ASME Past President Receives Safety Medal from the National Board

ASME Past Pnicht auslagerbar Receives Safety Medal from the National Board ASME Past President Receives Safety Medal from the National Board ASME Past President Receives Safety Medal from the National BoardMay 20, 2016 Madiha El Mehelmy Kotb, ASME past president and former National Board member representing Qubec (center), with David Douin, National Board executive director (left), and John Burpee, chairman of the National Boards Board of Trustees, at the award presentation in Kissimmee, Fla. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Sofsky of the National Board) The National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors recently honored Madiha El Mehelmy Kotb, Eng., past president of ASME, for her decades of tafelgeschirr ensuring public safety through the development and vorrcken of codes and standards. Kotb, a longtime National Board member representing Qubec, Canada, received the Boards prestigious Safety Medal at a ceremony held May 9 during the National Boards General Meeting in Kissimmee, Fla.Kotb, who served as ASMEs 132nd president in 2013-2014, was nominated for the award in recognition of her outstanding contributions in the field of boiler and pressure vessel safety by enforcement of codes, laws and regulations for the safe construction, installation and repairs of boilers and pressure vessels and through her service on many National Board and ASME committees. Kotbs nomination was approved unanimously by the Board of Trustees at its meeting in February.The Safety Medal, which is the highest honor bestowed by the National Board, honors distinguished contributors to professional organizations related to the boiler and pressure vessel industry. Candidates must have participated in National Board activities for at least 15 years and served at least one term on the National Boards Board of Trustees, the National Board Advisory Committee, a National Board committee or task group, or a nationally recognized standards committee or subcommittee. Madiha El Mehelmy Kotb r eceived the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors prestigious Safety Medal during the Boards General Meeting earlier this month. (Photo courtesy of Brandon Sofsky of the National Board)A native of Cairo, Egypt, Kotb is a resident of Montreal and a licensed engineer in Qubec. She recently retired as head of the Pressure Vessels Technical Division for Rgie du btiment du Qubec, a board established by the Qubec government to ensure the quality and safety of buildings and systems, including safety programs within the field of pressure vessels.Kotb has been a longtime, active volunteer with both the National Board and ASME. She served as a National Board member representing Qubec from 1989 until 2015 and as member-at-large of the organizations Board of Trustees from 1991 to 1993. In addition to her term as ASME president, Kotb, an ASME member for more than 20 years, has served the Society as Board of Governors member from 2008 to 2011 and vice president of Conformity Ass essment from 2003 to 2006. She also served as chair of the ASME Presidential Task Force on Uniform (Financial) Reporting and chair of the Qubec Section, as well as a member of the ASME Committee on Governance and Strategy, the Council on Codes and Standards, the Engineering for Change (E4C) LLC Management Committee, ASMEs Engineering for Global Development Committee, and the Committee on Ethical Standards and Review. She was the recipient of ASMEs Dedicated tafelgeschirr Award in 2008 and the Canadian Standards Association Award of Merit in 2003.

FEA Only as Good as the Operator

FEA Only as Good as the Operator FEA Only as Good as the Operator Modeling how products, buildings, and structures hold up under everyday use involves solving intractable partial differential equations that calculate stresses under myriad loads. For example, it may be necessary to model the weight of a 300-lb man on a plastic chair, a ship crashing into a bridge abutment, and more. Finite element analysis (FEA) models complex structures by approximating the nearly infinite deformations and changes in a structure as it undergoes stress. We can live with the error that approximations like FEA introduce because so few problems to which it is applied can be solved directly, comments Victor Kaliakin, professor of civil engineering at the University of Delaware. FEA most commonly analyzes for structural failure by predicting potential trouble such as a toy fracturing in a childs kralle or a roadway buckling on a hot summer day. The technique has revolutionized product testing by reducing t he time and cost of prototyping or physical testing. The automotive industry used to crash-test hundreds of prototype models per year. FEA allows them to destroy a lot fewer cars, while learning more about materials and engineering than ever before. FEA analyses of complex structures like cars often spins off in several directions, spawning a lot of questions along the way, Prof. Kaliakin says. Students from Ohio Northern University used FEA to model a Baja racing vehicle for the SAE Baja competition. Photo courtesy of ONU.FEA uses a 3D, rechneruntersttzte konstruktion drawing to generate a grid, known as a mesh, which reduces the design into small, discrete, continuous regions, or nodes, into which material and structural properties are imported. Regions of high detail, or high anticipated stress, require higher node density than noncritical areas. Greater detail provides more faithful representations but entails a heavier calculation burden. FEA software incorporates a wide range of functions or variables, including mass, volume, temperature, strain energy, stress strain, force, displacement, velocity, acceleration, heat flux, and various dynamic loads, as well as structural elements (rods, panels, springs, etc.). Each unique load scenario uses the original model but requires a separate analysis. Garbage in, Garbage out FEA traces back to Richard Courant, a mathematical physicist and Nazi-era refugee whose relevant work occurred at New York University during the early 1940s. Subsequently, mathematicians and engineers provided FEA with a robust scientific foundation that made it broadly applicable to engineering problems. Once the exclusive domain of supercomputers and Ph.D.-level experts, FEA is now accessible to any computer-savvy engineer. Whether thats such a great idea is open to debate. Numerous commercial and public-domain software packages can drop 3D drawings directly into an FEA engine. Modeling a structure these days is incredibly easy, but you sti ll need to justify your answers, Prof. Kaliakin warns. Representations that overly distort when loads are applied, or stress concentrations that change significantly over short distances, are tipoffs that something is wrong with the model. Where inexperienced engineers accept the model at face value, an experienced modeler may decide to add more elements in critical regions and re-mesh. Trust but Verify Its all about simulation, says Steve Remy, PE principal at Concinity Product Design and Engineering, New York, NY, a consumer, medical, and industrial product design firm. FEA reduces the burden of hand calculations and iterative prototyping in product design. But you will still need to make a confirmation prototype at the end. Its easy to generate a neat-looking model with really pretty colors and get totally bogus results. Remy suggests that modelers perform simple hand calculations to get an idea of the order of magnitude of the anticipated outputs. Then, when results say a part is ten times stronger or weaker than the estimates, an experienced engineers savvy or preliminary calculations will tell him something is fishy. Jed E. Marquart, Ph.D., P.E., professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio Northern University, frequently tests his students by throwing curveballs into homework problems, to assure that results will be unreasonable. Its too easy to get a solution that appears OK but is totally incorrect. Prof. Marquarts students use FEA to model radio-controlled airplanes for the SAE Aerodesign Competition, where the winner is the plane that can lift the most cargo. Marquarts group also used FEA to model a Baja racing vehicle for the SAE Baja competition. FEA enabled them to design the entire Baja vehicle, and lighten the vehicle considerably without loss of structural integrity, he says. Prof. Marquart himself has used FEA in his consulting work on piping systems, his specialty, and for hip and knee implants. In the right hands, FEA can save months of gru nt work and lead to heightened understanding of engineering structures and, perhaps, engineering itself. But like any other tool, it is only as good as the operator. Angelo DePalma is an independent writer.Its easy to generate a neat-looking model with really pretty colors and get totally bogus results.Steve Remy, PE principal, Concinity Product Design and Engineering

Overcoming failure in the office

Overcoming failure in the officeOvercoming failure in the officeNo one is immune to failure, butthere are a few things you can do to pick up the pieces and move forward - whether youre an employee or a manager. Here are a few things to keep in mind the next time it happens to you.Choose your words wiselyBe clear about what went wrong - just dont use annoying jargon.The Harvard Business Review features commentary from Ben Dattner, an organizational psychologist and author of The Blame Game, on what managers can do to get their teams back on track after failure.Dont sugar coat what happened or resort to corporate speak that abdicates responsibility. Avoid phrases like lets look on the bright side, were lucky it happened this way, we suboptimized, or a mistake was made. Instead, be clear We missed the deadline because we didnt take into account how long each task would take. When you focus on the facts, Dattner says, you can call it like it is without being demotivating, the publicati on reads.Take control of your own self-improvementJohn Rampton, an investor, entrepreneur, online marketing guru and founder of online payment company Due, writes abouthis business going under in Inc., mentioning that he lost all his money after the startup was sold because the wave had already reached its crest. One of his pieces of advice on failure is to actively decide to change.Its one thing to say you would like to change and its another thing to be forced into reinventing ourselves. If you are wanting to change, but merely talking about it, the result may be that you dont put the real effort into making the necessary changes that are required. Instead, you have to consciously decide to change and actually have an action that you do to accomplish this, Rampton writes. I had to tell myself that I did not want to be broke so I was going to take the necessary steps to lift myself out of that financial state. Half the battle in reinventing yourself is the mental opponent that stan ds in the way. Its that nagging little scummy creature in your mind that tells you that you cant - or it wont work. Banish that enemy.Process what happened - until a specific timeAllison Task, a careerand life coach, writes in Readers Digest that you should set a deadline for feeling down after failure.After youve grieved the loss, you come to a point where its time to re-engage. Depending on the nature of the mistake, it may be a matter of hours or it could take a few weeks. After you grieve, make a commitment to move on. Set the deadline based on your needs. And when that time comes, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and get back to it. The closure will help you re-engage and reemerge in the world again. And if youve had a thorough post-mortem, then youre walking back into the challenge knowing what you did wrong and what youll do differently next time, she continues.Read about how others have failed tooPatrick Allan, an author, screenwriter and staff writer at Lifehacker, re commends on the site that you read up on how others have failed in order to get out of your own head.What successful person do you look up to? Take a look at the failures theyve encountered in their lives and work. Read biographies, blogs, and listen to speeches. Successful people talk about failure just as much as they talk about success, and its because they respect how important it is to embrace it. Even the greatest people in our world have fallen, and fallen hard at one point or another, he writes.