The 200k Tesla Roadster is expected to have 600 mile range. What ICE car exceeds that? Most ICE are at about ~450 mile range, Model S is at 400 now. There's going to be a lot of battery improvements over the next couple decades pushing EV range far past ICE.
Gasoline has more than 10x the energy density of Li-ion batteries, with relative efficiency taken into account. I don't expect to see BEV exceeding ICE in range anytime soon.
Long haul trucks can do 2000 miles no problem, and extending the range is just a matter of adding more tanks. For now, there is no real competition over range in ICE cars, but if that becomes a thing, you can't win with batteries.
The only batteries that could compete would be lithium-air, and they are still in research phase, with no large scale commercial use in sight yet.
Energy density is just part of the equation. EV's also can use regenerative braking and recharge when going downhill. That's how Tesla's achieve their mileage. Electric engines are substantially more compact and lighter than similarly powered ICE's, giving more mass and volume budget to add extra batteries.
In the specific case of trucks, in most places you can't demand a driver to do a 2000 mile leg on a single stretch and, with the required pause to rest, it's also easy to recharge. A limit of 700 miles should be considered a reasonable target for truck range on a single charge.
Airplanes are probably the place where internal combustion (or not quite internal, but still combustion, as turboprop and jets are not ICE's) will have a significant share for a long time. Even there, short haul small planes are already electrifying.
My mid-2010s Subaru SUV has ~550 mile range, and fill-ups take ~5 minutes.
Semis can have 2000+ mile ranges.
I am also excited to see battery densities increase, but so far the way we're getting comparable range in EVs is by allocating a greater proportion of weight to fuel. And recharging is still relatively slow.
Right; see my other comment about recent experiences with a long drive in a Tesla Model S.
nothing beats the distance over time you can get with a gas vehicle, given also how quickly you can add range.
Many years ago, we used to drive from the midwest to California every year, which was two 800 mile days. We covered that 800 miles in about 13 hours, which is an average of 60 miles per hour.
A few weeks ago, we drove 800 miles in our Tesla, and did it in 16.5 hours, which is a little less than 50 miles per hour.
I know not all EVs are Tesla, but it's interesting to see where charging is going (others will follow suit).
Supercharging v3 gives you 1,000 miles of range per hour of charge (approx. if you're in the 20-80% SOC range I think). If you take a 6 min bathroom (or other) break every 100 miles (roughly every couple of hours), you can replenish those 100 miles during that break.
Personally, I find superchargers "too quick", as I tend to stop for lunch with my family when I supercharge, and I find myself having to rush to finish lunch so I can get the car out of the charger for someone else to be able to use it. I wish there was an option to say "charge slower and give that juice to the other guy" (many/most current supercharger "pods" have to share the current flow with another car).
> Personally, I find superchargers "too quick", as I tend to stop for lunch with my family when I supercharge, and I find myself having to rush to finish lunch so I can get the car out…
Pumping gas, I usually do not have time to even squeegee all the windows; I've never wanted to stop for lunch while getting gas.
The routine is different. You fill the tank, then park and get lunch. If you recharge while parked, the recharge time should approximate the duration of your lunch stop. Abundance of chargers may remove the urge to take the car out of the recharger before you finish lunch.
I don't think particulates was an issue (but I couldbe wrong). The main issue was Nitrogen Oxide emissions.
Basically, when not in emissions testing mode, the engine was running at higher temperatures which improves fuel efficiency but generates more NO from atmospheric Nitrogen. Also, the vehicles had insufficently sized or simply missing diesel exhaust fluid (mostly urea and blue coloring) resevoirs, so not enough was injected to react with the NO to hit targets; injecting DEF into the engine also reduces fuel efficiency. There was also something about not properly cycling the special catalytic converter for NO, which would probably show an efficiency difference on long trips.
I sold back my VW diesel and stopped paying attention, it would be interesting to see what the measured real life fuel efficiency is before and after the changes required by regulators.
When it was new (3 - 5 years old) my Dodge 2500 turbo diesel with a 120 liter fuel tank (31.7 US gallons) went 1,000km (620 miles) per tank. That's highway miles of course but 1,000km per tank is not exactly mind blowing it works out to 23.5 Imperial mpg or 18 US mpg.
An old cow-orker of mine said his old VW Rabbit diesel manual trans did 80 Imperial mpg (66 US mpg) on the highway. I have no way to verify that could be 10% BS. I've seen 50 US mpg stated (60 Imperial mpg). But who know synthetic oil, slim tires, highway miles, slow speeds all that may get it to the 70s mpg.
It's a PHEV, but my Ford C-Max Energi will do over 600 miles on the 14 gallon tank in long distance driving (full charge gets you 20ish miles of stop and go, or 5 miles of highway, so basically doesn't matter). I'd guess the HEV version should do better, as it has less battery weight, but is otherwise pretty similar AFAIK.
Many cars have 16-20 gallon tanks, so a 14 gallon is fairly small (although 600+ miles is plenty)
Off course, and actually more than the trunk, rear seats and even passenger seat in that case, but you absolutely cannot do that to a meaningful usefulness with extra batteries.
The VW Jetta TDI I bought in 1999 got over 50mpg on the highway (mid-40s city) and had a 14.5 gallon tank. The longest I ever got it was ~700 miles at an average of 52mpg.
And then the EV has to stop and charge for a couple hours. The ICE stops for gas for 10min. Also, check out records like the cross-country NY to LA cannonball run. Cars used there add additional gas tanks to extend range. I'd bet by the time you added enough fuel to a car to equate the weight of an EV battery the range would be significantly higher than that of the EV
The EV does not have to stop and charge for a couple of hours. Tesla's V3 superchargers charge at a rate of 1000 miles per hour. Those aren't widespread yet, but the common V2 superchargers provide about 560 miles per hour of charge.
The "miles per hour" charging rate is very misleading. Yes if you wanted to charge a bunch of Teslas to 20% capacity and swap them out after a few minutes each you'd get 1000 "miles charged per hour" But as the battery fills on each car, that rate drops substantially.
If only gas stations marketed their pumps like that. 10 gallons of gas can come out in 1.5 minutes in a Prius resulting in a fill rate of (500 miles range * 40 fill-ups per hour) = 20k mph! We won't consider the time it takes for the next user to get in and put the hose in because Tesla doesn't either.
I am a fan of EV vehicles as well but the long range fill up story is still not good.
You can charge at that full rate to about 80% battery capacity. And none of that matters because 99% of charging is done at home at night. I guarantee the average EV owner spends less time inconvenienced charging their car than the average ICE vehicle owner spends standing at a filthy, toxic gas pump. The only time an EV owner thinks about charging is on a road trip.
I don't know why there is some immune response when pointing out anything negative about an EV at the moment. I just said that the "1000 miles per hour" charge rate is disingenuous at best.
Also it is not true that the supercharger v3 charges at full rate until 80% [1]. The curve drops off quite a bit shortly after 20%. The other points you made, well I never disagreed with that. There are a lot of benefits to an EV, but one clear downside (at the moment) is the long trip charging. This is just a fact and not an indictment about EVs in general
Your average gas pump seems to pump about 38l/min [0]. Using a rather inefficient car with an usage of 10l/100km, you get an added range of 22800 km/h, or 14250 miles/h. So, still a factor 14 to go.
> And then the EV has to stop and charge for a couple hours.
Also, it isn't a couple of hours at all. 10% to 90% charge in model 3 takes about 50 minutes using a V2 supercharger (the most ubiquitous one) and about 40 mins using a V3 supercharger.
And both take much faster to get to lower percentages, due to the charge rate curve looking more like a log(1/x) graph, with rapid charge rate at the beginning that slows down the more your car is charged.
Again, the charge time is non-linear. You can get from 0 to 50% in just 20 mins. And also, if you are doing a long drive, won't you be stopping for 20-30 mins at least every 200-300 miles (roughly every 3 hours)? Just for bathroom breaks, to get some food, to stand up and stretch, etc.? Imo, this doesn't seem that bad at all.
I had the same kind of anxiety over charging too, but since getting an EV and doing multiple cross-state road trips in it and with just tons of daily usage, I found that worry to be unfounded.
Not at all, I recently completed a road trip from Chicago to Blue Ridge, Georgia with a full car (5 people, including me) in a Hyundai Sonata. It was an 11 hour drive. On the way there we stopped exactly once, and on the way back we stopped twice.
If we did this in a Tesla, we would've had to stop far more times, or each stop would have to have been much longer. That's not great.
Unless someone recently started doing it again trucks don't come with dual tanks anymore and haven't since the OEMs refreshed their designs in the mid to late 1990s.
We made a recent long trip with our Tesla Model S, which has about a 325 mile max range. There were plenty of superchargers, but it takes time.
You also end up stopping a lot more than once every 300 miles, because the rate of charge up to 90% is very fast, but the last 10% is very slow. We usually ran down to between 50 and 100 miles of range, and charged it up to about 290-300 miles, which took between 15 and 20 minutes.
It's not terrible, but compared to a gas engine, it's a good bit slower over time.
On the upside, it forces you to have a more 'easy going' drive.
Speaking as a child subjected to routine 2 hour road trips each way (often coming back the next day, once in a while the same day) and occasionally much longer road trips:
Stop the damned car and let your family out for fuck's sake.
Just because you can drive >4 hours nonstop doesn't mean you should drive 4 hours nonstop (I did on a solo road trip earlier this year. I forgot a piece of equipment and didn't realize until I was 5 miles out of town, so I had to 'make up time'. It was still a mistake.) Complaining that you can't drive 6 hours nonstop is some form of insanity that I am not qualified to diagnose.
Do you find lasting an entire Boston-SF flight without getting out of your seat "some form of insanity"? Because that's basically the same sort of situation as the 6 hour nonstop drive (although the car seats are probably more comfortable than airline seats).
Seriously?? You call that torture? The spoiled lives we lead here in the west truly makes us not realize hard realities. I can promise you that torture is way more unpleasant than sitting in the airline seat with your nice noise cancelling headphones and watching a netflix show on an ipad. Even as a over 6 feet person I did way more unpleasant stuff in the army compared to sitting a few hours in an airplane seat.
Calm down now, it's called hyperbole. You will encounter it a lot, especially online, so don't take everything you read literally.
Also, we are talking 6 hours, not "a few". And depending on your height, seat recline, and problems with lower back pain, you can bet for some people, 6 hours unable to stand up can be quite painful. Not, "bamboo shoots under your fingernails painful" but not something anyone would want to go through.
For me, the claustrophobia of not being able to stand up would be quite terrible.
If I'm traveling with someone, I'll stop every 2/3 hours. But if I'm by myself (and was still in my 20s)? I'm going to optimize every second (Gatorade bottles FTW). No reason other than to say I did...
Done that plenty myself, but eventually I figured out that being sedentary that long starts to affect my alertness.
Getting out of the car and getting the blood pumping makes me much more alert for the next hour or two. At first I didn't want to think about that meant about how alert I wasn't for the previous hour. Now it's kind of hard to ignore.
You see so many people in interesting jobs that have an origin story of something that happened to them, a friend, a sibling or neighbor when they were a kid. I just write software, so my stories are perhaps a bit less compelling than the oncologist down the block.
If you can send a building into space, land it on a postage stamp floating in an ocean... I have high-confidence you can solve production line scaling challenges.
Yes, that's why the Soviet Union's lead on space in the early 60s translated into abundant production of consumer goods. Ladas all over the place.
Making a spacecraft work and making a production line work are completely different problems, and there's little reason to think that an organisation good at one is necessarily good at the other. I'm not saying Tesla WON'T sort out their production difficulties, necessarily, just that it doesn't follow from SpaceX being good at space launch.
USSRs problems weren't that they couldn't make production lines work they were extremely good at manufacturing at scale.
The problem was that they were really bad at figuring out what needed to be made and at what amounts because of the worst kind of planned economy you can imagine (take aby soviet era product hammer, clock, lock, radio w/e and you'll see a very peculiar thing a physical price tag embedded on it, if you were a factory you were basically told you are making X now, price, profits and all economic decisions were taken out of your hands).
If anything their problem was that they produced way too much of pretty much everything on a whim.
Additionally there was all the wrong kinds of competition in which the establishment was the selective force rather than the market.
They also had problems enforcing quality requirements across different organizations. Aside from the military, it was impossible for a downstream organization to reject the output of an upstream supplier for low quality or non-conformance to spec. Hence each organization was incentivize to produce at as low a quality and at as cheap an interpretation of the central plan as possible, practical usefulness be damned.
Hence not just producing goods unsuitable to demands, but also shoddy build quality for anything that wasn't military supplies.
That was an outcome of having "factories" rather than companies you could have be making razor blades on Tuesday and radios on Friday.
Employment was also non selective you went to school, got your engineering degree did your thesis on jet engine blades and then sent to a factory across the country making mailboxes
Many of the design decisions of Soviet era engineering are becuase of these conditions stuff was designed with high tolerances because it will likely be produced on repurposed tooling not design for it by people who'll be trained every 2 weeks to make something else.
It was more core to the system than just the factories/companies distinction. If you allow downstream consumers to refuse products, and penalize upstream suppliers if their output isn't usable, then you have a market system, whatever label you want to attach to it. (Even if it does not include private ownership!) A functioning planned economy, on the other hand, has to encode all of these requirements in the central plan, which Soviet and Eastern Bloc experience suggests is computationally and organizationally infeasible.
In the limit, a central plan that works well is going to contain a detailed simulation of something that looks like a market economy, with rational actors modeled out at every step.
Turns out that at our current state of technology, doing that isn't feasible yet, but that may change at some point.
Eh, not necessarily. Markets don't find the optimal solutions for every problem. Look up "Price of Anarchy" in game theory. I don't claim that it's feasible to come up with central plans that beat markets, but there are cases where central planning can produce objectively better results.
Except that once you plan hits reality, the rational actors in the real world can look at the plan and change their behaviour to take advantage of it to serve their best interests.
It's like creating a fixed plan for each move in a game of chess where you can't change your game plan once the game starts, but your opponent can and also gets to see your plan at the beginning of the game.
No, it isn't like that. What GP is most likely suggesting is central planning done second-by-second, not year-by-year. Think less "government decrees" and more "closed-loop feedback control".
I suppose there exists a Nash equilibrium, where every actor can't act in a way that will decrease the effectiveness of the plan. Problem is that it's way too computationally expensive to calculate one for a 10 player Hold'em poker game, let alone an economy with millions of decisions and actors.
This isn't unique to the USSR however. There are similar weapons in the US arsenal (M2 Browning for example) that are so well designed that is still in service 84 years after initial introduction.
Back when engineers had to use slide rules, and metallurgy wasn't as sophisticated, designers had to over-engineer machinery (and buildings, and bridges).
The Khrushchev and Brezhnev-era USSR had a fantastic understanding of what needed to be made. Refrigerators, radios, televisions, washing machines, vacuum cleaners, and automobiles. Things that the public very clearly wanted, and that politicians were very clear about the public getting.
All of those things were consistently under-produced, and never met their quantity, or quality quotas.
And that is the problem, politicians were keen on building a TV.
You couldn't just build a TV there would be a great design competition and then a design will be selected.
The selection will be political which means that designs were not selected by market forces which favor merit but rather the whim of a corrupt and inefficient political machine.
The pricing also was an issue, economics in the USSR were screwed it was socialism bubble in a capitalistic world.
Everything had a price but the price was completely detached from the cost and the value of the product (the designers themselves could not gauge the true costs of their designs, and quite often the design that would keep as many people
employed would be favored which would cause even more inherent inefficiency)
When your TV was priced at 50$ but cost 500$ to make there will be shortages.
Additionally the USSR had a horrible problem with skilled labor despite probably having one of the better educated workforce in history.
This was because again lack of meritocracy and a free market a rocket engineer would be making as much as an engineer working on bicycle gears.
Unless you were well connected politically you also had very little choice on where would you be assigned to work.
Because of this building skills in critical industries in the commercial and consumer sectors was very hard.
There were different appliance manufacturing companies in the USSR, and consumers very clearly expressed their preferences. Different Soviet brands commanded different prices, and had different levels of demand for them.
Pricing was an issue for different reasons - some people had money that they couldn't spend, whereas other people had very little money. Food and housing were heavily subsidized but goods weren't, wages for different professions were very different (And rarely reflected the social/economic value of their work.)
It wasn't some communist paradise where everyone was equally poor. There were absolutely class and wage distinctions. An engineer building rockets was getting paid more, and had access to better stores (And priority on high-end consumer goods, that were less, or not available to the public) then one building bicycles. One way to be 'politically connected' was to work in an important industry (Specifically, defense. Being a senior manager also qualified.)
The Soviet rationing model rewarded both political parasites, and successful people[1]. A bit like 'meritocracy' works in many Western corporations, if you think about it.
The serious problems in the Soviet economy were the absolutely insane military spending, corruption, bureaucracy, theft, inconsistent accountability, and extremely conservative commandments from central management that strongly discouraged, and sometimes punished innovation and optimization.
[1] Unless you were a kolhoznik, or serf, tied to the land, a political problem, had relatives who were political problems, were one-quarter Jewish, etc.
That not true. Ph.D. in University was making the same wages as cleaner working in said University. You underestimate how ridiculous was communism. My parents after getting Masters choose to go into farming as it was better money.
Everyone has plenty money but you could not buy anything, you needed a special token to buy for example new fridge. Used products were more expensive than new. You needed to wait for everything.
People did not revolt because of propaganda and in a technological leap that happened after the war. In 1950 you will still go to the city on the horse but in 1980 everyone had running water, TV, electricity and at least a one car per village.
I visited the Czech Republic while they were still communist. The most hilarious thing I remember was a price stamped into loaves of bread. It appears they had official price brands distributed from a central point, since they looked the same everywhere. This means the price was probably unchanged for long periods of time.
Prices for most common goods (especially food) were fixed by the government in Eastern Bloc countries, usually they stayed the same over decades. The quality, especially for imported stuff (like coffee) could vary drastically, but the price stayed the same. For 'bread buns, rolls' (or whatever they are called outside Germany) the price in Eastern Germany was fixed at 10 Pfennig since forever, and it was commonly called a "10er Semmel" because of this (or a "fiver" for the small version).
I’m finishing up school for a Manufacturing Engineering degree. It’s frustrating when people look down on the degree due to a lack of appreciation. So many people are so far removed from manufacturing that they think a company simply walks into a store, buy a few parts, and put them together just like a consumer would when in reality there’s an entire discipline dedicated to figuring out how stuff should be made.
I graduated a couple years ago from Iowa State with an Industrial Engineering degree. Totally agree on how little most people understand on production issues. There's so much that goes into setting up a high volume assembly operation. To name a few:
* Bottlenecks are always being addressed. If you spend your time anywhere but the bottleneck operation, you're not increasing the capacity of the line.
* Quality issues can call back thousands of units and kill production for an afternoon. Hopefully the quality department catches everything, but without 100% testing they will be missing things. 100% testing of everything would drive costs up an insane amount, so sampling is done. Bad product slips through sometimes.
* The labor resources need to be effectively split so everyone is doing their task for the same period of time on the assembly line (and sub-assembly lines).
* Workers need to be trained and qualified for the positions they're doing. It could be as easy as 5 minutes of training on the new job content or as much as sending people to a training program because you can't hire the labor trained already.
* Fork truck drivers running into things can shut down an area during the accident investigation, preventing the typical restocking path (which is also finely timed out). Fork trucks run into things way more than most people would guess.
* Some production equipment breaks requiring unscheduled downtime. If you have redundant systems, you need to prioritize which units get processed next. You're already almost guaranteed to shut down production if you're running a lean operation.
* A supplier misses a delivery deadline. Especially on large assemblies like a car, you can't easily do more assembly and then add the part later. There's an order everything has to be assembled in. Yeah, you get to charge the supplier a shutdown rate, but that won't make your customer happy.
> This is a common challenge in lean manufacturing. Holding inventory is expensive in many ways, but having 0 on-hand inventory means every minor production hiccup is felt. Finding a balance to make supply chain, production, and management happy is a challenge.
* The sales people sold a product or feature which doesn't currently exist, so between design and production you've got to figure it out. Suddenly the line which was going to be streamlined with minimal product variety has 35 possible combinations rather than 4 and you have more logistics to deal with.
* A supplier abruptly stops supplying one of the products you are purchasing from them. You have 1 month to figure out a solution, send the trial runs through quality, write the work standards, etc.
* Procurement requests that a slightly different part is used from a supplier because it will save 5 cents/unit. Over 1,000,000 units that's $50,000 in savings. Do that on 15 parts in a big assembly and you're saving real money.
* The marketing campaign was more effective than anticipated, and demand for the next 3 months rose 25% (rather than the 10% boost anticipated). You now have to bump the production rate up an extra 15% which changes all the work instructions and line balancing, redo some workcells to allow for the increase in labor, increase traffic and congestion with the material handlers, buy/lease another fork truck, etc. There's a cascading effect. There's software which helps with the line balancing and possibly some of the internal material handling, but there's still some manual sanity checking of it all.
* The business is doing an IT transformation which can require anything from new/more computer systems on the line to completely retraining all of the staff on how to enter orders and production tracking into the system. Mentioning an ongoing Oracle installation will elicit condolences and heightened blood pressure from anyone who has been involved in one previously. I've seen Oracle implementations literally cause production employees of 20+ years walk off the job.
* The facility you're working in is land locked with no neighbor being willing to sell you land. Over 50+ years production lines were added, reconfigured, and removed. Shutting production down for 30 days to redo "everything" will cost tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and is only considered every decade or two.
That's a generalized list of issues I've seen while full time and on internships in a variety of industries.
I'm a Materials Engineer that works in an industrial plant (Steel Mill). Similar issues in this line of work.
Latency is a huge issue here. What you put into the Blast Furnace can take 8+ hours to propagate through. So when you are trying to react due to a quality issue can take a long time until you see the effect of the change you've just made. Online modelling and process simulation plays a big role here.
Supply is an issue as well getting an ore/coal shipment in can have 20+ day lead time. These boats are huge can take days to fully discharge them even things like docking space on the berth needs to be optimized and appropriately scheduled...
A lot of people can't grasp the sheer scale of our operation it is one thing to read a number on a page and another to walk the length of a conveyor and see what 500 Tonnes Per Hour actually looks like as it is going past you...
I've also worked in an "insane scale" plant and totally relate. I've been in two facilities where it took over 5 weeks to get product through from start to finish. One made big things, one made small things. Literal square footage to store stuff is sometimes the reason you cannot produce more stuff. Some items have 2 month lead times, which really slows down the ability to move fast.
I think most people could look at one aspect and determine a fix for when that isn't working well, but it takes much more to understand how the whole system reacts and how to keep production going reasonably well.
There could be, but you've got to remember they're often used in heavy industrial environments. Whatever solution would have to be...durable. They aren't treated gently. You have collision risks on the ground (people, guard rails, other vehicles, equipment) as well as above (loads falling before or during a collision).
For safety, you have engineered controls and managerial controls (if I remember my training right). Engineered would be a system like you mention. The beam noted below is managerial. Engineered prevent the issue, managerial try to mitigate the issue (but it can still happen if procedure isn't followed).
Lots of the danger is caused by the lack of visibility forward. You'll actually see forklifts driving "backwards" a lot of the time. They can turn their head/back around and see almost full visibility.
There are lights like this on many forklifts. They shoot a beam forward ~15-20 feet in front of or behind a forklift. They are super helpful for knowing where a forklift is before you turn a corner. https://sc01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB1nkQ0LFXXXXazXVXXq6xXFXXXx/202...
Mobile equipment injuries are often the largest reasons for First Aid's, OSHA recordables, and deaths in stereotypical "industrial" factories.
Thanks for the feedback. I'll throw some more down below.
Factories to me are like software to software engineers.
* Complicated systems with certain requirements to meet (transactions/second | units/day)
* Uptime requirements (99.99% for some web services | 70% is great for really old equipment)
* Budget requirements (dev time cost | cost per unit)
* Unrealistic deliverables (seamless launch on a production server without testing in that specific environment | 110% capacity scheduled and ignoring the preventative maintenance outages that were scheduled)
* Changing requirements (Customer changed their mind on <major feature> | Marketing wants to launch the new product in 2 weeks rather than 3)
* A variety of demands and sub-optimal conditions (crappy server to deploy on | factory equipment from the 1940's)
* Appearance of simplicity to the uninformed ("UX mockup is done, so the software will be in production next week!" | "Just increase inventory levels and we wouldn't stock out our customers.")
* People with different incentives pulling for different objectives (Non-technical manager doesn't get why code isn't done on time | Production is pissed that Quality won't release a set of parts)
At the end of the day, looking at and understanding the larger system is what makes an industrial engineer or software engineer effective. At first glance it may not seem like doing <x> will make a big difference, but <x> can either be a simple fix that was overlooked earlier or it can mean undoing hundreds of hours of work. That's true in programming and on the factory floor.
# Other IE Things
ERGONOMICS: Haven't even mentioned that yet. Workplace injuries often fall into an IE/mfg eng. role as well. Rather than doing the exact same thing all day long, it's not uncommon to switch jobs with a coworker after 4 hours. This gives the muscles required for Job #1 a chance to recover and repair before they're damaged too much. Doing the same thing all day can lead to repetitive stress injuries (and is simply more boring).
Fixing Drawings: Lots of times the prints (part drawings) will have assumed tolerances such as +/- 0.01" for lengths. If the designer simply marks "18 inches", it must be 17.99-18.01". To achieve that on cutting stock material to length will require some pretty good measuring. If it would function fine at +/- 0.5", the cost of production just decreased significantly. Throw it into the bandsaw and quickly confirm with a tape measure and move on. Tolerances should be as loose as possible to still allow for full functionality of the part/assembly. Going any tighter than required drives the cost up very fast. This is a common battle between manufacturing engineers and mechanical/design engineers. At Iowa State the mechanical engineers were briefly introduced to Geometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing (GD&T) around sophomore year while the IE's had ~1/3 of a class focused on it. There are thousands of ME's who know nothing at all about tolerancing and are making products more expensive because of it. I'm kinda passionate about this one. Tons of stuff has horrible tolerances
Order Quantities: How many of each part should be delivered from suppliers? What's the economic order quantity? [1] We have formulas for some of the more straightforward questions in this area, but things can get more dicey with something as simple as a bulk order discount. Is it worth ordering a bit more to get a price break considering the additional warehouse space required? That little modification makes the decision much more difficult.
Part Presentation: How will everything be presented to the assemblers on the assembly line? Just the orientation of a part can have a big impact on how fast something can be assembled.
Assembly Assistance: How will the parts be held during assembly? What can be done to make the assembly faster? Not threading the entire length of the bolt, tapering holes so screws drop in almost effortlessly, jigs to hold the parts, dummy-proofed systems so the parts physically cannot be assembled incorrectly, reductions in the number of pieces, etc.
Reducing Waste: In lean manufacturing, there are 7 wastes: Overproduction, Inventory, Waiting, Motion, Transportation, Rework, and Over Processing. [2] Reducing or eliminating these has a substantial impact on profitability. If you have a 5% profit margin on widgets and you scrap a widget, you just wiped out the profit from 19 good widgets. Bad quality is expensive.
Project justification: We have $40 million available for CapEx. What should we do with it? We have a set of possible projects, what combination will get us furthest towards our overall goals? What's the payback time on the investments? If it's more than 2 years, it won't get approved in most companies. The 2 year ballpark changes based on how conservative the company is and the overall economy, sometimes dropping to a matter of a few months for full payback during recessions. These calculations involve working with finance and accounting to determine the value of investments taking into account wage rates, overhead, cost of the project, and the discounted cash flows going forward.
Optimization: Is the way we're doing things mathematically optimal? As my professor put it, you want to run your system optimizing on profit so that a competitor cannot come into the market, get all the same suppliers and deals, then beat you on profit or cost to the customer. Pages 3-14 of this presentation demonstrate the introduction to optimization accompanying his explanation of why it matters. [3] Additional sets of slides available at [4]
Produce in-house or outsource?: Outsourcing can sometimes mean a company which specializes in that particular type of part will make it. This can reduce cost because your company doesn't have to be the subject matter expert on everything. It's also harder to get a response from a vendor regarding a quality issue than someone inside your same company.
# The "E" in IE
Finally, to refute an argument I've heard too often, IE's (at least from Iowa State) are not basically business majors. I had more practical business info thrown at me than an Aerospace or Mechanical engineer typically would, but the coursework is largely similar to other engineering programs.
There are programs I know of in which IE's are glorified business majors, but the Iowa State program is "Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering". ISU and Penn State in particular have a strong manufacturing emphasis. During undergrad, ISU IE's took Calc 1-3, DiffEq with laplace transforms, thermo 1, chem 1 (no lab), physics 1 and 2, materials engineering 1, and statics. Beyond that the engineering majors typically diverge into major-specific content.
For us, that includes classes on optimization, ergonomics, engineering economics, material removal processes (machining mostly), solidification processes (casting and injection molding with an awesome hands-on lab), engineering drawings, production systems (order quantities and stuff like that), stochastic systems (includes some factory simulation), quality assurance, and a rough 200 level calc-based statistics class.
I hope putting the info out there a bit more will make people more aware of the breadth of what we work on. I'm more than happy to answer any other manufacturing or IE questions.
You did a lot better job of expressing my thoughts than I did. I wrote my original comment for this thread in a hurry. I had a short lunch because one of our suppliers gave us a shipment of parts that were all out of spec. Management told me to keep the parts since they would get a discount on their next shipment if they kept these bad parts for production. Using these bad parts caused more rework than we’re saving. Buuuut I’m just ranting.
Back in my school IEs are called “Imaginary Enginners.” So they made shirts that said “We may be Imaginary Engineers but we’ll be your boss someday.”
No problem. It's probably analogous to showing an end user a UX mockup and then them changing the whole scope of the project and expecting it done in 2 weeks since the whole thing is basically put together. There are lots of changing demands and the system designer (manufacturing engineer or software engineer) is trying to not piss people off too much while achieving the overall goal.
I am putting together a few more examples in a sibling comment right now.
What's the usual sourcing process for large amounts of components? word of mouth? suppliers cold calling potential customers? how does company x that manufactures product y get in touch with part supplier z?
In the organizations that I’ve worked at (around 100 people), sourcing is done by the purchasing department. After some quality engineers give the green light on a few shipments to make sure the parts are good, the vendor is trusted and more of their parts can be purchased. Manufacturers usually try and stay with the vendors they have for parts because the vendors are trusted to give quality parts, have relationships, and lines of credit already established. Basically reduces risk of getting junk and investing more time and money to find something that works.
If you subcontract production, the service provider typically has supply chain specialists that source things on your BOM. Procurement people might do direct purchasing/negotiation (typically on special&pricier bits), or go to wholesalers for mass consumption items.
It was not the sole failing, but it was a big one. None of the light-industry (Consumer goods)-focused 5-year plans managed to have any positive impact on production.
In fairness, SpaceX is going to have real production line issues of its own to sort out -- how many landed rockets do they have in warehouses now waiting for refurbishment? Both companies are going to need to get good at this.
SpaceX already has one of the highest-volume production lines for boosters, upper stages, and fairings. They've got a lot more work to do, of course, but they're already done challenging things.
Ultimately, abundant production of consumer goods is an engineering and planning problem. Throwing a bunch of smart engineers at a clear goal will almost always solve the problem.
Maybe Russia just forgot to share progress downstream and kept space tech under military secrecy ? Or maybe too much resources allocated to space and none to the rest of society.
Different set of skills needed. By that logic car manufacturers should hire the people who designed the Curiosity Rover to run their manufacturing lines. This won't work.
Their launch rate was previously a struggle, but they have hit their stride this year with 13 launches in a little over 8 months (they had 7 launches in all of last year).
It's sad when we pay $5 for a coffee made in 5 minutes that we'll drink in 3... but not $5 for an app that took 5 months that we'd use daily for a year.
Most coffee cups already do have ads on them. They have you paying $5 for coffee, AND running around with free ads for them in your hands. And you don't even notice you're a walking billboard for them! Not to mention all that juicy data you're giving them with every CC purchase, or loyalty card swipe...
Not to mention that $5 might be the most expensive app someone buys, and then they expect updates for the foreseeable future despite on-going development costing loads more time. There have been developers who released a separate, paid sequel and were left with angry customers who expected updates to their original app.
My experience has been that since underlying platform software changes so quickly locally run purchases are often more work to maintain than SAAS offerings.
Is the world's oldest profession prostitution or cheating? Cheating in sport started as soon as people cared about the outcome, only now with ubiquitous data sources has it become increasing hard to succeed at. Cheaters hope they fly just between the fine line of amazement in their outcome and interest that would invoke investigation and lead to their downfall. The bank robber whose holdup note is written on the back of their deposit slip never thinks they'll be caught, so is the athlete who fails to consider the power of the data and dedication of slighted peers to unearth it.
I'm not in disbelief that she was caught, only that so many others weren't... Yet.
I find part of the entertainment value of sport to be the cat-and-mouse between two factions: journalists and competitors, and cheaters. No matter how much we deny it, this spectacle is the "meta-race" that gives these events real human drama.
Active users = check
Value delivered = check
Inability to develop profitable GTM plan = check
I didn't read about funding in the article, but outside of $ a VC or Angel will provide a network and path to solve GTM challenges AND get you in front of the right people for an exit.
I'm sure if this app called an Uber/Lyft timed to plane landing it could find a home...
As terrible as it is to write this, (while still really early and I'm far from a NTSB expert), but if you had to pin a failure event on human or design, you'd be better to have it rest on human cause.
Resolution could then be practiced or automated out of existence, versus structural design that could take years to resolve.
I don't see any way this could be anything other than a design problem. The engine can't be throttled, so there are no circumstances under which you'd want to feather during the burn. So there should have been, at the very least, an interlock to make it impossible. Either there was no such interlock, or it failed. One way or the other, I can't see how the root cause could end up being pilot error.
A better example might be the the Mercury Project, which made 17 unmanned test flights before attempting to put a man into suborbital tests, and a few more before into orbit.
There's also the relaxed stability concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relaxed_stability), which I assume is what you were referring to with the reference to the B-2, and per that Wikipedia article the MD-11 airliner employs it (although back when it was flying passengers if I'd had any option at all I'd have avoided flying in one, for many reasons I and others don't consider it to be a safe plane. And its parent DC-10 was the least safe wide body airliner in its days; as some people said before, and probably still now that Airbus is on the scene, "If it ain't Boeing, I ain't going").
As I noted in another posting, the new fuel used in this flight meant new patterns of vibration, some of which can only be found/tested in free flight. Sometimes you can get away with that, e.g. the Space Shuttle was never unmanned, then again the first flights had only two crew and they had SR-71 survival systems (ejection seats and intense environmental suits).
Isn't one of the advantages of the hybrid solid fuel / liquid oxidizer design that it can be throttled to some extent by cutting off the oxidizer using a valve?
I do agree that I can't see why a feather during a burn would ever be desired, but we'll have to wait for the NTSB to see whether the flaw was in the design or manufacture.
Glad to see this posted, AWS wasn't initially a fan of it as the artwork used infringed their brand but happy a common ground was found. Attendee feedback has been amazing.
