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Power Electronics (PE) is pivotal in fostering renewable energy. However, focusing on usage efficiency shifts environmental impacts across its life cycle, leading to excessive resource extraction and waste accumulation. Integrating environmental impact indicators in PE development is crucial for informed design decisions. Nevertheless, the current literature lacks the provision of adequate understanding of the PE product development process for successful ecodesign in PE industry. To effectively tackle the industrial integration aspect of ecodesign that enable functional and system innovation, this study employs empirical research, combining literature analysis with in-depth interviews with PE designers. Requirements for an ecodesign support to integrate ecodesign practices into the Product Development Process (PDP) of PCB-based Power Electronic Components (PECs) is proposed in this paper based on the interview results. These specifications are delineating the necessary working and decision- making steps. Subsequently, a parameterized Functional Block-based Life Cycle Analysis (FB-LCA) model is proposed under the requirement. A five-step methodology is proposed to operationalise the implementation of the FB-LCA model, aiming to supporting the definition of functional structure, configuration of technical solutions and choice of hardware components by considering environmental impacts generated all along life cycle, from manufacturing, transport, use, circularity scenario, end-of-life .The case study of a PCB-based boost converter design is conducted in collaboration with a PE engineer to test the practical implementation of FB-LCA model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Optimizing testing power is a paramount concern in modern digital circuit design, particularly as the intricacy of circuits continues to rise. This issue becomes even more pronounced with the scaling down of feature sizes due to advancements in process technology. The increase in testing power dissipation, beyond the regular operational state, raises red flags for both designers and test engineers. This paper introduces a novel cluster-based approach, shedding light on the efficient reordering of test vectors to mitigate the heightened switching activity. This technique aims to reduce the power consumption during testing, while still ensuring efficient error detection, maintaining the test period, and preserving the original order of the scan chain. Importantly, this reordering method does not introduce any additional area or test time overhead, minimizing the risks associated with these factors. The potential impact of this approach is demonstrated through concrete examples drawn from ISCAS'89 benchmark circuits. The results showcase a notable 11% reduction in switching activity, all while preserving fault coverage levels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we address the lack of a unified approach to understanding engineering practice by developing and presenting a taxonomy of common engineering activities. The taxonomy consists of 86 common engineering activities linked to 17 engineering competencies and the 11 International Engineering Alliance graduate attributes. The list of activities was developed using a six-step process, including multiple systematic literature searches and surveying engineers. The taxonomy provides a critical foundation for better understanding what engineers do, particularly in the Australian and New Zealand context. The taxonomy has potential utility in both engineering practice research and engineering education curriculum reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the challenges faced by post-disaster construction, the present study endeavours to offer an improved solution in a practical manner. To this end, a critical analysis of modular systems that can be employed in post-disaster construction is conducted, which is succeeded by the set of required features. Considering these features, a system based on modular prefabricated components (MPC) is presented, which effectively eliminates all hitches while demonstrating facilitated solutions. From a practical standpoint, a comprehensive description of the structure's dimensions, assembly steps and design constraints are proffered, accompanied by primary structural analysis factoring in the highest risk categories. The applicability and limitations of the system in post-disaster scenarios are also discussed in comparison to other modular construction methods. The findings indicate that the system exhibits high levels of disjoint-ability and collectability, flexibility and customisability, developability and repairability, in addition to being cost- and time-efficient. Furthermore, it demonstrates a favourable response to the predicaments posed by post-disaster situations, such as logistics, construction process, safety, seismic behaviour and environmental effects. Overall, this research highlights the applicability and potential of MPC systems in post-disaster construction and delivers a valuable output for policymakers, managers, architects and engineers involved in this regard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology development opens up for new possibilities to facilitate the production processes through digital information systems. To optimize the systems' value, the form, content, and medium must fit the needs of the workers. This article aims to contribute to the discussion on value, use and design of digital assistance systems for production. It presents empirical data from a case study at a Norwegian shipyard, on production workers' perception of coordinative challenges, and the value (including content) of digital assistance systems in complex shipbuilding projects. A quantitative survey among supervisors and operators at the shop floor was conducted twice due to different circumstances at the yard. These variations in circumstances are valuable to enable an evaluation of the workers' perception of coordinative challenges and digital solutions in different situations. The findings indicate a pronounced positive attitude towards the potential of digital systems. Moreover, the role of supervisors and operators in coordinative challenges leads to different requirements to the solutions. The results from this study will have both industrial and scientific implications, as they provide valuable insights to help develop user-friendly systems that aid both workers and the company in terms of efficiency and accurate communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wear phenomenon impact the operating efficiency and service life of engineering materials due to the influence of surface interaction at different working conditions. Successive tribological studies on wear-resistant materials in the last decade is estimated at approximately 40% of friction and wear, including laboratory tests. Most locally improvised wear testers in accordance with American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) and European (EN) standards, though, achieve 95-97% parametric accuracies with reduced cost, they hardly harmonize degradation and Archards coefficients for all possible wear factors, providing little data for simulation of mechanical and chemical wears which are responsible for non-uniform aggregation of wear patterns in practice. Complexities of intermeshing factors which combine to influence the effectiveness of developed test devices span over loads, speeds, temperatures, pressures, and ambience for various applications. This study highlights the techniques of wear characterization, test standards, and wear reduction with emphasis on surface texturing for improved eta/beta phase rearrangements at low working temperatures in the enhancement of grain contraction during high bias-voltage cathodic substrate multi-phase coating, phosphating during pretreatments using peening techniques, residual stress reduction during cryogenic heat treatments as well as the impact of suitable architectural matrix composite strengthening, microstructures, and material reinforcements as suitable factors to influence improved tribological behaviors in materials. Optimal additive manufacturing (AM-fabricating) techniques with pretreatments, thermal cycling, and tempering can engineer enhanced anti-tribocorrosion in automotive components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari) is considered a key species for its role as an ecosystem engineer. Given their important ecological function, there is a great concern in the scientific community regarding the many reports of disappearances or great abundance reductions throughout its distribution (from southern Mexico to northern Argentina). Based on an extensive survey effort, we report new data of presence of WLP after a period of no detections in the Argentine Yungas. The study was conducted in the Yungas ecoregion, provinces of Jujuy and Salta, Argentina. Data was collected from camera trap, direct sightings and footprints during 2013–2021. From a total of 30,186 trap nights, we obtained 8 WLP detections. There were no detections before 2017, while as of 2018 there was at least one camera trap record in each of the years. Additionally, opportunistic records were obtained yearly from 2019 to 2021. The period without detections could be related to a period of a population cycle, as suggested in different regions of America during the last century, being disease the most likely cause. These cycles generally follow a pattern of a rapid population decline, a period of absence or low abundance followed by slow population growth. We believe that if the trend continues and the number of detections increases, we could be facing the early stages of the increase phase in the WLP population cycle in the Argentine Yungas. This type of report is important to document and contribute to a better understanding of the WLP population cycle process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In today's world, people need sleeker devices with better functionality and longer battery life. This can be achieved by integrating more components onto smaller chips, resulting in a shift to low-geometry chip design. However, power dissipation due to dynamic and static currents is more prominent in all ICs, resulting in an increase in overall power consumption. Estimating power dissipation early will provide more accurate usage of power pads/strips and help floor plan engineers do power planning efficiently. As you provide more details about your design characteristics, the estimation of power will be accurate. The major focus of this work is to give an alternative solution to predict the power dissipation of integrated circuits using a machine learning approach in both pre and post layout. The proposed work uses supervision models and algorithms like Linear regression, KNN, SVM, and RF for power prediction and a comparative study is made between power estimates made using ML algorithms and by the Cadence EDA tool for a particular technology for various bench circuits. The average error is less than 4% when we compare the estimated power using ML and by using the Cadence EDA tool and shows that for estimation of power in integrated circuits, Random Forest is a well-suited algorithm with an error percentage varying from 2 to 4. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we make software services evolve safely and be long-lived? By designing on the premise of microservices, the services become loosely coupled, which can localise the changes in the system and accelerate the changes. However, from a medium- to long-term perspective, it is not easy to respond to changes in technology trends, business changes including legal revisions, and changes in user requirements among the changing project members. We propose DevFemOps as a way to enhance maintainability and achieve continuous quality improvement, coining the term DevFemOps to place Formal Engineering Methods at the center of the DevOps cycle. We also define the DevFemOps QA engineer as a new role within the agile development squad that is responsible for the quality of the product. In this paper, we will describe how the DevOps cycle, with QA engineers at the center, can bring us closer to the goal of DevFemOps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a novel theoretical framework of engineering ethics, specifically how engineering professional practitioners make sense of ethics. Multiple regression was applied to 2009 survey data (N=2276, 38% return) of practising engineers, to identify groups of competencies correlated with ethics. These were identified as values within an ethics worldview model. The model has two compartments. One is the development of a professional worldview, whereby professional engineers reconstruct their own values over time, and then seek to embody those in their own life. The other is an awareness of the need for professional judgement in complex decision-making. All the significant variables identified in the survey may be accommodated in this model. While the raw data (ex 2009) were dated, the method and findings help move the field forward by providing new insights into how practising engineers make sense of ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the relationship among engineers' basic skills, problem-finding and -solving capabilities, and innovation outcomes, using questionnaire survey data for Lao P.D.R., Thailand and Vietnam for the period 2016 to 2017. We perform two-stage least squares (2S.L.S.) estimations, which use the variables for engineers' basic skills and capabilities for finding and solving problems within the firm as instruments, and the indicators for capabilities for finding and solving problems of suppliers and customers as endogenous variables. The estimation results reveal the relationship between problem-finding and -solving capabilities and process innovation. The findings from the empirical analyses suggest a possible upgrading strategy for firms to transform quality control management into innovative abilities. The estimation results also support the necessity of policy support for nurturing both engineers' basic technological and managerial skills and capabilities for problem-finding and -solving. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A recent report by the Foundation for Young Australians that derived from an analysis of 4.2 million job advertisements in Australia from 2012 to 2015, revealed that the demand for professionals possessing creative problem-solving skills grew by 249%. This paper reflects on the successes of engineering educators in developing creative graduates and discusses the means to instil the skills of creative problem-solving. It considers research evidence of the suitability of heuristics (methods) for problem framing and idea generation that are sourced from the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) for enhancing the creative problem-solving skills of engineering students. Twelve TRIZ heuristics are considered. A repository of TRIZ educatinal materials (TRIZ Repository) is introduced. The outcomes of four studies from Australia, Hong Kong and New Zealand that embedded educational materials offered by the TRIZ Repository into existing courses are presented. This paper concludes that TRIZ heuristics are suitable for embedding into courses that require students to tackle open-ended problems. As demonstrated by the studies, even one class devoted to a TRIZ heuristic can statistically significantly enhance students' creative problem-solving self-efficacy. The TRIZ Repository of educational materials may enable many engineering educators to instil creative problem-solving into their courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when the routine tasks traditionally carried out by engineers are being undertaken by either technicians or technologists with access to powerful IT systems or AI with machine learning algorithms, there is an urgent need to reframe the education of engineering students beyond rote learning. This involves providing a learning framework to support creative problem-solving as specified by many of the Graduate Attributes required by the Washington Accord for accreditation of tertiary engineering degrees. At the same time, there is a growing movement towards STEAM led education that couples the traditional STEM subjects with the Arts in order to produce more creative and innovative engineers. Based on experience of developing a new design paper for undergraduate students that meets the needs of a specific group of people in society, this paper explores options to incorporate STEAM style education into engineering degree programs that builds on lessons learnt from the best of professional practice. The result is a multi-disciplinary framework coupled with pedagogical practices from the Arts and Design that focuses learning on the human sciences, natural sciences, craftsmanship and design thinking to provide holistic engineering education under pinned by technical competencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I "The exclusion of wisdom from economics, science and technology was something which we could perhaps get away with for a little while, as long as we were relatively unsuccessful; but now that we have become very successful, the problem of spiritual and moral truth moves into the central position." i - E. F. Schumacher Cathedrals are beautiful buildings. Those practices should include those that reinforce values like sustainability, participation, good work, and the use of new technologies in ethical ways. As leaders of innovation and technology management, one of the things we need to consider when a radically new technology bursts onto the scene is not only how it might be used, but how it might affect people and the work that they do. [Extracted from the article]

Using N2 or dry air to replace SF6 as high-voltage switchgear insulation media is a hot topic in the development of environmental friendly switching equipment. In order to make switchgear equipment with N2 has a much compact structure in space, engineers should fully understand the insulation characteristics of N2. In this paper, the breakdown characteristics of N2 at power frequency and with lightning pulse in the sphere-plate electrodes has been investigated and the effect of humidity on breakdown voltage analyzed. From the test results, it was revealed that the AC and impulse breakdown voltages of N2 were not seriously affected by different moisture content ranging from 0 to 1000 μL/L in N2. And the breakdown voltage was decreased 8~15% with increasing moisture contents from 1500 to 2000 μL/L. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are three types of liquid crystals (LCs) in the world: rodics, discotics and bowlics, corresponding to one-, two- and three-dimensional molecules, respectively. The rodics were discovered by the Austrian, F. Reinitzer, in 1888 and is the material behind the LC display industry of $100 billion annually. The discotics were discovered by S. Chandrasekhar’s team in India, in 1977. The third type, bowlics, was proposed by a Chinese, LIN Lei (Lui LAM), in 1982 while working at the Institute of Physics, CAS, Beijing. Distinguished from the rodic and the discotic, a bowlic molecule breaks the up–down symmetry, and bowlic LCs are one of excellent candidates for switchable ferroelectrics with great potential applications in ultrahigh-density memory devices. The importance of strategic bowlic materials has recently attracted increasing attention of scientists from multiple disciplines and engineers from different backgrounds. In this review, the history of bowlics and their recent advances in molecular design, synthesis and applications are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia is not immune to earthquakes and history proves their future location and magnitude cannot be predicted. To ensure life safety in a somewhat uncertain seismic environment, the appropriate design and detailing of reinforced concrete structures will provide a level of resilience so that in a rarer seismic event, the risk of a total collapse of the structure is ideally avoided. To design structures economically for the significantly higher earthquake loads, most of the loading is carried by the inelastic response of the structure. This is why the correct design and detailing of reinforcement to AS 3600, to provide structures with the ductility to respond inelastically to extreme seismic events, is so important. The new SRIA ‘Guide to Seismic Design and Detailing of Reinforced Concrete Buildings in Australia’, is intended to provide guidance on seismic design principles to graduates, practicing engineers with little seismic experience and senior engineers requiring refreshment on the delicate balance between life safety and the client’s cash flow. As Engineers have a role to communicate seismic risk to the community and reduce seismic risk for the community, this publication provides a valuable resource as it contains lists of questions that should be considered  in design. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A linear stochastic vibration model in state-space form, ẋ (t) = Ax(t) + b(t), x(0) = x0, with output equation xS(t) = Sx(t) is investigated, where A is the system matrix and b(t) is the white noise excitation. The output equation xS(t) = Sx(t) can be viewed as a transformation of the state vector x(t) that is mapped by the rectangular matrix S into the output vector xs(t). It is known that, under certain conditions, the solution x(t) is a random vector that can be completely described by its mean vector, mx(t): = mx(t), and its covariance matrix, Px(t): = Px(t). If matrix A is asymptotically stable, then mx(t) → 0 (t → ∞) and ... (t) → PS (t → ∞), where PS is a positive (semi-)definite matrix. Similar results will be derived for some output-related quantities. The obtained results are of special interest to applied mathematicians and engineers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the robustification of principal component analysis (PCA) has attracted lots of attention from statisticians, engineers, and computer scientists. In this work, we study the type of outliers that are not necessarily apparent in the original observation space but can seriously affect the principal subspace estimation. Based on a mathematical formulation of such transformed outliers, a novel robust orthogonal complement principal component analysis (ROC-PCA) is proposed. The framework combines the popular sparsity-enforcing and low-rank regularization techniques to deal with row-wise outliers as well as element-wise outliers. A nonasymptotic oracle inequality guarantees the accuracy and high breakdown performance of ROC-PCA in finite samples. To tackle the computational challenges, an efficient algorithm is developed on the basis of Stiefel manifold optimization and iterative thresholding. Furthermore, a batch variant is proposed to significantly reduce the cost in ultra high dimensions. The article also points out a pitfall of a common practice of singular value decomposition (SVD) reduction in robust PCA. Experiments show the effectiveness and efficiency of ROC-PCA in both synthetic and real data. Supplementary materials for this article are available online. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Due to substantial role of bridges in transportation networks and in accordance with the limited funding for bridge management, remediation strategies have to be prioritised. A conservative bridge assessment will result in unnecessary actions, such as costly bridge strengthening or repairs. On the other hand, any bridge maintenance negligence and delayed actions may lead to heavy future costs or degraded assets. The accuracy of decisions developed by any manager or bridge engineer relies on the accuracy of the bridge condition assessment which emanates from visual inspection. Most of the bridge ranking systems are commonly based on structural condition. Parameters such as functionality and client preferences are used in an isolated fashion. The developing prioritisation method described herein is an important step in adding more holism and objectivity to the current approaches. To achieve this goal, all important parameters have been identified, weighted and finally synthesised in an index introduced as Priority Index (PI). PI is expressed as a number which enables the decision-makers to simply understand and compare the overall condition of a variety of bridges in the network. It embraces three factors: structural efficiency, functional efficiency and client impact factor. The proposed model was tested through case studies and qualified experts (senior bridge inspectors, engineers and asset managers) from about 30 private and public transportation authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An interview with geological engineer and Amur Minerals chief executive officer Robin Young is presented. He describes his career background and the mining activities of Amur Minerals. Young compares Russia's mining industry and that of other countries. He also discusses factors that affect the exploration efforts of his company, including major equipment failure and the weather.

An interview with mining engineer Jeremy Wrathall is presented. Topics discussed, include Wrathall's development of lithium-bearing brines as his career highlight, his training as mining engineer and his corporate roles and the difficulties he faced in extracting lithium from Cornwall such as identifying the best place to drill and the best means of extraction.

The article reports on the 21st Century Professional Engineering Institutions (PEI) on May 5, 2017. Discussed are the 35 engineering institutions which attended the Young Members Workshop held at the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET) in London. Also discussed are the debates and discussion where members have the opportunity to share their own ideas.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses several issues including the materials and design communities who are constantly exchanging expertise; the use of animal parables to communicate ideas and a workshop for the young professional engineer members.