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In an effort to attract talented high school students to the engineering profession, Milwaukee School of Engineering (MSOE) has developed a number of outreach programs. The most successful of these, entitled‘Focus on the Possibilities’, allows the student to select a specific engineering discipline and experience a week-long program in their chosen area. This paper details the program developed by the Mechanical Engineering Department at MSOE to attract talented high school students to the mechanical engineering discipline. The program consists of an integrated design/build/test experience, centered around the design of a scale-model race car. The program is facilitated by two key technologies available at MSOE: solid modeling and solid freeform fabrication (rapid prototyping). Through creative use of these enabling technologies, the students are able to take the design of their racer from concept to realization and testing in the span of the week-long program. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of random variables and the application of probabilistic techniques for power system analysis has become an important issue due to the increased uncertainties faced by modern power systems. In the techno-economic analysis of an installation, especially at the design stage, several discrete values have to be considered for each variable, such as voltage, power, power angle, etc. Therefore, in handling such problems, it is advisable to use random variable ranges as explained in the paper taking the area of power transmission engineering as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The limiting situation of a pair of approaching circular arc crack tips in a homogeneous medium is examined to draw analogies with circular disc problems. As the crack tips approach each other, the narrow material ligament bridging the crack tips controls the stresses, stress intensity factors and energy release rates. In particular, this ligament sets up the length scale for singularity analysis for a given radius of the arc crack. Following a detailed analytical examination of approaching crack tips, a photoelastic visualisation of the stress field is presented. Experimental isochromatics are also compared with theoretical predictions for some specific cases. Finally, based on the ideas developed in this paper, existing notions on interacting cracks and cavities treated in the literature are reinterpreted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lot streaming is the process of splitting a job or lot to allow overlapping between successive operations in a multistage production system. This use of transfer lots usually results in a substantially shorter makespan for the corresponding schedule. In this paper, we study the discrete lot streaming problem for a single job in no-wait flow shops. We present a new linear programming formulation for the problem. We show that the optimal solutions are the same for the m x 2 case with or without no-wait constraints. We also present a fast, polynomial-time solution method for this case. For the general case, we prove that any solution which is 'close' to the continuous optimal solution will be a good approximation for the discrete problem. This property allows us to present two quickly obtainable approximations of very good quality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In all branches of engineering, from the earliest times to the present and into the future, there exist only two fundamental approaches to solve problems that arise in the discovery of knowledge and its application to society's needs: a. Theoretical modeling. b. Experimental measurement In engineering, this is true regardless of the discipline (mechanical engineering, electrical engineering , chemical engineering, etc.) or the engineering function (design, manufacturing, etc.). While some problems are adequately treated by using only theory, or only experimentation, most require judiciously chosen mix of these techniques. This is the situation that is presented in this paper, where besides to realize the theoretical analysis of the problem are used experimental measurements to obtain information that allow us to determine the cause of failure in the threaded fasteners of an assembled joint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]