Machine Design Blogs

Here is a “well, duh” moment: A study of college freshmen in the U.S. and China found that Chinese students know more science facts than their American counterparts — but both groups are nearly identical when it comes to their ability, or lack of it, to do scientific reasoning. The study suggests that educators must go beyond teaching science facts if they hope to boost students’ reasoning ability.

Am I being overly cynical here? This seems like it would be obvious to anyone who’s sat in a science or engineering class. How many people did you know in school who seemed to know the material backwards and forwards but couldn’t solve the problems on the exams?

Anyway, researchers figured this out after testing nearly 6,000 students majoring in science and engineering at seven universities — four in the U.S. and three in China. Chinese students greatly outperformed American students on factual knowledge of physics — averaging 90% on one test, versus the American students’ 50%, for example.

But in a test of science reasoning, both groups averaged around 75% — and this for students hoping to major in science or engineering. How much worse it is for non-science majors they don’t say.

You can read the full release on this here:

http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/548591/?sc=dwtr;xy=5017520

You’ve probably heard about the hand-wringing that surrounds poor math abilties of US kids compared to those of many other nations. The folks who put on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study recently found out the mathematics abilities of U.S. kids have improved. You can read the details at their Web site, http://nces.ed.gov/timss/.

But even better, you can match yourself up against 4th, 8th, and 12th graders in math, science, and a couple of other areas by taking an online quiz at that site:



http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/eyk/index.asp?flash=true

Check out this neat animation created in COMSOL multiphysics software that studies the film boiling of water. The “Leidenfrost point” referred to is the lowest temperature at which a hot body submerged in a pool of boiling water is completely blanketed by a vapor film. There is a minimum in the heat flux from the body to the water at this temperature. The animation shows the fluids volume fraction over time as a surface and contour plot. In CFD, volume of fluid (VOF) method is a numerical technique for tracking and locating the free surface (or fluid-fluid interface).

Day Two of PTC event. Improved support for top-down methodology: Info from ProductPoint and other stuff can be stuffed into Pro/E, and then worry about the component’s fitting, etc. Windchill Web 2 look for Windchill — clean and crisp. More AJAX and DHTML widgets. Create requirements as objects in Winchill, organize into structures as a Bill of Requirements. Then tie that in to system requirements. Generate traceability matrices. Manage changes to requirements. Requirements are thus tied into the same system, Windchill 9.1 (mid-09).

New ideas in conceptural engineering — the layout of the product. Can’t get to the next level of problem solving in 2D. Customers want the flexibilty and speed of 2D that morphs into 3D. This is for Wildfire 6. Windchill MPMLink to manage manufacturing resources. The factory itself is the product.

From paper docs to product information delivery: Evolution of Arbortext (in 2010). Paper documents…..Electronic documents……..Product information delivery: user manuals; complaince reports; training; service contracts; spare parts catalogs, illustrated and electronic.

To come in the future: Innovation management in Windchill and crowd sourcing (mass collaboration) capbailities supported by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

Boston is sunny but cold — a nice break from our gloomy Cleveland winter and its excessive snowfalls. PTC is holding its annual media event at the company’s Needham corporate headquarters. Attending are about 100 to 150 media analysts and a few trade journalists from Japan, Italy, Germany, and the U.S., among other countries.

Part of day one:

Dick Harrison, President and CEO spoke on PTC’s corporate strategy: He says PTC’s business is good and it has made 241 million so far this quarter. All the channel partners and salesmen are optomistic about the “product development solution (PDS).” This is shorthand for PTCs various applications such as Pro/E, Windchill, Arbortext, and Mathcad, etc. Harrison says EADS in Europe, which had used SAP is switching to the PDS. He also says PTC recently got a 20,000-seat order from Samsung. Spending is difficult in a tough economy, but customers are focused on PLM: They want to globalize and have shorter lead times; they want to automate the product-design process. Harrison says the high-end CAD market is saturated for large enterprise customers. Standalone CAD is a thing of the past. Companies need PLM for global collaboration. Many U.S. companies are outsourcing detailed design (CAD). Product Point (basically a version of Windchill on Microsoft’s Share Point) targets SMBs with CAD and PDM. Harrison says PTC is just as big as SolidWorks and Autodesk in the SMB space. PTC is not laying off any of its salesforce. China is its second-largest market for emerging geographies. SAP, Dassalt, and Seimens are all European based. PTC just bought Synapsis (compliance software for EU standards).

Jim Heppelmann, Chief Product Officer says the modular approach to the PDS means that SMBs can now have analysis, surfacing, and CAM capabilities. He defines programs that are “integrated” means they are engineered to work together. CADDS — old Computer Visions Technology — is now for ship building. CoCreate — explict modeling tool. Pro/E is growing in SMBs; Mathcad, Arbortext usually for larger companies. ProductView; InSight; ProductPoint works with SharePoint and can also work with the complete Windchill. InSight is the new name to the Synapsis acquisition (takes a BOM and performs a chemical analysis of each part to see if they don’t comply with a specification such as REACH, RoHs, and other compliance standards). The beginning of a platform for BOM analytics.

According to Heppelmann, SharePoint is like the “new Windows” in that soon everyone will be using it. It’s a “social-computing” platform. ProductPoint is for small workgroups that need to vault and share structured information, and for Windchill customers. SharePoint is the fastest growing product in Microsoft history. Discussion forums, wikis, blogs, RSS, IM… Social computing and Web 2.0 — came out of a social community. Gives people a way to work togeter. Web.1 was HTTP; HTML; and Java. SharePoint is platform for social networking for a business community. Wildfire 5 will be optimized for social computing. ProductView: graphics provides a visual front end so you can, for instance, see which part of the assembly is not compliant. Can do a graphical search, or a digital mockup inside a Power Point slide, for examples.

Windows SharePoint manages office documents. ProductPoint bolts on top of it. Can work with CAD structures, even Mathcad and Arbortext structures. Also other appplications such as Autodesk. Has Microsoft Ribbons UI. Lets engineers see an aggregation of information from a bunch of different sources. PLM Connector — shares information between PLM solutions (manufacturer’s and supplier’s portal). Maintains PLM information. Is used with Product Point to integrate with other systems. ProductPoint only requires SharePoint or MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Server).

Microsoft: Also designs all its products in Pro/E. Office SharePoint Server (platform). Collaboration = blogs, wikis, rss reeds, social networks, tagging, social bookmarking, mashups, and personal profiles. “Social Computing.” SharePoint and ProductPoint together can automate the distribution of media. Works in the background to generate almost everything about “My Site.” Can search for collegues by social distance. Can keep up to date with people in a hands-off manner. Retiring work force walks out the door with valuable information: Use Wikis as a way to create pride in people that are leaving (their name is on the article) and provide a familiar interface for young engineers. Pod-casting kit for SharePoint — record and publish infomation on media players, Web pages, and the like.

As a (female) manufacturing and CAD / CAM / CAE editor, I occasionally get pitched on stories about “the training of women to do traditional male jobs.” The pitch actually offends me as it probably does the many other women who were doing these jobs 20 years ago, and more. I spent a long time in extremely macho blue-collar manufacturing environments and had to prove myself in really tough old-boy networks. To me, those days are long past, old story. Nowadays, I think women are as capable as men, and should be trained right alongside of them.