Skills, process descriptions, and solved problems at the Enggcyclopedia
An excellent resource on process, instrumentation, and piping engineering: the Engineering Design Encyclopedia. Whether you’re looking for a sample heat exchanger calculation, just learning what the term flow meter means, or trying to discover how a sulfur recovery unit works, there’s some good content here. It’s not yet comprehensive enough to earn the term “encyclopedia,” but it’s worth a quick peek to anyone finding my blog useful.
Popularity: 2% [?]
A lot of what is written about management is pure fluff. But a few things are keepers, and one day I stumbled across something worth putting in “the file.” A successful manager at Microsoft shares a few tips for success, mainly about the power of priorities and knowing when to say no: even to an idea that is good. (I know that this is a totally novel concept for this blog).
Check it out, it’s a worthy supplement to your Saturday paper: The Art of Project Management: How to Make Things Happen.
Effective PMs simply consider more alternatives before giving up than other people do. They question the assumptions that were left unchallenged by others, because they came from either a VP people were afraid of or a source of superior expertise that no one felt the need to challenge. The question “How do you know what you know?” is the simplest way to clarify what is assumed and what is real, yet many people are afraid, or forget, to ask it. Being relentless means believing that 99% of the time there is a solution to the problem (including, in some cases, changing the definition of the problem), and that if it can’t be found with the information at hand, then deeper and more probing questions need to be asked, no matter who has to be challenged. The success of the project has to come first.
Popularity: 2% [?]
3D Printers, also known as Fabricators or “Fabbers.” Have you heard of them? There are a variety of techniques that slowly build pre-programmed objects in a variety of materials, varying in scale from hobbyists spraying thin resin films into fun shapes to airplane manufacturers preparing to bypass manufacturing limitations by “printing” airplane wings in heretofore impossible shapes. Some consider it could become a revolution on scale with the printing press, steam engine, or transistor.
The leading systems range in price from just under $25,000 to about $60,000 per unit. An annual maintenance agreement costs about $3,000 to $9,000 and vary by machine type. Materials range from about $1.50 to $2 per cubic inch of part (including infiltrant) for the materials from Z Corp. to $250 per kilogram for the ABS material for the Dimension machine.
On the lower cost end hobbyists are already able to build and run these machines (for about the cost/difficulty of maintaining a classic car, it would seem). For business, cost considerations can favor 3D printing over plastic injection molding for small runs – currently about 1000 units or less. One company even lets you print your World of Warcraft character as a 3D Plastic model, because it’s so easy to adapt the same machine to many different designs.
Coming to a desk near you? ...but maybe we should let Apple pretty up the case first.
The mind quickens with possibilities: as technology improves, more materials can be printed, and the costs come down, what could we do? I feel like fantasizing a little this week. What might happen when the technology is really, fully developed, perhaps in a few decades from now?
Popularity: 3% [?]
Intergraph’s SmartPlant P&ID (SPPID), is part of their data-base driven SmartPlant package. It uses a drafting interface, like AutoCAD, but with some big differences. SPPID is both much more powerful than AutoCAD, and much less suited to quickly creating drawings.
Why? SPPID lets you use the P&IDs to populate the underlying SmartPlant project database. The idea is that you can use this database to get reports (like line lists, valve lists, etc.) and also link to other programs (like your SmartPlant 3-D plant layout). Therefore, in creating your P&ID, you’re also creating multiple documents that rely on and flow from it. All these documents will rely on the same database and therefore always be in agreement.
The program takes a while to master, and the database aspect makes the program slower because everything you do has to be communicated back to the database. Investing the extra time to create that datbase does payoff big down the road, but time is always at a premium and we still want to get our drawings out faster. Here are a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way. I’m going to write assuming you know the program already or have at least taken a course with it, and want to swap some tricks.
Toolbars
In the symbol catalog explorer, you have the option to create your own personal toolbars of symbols. Use it, abuse it, it is definitely well worth the time and screen real-estate it takes to make a good toolbar. You can place/anchor/dock the toolbars to any edge of your screen, and it is well worth the screen real-estate. You can make several toolbars, and make sub-divisions within the toolbars, and I suggest you make several smaller toolbars grouped by theme. Keep all your commonly used symbols handy and only browse symbols for the rare items.
As a suggestion, here are some things I have on my toolbar: read more…
Popularity: 9% [?]
The website is back to normal and the “generic money-making link site” harpy is banished. I’ll have some lengthy articles later this month. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Popularity: 2% [?]
Loading ...