mechanical engineering design 2004

editorial

Soul of a Designer

by John G. Falcioni, Editor-In-Chief

Deciding on a suitable replacement for the fallen World Trade Center in New York City has not been easy, nor has agreeing on the design for a memorial at Ground Zero.

Just as it was when Renaissance designers—a mixed breed of engineers, architects, builders, and artists—argued over the look of ornate ceilings on 15th-century churches, designers have differed on how best to memorialize the death and destruction of Sept. 11, 2001.

Product development teams, even virtual ones whose remote locations are connected by way of the Internet, understand that the ultimate prize of each team is the creation of a successful design. Yet the process of designing remains, in many ways, subjective.

While we've come far in developing advanced design tools over the centuries, the soul of the designer remains unchanged.

The Past — And Future by Gayle Ehrenman, Supplement Editor

The past is never dead. it's not even past." So said William Faulkner, and nowhere is this more true than in the field of engineering design. By some accounts, modern mechanical design principles date back to Renaissance Florence, and Filippo Brunelleschi's method of designing and building the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore. As Associate Editor Jean Thilmany points out, the six-step design process used by Brunelleschi remained the norm for roughly 500 years. And then came computer-aided design—which changed the way mechanical engineers did their jobs. CAD and other varieties of computer technology have enabled design engineers to make major changes in how they work. The newest concepts are collaboration and virtual engineering teams. A military-funded group, the Virtual Parts Engineering Research Initiative, is collaborating to build a framework, tools, and technologies for collaboration in reverse engineering legacy parts. The team is spread out across the United States, with each group tackling a part of the design engineering process—something that is possible only because of the use of computers. Patricio Mendez, Stuart Brown, and Thomas Eagar of Exponent Inc. and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology admit that they couldn't have begun to describe the behavior of molten metal in high-speed welds without the use of computers. Using a technique they developed, called Order of Magnitude Scaling, they were able to identify critical factors that limit welding speed. Order of Magnitude Scaling attempts to reproduce, in a computer, the thinking processes of veteran engineers. Sometimes, the best way to reinvent a product is to start with the old design—and figure out a way to make it better. A European engineering enterprise has done just that with the heart-lung machine, the lifeline of open-heart surgery. Computer simulations helped Dideco SpA create a smaller, unified heart-lung bypass device that eliminates some of the most serious side effects of open-heart surgery. The modern era of engineering design may have begun just 50 years ago, but its future is unlimited.

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