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Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory Cool. Fuel.

ME 406 Lesson 2: Literature Reviews

There’s an old saying — “A week’s worth of time spent in the library can save a year’s worth of time in the laboratory.”

Of course today the time is usually spent on-line with Google instead of the library. Enter the quantity vs. quality debate. Do you want 5 highly relevant sources to your project with the chance that you miss an important one? Or 5 million potentially relevant sources to your project that you have to sift through to find the golden nuggets? The answer is probably the first.

So ask yourself, do you feel proficient at navigating the aggregated on-line knowledge of human … » More …

ME 406 Lesson 1- Introduction

Welcome to Northwest Engineering Inc. I’m the CEO, boss, and your supervisor. Here at NEI we characterize the performance of large mechanical machinery for use in other engineering systems.

Before we tour the lab and assign projects, you need to know how the class is structured. Here’s a link to the course syllabus with the schedule: ME 406 syllabus Sp19.

During this first Engineering Experimentation third of the class, each class lecture corresponds to the portion of your report and presentation you need to complete. Let that be clear, if you keep up with the class lectures, the work of completing your report and … » More …

Its OK to not agree with the A-Game

The A-Game

Welcome back to a new semester on campus!

Students, Faculty, and Staff have received several reminders and free copies of Kenneth Sufka’s book “The A Game.” If you’re a student, have looked at the book, and have some concerns and issues, IT’S OK TO HAVE THOSE CONCERNS! I read the book and attended Dr. Sufka’s original lecture on campus and had serious disagreements with the entire premise. But I’m not saying you shouldn’t read it! You should. Just be aware of the book’s intended audience and … » More …

Our near-miss hydrogen vent in ETRL 221

 

Yes, rumors about a hydrogen bomb in ETRL are exaggerated.

On August 2nd around 10:00 am, the HYPER lab had an uncontrolled hydrogen vent into ETRL 221. There was no damage to equipment or personnel, leaving the event classified in accordance with U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) criteria as a “near-miss”. While no critical flaws were identified with the experiment design or procedures for handling the event, the subsequent expert review by the Hydrogen Safety Panel has valuable lessons learned for the WSU and cryogenic hydrogen research communities.
Event Timeline
Around 9:00 AM — A bird flew into a sub-station and shut down power … » More …

Leachmans win Best Poster Award at ASEE Conference

WSU Engineering Librarian Chelsea Leachman and I wrote a paper for the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE) Conference in New Orleans titled, “Modification of the House of Quality to Assess Information Gaps during Quality Function Deployment of Engineering Design.” The paper discusses how we modified a common engineering design tool to naturally facilitate the literature review process. We subsequently tested the technique in my Systems Design class.

It was announced earlier today that the poster we submitted (shown below) won the Best Poster Award for the Engineering Librarys Division (ELD) of the ASEE conference. We’re now up to three most outstanding poster awards, including … » More …

“I wish I worked there!”

Last fall I perused the book, “I Wish I Worked There!: A look inside the most creative spaces in Business” By Kursty Groves, Will Knight, and Edward Denison (photographer). The book goes inside many of the world leading design spaces, including Google, Dyson, Lego, Pixar, and others. The authors conclude that any truly creative space must have four key elements:

Play
Focus
Work
Collaborate

Sounds pretty good right?

It should be obvious that explicitly labeling something as a “creative space” entirely misses the point, and is the crux of the joke in the above image. … » More …

What design theory says about our future WITH AI

Please, allow an upfront disclaimer: I’m not an Artificial Intelligence (AI) researcher — yet. This post focuses on the neurological pathways and memes for how humans design and construct knowledge. Which provide insight into how we will and are using AI.

I’ve posted about spiral memes frequently in the past. The key points to review here are that every major phase in human history had a dominant collection of memes, each of which had a dominant communication medium. For example, the advent of silicon wafers and binary data storage allowed all previous communications to be stored and decoded in a singular format (corresponding to the … » More …

The potential for hydrogen fueled cars in Washington State

This article was originally drafted as an Op-ed submission for the Seattle Times and included input from many people at WSU. Thank you to all of them for the help:

According to the Washington State Greenhouse Gas Emissions Inventory, gasoline fueled cars are by far the largest polluter of carbon dioxide in the state of Washington, accounting for one out of every four molecules emitted. If our state is going to reduce carbon emissions, we’re going to need many zero-emission vehicles– and soon.

Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) or hydrogen Fuel-Cell Electric Vehicles (FCEVs) are the most common zero-emission vehicles. Washington state is making excellent strides … » More …

A proposal for large scale hydrogen liquefaction in the Pacific Northwest

Two years ago I received seed funding from the WSU Energy Systems Innovation Center (ESIC) to investigate the potential for large scale hydrogen liquefaction in the Pacific Northwest. Since then I’ve had numerous conversations with diverse stakeholders including existing liquid hydrogen producers, program managers in the Department of Energy, Bonneville Power Administration, wind farm operators, chlor-alkali plant operators, bio-mass refiners, bio-fuel producers, and regional fuel cell companies. After two years of considering all of the diverse stakeholders for a system of this size and complexity, an awesome concept for our region has finally emerged. I’ll present this in the following parts: 1) existing North America … » More …