So what IS planned obsolescence? It is basically designers and manufacturers planning and designing a product to have a fixed service life, after which a new product must be bought. Instead of making a product that will as long as technically possible, a company would be making a product that is the most economically beneficial in the long run.

Is planned obsolescence a get-out-of-jail-free card for the economy?

The first major case of planned obsolescence was in the early 20^th century with the light bulb industry. A group of the largest light bulb manufacturers was created with the sole purpose of regulating the expected lifetime of light bulbs. Before this light bulbs used to last more than 2500 hours and it was one of the main advertising highlights, but the lifetime was reduced to 1000 hours by this cartel. And that what they named themselves: The Phoebus Cartel. This reduction in average bulb lifetime resulted in people buying bulbs more often, and more hence money in the cartel’s pockets. They even fined member companies if samples from their production lines lasted too long!

Whilst this can be seen as a disease, it was also proposed as a cure, a cure for the Great Depression in the USA in the 1930s. Bernard London proposed the idea to kick start the economy, although it was never implemented.

More recently, Apple came under fire in the USA for the limited life of the iPod. They made it very hard for an iPod user to replace the battery, which meant that after 18 months of use, it was more worth it to buy the latest model rather than replace the battery.

As planned obsolescence might be economically beneficial, it has some environmental drawbacks. As products have shorter life-cycles, there are a larger number of products reaching their end-of-life and being thrown away. There has been a huge increase in disposed waste resulting from this. Obviously at the moment this is not a sustainable way of life, but we live in a consumer society and seem addicted to it. But can it be a cure for the recession that has not gone away completely? Or is it a disease that will cause countless problems for years to come?

For engineers and designers it can cause moral and ethical dilemmas. I, for one, have always been taught to design something to its full potential, and if I do not do that, am I falling below the standard of the engineering profession? Do you think engineering institutions have tackled or are tackling this issue properly?

The Thameslink Programme, as you may well already know, is a £6 billion upgrade/expansion of the existing Thameslink rail network. Current trains are being replaced with newer and longer carriages; in addition to greater capacity, these trains will service a greater range of stations to the north and south of London. Passengers on these trains will no longer need to change trains in London to get to where they need.

At first glance, the Thameslink Programme sounds like a godsend, especially to regular commuters. We’ve all seen the legendary photos of overcrowded trains in Japan and shuddered to think how it felt to be there… Read more…

Many of you reading this may be feeling the after effects of over-indulging in chocolate over the weekend – in fact you may still be over-indulging as this goes to post!  But have you ever wondered how all of those billions of chocolate eggs are manufactured?  Here’s how… Read more…

The first thing I’d like to say is that it would be great to see a lot of discussion using the blog’s comment system on these articles. I’m not expert on these topics and most articles tend to be drastically biased depending on who wrote them, so let’s hear from you guys. The real experts! Leave a comment!

James Cameron wins the race to the bottom of the Mariana Trench

If you’d been following the race between the three competing teams to be the first to bottom and back, James Cameron has won, taking the first footage from the deep!

I’m all for these feats of engineering, it’s a great way we can push our technology and showcase engineering to all on a global scale.

Tomorrows world: The Tacocopter and Human Bird Wings

2 weeks ago I was incredibly taken in by a series of 14 amazing videos where Jarno Smeets, a Dutch engineer, designed and built his own flapping bird wings. The next day I wasn’t so sure anymore and today I’ve found articles confirming he’s admitted to the hoax. In my defence Jamie from Mythbusters was convinced too! 

As an Engineer I thought I was immune to these types of hoax by being able dismiss them on technical grounds but Jarno suckered me in with some amazing CAD models and test videos of his invention. He claimed to have used 2 high power brushless motors to power-assist his flapping motion and for awhile I truely believed we’d achieved the required energy density to make such a mode of flight possible…

Maybe again in 25 years?

What’s next a drone helicopter that delivers Tacos right to your door? Link, I’m almost certain this is another fake, but the concept made me smile. In terms of tomorrows world technology, quadrocopters are definitely worth following:  complex formation flying, or playing their own music.

The War on Photovoltaics

It’s hotting up in Germany and soon it could all get a bit messy! Big, Traditional Energy Companies don’t like consumer level feed in Photovoltaics. For energy providers shackled by government regulation and tariffs they’re not profitable. Here’s why: Peak Power

Recently I heard that part of the backlash consisted of claims that new PV technology is so widely adopted in countries like Germany that it will destroy their grid. Residential switch gear can’t cope with the power at such a low level in the network. Is this really true though? Or are they just dragging their heels trying to cling onto safe, profitable fossil fuels.

We all know solar isn’t THE single answer to our problems but it was never going to be easy was it? Unless big energy companies get on board with the new market requirements of a green, non-fossil fuel based power network, they shouldn’t be able to make any money anymore. Companies will never be responsible unless it is profitable, so unfortunately they’re going to need a bit of consumer and governmental squeezing along the way.  I guess the trick is not squeezing so hard the bubble bursts.

Some amazing pictures and expedition write ups from Polar Discovery

I would thoroughly recommend reading the accounts of these expeditions, starting from here you’ll be told just what it takes to get a team of scientists to the poles, for them to actually carry out their experiments and then get them back again. Trust me, its hardcore!

What caught my eye was this picture of a fluorescent dye being used to track glacial melt water. When I first saw it I thought it was the beginning of the second coming or something. The Journal diaries with regards to this particular experiment start here

If you want more there are plenty of journal diaries of their expeditions available from the site’s index.

Welcome to our first official guest blog, written by Dr. Anna Coppel, IMechE Greater London Region SET for Sport Chair.

How often have you heard “isn’t that someone who wears overalls and fixes cars” as the response to the question “what does an engineer do?” When I hear this (and I can tell you it has been more often than I would care to share) it makes me a touch angry but determined nonetheless to tackle this common misconception. I’m not talking about challenging people who are our contemporaries, as frankly they should know better, I am talking about opening the minds of young people to the possibilities of becoming an engineer.

As I am not a politician (or a policy maker of any sort), but an engineer, the options are limited. However, with the help of organisations like the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, STEMNET and wonderful NGOs such as Portia people like you and I can go into schools and both inspire and educate young people about becoming engineers.

I have been lucky enough to be involved in a number of schools events. One event in particular seems to have caught young peoples’ imaginations and it might be something to do with the upcoming London 2012 Olympics. The event is called SET for Sport (SET is Science Engineering and Technology) and it aims to showcase the many and varied ways in which science and technology can interact with sport and how it has completely revolutionised both sports equipment and performance over the years in which London has hosted the Olympics (1908, 1948 and 2012).

Could you imagine Usain Bolt running sub 9.6 seconds without a set of spikes, starting blocks or access to top sports nutritionists, bio-mechanists and psychologists? Would Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendleton and the other GB cyclists be at the top of their sport without the assistance of aerodynamics specialists and materials engineers? Would Oscar Pistorius be able to walk, never mind compete with able-bodied athletes on the world stage, without biomedical engineers?

Bicycle technology has moved on immensely in the past 100 years.  Modern sporting competitions are as much about the technology as they are about the athletes.

The SET for Sport schools event is a full day of off-curriculum activities aimed at year 9s (13 and 14 year olds). The tasks set range from designing a tug of war shoe and a sport of the future; to debating the ethics of whether there should be a limit to the role of engineering in sport. Each year we have also had a former Olympian as a guest speaker to talk about how engineering and science has helped them in their careers.

The event is in its fourth year and in this, its concluding year, we hope to run it across as many regions in the UK as we can. To use the momentum and interest in sport that the 2012 Olympic games have generated to try and get more young people taking STEM subjects at A-level and beyond.

The demand for STEM qualified school leavers and graduates is expected to continue to increase in the UK. So it is important that when it comes to picking their A-Levels and degrees young people are aware of the massive variety of careers which are open to them in the field of science, engineering, technology and mathematics. It’s not about fixing cars in oil stained overalls, but instead it could be designing the next generation of running shoe or prosthetic limb.

If you would like more information, or would like to be involved in the next event please contact Dr. Anna Coppel (IMechE Young Members Panel London Region SET for Sport Chair and Arup).

Tribology is one of those funny things that pervades the everyday lives of absolutely everyone who lives anywhere in the world – and yet is almost unknown amongst the general public, and more worryingly amongst many business leaders and politicians as well.  Even a lot of engineers are surprisingly clueless about it!

That’s not to say people aren’t aware of the obvious physical effects of tribology, just that very few of the people who should do, actually realise just how important the understanding and correct application of tribology is.

Read more…

Have you ever seen a video of carbon nanotubes being drawn out and spun into fibres? It’s incredible to see these wispy fibres forming a twisted yarn that has a tensile strength of 63 GPa, but is nearly 6 times lighter than steel. They could be used to make paper thin batteries actually made on paper, cabling, improved solar cells and ultracapacitors, to name but a few applications. What’s better a SUPER capacitor or an ULTRA capacitor? Just sounds like American marketing to me…

It’s hard not to get overly excited when a new super material comes along, but very rarely do we discover the toxic or other unpleasant side effects before we use the material in just about every application we can think of.

Lead pipes, lead make up, lead paint and lead in petrol. For the last hundred years, we’ve kept our buildings fireproof as well as nice and toasty warm with asbestos insulation, and we’ve produced massive amounts of CFCs because they make good refrigerants and blowing agents for foam production.

You could forgive the earlier generations for making some of these mistakes, but in a testament to human ignorance and sheer bloody mindedness, it took about the same amount of time after we’d discovered these materials to be toxic, carcinogenic or destroying the Ozone layer, for us to finally stop using them. Although we’ve seen that just because the EU has banned a material outright, it doesn’t mean other countries can’t keep selling it to the third world! Aye Canada?

It’s definitely about time we were a little bit more careful, lest history repeat itself. The very definition of a nanomaterial is that it consists of particulates at the 1-100nm scale, definitely small enough to be drawn into the alveoli, the smallest part of your lungs or absorbed through your pores. What happens once they get there, we don’t really know. Nano materials have enormous surface area to volume ratios and interesting quantum effects. It’s not an easy problem to solve either: if the new material we are developing is at the forefront of our technology then it is more than possible its toxic effects are also well beyond our understanding.

But aren’t most of these materials confined to laboratories? This isn’t a public health risk. Well, firstly, that attitude sucks if you’re a laboratory worker, who in a lot of footage don’t appear to be wearing respirators, and secondly, nanomaterials are already in use all around us in sun creams, cosmetics, ultra-lightweight composite parts for bicycles, the latest sports racquets and golf clubs.

I don’t take great joy in being the party pooper, but on this one I’d like to throw my magical cautionary dust into the wind. Our latest super material could well be toxic and we don’t even know it. It has happened so many times before; it’s going to happen again unless we start being a bit more careful.

The current environmental crisis is the biggest opportunity that humanity ever has ever seen.  What, ‘opportunity?’ Yes, ‘opportunity’.  Within a decade we can end unemployment by putting the whole world to work implementing solutions to the crisis, and socially evolve as a species to boot.

This is especially true of ecological-creditor countries.  In Africa, ManufacturingChange.org is seeing a sharp rise in the number of manufacturing-driven social enterprises that are centred on appropriate-technology-based recycling.  Driven by chronic resource shortages, they’ve started down a path of seemingly recycling everything, into everything.

On the other hand, the Western ecological-debtor countries are (rightly) pouring their resources into specialised high-tech, predominantly solar-based, technology.  The race is on – do we have enough fossil-fuels to build our solar-infrastructure?  Perhaps.  Perhaps not.  It’s a close one.

I believe that the human species will win our collective solar-race – something which I think every engineer should passionately affirm.  Once over the finishing-line, we may well find that it all came down to the growth of these smaller recycling organisations in the ecological-creditor countries, saving and re-capturing the resources that were needed to drive the solar-revolution.

Do you agree?  Are we working together to overcome ecological debt?  Do leave your comment below.

Each Wednesday one member of the Developing Engineers team gets to select their five favourite engineering stories from around the internet. I’m going to point you to the new “BBC Future” website, introduce you to three of Scotland’s greatest engineers, show you how to steer a wheelchair with a tongue piercing, how an electric motor could help prevent helicopter crashes and point you to the soon to be new favourite weapon of teachers and parents everywhere.

The BBC’s new “Future” section

This week I stumbled on the “BBC – Future” website (UK surfers will need to click here) and have been very impressed by what I have seen so far. The stories are much longer and more in depth than those served up on the BBC News Science & Technology sections.

For reasons that aren’t clear, it’s apparently not accessible for UK surfers (I’m based overseas) directly but there’s nothing Google can’t help with…

Anyway, head on over there (UK surfers click here) and let us know what you think in the comments!

How Scottish Engineers changed the world

The Scotsman’s blog has a piece on three of Scotland’s greatest engineers, Telford, Fairbairn and Nasmyth and in particular their work in bridge construction and steel fabrication.

Most of us have heard of Thomas Telford, but Sir William Fairbairn and James Nasmyth may be new to some of you; head over to the Scotsman and find out what their contributions were to engineering.

Move over joysticks, here comes the tongue controller

Top Gear may have had a go at upgrading mobility scooters but their hand-steered systems are just so passé.

Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering revealed that they’ve been working on a system that allows a tongue stud combined with a headset and an iOS device

Just a word of advice, don’t try and get that annoying bit of food out of your teeth whilst navigating a built-up area…

Check out the “Tongue Drive” here.

No more whirly-splat

Not my headline but that of an article in the current edition of the Economist, which leapt out at me when I opened it at the weekend.

You may know that helicopters can “autorotate” when the engines fail but you may not know how difficult it is to transition into and out of autorotation. Get it wrong and you’ll get a very vivid insight into the hyphenated words in the Economist’s headline. The team at Eurocopter (part of EADS) think they can solve this with an electric motor.

Head on over to the Economist to have a look.

Echoed into submission

Anyone who regular works with colleagues scattered around the world will know the difficulty of trying to speak on a teleconference when you can hear your own voice on delay.

Well, two enterprising gentlemen have taken this annoyance and turned it into what they describe as the “SpeechJammer” and what the Daily Mail called “a mute button for people“. Kazutaka Kurihara of Japan’s Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University submitted a paper at the end of February outlining how they use a directional speaker and microphone to broadcast someone’s speech back at them, causing confusion and leading to the speaker giving up.

Their own video shows exactly what it does. I think the laser sight adds to the menace.

Right, that’s your lot for this week. Let us know what you think of the articles chosen in the comments to this post and check back next Wednesday for another round up of Engineering news from another member of the Developing Engineers team.

Don’t forget to follow Developing Engineers on Twitter (@DevEngBlog) where we’ll be sharing any interesting engineering related news stories with our followers throughout the week.

Nick

As a long-time Associate Member of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (AMIMechE), I recently decided it was time to drop the “A” and register for Chartered Engineer (CEng) status.  Having let my Monitored Professional Development Scheme (MPDS) lapse several years ago and changed jobs since, I checked out the options for us more mature candidates on the IMechE website…  and was shocked to discover that I’d  basically have to write “Me: The Essay” (2000 words) in order to become Chartered.

It’s called the Professional Review Report and it’s the long-standing process for demonstrating that you meet UK-SPEC competencies when you aren’t on a company-accredited scheme.  Wading through pages of industry- and role-specific examples, guidance notes and instructions, it seemed the essay itself would be the biggest challenge of my career, never mind developing new technology,  running manufacturing lines or leading a project team spread over three countries.

It was only after about 1500 words and a quick visit to my newly-appointed mentor that I became aware of the New Application Process.  The main difference with the New Way is that instead of an essay with UK-SPEC competencies in the margin, there is now only one form, and you fill in examples for each competency in a logical way.  For the benefit of all non-MPDS applicants, here is the link.

As I’m not the only one to have been caught unawares by this change, I wrote to the IMechE with some feedback, and they are reviewing the advice available on their website.  If in doubt, get in touch with them directly, and good luck to anyone going for Chartership.