A systemic overview of the evolution of electrical engineering: aSouth African perspective

The paper uses the systems approach to analyse how the discipline of electrical engineering has evolved over the years and to ascertain whether the custodians of the discipline have kept pace with this evolution. Particular attention is given to the knowledge system, the societal system, the education system, the world of work and the learned societies. The paper focuses on understanding the various dynamics among the systems so that strategic attention can be given to the relationships between subsystems, rather than specific solutions     

Precision engineering: an evolutionary perspective

Precision engineering is a relatively new name for a technology with roots going back over a thousand years; those roots span astronomy, metrology, fundamental standards, manufacturing and money-making (literally). Throughout that history, precision engineers have created links across disparate disciplines to generate innovative responses to society's needs and wants. This review combines historical and technological perspectives to illuminate precision engineering's current character and directions. It first provides us a working definition of precision engineering and then reviews the subject's roots. Examples will be given showing the contributions of the technology to society, while simultaneously showing the creative tension between the technological convergence that spurs new directions and the vertical disintegration that optimizes manufacturing economics.     

Hurricane Katrina: an environmental perspective

On 29 August 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast of the USA to become one of the worst natural disasters in the country's history. The forecasts and official warnings of the event issued by the US National Hurricane Center up to 60 h ahead were excellent and largely based on an 'ensemble' of model and statistical guidance. The Met Office Global Model is highlighted as one of the best performers for Hurricane Katrina. The active 2005 Atlantic hurricane season has fuelled the debate on the impact of climate change on tropical cyclones. Some recent publications have suggested that this impact is already apparent, while others are more cautious. Inconsistencies remain among many of the theoretical, modelling and observational studies. Despite the excellent warnings, there was a tragic loss of life as a result of Hurricane Katrina which has led to political questions concerning complex socio-economic issues, the state of flood defences and how to coordinate the reaction to and mitigate the impact of such monumental natural hazards.     

Patent information: an historical perspective

An historical survey of one specific technical field, as illustrated in patent disclosures, is presented. The field is umbrellas, parasols and walking sticks, from the first British patent of 1780 up to the present day, using classified abridgements in bound volumes of hard copy until the mid 1970s and online databases thereafter. More detailed analyses of the last 20 years are provided. Unlike many recent rapidly developing fields, this field has changed relatively little over two centuries; annual inputs are comparable since the middle 1800s, while many similar solutions to recurrent problems resurface periodically. Nevertheless, discernible commercially and technically significant improvements occur throughout this period, as well as many short-lived tangential developments. Some reasons for this pattern are suggested.     

The fascinating world of the Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert equation: an overview

The Landau-Lifshitz-Gilbert (LLG) equation is a fascinating nonlinear evolution equation both from mathematical and physical points of view. It is related to the dynamics of several important physical systems such as ferromagnets, vortex filaments, moving space curves, etc. and has intimate connections with many of the well-known integrable soliton equations, including nonlinear Schr?dinger and sine-Gordon equations. It can admit very many dynamical structures including spin waves, elliptic function waves, solitons, dromions, vortices, spatio-temporal patterns, chaos, etc. depending on the physical and spin dimensions and the nature of interactions. An exciting recent development is that the spin torque effect in nanoferromagnets is described by a generalization of the LLG equation that forms a basic dynamical equation in the field of spintronics. This article will briefly review these developments as a tribute to Robin Bullough who was a great admirer of the LLG equation.     

Towards an interconnected world

正Not long before,the 2016 ISO General Assembly in Beijing marked a great success of international standardization calling for improved global connectivity.The event was believed to be the most influential ever with 160+ISO members and nearly 20 international organizations in attendance,deliberating on the present as well as the future of standards.Apart from the agenda and election of the new ISO leadership,the participants were especially im-     

A rescuer’s perspective on the world trade center disaster recovery

The World Trade Center (WTC) attack presented a terrifying but unique challenge to every American who observed or experienced that day. Everyone wanted to help in some way, but no one knew what to contribute that would be of value. The enormity of the disaster was beyond comprehension, and the feeling of most was “what can anyone contribute?”While touching very briefly on what happened at the WTC, this article deals primarily with the human aspects of the disaster. Many people tried to do “something” to assist, although all felt inadequate to the task. The human interest stories are truly a positive side of Americans simply doing what they could to help. Virtually everyone we encountered did not want any credit for what they contributed, even when their contributions were enormous in the eyes of others. This article does not even attempt to cover a significant portion of the contributions because no one could from a single vantage point, but it does discuss a few of the many contributions. Figure 1 (above) shows the overall WTC view.     

Trajectory control in the world coordinate system by an adaptive forecasting algorithm

A new approach to trajectory control of an industrial robot is proposed which aims to reduce the error in the trajectory, under the assumption that the position of the hand is known or can be measured in Cartesian space. An on-line system identification technique, referred to as the adaptive linear modelling technique, and a forecasting algorithm to generate corrective commands were used. A laser measurement system with a laser source and a photodetector was developed to detect the error between the actual and desired trajectories in Cartesian space. By implementing the proposed methods a 70% improvement in controlling the trajectory error was achieved.     

Engineering change: an overview and perspective on the literature

Engineering change has grown steadily in prominence both as an important issue for industry and as an active academic research area. This paper provides a categorised overview and perspective on the published academic literature on engineering change. The aim is to give new researchers an understanding of the field’s breadth and depth, as well as pointers towards additional information, and established researchers a non-dogmatic summary perspective on the work accomplished in this area. Change is defined as an alteration made to parts, drawings or software that have already been released during the product design process and life cycle, regardless of the scale or the type of the change. A change may encompass any modification to the form, fit and/or function of the product as a whole or in part, and may alter the interactions and dependencies of the constituent elements of the product. Key aspects of the engineering change process are highlighted along with the tools and methods that are available to support the process. The nature of products (in terms of complexity, architecture and degree of innovation) and how that affects engineering change are covered. Important related areas such as organisational structure and employee attitudes are also highlighted. The paper concludes by discussing different strategies that have been proposed to cope with engineering change in today’s manufacturing environment.     

Handling design perceptions: an axiomatic design perspective

This study develops a method for determining optimal design embodiments under the following assumptions: (1) the design approach involves the axiomatic design theory and (2) the design-relevant information refers to a designer’s intuition, expressible as f-granular information. The optimal design embodiments are then obtained by determining such optimal set of crisp points having definiteness positions close to each other. Here, a crisp point means a value of one of the parameters needed to specify the design. The definiteness position of a crisp point depends on two factors: (1) how much a designer knows about this point, and (2) how desirable it is to design the actual product. The usefulness of the proposed method is demonstrated by an example that involves both weight and dimension measures. As axiomatic-design-theoretic practices move further into the age of design automation, various machine intelligence techniques capable of computing qualitative information (f-granular information) rather than numbers (numerical or semi-numerical information) will be needed. This study is intended to further such investigations.

The Teaching Company Scheme: an academic perspective

The Teaching Company Scheme is one of the most successful initiatives for the promotion of academic-industrial collaboration in the UK, yet is the least well known. The benefits to participants are many but experience has shown that they do not always arise automatically. This paper attempts to give participants sufficient insight into the Scheme to minimise the risk of the benefits not being achieved     

Analysing the theoretical roots of technology emergence: an evolutionary perspective

Scientometrics - There has been much research concerning emergence in technology, ever since knowledge has been accepted as a prime engine of economic growth. However, even though there are a...     

Electrochemical development of hydrogen silsesquioxane by applying an electrical potential

We present a new method for developing hydrogen silsesquioxane (HSQ) by using electrical potentials and deionized water. Nested-L test structures with a pitch as small as 9 nm were developed using this electrochemical technique in saline solution without adding hydroxyl ions. Furthermore, we showed that high-resolution structures can be electrochemically developed in deionized water alone. Electrochemical development is controlled by the applied voltage and may overcome several of the limitations discussed for alkaline developers, such as poor hydroxyl anion diffusion and charge repulsion effects in small trenches.     

Modeling brain electrical activity by an image-based boundary element method

Electroencephalography (EEG) source localization of brain activity is of high diagnostic value. This work aims to improve the low-spatial-resolution scalp EEG measurement through noninvasive numerical procedures. An image-based boundary element method (BEM) is developed to reconstruct cortical brain potential distribution from the scalp input. The developed BEM circumvents a practical challenge of linking scan images to model-based computation by translating the scan surface tessellation directly into mesh discretization for the BEM. Related issues, such as the numerical regularization of the ill-posed inverse problem, which are crucial to achieving reliable solutions, are discussed. The numerical studies show that the developed BEM can effectively handle the potential reconstruction on a detailed brain surface from blurry scalp potential input, and may become a promising tool to aid clinical diagnosis of brain-related problems.     

Turbulent Flow Around an Oscillating Body in Superfluid Helium: Dissipation Characteristics of the Nonlinear Regime

By examining the resonance curves of an oscillator submerged in superfluid liquid helium, it is found that their shape is affected by two distinct dissipation regimes when the amplitude is large enough to generate turbulence in the liquid. In a resonance curve, the central part close to resonance, may be in a turbulent regime, but the response is of much lower amplitude away from the resonance frequency, so that the oscillation can still be in the linear regime for frequencies not exactly at resonance. This introduces an ambiguity in estimating the inverse quality factor Q ^?1 of the oscillator. By analyzing experimental data we consider a way of matching the two ways of estimating Q ^?1 and use the information to evaluate the frictional force as a function of velocity in a silicon paddle oscillator generating turbulence in the superfluid.