May 15 2008 1:06PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

 

It’s a small world on airplanes flying between technology coasts. This time on the San Francisco to Boston run, I cornered Udi Meirav, CEO of Luminus, which is doing great things with LED lighting. The small world part is that two years ago, I wrote about Luminus’ Phlatlight technology just as it was entering the projection TV market. Compared to TVs using mercury arc lamps, Phlatlight LEDs produce a superior picture, last much longer and are kinder to the environment given they don’t contain mercury. Luminus Phlatlight LEDs can be found in the ...Read More

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May 5 2008 9:37AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Design News Editor-in-Chief John Dodge and Web Editor Regina Lynch will spend the day tomorrow with General Motors and one of its Chevy Equinox hydrogen fuel cell test vehicles. One of the most exciting aspects will be fueling the vehicle at a Shell Hydrogen facility in White Plains, NY (we pick the car up at GM's Training Center in nearby Ardsley).

I blogged last week about the fact hydrogen still comes from fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas. And indeed, it does, but what makes this Shell refueling station (actually located in a DPW) is the hydrogen is made onsite from water and electricity, a...Read More

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May 1 2008 7:43AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |

Next week, I will spend a few hours test driving one of a hundred experiemental GM Chevy Equinox powered by hydrogen fuel cells. These vehicles promise zero emissions are represent one of several alternatives to gasoline. The problem, as an MIT professor friend of mine pointed out recently, is that the pure diatomic hydrogen  to power fuel cells either comes from fossil fuels like natural gas or coal and requires significant energy in the refining process. Indeed, where is all this pure hydrogen going to come from? And what will it cost? The Dept. ...Read More

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Apr 28 2008 9:24AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |

Styrofoam has been with us for 67 years and it'll probably be here well after humans have been driven from the planet.

Styrofoam, developed by Dow Chemical in 1941, is a scourge. I realized that not after my employer rightfully banned Styrofoam coffee cups a couple of years ago, but after I picked trash this weekend at 60 acres of conservation property near my home. The tick-infested area is bordered  by a big bend in the Merrimack River and it catches all manner of trash coming down stream, almost all of it plastic - bottles, bottle caps, recycling bins from towns upstream, tampons, needles, condoms, pens, wrappers, combs, balls, toys, and many types of plastic twist-off seals. There was very little metal, save a transmission or two. 

But th...Read More

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Apr 24 2008 9:31AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (4) |

A fact buried deep in Bosch Rexroth Corp. CEO Berend Bracht's presentation about the worldwide outlook for 2008 blew me away. Canada has lost 400,000 manufacturing jobs during the past five years. Think about it: At barely over 33 million, Canada's population is about one tenth that of the U.S. Proportionately those jobs have a much bigger than what's happening in a much more dynamic U.S. economy. That said, when you you lose your job, you don't much care where you are.

Indeed, a report just out from Toronto-Dominion Bank says "tens of thousands" in manufacturing are being lost to stiff competition and the U.S. recession. The report says 130,000 Canadian manufacturing jobs disappeared in 2007 alone. Especially hard hit are the provinces of Queb...Read More

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Apr 24 2008 8:36AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Butterflies taste with their feet. A duck's quack inexpliquably doesn't echo. Only one in two billion people will live to be 116 or older. These are "Fun Facts" on Bosch Rexorth's fun and humorous Creative Diversions web pages for engineers. My favorite are its Top Ten  lists especially Top Ten Reasons to Date an Engineer and Ten Top Reasons Not to Date an Engineer. It has some good videos in its archive "...Read More

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Apr 23 2008 7:36AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Bosch-Rexroth Corp. CEO and President Berend Bracht announced yesterday that the company would invest $247 million in a new plant in Germany to build large gearing systems for wind farms. In an interview yesterday, I asked him why wind turbines have not taken off in the U.S. as they have in Germany. The reason, he suggested without actually saying so, lies squarely at the feet of Congress and the White House, which both have failed to act. The wind was the back of the industry "seven or eight years ago" but then entered the doldrums, according to Bracht.

Last year, U.S wind turbine electricity output grew 45% after years of stagnation relative to leaders like Germany, acco...Read More

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Apr 14 2008 8:31AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

You can tell there's a lot of green hype swirling through the airwaves. When oil and large industrial companies start billing themselves as green, it's time to a hard look at what's green and what isn't. BP doesn't stand for British Petroleum anymore. It means "Beyond Petroleum." A flower is its new emblem. Ahh, I see. GE, one of the worst polluters in American industrial history, has Ecomagination. And a snowball will freeze in hell when Exxon Mobil says it's green.

The marketing of green is over us like low-hanging nuclear cloud. New green labels are popping up like spring flowers. Mercedes has its BLUETEC clean diesel technology. MIT renewables experts were calling it "Clean Tech" at a conference over the weekend. Sounds like ...Read More

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Apr 10 2008 9:00AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (6) |

SeattlePI columnist Bill Virgin writes a great column this morning on Boeing executives losing credibility over the third delay in the 787 Dreamliner's roll-out. He lays some blame on the  move of Boeing's corporate HQ from Seattle to Chicago. He quotes a source who asked:  "Did the guy who knows how to make airplanes move to Chicago or D.C.? Or did Boeing forget how to make airplanes, sort of like how Starbucks seemingly forgot how to make coffee?" Sounds like a former Boeing engineer to me. Slanted to the local view and sympathetic to Boeing's unions that would love to see the global production plan scrapped, the column still is a good read. The only thing he omi...Read More

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Apr 7 2008 2:06PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

I have wrestled with quick connect hydraulic couplers on my tractor for years. Residual pressure left in the lines on my loader makes it impossible to re-connect and difficult to disconnect. So when I got some samples of Parker Hannifin's Universal Push-to-Connect assembly, I thought maybe this was an answer to my wrestling with messy and stubborn couplers.

Alas, Parker Hannifin's Tube Fittings Division (TFD) in Columbus developed a new hydraulic nut which promises to simplify connecting in high v...Read More

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Apr 7 2008 11:17AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (2) |

Now here's some horrifying pictures of a badly abused jet engine (see photos). Word is that an unspecified Chinese Airline was fine about flying a four-engine jet on three engines until the German authorities grounded the craft in Frankfurt am Main airport. Apparently, the engine maintainer back in China had affixed seat belts to the fans to prevent a wind-milling effect. The fan blades, as the photos show, are severely damaged. Word is the other three engines had to be replaced before the plane was allowed to fly again. It’s a hard story to corroborate and after receiving it via e-mail, I found the story along with the chilling photos on an ...Read More

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Mar 31 2008 11:33AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

They're called social utilities. Facebook and Myspace are the best known. My college-age kids have been on Facebook for years and I opened an account a couple of months ago. Ain't I cool!?

The Facebook Fact Book says precious little about Facebook: Founded in 2004,  Facebook has 67 million users who visited their account at least once within the last month. It is the "second-most trafficked PHP" installation in the world. P...Read More

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Mar 28 2008 3:49PM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

Do you have days when nothing works? I had one today and am totally sour on computers and all the crap you attach to them that doesn't work.

The first problem occurred when I wanted to edit a short video. Neither Pinnacle Studio 11, my main video editing tool, nor Movie Maker in Windows XP would work. They crashed every time I tried to Firewire video off my  camcorder. And this is after I upgraded my video card and added two GB of memory specifically so I could us these tools! No wonder everyone says video editing should be done on a Mac. The PC and MS Windows are neither powerful nor stabl...Read More

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Mar 27 2008 11:22AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (7) |

Tanker Wars have ripped a page right out of the Clinton Obama nastiness playbook. And they are getting ugly.

Boeing has launched a newspaper ad campaign claiming that the Air Force's selection of Northrup Grumman/EADS to build the new generation refueling tanker is unfair. Boeing says it was cheated on cost, risk, past performance, mission capability and  size requirement. The summary reads as follows:

"The bottom line is that the selection process for the KC-X was flawed by countless irregularities.
In the evaluation, selection criteria were misapplied, the RFP was disregarded and the requirements
of the Federal Acquisition Regulation were not adhered to—resulting in the selection of a much
larger, more vulnerable, less capable and ul...Read More

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Mar 26 2008 10:09AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |

As Doug Smock mentions in a recent post, we paid a visit to Sabic Innovative Plastics’ R&D facility in Pittsfield, Mass. The 96,000 square foot facility is known as the Polymer Processing Development Center (PPDC) and indeed, it is a world class facility that originally was opened by GE Plastics. Sabic purchased GE Plastics last year to add specialty plastic parts to its well-established commodity resins and chemicals business.

In fact, the cyber ink is barely dry: Sabic Innovative Plastics still uses the ...Read More

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