From Desktop Engg Magazine Dec 2005
----------------------------------------------
Suchit Jain, the vice president of analysis products at Structural Research and Analysis Corp., says that this group of users wants to solve problems as is, whereas (traditional) analysts know how and when to simplify a problem or to use symmetry as appropriate. Jain says the former groups’ approach has now become, "Whatever I see, I want to analyze."
--------------------------------------------------
In March 2004, 'Model Size- How large is large enough (1000 elements)?' - we were discussing.

For X-Gen CAESAR II users, what is the current size of stress isos - 30 or 40 A3 sheets ? How can people check, verify or audit such documentation ? Are they supermen ?

regards,
sam

Models have gotten bigger in the last 30 years and people now want what seems like everything to be analyzed.

The B31 codes still sum up to me what the criteria is...

But the real secret is the skill of the evaluator.... that skill or the lack thereof is not easily documentable perse!

Luf Sir, you have written right.

But, even those who are hardest to satisfy in all other matters nowadays, are not in the habit of desiring more of the skill you talked about than they already have. Mainly this occurs due to lack of flexibility and learning agility. Young minds should explore the alternatives, question
the assumptions and guard the charming naivete in them while learning from every part of daily work.

In a complicated and dangerous business of piping stress analysis, software can help but not substitute the skill of analysts. In many of the bulk produced documents of stress analyses we are not finding the minimum amount of aptitude, common sense & judgements. It seems availability of tons of quality high-end competency at low cost is more a myth than reality!

In this fully commercialized world with diminishing state support to technological education, the quality of mass produced screwdriver-technology engineers are questionable. Only transparent competency checking before & intensive training after recruitment regarding theory,practise & values can raise the present dismal standard.

regards,

sam

P.S.- It seems that none has any comments on this issue in this discussion forum. But, why ?

Sam,

I found the title of this thread quite stimulating perhaps people are unsure as to what to say.....

Since 3d Cad packages have been able to send geometry to stress analysis software .... more systems commonly are analyzed than prevuiously and the models have gotten bigger... in part because of the abilty to send geometry to the analysis software....

But as you look and analyze system after system you will eventually aquire the ability to write off some systems without using software. At least as far as pipe stresses are concerned, but equipment loads require a numeric solution.

Luf Sir,

My concern was regarding reliability of solution in large models in complicated & dangerous business of petrochemical applications, not simply writing off some systems without using software for bringing down the size of the piping systems stress analyzed.

Earlier we had never modeled something that big in large unit power plant & nuclear piping even with very powerful computers at our disposal, just due to the very rigorous checking & regulatory/safety committee reviews.

Perhaps in this era of interesting times, we have lost the importance of flawless execution.

Pilots have to know that they are in a mission where they need to just follow the brief; even if they can wipe out a whole city from a distance of thousand miles, will it help in winning the War!

We have very powerful hard wares & soft wares at our disposal at present; our aim is to ensure safety & minimization of life cycle cost of the plants we design for our clients. If that can be served by making a large PDS or PDMS model of the whole process plant by a drafting hand & exporting the same to structural analysis software for analysis & interpretation of results reliably, we have nothing to worry! I wish in the 'Internet of Things To come', such a day will come; in the transition phase, our clients need to remain safe & sound at least to witness such a day!

regards,
sam

P.S. - Many studies & audits have brought out the need for quality & integrity in human resources in design engineering today. In a connected World, any kind of protection of the mediocrity will be a drag to business.

for a change - what a person can be if he loves to be so...

Such one-line-lesson you can learn by reading a big, but interesting article, reproduced below.

regards,

sam

Dad, I wannabe a physicist’
By Leonard Susskind
(who discovered string theory)


My father was a tough wiry Jew from the Bronx. He was a small man with Popeye forearms and hands strong enough to crack walnuts just by squeezing. He was my hero. No one was as strong, honest, smart, or brave as he. He was a plumber and his business was in the rotten tenement buildings in Harlem and the South Bronx where we lived. It was nothing like being a plumber in Palo Alto where I live now. The buildings were dirty, smelly, full of rats, and dangerous. A good part of his business was sewer and drain cleaning which is filthy work. From the age of 13 I worked with him after school, Saturdays, holidays, and all summer. The family plan was for me to take over the business sometime after I finished high school.

The truth was that I hated sewer cleaning and wanted to get out. Coming from a working class family where nobody had gotten past the 5th grade, I had no idea what else to do. But my father had an idea. He wanted the two of us to go into the heating business. This meant big furnaces and hot water boilers for the tenement buildings. He thought that I should go to college and learn heating engineering. This seemed better than the sewer, so in 1957 I enrolled in the City College of New York as a freshman-engineering student. CCNY was a subway college and it was free.

The first year was great. It was all mathematics and physics. Physics was completely new to me. I had no idea that a person could become a physicist and make a living, but I was good at it and it was fun. I did well those first two semesters. By that time I was married with a small baby and I still worked whenever I could. I was enjoying life. But then came my first real engineering class. It involved making drawings of mechanical parts like gears, cogs and that kind of thing. In those days there were no computers and you did the drawing with India ink and a kind of pen invented by the devil himself, a so-called ruling pen. Using it was a trick I simply couldn’t master and so by the time the rest of the class had completed three drawings I was halfway through the first.

I still remember the professor’s name —Harold Rothbart. Toward the end of the semester HR came over to my drawing table and said “Susskind, you are failing this class.” This was bad news. So far I had done very well in college and I was on schedule to graduate and go to work full time to support my little family. Then he said that he would pass me under one condition, namely, that I drop out of engineering. I said “What am I going to do? I’ve got to become an engineer so that I can build heating systems.” HR looked concerned and then said, “Susskind, you’re a very smart kid. You should become a scientist. Go talk to the science departments and find out if they will take you.”

To me, at that time, science meant white lab coats and test tubes. So I went to the chemistry chairman. He looked at my record and said that since I had not taken any chemistry courses it would take me at least an extra year-and-a-half to graduate. That was a non-starter. I had to get to work.

Next I tried math. I had gotten an A in calculus, but I still didn’t have enough math credits to graduate on time. So finally I went to the physics department. I talked to a guy chomping on a stinking cigar. His name was Harry Soodak and he became my physics mentor and friend. We are still good friends to this day. He said that I could probably get through in time if I did some extra studying in the summer.

I figured to myself that I was smart enough to find out how boilers and furnaces worked on my own, and I would graduate with a physics degree. My father would never know the difference. But things don’t always work as planned. I fell in love with physics and discovered that it was still a living, breathing science and that it was possible to be a physicist. For the next three years all I wanted to do was learn physics and try my hand at doing it myself. With Harry’s help I gradually became a physicist, a beginner to be sure, but a physicist nonetheless. I knew I could not go on being a plumber.

But I would have to break my father’s heart. I had to tell him. So I worked up my courage, drove over to his house with my wife and baby, and said, “Ben (my father’s name was Benny), I’ve got to tell you something.” I was scared, but I blurted it out. “I’m not going to be an engineer.”

The tough guy looked at me and said, “What the — do you mean, you’re not going to be an engineer? What are you going to be — a ballet dancer?” I said, “I want to be something else, a physicist” “Physicist? Physicist? What the hell is a physicist?” I really wanted to say, ha ha, I’m kidding. But I held my ground and answered “It’s a kind of scientist.” He had never heard of physics before and he responded, “Get out of here — you ain’t going to work in no drug store.” He thought I had said pharmacist. I was not sure that I could explain so I took a shortcut. I said “a scientist like Einstein.”

“Einstein?” he said. “Yeah, Einstein.” For a full minute he stood silent, in deep thought. Then he said, “Are you any good at this stuff?” I knew that I was and I said so. He got quiet again for 15 or 20 seconds and then pointed a short piece of pipe at me. “Look Sonny” (that’s what I was called at that time) “you ain’t gonna be no plumber. You’re gonna be a physicist. Like Einstein!” Then my mother, who was listening started to cry. “Oh my god, he won’t be able to make a living. The baby won’t have enough to eat. They’ll starve.” Ben turned around and shot her an angry look. “Shut up, he’s gonna be Einstein.”

Oddly, as soon as I discovered physics I stopped doing well in college. All I wanted to do was physics, but CCNY rightly wanted me to get a full education: English, Biology, History, German etc. The conflict was resolved in favour of physics.

I immediately proceeded to fail every non-physics course for the next couple of years. But fortunately, Harry Soodak and a couple of other physics professors thought enough of my abilities to convince Cornell University to accept me as a graduate student — a graduate student who hadn’t graduated. Three years later I had a freshly minted Cornell PhD in physics, but still no bachelor’s degree. Then one day, the year was 1966, after I was already an assistant professor at the Belfer Graduate School of Science (Yeshiva University) in New York, I received a large envelope from CCNY that contained a diploma and an updated transcript. All the failed courses had been eliminated, but I noticed that I had been credited with proficiency in a number of subjects including plumbing.

I loved being a professor at the Belfer Graduate School. It was an extremely stimulating place full of great physicists like David Finkelstein, Yakir Aharonov, Joel Lebowitz, Eliot Lieb, Roger Penrose, Freeman Dyson, and Al Cameron. It was during that time that I co-discovered string theory. But the good times at Belfer lasted for only 10 years. Bad economic times in the 1970s undermined the economic base of many universities, but none so dramatically as The Belfer School. It went belly up and I had to trundle off to Stanford University where I have been a professor since 1978.

The intellectual life of theoretical physicists is a strange one. Driven by curiosity about the mysteries of the physical world, we spend most of our time confused and frustrated by questions that just won’t yield — questions like “Why is it that quarks behave like miniature ‘tar babies’ stuck together by some sticky substance that just won’t let go?” or “Are the bits of information that fall into a black hole destroyed by violent tidal forces at the black hole’s singularity, or are they radiated back into the world when the black hole evaporates?”

For me, most of the time has been spent going in circles over paradoxical conflicts that I am unable to resolve. But I have been luckier than most. From time to time, the confusion has been punctuated by brief periods of discovery — Eureka moments — when I was able to break through some problem and see some new pattern. The discovery of string theory was like that and so was the discovery that the world is a kind of quantum hologram. Both of these ideas are now main-stream physics but I had the good luck to recognise them early on. These brief periods of illumination are what theoretical physicists live for.

I’ve also been very lucky to be part of the incredibly interesting society of theoretical physicists and had such extraordinary friends as Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking and countless less famous but equally fascinating colleagues. We live in a unique and amazing world of ideas that I wouldn’t trade for any other. All I can say is, “Hey diddle dee dee, a physicist’s life for me.”

I have often been asked if there was any book that influenced me to become a physicist. I only recall one and I don’t remember when I read it. It may have been high school or even early college, but it left a very strong impression on me of the romance of theoretical physics. It is probably the place that I first learned who Einstein really was and what he had done. The little book was George Gamow’s wonderful One Two Three Infinity. At the time I would have been amazed to know that Gamow was more than a writer of clever short popular books. He was the father of the modern Big Bang theory of the Universe. Later in life I came to greatly value some other popular science books. I’ll list them in no particular order. The Double Helix by James Watson, Dreams of a Final Theory (Steven Weinberg) and The Selfish Gene (Richard Dawkins).

Sam methinks, is a romantic.
Sam should work here and have the romance beaten out of him by fire breathing Pipers!!

To T.J.N,

Romantic - arn't you, too? Otherwise, how have you read this long article!

In fact, all of us spending time in this discussion forum are like the mirror seller in the land of blinds; but, who knows, may be some day these chicks(young birds) will open their eyes by God's grace to find themselves so charming!

The other day I was reviewing a large(150nos of A3 sheet) ambient temperature carbon steel piping analysis - one person spent more than a week on it in Caesar-II modelling (spending 12 hours/day & 6 days a week) just to analyze the piping for solar radiation, along with sustained weight, wind & seismic event.

Is he romantic with his work ? Perhaps not. But, still I admire him, as in him I find the hero - 'the small man' Dad of our great Leonard Susskind. These young people are making industries competitive by their hard labor. We just remind them that they need to improve & go up in the value chain. They should realize that maths does what comps can't - from nanosec to years - various types of timescales are possible & what can be done in 150 no A3 sheets, can be done in one A4 sheets sometimes.

regards,
sam

I usually have to take people out back for a good beating (figuratively speaking) when they go and build models of ambient piping. It's things like that which give stress analysts and oft times deserved bad name

Am I a romantic? :-)

Dear,

We, Indians, too, never stress analyze ambient piping where we decide; elsewhere - you better guess ?

We have analyzed 2"NB steam drain piping for a combined cycle power plant in NY for months, just because someone paid for it & asked us to do so.

Is it our fault that we accept what you willingly give, because we can't afford to refuse ?

regards,

sam

LOL some contracts require stress analysis via the computer of ambient lines in areas subject to seismic or wind loadings....

When I have pointed out to these clients what the code requires or doesn't they simply want the PC print out!

Luf Sir,

We have to realize that people who decide our fate follow policy manuals & standard work processes for everything: even the margin on the letterheads are pre-decided for them and they just go through loops to get approvals for almost every decision. It is better to match ourselves with their requirements & get along with them.While changing ourselves, we shouldn't compromise on our values, still, in this interesting time of Wal-Mart where each one of us are nothing more than a commodity!

The famous poem by Martin Niemöller (1892-1984) is now applicable for US too, about accumulation of Globalized Market power by the targeting of specific groups one at a time:

"First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak out for me. "

regards,

sam

True sad but true!

Sir,

We shouldn't despair. Fakes never last long. Otherwise, Enron could still remain as the market leader. As cheap suppliers never think of tomorrow, their products operate with break-downs & problems. There, experienced & ownership-oriented niche players can chip in with modernized tools of nonlinear FEA, CFD & test benches or sometimes, simply with their omnipotent minds.


In one instance in India of 25 MW units of pulverized coal based power plant of 6 feed heaters,client thought that he made a big saving over local not-so-efficient fluidized bed power plant with smaller number of heaters. Had the cheap supplier internalized the cradle-to-grave life-cycle cost of the plant including frequent maintenance, it could not be that cheap! Within a couple of years, client learnt the same in the hard way.

If some have service attitude, inventiveness and integrity, businesses can't afford to overlook them for long! If anything else could be true, then there could not be any sustainability of non-profit making organizations all over the World!


Let us use our frustration as a source of change, accept it as a course-corrector. Stephen .A. Diamond in The Psychology of Creativity pointed out how difficult a person Michelangelo was, bitter and depressed, imagining enemies everywhere. He was furious when Pope Julius II asked him to paint his chapel but the painting on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel turned out to be one of the most astonishing creations the world has known.


Our needs are very few; when we realize that, we can never be sad!

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2006 TO ALL!

regards,

sam