Interdisciplinary fields—like biomedical engineering—require students to become familiar with basic principles in a wide range of topics, according to Richard Hart, chairman of the department of biomedical engineering at Tulane University in New Orleans.

He teaches the freshman-year course, "Elements of Biomedical Engineering Design," which introduces students to the varied aspects of engineering that enter into biomedical engineering projects. Students in his class work with software that can analyze for physical phenomena working in tandem.

"I was struck by how cool it would be to have a biomedical finite-element course that could incorporate not only structural aspects but also thermal, electromagnetic, and other physics," Hart said.

His students use Comsol Multiphysics for this multiphysics modeling. Comsol Inc. of Burlington, Mass., makes the software.

For one class project, students use the software to design and analyze a hip-replacement assembly. The students follow a series of step-by-step instructions that lead them from geometry creation to post-processing analysis.

In our increasingly wireless world, the air is full of electromagnetic signals that carry data from one place to another. While wireless technology is a boon for the security, commerce, and entertainment industries—not to mention for the average coffee shop patron with a laptop—it carries a little-talked-about downside. The technology sometimes interferes with implanted medical devices like pacemakers, defibrillators, and drug-infusion pumps.

A pacemaker is tested in the EAS/Medical Device E3 Test Center's torso simulator, which contains saline solution to mimic electrical characteristics of a human body. Georgia Tech operates the center.

To help device manufacturers determine how to best avoid interference, the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta operates the newly expanded EAS/Medical Device E3 Test Center, which studies the interaction between medical devices and systems that radiate electromagnetic energy—like electronic article surveillance, or EAS, systems, said Ralph Herkert, the center's manager.

Retailers use EAS systems to help deter theft.

Wireless systems can operate on the same frequencies as biological signals, like a heartbeat.

"Electronic article surveillance systems may cause medical devices to do anything from shutting down to invoking therapy at the wrong time—not a good thing if you're wearing
a defibrillator, which is supposed to shock the heart when needed," Herkert said. Placing a filter on a medical device would shield it from wireless signals, but also would exclude the very signals that the device is designed to detect, Herkert said.

"Instead of filters, medical device manufacturers must deal with the interference in other ways, such as refining their firmware algorithms," he said.

To study medical devices, researchers place them in a tank of saline solution that exactly mimics the electrical characteristics of the body. The tank moves along a track that exposes the medical device to nine EAS systems and five tag deactivators that use various types of magnetic, acoustic-magnetic, and radio frequency technologies.

Researchers perform several tests on the device while it's in the tank. The device also can be moved within the tank to mimic placement at various locations within the body.

Device makers use the resulting data to improve their products and make sure they meet Food and Drug Administration requirements, Herkert said.

An Italian aerospace company recently sought software for designing parts of composite materials, although engineers there were loath to give up the CAD system they'd been using for years for noncomposite design.

The company found a way to please the engineers. They get to keep their CAD system while adding an integrated application for composite design.

Engineers at Italian aerospace company Alenia-Aermacchi of Venegono, Italy, use a dedicated composite-design software application, which operates in tandem with their usual CAD package.

The jet maker AleniaAermacchi of Venegono, Italy, now uses FiberSim software specifically for composite design. It operates within the company's longtime Catia CAD system.

The aerospace company wanted to generate designs and share composites and other design information, all within the same CAD system, according to Steve Luby, president and chief executive officer at Vistagy of Waltham, Mass., which makes FiberSim.

Catia is from Dassault Systèmes of Paris.

Manufacturers who turn to collaborative technologies like product lifecycle management do so to improve their product development processes, according to a recent study done by the Aberdeen Group, a research firm in Boston. And, according to the study, it works.

"Our research results show that manufacturers that have best-in-class product-development performance are typically leveraging collaboration and collaborative solutions more than their poorer-performing peers and competitors," said Jim Brown, Aberdeen Group's vice president of product innovation and engineering research.

Those manufacturers rely on their collaborative systems to communicate with internal departments and with external parties, such as customers and third-party engineering teams, Brown said.

Aberdeen Group's study, Product Lifecycle Collaboration Benchmark Report, analyzes the different types of collaboration found at manufacturing firms, and discusses which approaches are successful and more likely to deliver a competitive advantage.

It's a big standardization project, but the aircraft company is up to the task.

Boeing plans to standardize product lifecycle management software for all of its commercial and defense airplanes.

One standard PLM platform across most operations will let Boeing engineering, marketing, human resources, and other departments manage workloads and communicate about projects, said Dave Fennell, a Boeing vice president of information technology. He works with the company's PLM systems.

The market research firm Daratech of Cambridge, Mass., estimates that about 30,000 Boeing employees on the commercial-airplane side and even more employees on the military side will use the software.

Work on the company's Joint Direct Attack Munition aircraft is the first project slated for the new software. For that project, Boeing has already moved all product data from different legacy systems to Teamcenter PLM software from UGS of Plano, Texas, Fennell said. That's the application that will eventually be used across the entire company as part of the standardization project.

For their engineering design class at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, four mechanical engineering majors were assigned to devise a portable Braille writing device that required no electronic components and cost less than $50. In the process, they would learn how to design for their clients and to work with computer-aided design.

Typewriter-style or computer-based Braille writers typically cost much more than $50, said Marc Maurer, president of the Baltimore-based National Federation of the Blind, which sponsored the project.

The students came in well below that target price at the end of a two-semester project. Their Braille writer, if mass-produced, would cost about $10 each in an easy-to-assemble kit, said Emily Kumpel.

She worked on the project along with Peter Lillehoj, Mark MacLeod, and Penny Robinson.

For their design class, four Johns Hopkins engineering students designed this Braille writer, which operates mechanically and costs significantly less than traditional writers.

To keep assembly and maintenance costs low, the students' handheld writer works in a strictly mechanical fashion. Its six buttons can be depressed to produce any of the embossed patterns that correspond to a Braille letter, number, or punctuation mark. The device is used with a traditional Braille slate that features rows of rectangular openings, often called cells. When a piece of paper is inserted into the slate, the device can insert one Braille letter or number into each cell.

Normally, a blind person uses a stylus to poke up to six indentations into each cell, forming one bump at a time. The students' device uses metal pins to emboss up to six marks at once, which could speed up the writing process, Kumpel said.

MacLeod handled much of the computer-aided design work. He said that using CAD in such a hands-on manner helped him prepare for his future mechanical engineering career.

His teammates had to put themselves in the shoes of the device users, who wouldn't see the machine they'd be operating.

"We had to remember their disability," he said. "How do we solve the design problems with that in mind?"

You can imagine the reams of data generated on the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter project. Lockheed Martin is designing the F-35 to replace many defense aircraft, including the F-16 and the Harrier.

To find the best airframe, Lockheed Martin will test three airframes in different locations. That's why information management will be critical, said Robert Burt, director and chief structures engineer for F-35 structural development and integrity. The company purchased special software to track and organize the F-35's static and dynamic airframe test data, he added.

Lockheed Martin engineers brought in special software to organize myriad airframe test data for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Engineers will test three potential airframes for the project.

Static and durability testing for two short takeoff, vertical landing airframes will be performed at the Lockheed Martin Engineering Structural Test Facility in Fort Worth, Texas. Similar testing of two conventional takeoff and landing airframes and horizontal tail components for all three variants will be conducted at the BAE Systems Structural and Dynamic Test Facility in Brough, England.

The company's new software, ICE-flow Library and GlyphWorks, will track and manage the airframe test data, Burt said. The software is from nCode of Southfield, Mich.

When school started this year for Wayne State University engineering student Melissa LaBell, she fired up her laptop in class. Her professor not only encouraged laptop use, he required it.

LaBell had leased a fully loaded laptop, as required by the Detroit-based university, according to a story in The Detroit News.

LaBell, 19, is one of approximately 200 freshmen in the College of Engineering. All are required to use or lease laptops as part of the university's new mandatory program.

The laptops will cost Wayne State students $330 each semester over the next three years. Returning students may keep the computers over the summer with no additional fee.

"Computers are the required tool for engineers," Michele Grimm, Wayne State's associate dean for academic affairs, told the newspaper. "It's imperative for the students to have continual access to computers as they progress through their education."

The university started exploring the program three years ago, after noticing that the computers in the campus libraries were not meeting students' needs, Grimm said.

Robert Kakos, the director of Wayne State's Engineering Computer Center, said that the computers are customized to suit students' course loads.

e-Builder of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., has released e-Builder Professional, a document-management program for engineers.

Motive Systems of Tampere, Finland, has issued a new version of its document management tool, M-Files 3.0, with new workflow features.

Delcam of Birmingham, England, has introduced PowerMill Modeling, a data repair module for its PowerMill computer-aided manufacturing system. It allows users to correct all the common faults with CAD data sent for machining.

Stereolithography resin developer DSM Somos of Elgin, Ill., has announced a new effort to connect original equipment manufacturers with rapid prototyping service bureaus that provide desired Somos materials.

AutoForm Engineering GmbH, of Zurich, Switzerland, which makes software for the die-making and sheet metal-forming industries, released AutoForm version 4.1 for part and tool geometry.

CEI of Apex, N.C., has released EnSight 8.2, the latest version of the company's visualization software.

Tech Soft 3D of Oakland, Calif., which provides graphics components for the CAD and CAM industries, announced release 13 for its Hoops 3-D Application Framework.

Seemage Inc. of Waltham, Mass., is shipping version 3.2 of the Seemage platform for CAD viewing.

For CAD printing from a portable device, ThinPrint of Berlin has released Content Beamer for BlackBerry 2.5.

Right Hemisphere of Fremont, Calif., which makes graphic-management software, says that its PGM software can now import SketchUp models and export them to a wide range of 2-D, 3-D, and publishing formats.

Engineous Software of Cary, N.C., which makes integration, automation, and design optimization software, has released iSIGHT-FD version 2.0, which offers more design drivers to help users find better designs.

Z Corp. of Boston hasintroduced a handheld, self-positioning
3-D scanner that can digitize surfaces in real time.

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