To the Editor: The lack of women in engineering and technology is serious for our nation as we lose our global competitiveness from the lack of interest in math and science among our youth.

There are things ASME members can do. Send a copy of the "Filling the Void" article (February) to middle and high school counselors, principals, school board members, and district superintendents. As a Rotarian, when we have a student of the month honoree who expresses an interest in technology, I volunteer to talk with the parent and the student about engineering as a rewarding career. Yearly, I'm a resource for the seniors who choose to write their career choice interview on engineering. I have an engineering-careers booth at the county career day for high school incoming freshmen. Our four children pursued technology programs at Purdue University, my alma mater.

I'm proud that my engineering career was spent reducing the import of oil and reducing greenhouse emissions as a diesel engine chief engineer and then later as chief engineer of companies building trucks and buses, using a variety of alternative fuel engines, including clean diesel.

Talk to youth about solving social, environmental, and health problems as an engineer.

Henry Borger
Laurel, Md.

To the Editor: I have been reading pieces like "Filling the Void" (February) for more than 20 years, and in that period the percentage of women in engineering has increased very little even as the percentage of women in other college courses has skyrocketed.

As the father of five (three girls and two boys) and the grandfather of 13 (six girls and seven boys), I am pretty familiar with children of both sexes. I have seen them play and study and read for countless hours, and I can testify that there are basic differences between boys and girls that predispose them to different types of work.

For example, almost all little boys love trucks and building things and war and rough competition. And most teenage boys like the same things, plus girls. Most little girls, on the other hand, like dressing up, coloring, board games, reading, and playing with baby dolls. When they get a little older, many girls develop a liking for organized sports, and they substitute playing with boys for playing with dolls, but their other interests stay the same.

What does this have to do with engineering? Well, engineering is basically about building things like airplanes, rockets, cars, trucks, buildings, roads, electronic devices, dams, machine tools, and factories. Until an engineer has built something tangible, he is not truly an engineer. And the hard truth is that boys and men are much more interested in building things than are girls and women.

My evidence is, of course, based on a very small and specific sample; however, I have talked to many other parents, both male and female, and they all agree with my observations.
Are all women uninterested in engineering? Of course not. However, I believe that these traits are common to a sufficiently large percentage of women, so that it is unrealistic to expect women ever to make up a major fraction of the engineering profession. And any effort to force equalization would be unfair to women and the profession.

To the Editor: Because I have worked on the design of vehicular turbine rotary heat exchangers, regenerators, static heat exchangers, and recuperators at Solar Turbines in San Diego, the article "Heat Exchanger Turns More Efficient" (Technology Focus, November 2006) attracted my attention. The claim of improved efficiency by preheating the inlet air is not valid.

Heated inlet air reduces the mass flow with resulting loss of power. In fact, industrial practice is to use inlet mist coolers in hot environments to compensate for lost power. Preheating the compressor discharge/combustor air reduces the amount of fuel required with resulting increased thermal efficiency.

Claiming 97.5 percent heat exchanger efficiency is confusing, as the recognized parameter for heat exchanger performance is "effectiveness," the proportion of heat actually exchanged. Perhaps the 97.5 percent reference is to seal leakage. The claim that ceramic core is used because metals will not withstand the exhaust gas temperature stream also is not valid. Most moderate performance gas turbines have exhaust gas temperatures around 1,000°F—much lower with high-performance machines, easily within the range of ordinary stainless steels.

Because of ceramics fragility and low thermal conductivity, metals are a much better choice, as the high thermal conductivity allows a much shorter residence time to achieve the proper operating temperature, in addition to a more rugged core. Automotive ceramic emissions reactors have this problem of coming up to temperature quickly.

Solar Turbines designed and tested drum-type regenerators for a 600-hp military tank with various cores, including stainless corrugated foil, stainless layered screening, and metallic and nonmetallic seals, including a unique nonrubbing roller seal. Because of the mechanical complexity, power losses, seal leakage, and reliability, the project ended up with static recuperative design, with zero leakage and no mechanical complexity.

In the late 1960s, Solar Turbines designed a 300-hp recuperative gas turbine for heavy-duty highway trucks for International Harvester, now International Truck and Engine Corp. This compact engine was designed around a unique Solar patented "wraparound" static heat exchanger, which also provided the structural support for the rotating components. Several engines were installed in trucks that were used in practical year-round service around the Illinois/Ohio area. The "Turbostar" truck and the gas turbine were described in my letter published in Mechanical Engineering in November 2003.

Editor's note: David Gordon Wilson, CTO and president of Wilson TurboPower, the source of the story in question, clarified for us that it is inlet air to the combustor that is heated to improve turbine performance. We're sorry if that was not clear in the original story.

A prototype of Wilson TurboPower's heat exchangers boosts effectiveness to 97.5 percent.

Wilson also wrote to us: "When one can produce a heat exchanger with 97.5 percent effectiveness, thermodynamics is kind enough to reveal an optimum pressure ratio that is low, around 2.5:1. We use this pressure ratio in combination with a multistage compressor and turbine to allow us to use very low blade speeds in very-high-efficiency machines. The extraordinarily low stresses resulting from the low blade speeds enable us to use multistage axial-flow turbines with robust ceramic blades, which can easily allow turbine-inlet temperatures in the 2,200-2,500°F range to be used. The combination of these temperatures and a low pressure ratio produces turbine-outlet temperatures far above the limiting temperature for metal recuperators.

"We are developing ceramic regenerators with a patented arrangement that gives low compressed-air leakage and long seal lives. Heat passes into and out of a thin layer of the wall in a regenerator, so that a high conductivity is not required. In fact, we choose ceramics with a low conductivity because we don't want to 'short-circuit' the heat from the hot face of the regenerator wheel to the cold face. The result of all these logical choices is a gas-turbine engine of 300 kW projected to have a shaft-power thermal efficiency well above 50 percent down to about 25 percent power."

To the Editor: Halliburton's move to the Middle East, after a devastating war in which over 3,000 of our soldiers have perished and at least 60,000 innocent people in the region have died due to collateral damage, isn't something I am delighted by. That a self-serving firm like Halliburton can get positive press for moving their act to a country that will not tax them is not something to be proud of.

Halliburton took advantage of this war to suck our treasury dry. Now they will move on to a country that will allow them to avoid U.S. taxes. This may be great for Halliburton's bottom line, but it is strictly a hit-and-run disaster for the United States.

Editor's note: The writer's comments are in response to a March 13 Breaking News story published by Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online. Reprinted from the Houston Chronicle, it discussed the plans of Halliburton and other energy companies to set up headquarters in the Middle East.

To the Editor: As a professional nuclear engineer, I am disturbed by Brian Marple's letter in the November 2006 issue of ME magazine. He fails to see his own pro-nuclear propaganda when he makes statements about the Three Mile Island Unit 2 accident and the safety of reactors.

I still remember the morning of March 28, 1979, when the TMI-2 accident started. I was attending a small meeting with Harold Denton of NRC in his office in Bethesda, Md., when he got the urgent telephone call saying that a serious incident was under way at TMI-2. He immediately terminated our meeting.

As the infamous day went on, we all heard the bad news from TMI-2 getting worse and worse. We heard about confusion over critical instruments, safeguards systems, and operator actions. We heard about the loss of reactor core cooling, the possibility of core melting, a hydrogen explosion, the possibility of reactor vessel and containment failure, the possibility of containment venting and many other confusing reports.

Brian Marple's statement that nuclear energy is clean and safe is not helpful for the advancement of the nuclear power option in America.

Nuclear energy is not currently accepted by the American people as being clean and safe. The American people will never accept nuclear power plants if the NRC, the nuclear industry, and engineers are dishonest about past and present problems associated with nuclear energy.

To gain the acceptance of the American people, the nuclear industry must resolve the nuclear safety problems, be honest about the pros and cons of nuclear power, and work with the American people so that they can understand, verify, and trust that nuclear energy is cheaper, cleaner, and safer than other energy options.

To the Editor: In his letter to the editor (February), Jim Dwight makes an interesting comment about the hyperventilating of the news media and others who know little about what they are talking about when dealing with such technical matters as the Three Mile Island nuclear accident back in the late 1970s.

I recall watching the CBS Evening News on the evening of the Three Mile Island accident when Walter Cronkite, with a long face, said in a crisis tone that "we were on the verge of a nuclear holocaust." At that stage, I turned the television off and have not watched the CBS' Evening News since. There is no doubt in my mind that Walter Cronkite and the other network news anchors did far more psychological damage to the local people than did any radiation emanating from the damaged plant.

It is a matter of regret that anything of a technical nature that involves business immediately becomes politicized. Nuclear power is just one such matter. The energy situation and global warming are but two other such matters.

Unfortunately, largely due to the mainstream media (together with far too many people who are technologically illiterate), the truth gets drowned out by various people in our society who are trying to advance a political agenda. Of course, in the final analysis it all balances out because in our society it is the "bottom line" that eventually determines which way we go.

In the meantime, all the agonizing simply means that it just takes us longer to get there.

To the Editor: Darrell A. Bacon (Letters, March) is a man after my own heart. Although I am not an engineer, I have followed this magazine for the past several years with an ever-increasing admiration for all that mechanical engineers and mechanical engineering stand for.

Mr. Bacon reminds me of a boss of some 40 years ago who would smile and comment that it was very gratifying to have his ideas ignored or rejected, only to find them in use some years later, the product of some other mind. He called it "the NIH syndrome"—not invented here.

Arthur C. Ratzell III, in his article, "MEMS From the Nanoscale Up," (March) also invokes a comparison with my own present condition as he describes the efforts to overcome failure as an invaluable lesson.

Contrast that to the medical-pharmaceutical world where a person's adverse reaction to a medication is viewed as nonsense if it isn't on an existing list.

You all should be holding your heads high for your attitudes, your results, and your accomplishments.

You're almost like Marines.

To the Editor: Professional engineering societies throughout the world have an added responsibility to champion the course for sustainable environmental issues and must also be seen as the architects of sustainable practices.

It has become an undisputed fact that the most pressing issue on the globe now, apart from the threat posed by HIV/AIDS, is about our environment. Efforts have been made from different quarters to find possible solutions to environmental issues, but it looks like there is more work to be done.

Engineering societies have the major task of propagating good and sustainable policies and practices to be adopted by governments to find lasting solutions to this problem, most importantly the emissions from our vehicles. In doing this, we would be the leaders of national development and gain the respect of the citizenry.

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