Yeah, I figured you had your tongue in your cheek.
I don't know what it is, but I think that they still see a technical career as the most secure pathway to success for their kids. Language, race, and ethnicity matter little; it's pretty much a meritocratic pathway for smart kids.
My son graduated from a school with lots of social connections (80% are in fraternities and sororities) and loads of social pathways to Wall Street and to Washington lobbies. Few foreign students attended.
You can really see it at Princeton, a feeder school for Wall Street, corporate law, and politics that also has lots of foreign students. The foreign kids are the ones who populate the engineering and science departments.
My son is just finishing a master's program in mathematics at Georgetown. It has some character in common with Princeton. In one of his first math classes, he was only one of two students whose native language wasn't some variety of Chinese. The two American-born kids also were the only ones in that class who work full-time in addition to being grad students. The Chinese kids were all on some kind of financial support from home.
Yeah. I saw some numbers on it last year, which I forget, but I should go looking for some quantitative measures of how much reshoring is going on.
Harry Moser of the Reshoring Initiative
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...is pretty accessible and probably could steer me to the numbers. He's an old source of mine for articles and we used to be competitors when he was at Agie. I'll have to give him a call sometime soon.
Having engineering and manufacturing separated by great distances can definitely be problematic, and then there are language barriers and culture differences that effect manufacturing methods and product quality. I recently discovered an example of remote manufacturing that appears to be failing miserably.
Epiphone guitars were previously made domestically.. then they were made in Japan alongside quality Japanese instruments, then in Korea, and more recently China. The Korean models are considered to be much better quality than the Chinese models, but not quite as good as the Japanese models.
From what I could see taking place at the Epiphone forum, the Chinese models are being returned by consumers in fairly large numbers for more-than-obvious defects. Dealers are required to make significant investments in Epiphone inventory to become/remain dealers. I dunno what the markup is on these instruments, but I would guess that high numbers of returns would cut fairly deeply into dealers' profits.
It appears that the primary quota in Chinese export consumer manufacturing is tonnage.. fill the containers so the ship can leave, repeat.
Epiphone has another problem with anticipating dates of availability for new product roll-outs.. delays of 6 months seem to be fairly common, some are longer. I read a number of scenarios that went like this.. a consumer orders a new model for the availability date (let's say January) in December, then in June or August they receive a defective product and have to decide whether to return it or keep it. The dealer might refuse a return, or attempt to repair defective features, or offer a discount.
I own some examples of these products where something as predictable as a CNC cutting operation is so messed up that it appears to have been done by a poor-sighted operator and a hand router. The majority of the instrument fabrication operations are CNC (cutting/shaping, painting/finishing etc) and fixture based (fitting, alignment, gluing etc) and some of the defects are difficult to understand.
I have the same difficulty understanding how threads in tapped holes are frequently oversize in many Chinese products such as Harbor Freight-grade, and even supposedly better grade products.
Some reports say the economic structure in China is changing, and fairly large numbers of manufacturing facilities have failed and/or stopped operations. I've even seen a couple reports that claim that generally, workers are becoming more demanding and are beginning to have greater expectations than just working for 'slave' wages.
Did the driver survive? If so, is the PTSD treatable?
And I bet they now test them with the airflow at various angles, and not necessarily laminar. I'm sure they had tried the car running straight ahead and no problem.
Such stories are common when a new type of airplane is flown for the first time, always by a test pilot.
I don't doubt that ground effects are a problem to model.
As for long-standing problems in modeling, turbulence is not well understood. And it's that the physics of turbulence that isn't understood, so nobody knows what to tell the computers to do.
CFD has improved in many ways over the last 14 years, better algorithms for sure, but more importantly better computers. By Moores Law, the performance increase will be 2^(14*12/18)= 645 to one.
My son builds prototypes for his work now , industrial equipment, mostly cleaning machines etc. Looks like a car only its small volume specialty stuff.
Their engineering department produces a finished machine in cyberspace. His group then builds one. There are A LOT of changes, egineering design still can't anticipate the many little production problems.
The first skin is bump bent and tacked together. then engineering re works the whole thing. Only then is produciton tooling buiilt.
are the auto companies way ahead on this design method?
Nobody was hurt. It was the *third* time one of the M-B CLRs went airborne over that weekend at LeMans, two of them resulting in backflips. Mercedes-Benz said they made some aerodynamic miscalculations.
It left a bad taste all around. I suppose you know about the M-B 300 SLR that went airborne at LeMans in 1955 and left 83 spectators dead, the most famous racing disaster in history. Mercedes Benz pulled out of racing for close to 40 years after that one. They seem to have aerodynamics troubles from time to time.
Here's the whole story. The car never got much testing time:
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Well, that's encouraging. The Cd's of cars have come down remarkably, and no doubt the computer modelling has been a major part of it.
I'm guessing that Mercedes didn't realize that they needed a real aerodynamicist, and that even the best of car guys is not good enough at this.
War story. My father was an aeronautical engineer. His last job before retirement was at Stone and Webster, and Architect-Engineer firm busily building nuclear power plants. You may ask what use an AE firm could make of an aeronautical engineer. S&W was baffled. They were flunking the check-valve tests on a brand new nuclear powerplant. In these tests, a gate valve is opened, allowing superheated steam that normally feeds the turbines to instead escape to the air.
The pipe in question is three or four feet in diameter, and is carrying steam at high pressure and almost a red heat. A large check valve in the pipe is supposed to detect that the steam is flowing too fast and close, protecting the nuclear steam generator from boiling dry.
The check valve is supposed to survive ten such test events. Instead, after two or three tests, the internal parts of the check valve crumbled and were spat out of the system and into the air. I was never at such a test, but I have to believe that it sounded like the world had ended.
S&W did and redid, checked and rechecked, all the calculation. No problem found. But problem not solved.
Anyway, someone at S&W realized that they needed a new approach. All the existing design methods are effectively static, talking of pounds of steam per hour and the like. So they found someone who knew the next level of fluid-mechanical theory and engineering.
It worked.
What S&W had built was the steam equivalent of a water hammer. When the gate valve was opened, the steam flowed at hundreds of miles per hour, which triggered the swinging door in the check valve to start swinging closed. The door was promptly grabbed by the flow and slammed closed. With an unforgettable bang.
The speed of the steam will have become supersonic at the choke point, where ever that was in the system.
But the story doesn't stop. That steam was moving hundreds of miles per hour, and it cannot just stop, so it piled up against the closed door until the back pressure was sufficient to stop the flow. But still the story doesn't stop. This pile of high pressure steam sent a steam pulse back towards the steam generator. When the high pressure pulse enters the steam generator, it's in a far larger container than the pipe diameter, and something tricky happens - a low (probably negative) pressure pulse is reflected back to the check valve. When it reaches the check valve, the low pressure lifts the swinging door off the seat, and flow resumes. But the nuclear steam generator will not be ignored, and the door soon slams shut again. And so on.
Each test caused the swinging door to slam into the seat multiple times, at least four or five time. So it wore out too soon.
The solution was to equip the check valve door with a glorified screen door closer.
Well, partly. The rule is that people keep adding geegaws until the system becomes too slow. More hardware speed leads to more geegaws, not better performance as seen by users.
I don't know if was planned, but off-shore manufacturing and import by our "domestic" companies sets up one of the all time great tax evasion and possible fraud schemes called "transfer pricing."
The goods are made to U.S. design and sold for cheap to a trading company located in a tax haven. The goods are then sold at full price to the U.S. parent company for import and distribution, and the profits accumulate tax free (and unregulated/unaudited) in the tax haven. This is how many U.S. corporations pay little or no income tax despite a nominal 35% rate, and are able to accumulate massive unvouchered "slush funds."
It now takes Windows (I'm still using 7) half a gig of hard disk and memory just to get it up and running. Programming efficiency sure has taken a (s)hit. Methinks the "reusable code" mantra has taken over programming like "diversity" and "political correctness" have taken over our gov't, to its ruination.
Good grief. Yes, that is quite a story. It sounds like some of those phenomena are things that no one, not even most engineers, would be able to anticipate.
With a background in aerodynamics, you'd probably find the development of enclosed-wheel race cars (sports cars, and then fully enclosed GTs) pretty interesting. It's changed radically in several steps since the mid-1950s.
First, there was the problem that those slick sports cars, like the Jag D-type, turned out to be pretty good airplane wings. At speeds over 170 mph, the tail end would lift and the car would fishtail. They just touched 200 at Le Mans in 1955, and this was their solution:
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The vertical fin helped a bit but it wasn't enough. They built race-car drivers differently in those days. Today, any driver would bring it in and park it as soon as the rear end got loose.
The Italians realized that they had to get some downforce at the rear, and to reduce the vortexes that were creating drag, so they did this:
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(the little lip spoiler at the rear)
Then came the American winged Chaparral:
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...and all hell broke loose. Today's race cars have atrocious Cd's and can't begin to approach the speed/horsepower ratios cars had from the mid-'50s through the mid-'60s. It's all about downforce now, and cornering force has gone from under 1G to over 4G for Formula 1 cars.
That's where the action is. The aerodynamics are very subtle and very confusing. But for people who know what they're looking at, it's probably very interesting. For me, it's mostly confusing.
Electrical transmission lines experience a similar problem, with their unavoidable inductance and capacitance giving the effect of inertia. It's a very serious concern in high-speed computer design. The ignition spark coil is similar to a water hammer.
In radio a mismatched antenna load that reflects energy back to the transmitter raises the SWR and the voltage (=pressure) in the feed line.
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There's an advantage in knowing something of several branches of engineering since what is esoteric in one field may be commonplace in another.
Duh. I would be surprised if it were not so. Does no one realise that the re are many more non-US-born people than there are US born people? Why wou ld anyone think that there would be more US born people at the top levels?
It used to be that it was more difficult for non US born people to come to the US for an education. But jet planes make it a lot easier than when sai ling ships were the only way to cross oceans.
What is really stupid is that we require most of the non US born graduates to return to their original country where they then compete with those in t he US.
Businesses are created to make money. They are not created to innovate. So we should have a laissez faire attitude to making money regardless of ho w the money is made and how much is made. The opposite of laissez faire is having the government plan and control. That worked real well in the USSR .
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