anywhere in the pool becomes available, even for a few minutes, a waiting job is sent to it for processing.

To enable this type of distributed computing, Purdue uses a version of an open source application called Condor, developed at the University of Wisconsin in Madison specifically for scientists and engineers. Today, businesses like investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase and semiconductor manufacturer Micron Technology use Condor, too.

Michael Ryan, chief technologist of the computing backbone for J.P. Morgan Chase, said computing cycles are sometimes referred to as MIPS, an acronym for millions of instructions per second.

"A MIP is a terrible thing to waste," Ryan said. "On Wall Street, how many calculations you can get done in an eight-hour window can mean gigantic savings for the bank in real dollars. The more accurately you can model your risk, the more money you can save your company."

At Purdue, the computers in the Condor pool are used roughly 45 percent of the time for their intended purpose and 45 percent to run Condor jobs, McCartney said. They get to take a computing equivalent to a coffee break the other 10 percent of the time.

"People are looking past this technology because it's not sexy," he said. "Technology people are interested in new machines and big-iron computers. But distributed computing is the future, whether it's sexy or not."

Thomas Krüger didn't initially think his employer, Entec Beez-Lademann GbR, could use computational fluid dynamics software to simulate the unique motion of the automotive oil pump that it makes. He thought wrong.

Today, the manufacturer, located in South Thuringia, Germany, where Krüger works as an analyst, uses CFD software to simulate oil flow through virtual pumps. And engineers have a better understanding of how best to design their pumps for best flow, Krüger said.

Unlike traditional rotary designs, the Entec PSZ oil pump relies on an adjustable pendulum slidegate. Oil pressure regulates pump flow, which allows the pump to supply exactly the amount of oil necessary for a given operating condition, Krüger said. By delivering only the oil required, PSZ pumps are energy efficient.

For CFD, the company uses Star-CD from CD-adapco of London.

Talk-show hostess Kelly Ripa recently got a rather unlikely gift—a sculpture of her head based on a 360-degree laser scan of same. The scanning process took about five minutes in her New York television studio.

Employees at Direct Dimensions, a digitizing and laser-scanning company in Owings Mills, Md., did the honors.

Three-dimensional face scanning uses a 3-D camera to take a series of rapid laser images of the subject, who is seated in a chair. The chair is rotated for a 360-degree picture. The data is collected and sewn together in a computer file to form the image in the desired size and format, according to Michael Raphael, Direct Dimensions' president and chief engineer.

Kelly Ripa, one half of the Regis and Kelly talk-show duo, recently received a life-sized replica of her head, made possible by a combination of laser scanning and rapid prototyping hardware. She received the gift on the air.

Ripa's scanned image was printed in sculpture form using rapid printing technology from Z-Corp. of Burlington, Mass.
Laser scanning also allows engineers to capture 3-D data from an existing product, according to Direct Dimensions. The object could also be turned into a computer model, via rapid prototyping techniques, for manipulation.

Digital Dimension employees presented their sculpture to Ripa during a broadcast of her TV show with Regis Philbin, "Live With Regis and Kelly.

The three-dimensional computer programs of the future will grant users the ability to see through walls and objects just like Superman.

That's the conclusion of Niklas Elmqvist, in his doctoral dissertation in computer science at Chalmers University of Technology in Göteborg, Sweden. He says he's developed a new, better way to take a guided tour of a digital 3-D world.

One problem with today's computer-based 3-D environments, Elmqvist said, is that you can easily lose track of where you are and where you're going because the visual clues that real-life humans use to move through space don't exist in the virtual world. In his dissertation, he showed new methods to help the user move through complex 3-D environments.

His work incorporates the visual cues like size, shape, and motion that we humans use to track ourselves against our surroundings, Elmqvist said.

He also included a computerized method to push away objects that get in the way in those 3-D worlds. Elmqvist defended his thesis, 3D Occlusion Management and Causality Visualization, in December. It is available, in English, as a 263-page .pdf file through the university's Web site at http://www.cs.chalmers.se/~elm/
projects/phd-thesis/thesis.pdf.

Two English researchers say they've prototyped a flight computer to improve the interaction between an airplane's autopilot and its real pilot. Put broadly, the researchers think the autopilot needs to do more work.

Although autopilots and pilots individually seldom make mistakes, on rare occasions errors happen, usually due to communication breakdowns between the two, said Peter Johnson, a computer science professor at the University of Bath in England. Usually the miscommunication results in nothing more than a moment of confusion. Occasionally, albeit rarely, it leads to an accident, he said.

Johnson and Rachid Hourizi, also a computer science professor at the University of Bath, recently tested their theory that these misunderstandings occur because of what they call the low-level communication style of the autopilot—rather than because of error on the human pilot's part. The autopilot essentially leaves many decisions up to the real pilots, without helping them make those decisions, Johnson said.

Currently in computerized cockpits, the autopilot tells the pilot what's happening. The autopilot readout might say, for example: "The plane is flying at 10,000 feet." From this, the pilot calculates what the plane should do next, Johnson said.

He and Hourizi came up with new software that gives the autopilot more of the calculation work so it can better help determine what to do next. The software makes the interaction between the autopilot and pilot more explicit, which reduces the chance of a mistake. It also frees up more time for the pilot to make high-level decisions, such as ensuring the plane is on course.

Airplane makers have expressed interest in the researchers' work; their system could be incorporated into active autopilots within one decade, Johnson said.

The Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales of Paris, the French government's space agency, recently implemented computer-aided design and related data management and collaboration software, all from MSC.Software of Santa Ana, Calif.

The applications are now used at CNES's Toulouse Space Centre and the Evry Space Centre, said Jean-Nöel Bricout, head of structures and mechanical engineering office at CNES.

The agency produces satellites and satellite launchers.

It took 17 years, but Joe Harralson and his team at Sierra Design Engineering say they've helped design the world's fastest motorcycle.

The cycle that his Mount Aukum, Calif., engineering firm helped design for BUB Enterprises of Grass Valley, Calif., set a world record last year. In September, it reached a speed of 350.884 mph during the 2006 International Motorcycle Speed Trials at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah.

The BUB Enterprises motorcycle set a world speed record of 350.884 mph at Bonneville last year.

The previous speed record had stood for over 15 years. The motorcycle, named Seven, looks more like a rocket on two wheels than a traditional street bike, Harralson said.

Harralson used finite element analysis software from Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh to analyze several motorcycle components while they were being designed, including the engine crankshaft, frame, rear suspension, and wheels.

"At almost every step, we were in unexplored territory, and the ability to analyze stress and deflection was essential," Harralson said. He's a former professor of mechanical engineering at California State University, Sacramento, and has previously worked as an engine-design engineer.

Nearly one million robots roam—or wield tools—in manufacturing plants around the world today, according
to the Robotic Industries Association in Ann Arbor, Mich. Nearly half of them work in Japan.

Today's robots perform a range of tasks—from handling materials to spot welding and packaging. The engineers that develop them rely on simulation software to analyze robots' movements before those robots are even made.

For example, Robo-Technology of Puchheim, Germany, recently developed a six-axis robotic system to ultrasonically test helicopter parts up to six meters in length. The company used analysis and simulation software—specifically Ansys Workbench software from Ansys Inc. of Canonsburg, Pa., to verify that the rigidity and vibration behavior of the system met customer demands, according to an Ansys spokesperson.
Robo-Technology was particularly interested in synchronizing their robots, Ansys said.

Similarly, Motoman Inc. of West Carrollton, Ohio, also used Ansys simulation software to develop a robotic overhead transport with a two-meter boom that can carry a 110-pound payload. To increase reach and payload, Motoman created the boom with less mass than previous booms.

VI Group, the parent company of Vero International Software of Wixom, Mich., has acquired Camtek Ltd., a Malvern, England, maker of computer-aided manufacturing software.

SolidWorks of Concord, Mass., says its SolidWorks 2007 CAD software is certified by Microsoft Corp. for its Windows Vista operating system.

A series of free multiphysics tutorial CDs is now available from Comsol of Burlington, Mass. The company makes multiphysics software. Each CD contains a general introduction that illustrates how multiphysics modeling can be applied in a particular field, followed by examples.

Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., and PTC of Needham, Mass., have formed an interoperability agreement. Autodesk will incorporate the Granite Interoperability Kernel from PTC into AutoCAD and Autodesk Inventor while PTC will incorporate RealDWG technology from Autodesk into Pro/Engineer Wildfire.

Cimmetry Systems of Montreal has released AutoVue version 19.1 for SAP's PLM platform, Enterprise Central Component 5.0. AutoVue users gain access to documents stored in the mySAP repository.

Dassault Systèmes of Paris has released the third version of its Industry Solutions Business Process Content, version five.

Engineering data management software maker Cyco Software of Atlanta has released Cyco AutoManager View 2007.

CoCreate Software Inc. of Fort Collins, Colo., which makes PLM software, has released 2007 CoCreate OneSpace Suite.

Laser Design Inc. of Minneapolis released its Catia importer for Geomagic Qualify 8, which is automated inspection software from Raindrop Geomagic of Research Triangle Park, N.C.

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