Arizona decision makers are putting to good use the visualization, simulation, and modeling tools that are valued by engineers.

The visualization center at Arizona State University in Tempe is helping policy makers essentially put all their cards on the table—and look at those cards in a meaningful way—as they wrestle with complex decisions, said Rick Shangraw, the center's executive director. Information is displayed on a large, 260-degree screen, which gives participants a common frame of reference for exploring issues.

The center, dubbed Decision Theater, has undertaken more than 20 projects for a variety of government and commercial clients, Shangraw said.

"Through our services, our clients can experience a more comprehensive way of addressing issues," he said. "They generally come to us with a lot of complex information from different sources and they ask us to integrate that data, to fuse it in a way that allows everyone to look at the information in a more understandable form."

For instance, for Tempe city officials Shangraw and his staff created a 3-D, geographically accurate model of the city, which included yellow buildings to represent structures that were planned, proposed, or under construction. City officials use the model to better understand how new structures could change the character of Tempe. They also use it as a tool to help set height restrictions for buildings in various parts of the city.

"The mayor told us the detailed visualization allowed city officials to make a decision in hours versus days or months," Shangraw said. "They were able to see a changing city on our immersive screens as we took them on a virtual flying tour."

The theater recently completed a model for the Scottsdale Unified School District, which allowed district officials to see annual enrollment projections to the year 2030, said John Baracy, the district's superintendent.

And officials in Surprise, Ariz., use the visualization tools as well.

"Impacts of growth management decisions are hard to visualize, and the Decision Theater is making that possible for our commissioners and councilors," said Scott Chesney, the planning and community director in Surprise.

Certainly, they're environmentally friendly, but let's face it: Electric cars can be a staid bunch. Can such a car ever be sexy?

Yes, say the makers of Tango, an all-electric two-seater that rockets from zero to 60 miles per hour in four seconds.

Commuter Cars of Spokane, Wash., manufactures Tangos to order for $108,000 to $148,000, depending on battery options. And it has plans to ramp up volume production, once it secures additional funding, said Rick Woodbury, the company's president.

The Tango is a two-seat electric car that can travel two abreast in traffic lanes. George Clooney bought the first one and drives it around Los Angeles. It can go from zero to 60 mph in four seconds.

He dreamed up the car concept while parked in a Los Angeles traffic jam. So it's no surprise that Woodbury claims the Tango can travel two abreast in a traffic lane, safely switch lanes through small gaps, glide through gridlocked traffic, and—at 39 inches wide—park four to a space.

Oh, and George Clooney bought the first one.

Commuter Cars outsourced the initial Tango design to an engineering firm that used a hodgepodge of computer-aided design software and handed over a set of files that, while well engineered, were a disorganized mess, Woodbury said.

"A sheet metal contractor told us to get SolidWorks software and straighten out our files, and we did," Woodbury said. "We're using SolidWorks to refine the design every day."

The SolidWorks company is based in Concord, Mass.

The dynamics of a beating heart, the turbulence surrounding the fuselage of an airplane, and the field of forces inside a molecule are all things that can be seen—and felt—with newly developed visualization technology developed at Linkšping University in Linkšping, Sweden.

Today's powerful computers have opened previously unimagined possibilities regarding the presentation and analysis of scientific data. Volume data, like 3-D computer tomographies of the human body, already contain a great deal of information. In a growing application, the data of CT scans is being rendered by rapid-prototyping devices into 3-D models for many doctors. (For more on that, see the feature, "Solid X-ray," in this issue.)

But CT analysis can still benefit from the addition of information gained from senses other than sight, according to Karljohan Lundin Palmerius, a computer researcher at the school's division for visual information technology and applications.

Palmerius has come up with methods to explore volume data using the sense of touch via haptic feedback.

Thanks to new computational algorithms, 3-D forms can be studied in a manner natural to the user, who works at a computer screen with a small touch tool—a haptic device—that provides feedback to the user's hand, Palmerius said.

His haptic method can provide a better way to diagnose patients, he said. The doctor can literally feel the CT scan, after all. It also gives doctors a way to practice on a patient before they operate for real.

The computational biomechanics group at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute in Bologna, Italy, has married finite element analysis with a computer tomography image to predict how patients would experience mechanical stress to their bones.

The combined method can predict the risk of fracture in certain patients. Doctors can use the information to plan complex skeletal reconstructions or to find out why
a joint failed, according to Luca Cristofolini, who leads the research.

He created the method, and his group outfitted eight cadaver bones with sensors, then subjected them to loading conditions to find the areas of mechanical stress to a proximal femur—a thigh bone that's long been considered one of the most difficult to model accurately, Cristofolini said. Researchers mapped that information using FEA.

They then combined CT images of the bones with FEA results to come up with a computer model that could be used to predict mechanical stresses to the bone.

Their work appeared in the April 2007 Journal of Biomechanics.

What's the air pollution like in your city at any given moment?

Engineers at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., are working on a way for you to find out. Their system would give a real-time, online, detailed, and accurate report of air quality in large metropolitan areas.

The mobile air quality monitoring system would monitor air quality with car-mounted sensors that measure emission levels, according to Akos Ledeczi, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Vanderbilt.

Those emission numbers will be fed into SensorMap, a software platform from Microsoft that integrates and publishes sensor data in real time on the Internet.

The sensor-mounted cars will drive around the city, sampling air pollutants every few seconds. The sensors note the time and location of each sample. Then, when the car passes
a WiFi hotspot, the information is automatically updated to the SensorMap portal, where a detailed picture of the air quality in the area is always displayed, Ledeczi said.

What was it like to walk through the Colosseum when the Roman Empire was at its height? Some scholars may have a good idea, but what about the rest of us?

Someday soon, even the uninitiated may be able to see close up what life was like in the distant past, according to Alan Chalmers, a visualization professor at the University of Warwick's new digital laboratory. He leads a project to reconstruct the past via what he terms very realistic graphics, including three-dimensional technology. Chalmers' group wants to depict how historic sites looked in their heyday.

"We're trying to produce images that show more realistically the actual conditions of the time," Chalmers said.

To do this, the researchers in the digital laboratory take up-to-date information for a historical place like the Colosseum and combine it with 3-D CAD technology. In this way, they can model the effects of smoke, dust, fog, and interior lighting, which affected the way that buildings looked to contemporaries.

The group is seeking to reconstruct churches, palaces, and other ancient sites to help historians, students, and museum visitors get a feel for what it was actually like to be there.

New developments in display technology also make it possible to produce images that are many times brighter, more vivid, and incorporate better contrast between light and dark—and are, therefore, much more realistic—than those previously achievable, Chalmers said.

"The future might see the combining of accurate, high-fidelity 3-D representations with temperature, smell, sound, and other parameters," Chalmers said. "Our work may lead to a significant new tool that could help put us in closer touch with the past."

Often, the best price isn't from the company closest to home. But how can you find a better price? As with so many things, the Internet has made even small companies global.

Because the engineering services company Electromechanica custom-designs and prototypes a variety of industrial systems, it bids on many different parts, said Karl Edminster, the company's founder and president. The company makes everything from test equipment for the electronics industry to custom fixtures for manufacturers.

The problem was that engineers at Electromechanica, in East Freetown, Mass., moved so fast they often didn't have the time to track down suppliers outside their area who might offer them a better price than the supplier around the corner. That sourcing problem could slow down turnaround time, Edminster said.

And the company's southeastern Massachusetts location didn't help labor costs, Edminster said.

"We're in about the most expensive place you could possibly run your business," he said.

Recently, staffers have started posting requests for quotes, or RFQs, on MFG.com, a Web-based subscriber service that links potential buyers to a database of suppliers. The suppliers pay a subscription fee for access to the RFQs. Buyers post requests at no cost, said Mitch Free, chief executive officer of MFG.com.

Since joining MFG.com, Electromechanica has cut the cost of its machine parts by one-third, partly because it can cast a wide net for its needs.

Staffers found an especially hard-to-find wire material for specialty copper parts in Wisconsin through the online service.

"And we got a phenomenal price on these potentially very expensive parts," Edminster said.

Although an auto race MaY go for hours and cover hundreds of miles, a few inches can separate the winner from the runner-up. Because races are so tight, race car engineers turn intense attention to chassis and suspension design and to tuning the vehicle's setup to a particular track on race day. All these tactics save seconds in the race.

Engineering simulation plays a critical role in this kind of work, according to engineers at Toyota Racing Development of Costa Mesa, Calif., which designs and builds engines and race cars.

"In the past, most vehicle development was based solely on seat-of-the-pants intuition and extensive physical testing," said Skip Essma, a race vehicle engineer at Toyota Racing Development. To limit vehicle development expenses, governing bodies at racing organizations have put in stringent restrictions on physical testing, he added. That means race car engineers increasingly run simulations and analyses prior to putting the pedal to the metal.

For his part, Essma uses simulation software called LMS Virtual.Lab Motion from LMS of Leuven, Belgium, to find the best chassis design. Toyota Racing Development models the entire vehicle with the software, including the frame, suspension, steering, braking system, and body.

The software enables engineers to use multibody simulation to accurately predict handling, grip, cornering, balance, and lap time, Essma said.

Now, Toyota Racing Development has formed a partnership with LMS to market a simulation package specifically for race vehicle engineers.

Moldflow Corp. of Framingham, Mass., which makes design analysis software for the plastics injection molding industry, has released Moldflow Structural Alliance, a plastics-analysis software for use with Abaqus and Ansys analysis software.

Oracle of Redwood Shores, Calif., will acquire Agile Software Corp. of San Jose, Calif., a leading provider of product lifecycle management software for approximately $495 million.

Dassault Systèmes of Paris has released Abaqus version 6.7 of its finite element analysis software suite.

Metris of Leuven, Belgium, has released Focus Scan 5.0, a data acquisition and point cloud preprocessing program for the Metris CMM-based laser scanners.

Romer Inc. of North Kingstown, R.I., is now selling ScanShark, an inspection and reverse engineering system. The system is particularly effective for difficult-to-reach spots, such as inside an aircraft or underneath an automobile, according to the developer.

CAD maker think3 of Cincinnati said its suite of products fully supports the new Windows Vista operating system.

Tormach LLC of Waunakee, Wis., which makes computer numerically controlled software, has updated its CNC Machine Control software.

A durability-based software and instrumentation maker, nCode International of Southfield, Mich., has released its ICE-flow 4.1 product family. The software allows users to manage, process, and visualize channel counts of data.

Finite element analysis maker Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh has opened an office in Santa Clarita, Calif., to expand its West Coast sales and support network.

TransMagic Inc. of Westminster, Colo., a developer of 3-D CAD translation and interoperability software, has upgraded its software to the TransMagic release seven product line.

nPower Software of San Diego, Calif., allows for translation of SolidWorks files directly into Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk VIZ with the release of its company's Power SolidWorksToMax.

Pathtrace of Reading, England, now offers EdgeCAM 11.5, the latest release of its computer numerically controlled offline programming system.

Altair Engineering of Troy, Mich., which makes engineering technology, is collaborating with Mimos Berhad of Turin, Italy. The two will jointly develop grid-enabled solutions for various applications, such as CAD, 3-D animation, visual effects, and graphics.

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© 2007 by The American Society of Mechanical Engineers