Skip to main content Skip to navigation
Hydrogen Properties for Energy Research (HYPER) Laboratory Cool. Fuel.

ME 316 Lesson 5: Defining What a Design MUST and SHOULD do

For those of you curious, Jake was lucky enough to be in Florida watching the MUOS-4 launch this morning and won’t be back until Friday. This is a great example of a complex system like the one we will be designing (and uses liquid hydrogen too!).

Now that you have seen the competition requirements, talked with our customers/clients, and had a chance to read relevant literature on your specific topic, you should have a pretty good understanding of what is required and some of the specific challenges we will have to rise to meet. It’s time to start talking systems design!

No engineer, regardless … » More …

ME 316 Lesson 4: 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 which means you need to talk to a librarian.

Contrary to popular belief, librarians are … » More …

Telling vs. Showing by Theory

“Tell me and I’ll forget. Show me and I may remember. Involve me and I’ll understand.” ~Lao Tze

A traditional engineering homework assignment wants you to tell us the answer. Need proof? Look at a calculator and see how hard it is to plot a function or curve. Calculators are typewriters and should have vanished long ago. Asking someone to tell us an answer is much easier than plotting a trend or curve. Plotting requires spatial awareness of the physical interplay of operators within your mathematical function. Explaining plots shows us that we understand why trends appear.

Showing by theory is essential in complex systems … » More …

Conformance vs. Compliance

 

The difference is subtle:

Conformity

 

and one is used to define the other —

Compliance

 

— but from a design standpoint the difference is essential. Where conformance must follow an algorithm, compliance can follow a desire, wish, or even yes, a rule or process. Dr. Chuck has a great piece on how companies tend to follow a design progression from mystery –> heuristic –> algorithm. We emphasize heuristic’s over algorithms in ME 316 because we tend to engineer things that are … » More …

Buyer vs. Builder

Buyer from Aerospace Company A walks into a room of potential suppliers and says, “The only thing I care about is how cheap you can meet spec.”

Builder from Aerospace Company B walks in later and says, “We want to be able to rely on you and you to rely on us. What’s the price you need to be able to provide reliable parts that keep us competitive for the long haul?”

Being the builder is about much more than buying parts, managing a budget, and building components. You’re building confidence in your suppliers, sponsors, and team-members that can’t be bought. You’re building relationships that … » More …

Recorder vs. Reporter

A ritual hazing practice in many organizations (including department meetings) is to ask the newest person in the room to “take the minutes”, “secretary” is too loaded of a term now, so we call them a recorder:

Recorder

 

12 years ago I thought I was novel for typing meeting minutes in an e-mail window in real time and sending to the team at the close of the meeting. After awhile though I realized that nobody went back and read the minutes. Thank goodness they didn’t! My recording was sloppy relative to the free audio recorder apps on most cellphones nowadays.

» More …

Leader vs. Liaison

It’s always gone without saying that the first step in team formation is to identify a leader. That’s why the team member roles we defined in ME 316 last Wednesday caught many off guard. We defined roles of Builder, Compliance, Reporter, Theory, and Liaison for each team. Note no “Leader.”

Some of you that know my background are immediately saying, “But Jake, you’re being a hypocrite, you led almost every team you’ve been on since elementary school.” While that’s mostly true, and I’ve won with more teams than not, for some reason, I stopped seeking leadership positions after high school. Why I stopped when I … » More …

Support and a mission from the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust

It is my pleasure to announce that the M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust has awarded our H2-Refuel team a $60k (+$60k WSU match) Commercialization Gap award to prototype and commercialize our hydrogen fueling station concept. The Program Director, Dr. Moses Lee, specifically stated:

“This grant will be made to Washington State University in honor of the late President Floyd. He was a great and well-regarded man who has done tremendous service to WSU and the State. His vision and legacy will live on. The Trust and our Trustees thought our support of this excellent project is a good way to honor him.”

This builds on support … » More …

ME 316 Lesson 2: Conway’s Law and the Design Process

Nature began designing systems long before our time. You’re likely already a natural at design and you might not be aware of it. Let’s take a quick class survey on associating information flows (see link to Google Form in Slack 316 private group).

How we store, share, and process information has a huge effect on the designs we produce. In 1968 Mel Conway published a paper titled, “How Committees Invent.” This document is generally considered the origin of what is now called Conway’s Law:

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations. ~Mel … » More …

Ortho–Para Effects on Hydrogen Mixture Measurements

While conducting composition measurements on helium-hydrogen mixtures using a Varian gas chromatograph at WSU’s Analytical Chemistry Service Center, I discovered that the ratio of orthohydrogen–parahydrogen has a significant effect on the measurements.  An in depth discussion of the allotropic forms of hydrogen can be found in the previous post “Why equilibrium hydrogen doesn’t exist”.  In my system, gaseous hydrogen is condensed in a copper test cell at 20 K.  An ortho-para catalyst is placed in the bottom of the test cell to ensure all of the hydrogen is converted to parahydrogen. Helium gas is then introduced into the test cell to the desired pressure. The amount … » More …