Automotive

Hitting the Brakes: Engineering Design and the Production of Knowledge

Inventing Flight: The Wright Brothers and Their Predecessors

The invention of flight craft heavier than air counts among humankind's defining achievements. In this book, aviation engineer and historian John D. Anderson, Jr., offers a concise and engaging account of the technical developments that anticipated the Wright brothers' successful first flight on December 17, 1903. While the accomplishments of the Wrights have become legendary, we do well to remember that they inherited a body of aerodynamics knowledge and flying machine technology. How much did they draw upon this legacy? Did it prove useful or lead to dead ends?

Beginning with the earliest attempts at flight, Anderson explains how Leonardo daVinci first began to grasp the concepts of lift and drag which would be essential to the invention of powered flight. He describes the many failed efforts of the so-called "tower jumpers," from Benedictine monk Oliver of Malmesbury in 1022 to the eighteenth-century Marquis de Bacqueville. He tells the fascinating story of aviation pioneers such as Sir George Cayley, who in a stroke of genius first proposed the modern design of a fixed-wing craft with a fuselage and horizontal and vertical tail surfaces in 1799, and William Samuel Henson, a lace-making engineer whose ambitious "aerial steam carriage" was patented in 1842 but never built. Anderson describes the groundbreaking nineteenth-century laboratory experiments in fluid dynamics, the building of the world's first wind tunnel in 1870, and the key contributions of various scientists and inventors in such areas as propulsion (propellers, not flapping wings) and wing design (curved, not flat). He also explains the crucial contributions to the science of aerodynamics by the German engineer Otto Lilienthal, later praised by the Wrights as their "most important" predecessor.

In telling the dramatic story of the Wright brothers' many experiments at Kitty Hawk as they raced to become the first in flight, Anderson shows how the brothers succeeded where others failed by taking the best of early technology and building upon it using a carefully planned, step-by-step experimental approach. (They recognized, for example, that it was necessary to become a skilled glider pilot before attempting powered flight.) With vintage photographs and informative diagrams to enhance the text, Inventing Flight will interest anyone who has ever wondered what lies behind the miracle of flight.

The Mechanic

A man is surprised at a young woman's hobby.

A man is surprised at a young woman's hobby.

Complex Systems Concurrent Engineering: Collaboration, Technology Innovation and Sustainability

Concurrent engineering is well-established as an approach to engineer product parts. However, the concept has much broader application. Complex Systems Concurrent Engineering: Collaboration, Technology Innovation and Sustainability demonstrates how concurrent engineering can be used to benefit the development of complex systems, to produce results that sustain balanced stakeholder satisfaction over time. Gathered from the 14th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, the collected papers cover all aspects of the sustainable and integrated development of complex systems, such as airplanes, satellites, space vehicles, automobiles and ships.

Complex Systems Concurrent Engineering: Collaboration, Technology Innovation and Sustainability focuses on five major areas:

Knowledge and collaboration engineering and management;

Systems engineering, analysis, modelling, simulation and optimisation (including value, cost, risk, and schedule issues);

Product realisation processes, methods, technologies and techniques;

Business, management and organisation issues (product life cycle processes other than development and manufacturing); and

Information modelling, technology and systems.

Applications of Intelligent Control to Engineering Systems: In Honour of Dr. G. J. Vachtsevanos (Intelligent Systems, Control and Automation: Science and Engineering)

This book represents the work of top scientists in the field of intelligent control and its applications, prognostics, diagnostics, condition based maintenance and unmanned systems. The work presents an approach to solving engineering problems related to manufacturing, automation, and especially unmanned systems and describes recent advances in the disciplines mentioned above. The main goal of the book is to demonstrate how concepts and ideas from diverse disciplines are merged within a common framework applied to the solution of complex problems.

Ergonomics and Safety of Intelligent Driver Interfaces (Human Factors in Transportation)

Even to the casual observer of the automotive industry, it is clear that driving in the 21st century will be radically different from driving as we know it today. Significant advances in diverse technologies such as digital maps, communication links, processors, image processing, chipcards, traffic management, and vehicle positioning and tracking, are enabling extensive development of intelligent transport systems (ITS). Proponents of ITS view these technologies as freeing designers to re-define the role and function of transport in society and to address the urgent problems of congestion, pollution, and safety. Critics, on the other hand, worry that ITS may prove too complex, too demanding, and too distracting for users, leading to loss of skill, increased incidence of human error, and greater risk of accidents.

The role of human factors is widely acknowledged to be critical to the successful implementation of such technologies. However, too little research is directed toward advancing the science of human-ITS interaction, and too little is published which is useful to system designers. This book is an attempt to fill this critical gap. It focuses on the intelligent driver interface (IDI) because the ergonomics of IDI design will influence safety and usability perhaps more than the technologies which underlie it.

The chapters cover a broad range of topics, from cognitive considerations in the design of navigation and route guidance, to issues associated with collision warning systems, to monitoring driver fatigue. The chapters also differ in intent -- some provide design recommendations while others describe research findings or new approaches for IDI research and development. Based in part on papers presented at a symposium on the ergonomics of in-vehicle human systems held under the auspices of the 12th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, the book provides an international perspective on related topics through inclusion of important contributions from Europe, North America, and Japan.

Many of the chapters discuss issues associated with navigation and route guidance because such systems are the most salient and arguably the most complex examples of IDI. However, the findings and research methodologies are relevant to other systems as well, making this book of interest to a wide audience of researchers, design engineers, transportation authorities, and academicians involved with the development or implementation of ITS.

The Future of Product Development: Proceedings of the 17th CIRP Design Conference

These proceedings represent trends in Product Development concerning industrial vendors and scientific research aspects. Coverage includes the following topics are covered: Design Theory, Product Design, Requirements, Collaborative Engineering, Complex Design, Mechatronics, Reverse Engineering, Virtual Prototyping, CAE, KBE and PLM. The papers presented in this book show that answers can only be composed out of a variety of solutions where psychological, economical and technical research results are taken into account.

Improving Complex Systems Today: Proceedings of the 18th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (Advanced Concurrent Engineering)

As the main theme of Improving Complex Systems Today implies, this book is intended to provide readers with a new perspective on concurrent engineering from the standpoint of systems engineering. It can serve as a versatile tool to help readers to navigate the ever-changing state of this particular field. The primary focus of concurrent engineering was, at first, on bringing downstream information as far upstream as possible by introducing parallel processing in order to reduce time to market and to prevent errors at a later stage which would sometimes cause irrevocable damage. Up to now, numerous new concepts, methodologies and tools have been developed, but over concurrent engineering’s 20-year history the situation has changed extensively. Now, industry has to work in the global marketplace and to cope with diversifying requirements and increasing complexities. Such globalization and diversification necessitate collaboration across different fields and across national boundaries. Thus, the new concurrent engineering calls for a systems approach to gain global market competitiveness. Improving Complex Systems Today provides a new insight into concurrent engineering today.

Networks in Action: Communication, Economics and Human Knowledge

This book presents the latest information on both the theory and applications of networks, especially from the fields of transportation and communication, economics and human knowledge handling. It demonstrates that networks are of broad interest and that networks analysis from different disciplines offer unifying insight. Special attention is paid to networks in the ever increasing integration of Europe. Another point of focus is upon combinatorial aspects and the interactive effects between different networks, often known as synergetics.

New World Situation: New Directions in Concurrent Engineering: Proceedings of the 17th ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering (Advanced Concurrent Engineering)

The proceedings contain papers accepted for the XVIIth ISPE International Conference on Concurrent Engineering, held in Cracow, Poland, September 6-10, 2010. No matter how diversified concurrent engineering (CE) may be, there is certainly a direction common to all the CE research and applications. The reader will find that, although each paper deals with different issues, the main thrust of most of the papers contained in New World Situation: New Directions in Concurrent Engineering is towards the human, i.e., viewing a designer as human, engineer as human, customer as human, and even a knowledge engineering as human. This trend is also reflected in session organization: design knowledge utilization and knowledge engineering, product design and development, lean product development, human centric product design and development, advanced manufacturing and mass customization, and advanced manufacturing.