Apologies if I did not see a similar thread.

Firstly: condolences to all affected.

Why would the failure cascade like that? Should it not have "fuses" built in?

Is it bad design? Normal? Simply the span dictated this design?

Just a curious "engineer".

According to an engineer named Hugh Leyton

I was browsing imgur this morning, and there was a Confession Bear on the front page claiming, "I'm an American, and I wish the U.S. would use the metric system." Now, this person is perfectly entitled to his or her own opinion, but what irked me was how many of the comments were "OMG I'm an engineer and unit conversions are the worst, why can't we just use (insert metric unit here) for everything??!?!"

I have one argument that justifies my title: different units are appropriate for different situations.

Coming from the AE world, nautical miles, and the associated units (knots, degrees) are exceptionally more useful than miles, kilometers, lightseconds, whatever to describe an aircraft's capabilities. Similarly, it is much more intuitive to describe Alpha Centuri as a little over 4 light years away than 4e13 kilometers - one is much more useful than the other.

What's nice about Imperial Units is how well they describe the human experience. Base12 units like the foot are easy to divide into integers on the fly, Fahrenheit offers greater resolution for temperature at conditions typical of Earth than Celsius (and I don't see anyone advocating for Kelvin, the temperature you'd actually use in most engineering applications I can think of), gallons are easily broken down into integers of subordinate units.

I'm sure every discipline has its own examples, but I like to think that part of our role as engineers is to do the legwork on the back-end in whatever system is appropriate, but to deliver products that are easily understood by our customers. If that means you've got a little math to make sure your customer knows his 350 horsepower truck with 460 pound-feet of torque can tow a 2 ton boat at 62 miles per hour, well, that's earning your engineer's salary.

/rant

Hi everyone,

I wanted to share a recent project I worked on that demonstrates how using systems in different manners than industry standards can significantly reduce costs. You can refer to my project to understand what I’m talking about. Typically, building a frame for a robust 2-axis motion system costs around $8,000 to $10,000, but I managed to create one for just $800 to $1,000. 

The Traditional Approach

Usually, the main structural frames for systems like this are cast, coming as one large piece. This method is very expensive to manufacture, post-process, and even design.

My Approach

To solve this issue, I sought the cheapest manufacturing processes for steel available to me, which turned out to be 2D CNC of steel, either using water jet or plasma cutting. Here’s a breakdown of my method:

• 2D CNC Steel Plates: I used 2D CNC steel plates to create the main frame. This process is much cheaper than casting large pieces.

• Coupling Plates with Bolts: By cutting multiple shapes from steel plates and coupling them with bolts, I was able to construct a 3D frame.

• Custom Angle Brackets: I designed custom 90-degree brackets to couple the horizontal assembly to another set of 2D steel plates in the vertical direction. This mimicked a 3D casted steel frame.

Benefits

This method resulted in a frame that was as robust, accurate, and high-performing as those made by conventional means but at a fraction of the cost. It was multiple folds cheaper and reliable enough for the intended application.

Further Discussion & Application

This approach can be refined further. Imagine a specific modeler that imports a 3D model of the desired frame and iterates using Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to build an assembly with 2D plate slices. The modeler would determine the shapes, thicknesses, and coupling methods to be used. We are currently working on such a system/modeler.

Hope I'm not beating a dead horse or asking this for the 200th time this month...

A few weeks ago one of our interns at work wrote a small guide for some of our techs to drill a hole. (A bit more complex than that but thats the jist.) The guide was pretty fat, and was focused on avoiding work hardening of the drilled surface - all fair except that didnt seem like it would be an issue given the material and requirements. It turns out he had used ChatGPT to inform some of his technique, which gave him wrong temperatures. (Although also credit where due - work hardening wasn't something I had considered at all.)

Today I asked another engineer how many watts it would take to draw near vacuum on a small chamber - mostly a BS question - but his response was to ask ChatGPT... suggestion seemed serious.

By all accounts I'm a very average engineer in skill and work ethic... But it seems bonkers af to use ChatGPT for actual work.

Have a feeling its use will become fairly prolific at some point especially if its useful. Must be akin to people using Google a decade plus ago versus a book or flipping thru ASME...

What is the general consensus on this? Anyone here lean on ChatGPT for work pretty regularly?

Sorry that this is off-topic, but it was not said explicitly enough in the top comments of The 6% (Occupy the Lab).

It is nice if you work hard, and like to do your job, and do it well. But not everyone is able to go from high-school too working life in a straight line, and people deserve better than to have to slave away, while the wealth of the nation gets stashed away somewhere else. Besides, other people may be more on the sharp end of the economic crisis.

SmokeyDBear said:

Convincing engineers that they're well paid for what they actually do is one of the most impressive accomplishments of business people.

But it isn't that they needed much convincing. It is the mentality of the engineer that he is already paid enough. It is the mentality of some business people to try grab everything he can, a mentality which should be fought, for it can destroy our societies.

Basically the people implementing the solutions would inform the people designing them.

So imagine our highschools had a more vocational focus again.

I say at 16 a person should be allowed to train to become an electrician. After 4 years, they will become a journeyman. They can continue that career path, or they could now train to become a technologist. So on and so forth.

Your thoughts.

http://www.macleans.ca/education/university/why-dont-future-engineers-learn-real-world-skills-in-school/

So I saw an ad today advertising the powershare feature of this phone. From my experiences with rapid charging and rechargable batteries in general, I predict that in a year, there will be a pr headache for Samsung for accelerated battery depletion....

Thoughts?