More than a few years ago, bordering on the “many”, I was invited to take part in a graduate selection weekend for Ford in the UK. It was a battery of tests ranging from one-on-one interviews and team-working simulations to presentations and problem-solving “incidents” – all nicely wrapped up in dinners and coffees in a pleasant hotel in the countryside.

One of the tasks – maybe there were twelve of them, I didn’t count – was to decide what equipment should be offered as optional, standard or not at all for a sporty Ford Escort model (these were the pre-Focus days), to meet a budget. We then had to write a report explaining our choices, needing to meet a most important deadline (lunch).

Being a bit of a car enthusiast, I made what I thought was a decent selection (including ABS and airbags as standard equipment), whilst keeping some budget for a few luxuries as standard (a CD player, I think), to differentiate Ford from, say, BMW, whose cassette tape decks were one optional extra, speakers to hear music from seemingly another…

Being a well-drilled undergraduate engineer, I wrote the subsequent report in the only way I knew how - with an introduction, a summary, a body and conclusions.

When I was given the job offer a few weeks later (which I took - a decision point that remains with me to this day, and is definitely worthy of a post of its own), Ford gave me some feedback over the phone. My presentation had been borderline terrible, but the report I had written was excellent.

In fact, it turned out that I had been the only candidate to actually write a report. Everybody else had written prose.

So, in honour of that, and in recognition of the possible fact that report writing remains for me, over emails and presentations, the main recipient of work related keystrokes, here’s my report on report writing in engineering.

TITLE

An Investigation into the enduring and endearing constraints of report writing

Author

The Literal Engineer

SUMMARY

The act of reading a technical report involves a certain mental effort. This effort should be rewarded with increased knowledge. In order to minimise the effort and to maximise the potential for knowledge extraction, the report writer should generate the report in as standard a way as possible.

The act of writing a report invokes a particular and peculiar mode of language, which itself requires a mental switch and effort to maintain, the passive voice. Writing in the passive voice lends the report an appearance (but no guarantee) of objectivity. A potential pitfall of the passive voice is the risk of the writing becoming stilted and unreadable. Yet this pitfall is deemed to present a lower risk to knowledge transfer than chatty and poorly applied novelistic writing.

Deciding on the tense remains difficult. The report should be written with history and evidence in mind; a report is a snapshot of the status of whatever is being investigated at the time, in this case – report writing. Using the passive voice is, overall, a positive constraint.

EQUIPMENT

Mid 2012 MacBook Air

2006 Rain Recording PC workstation with Logitech keyboard and mouse

Microsoft Word 2013 and Online

Microsoft Office 365 / OneDrive

Typepad blogging platform

Evernote note taking platform

Firefox and Safari browsers

1. INTRODUCTION

A technical engineering report can be understood as a window to a complex and meaningful event (or series of events) that took place within an organisation. The intended goal of a report is that its findings be understood. For this goal of understanding to be even remotely achievable, the report writer must describe the event in sufficient detail with sufficient brevity and clarity to form a synthesis of the outcomes of that undertaking. A report should therefore be  logically structured and legible.

Ideally, the summary and conclusions from a report should add to the great body of human knowledge. It is recognised, however, that, more often than not, reports must be produced to describe small-scale and often painfully regular events.

Regardless of where a report lands on the scale of import (or lack thereof) to humanity, the form and language follow traditional structures. Report writing in the technical fields is designed to enforce (the impression of) objectivity. The passive voice depersonalises the investigation and can be construed as an attempt to prioritise facts over individual actions.

I did not post this report on 30th Sep.2014

rather:

This report was posted on 30.09.2014

The tradition of using the passive voice imposes a constraint on the writer, which forces upon him or her (the passive voice at the very least enables authors to avoid the awkward distinction of the sexes) a mental switch and effort to make and to sustain the passive voice. This is an appropriate cost of entry, as the reader needs only recognise one style, whatever the source of the report.

2. THE STRUCTURE OF A REPORT

Reports are constructed around a common set of elements that may vary in style, format or order from organisation to organisation, but nevertheless ensure swift navigation to the pertinent sections or level of detail for the experienced reader - from an overall summary (usually to be found near the beginning), to detailed descriptions of equipment and methods used, via a logically structured body of evidence and discussion. The report at hand loosely follows such a typical structure and does not purport to set any standards with its own form.

It is also based on very little evidence.

3. THE CONSTRAINTS IMPOSED ON LANGUAGE IN REPORT WRITING

Actions and analyses leading to conclusions and summaries – no matter how breathlessly exciting at the time of their experiencing – are, in translation into a report, passed through a mental filter that compresses them into the passive voice.

This imposes a constraint on the author, which, similarly to the imposition of a recognisable structure on a report, lightens the burden on the reader (see Section 3.1 for more considerations on the reader’s role).

As in so many cases, especially in the arts and in engineering, this constraint can be viewed as overall positive: few physicists or engineers have been recognised as possessing the gifts of novelistic writing (or even spelling); honing the craft of the passive voice relieves these authors of many grammatical pitfalls.

The key to the passive voice, and the difference to novelistic writing, is that there are no characters or personalities to deal with. Someone or something does not do something to some other thing or person. Rather, some action is done to some object.

The strut was loaded into a tensile testing machine and its stress-strain curve was determined.

The sample was subjected to 60 cycles of cyclic corrosion testing according to specification X

The tea bag was placed into the pre-warmed cup. The cup containing the tea bag was filled to just off brim-full with boiling water. The assembly was left to stew for 4 minutes.

Humans act in all technical investigations, but the passive voice strips them out as being extraneous information. Whilst this is not always to be considered positive in most human relationships, being able to divide out the common denominators is, just as in arithmetic and mathematics, key to understanding the basic signals of what is being investigated. Humans, then, are a form of noise – in technical reports, at least.

Writing in the passive voice is a skill that must be honed with practice. For as long as the passive voice does not come naturally to the author, each sentence needs to be reviewed to ensure that the reader is not forced to stumble upon a person or a character rather than a description.

The implication of objectivity is valid. It doesn’t matter who did the test (especially in the sense of Professor vs. technician, or he vs. she): it’s not a diary. That information can be captured in lab notes, engineers’ notebooks, or the famous case notes from AT&T Bell.

3.1 THE BENEFITS OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

The passive voice is intended to portray the investigation as being impartial. This:

• enforces a certain mental discipline
• requires a certain mental “Umstellung” that brings the author into a standardised frame of mind.
• permits the reader to read reports from any source in a similar frame of mind.
• avoids “War and Peace”-style questioning of who was doing what to what other thing – no need to buffer names
• ensures that personalities and their status are largely avoided
  • The facts and conclusions come first.

3.2 DISADVANTAGES OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

• It is easy to “hide” the contribution of laboratory personnel, lower level engineers, and so on, to attribute the report to one “star” player. This is more likely to be an issue in the world of university, where academics are forced to publish on a regular basis – a quality investigation on a returned part is less likely to be the cause of professional envy.
• Can be stilted, can become impenetrable,
• Enforces the use of some awkward words or constructions

4. SELECTING THE TENSE

A key decision that needs to be made early on in writing the report, one which generates some confusion, even within one report, is the tense. Some decision aids are suggested as follows:

• Tests are described in the past tense: they were performed (“the samples were tested using the tensile testing machine at yy mm / minute”)
• Results are described in the past tense: “the stress-strain curve Fig. x.y was generated”
• Findings may be either in the past or in the present tense:
• If a test was performed on a particular sample, e.g. investigating a failure, then the findings may be presented in the past tense:
  • “brazing of the joint was found to be incomplete”
• If a result was fundamental, then the findings may be presented in the present tense: “the maximum tensile strength of the xx joint is YY MPa”

5. CONCLUSIONS

The technical report remains its own art form. Its art is knowledge and its form shall minimise the resistance to knowledge transfer. I really think that the passive voice helps to – oh, damn!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

www.sussex.ac.uk/ei/intern…

Whilst I’m no longer much of a gamer (I finished Half-Life 2 and got several hours into Oblivion before dialling down the game time), I do like to keep tabs on what’s going on in that world. Right now, the biggest thing since sliced zombies is Destiny,with its massively online save-the-solar-system campaign of dealing death to death-dealing aliens. Its creation was a huge undertaking, both in terms of manpower and financially.

One paragraph of one article about Destiny really stuck with me, though, and it didn’t have much to do with the game itself. The Guardian newspaper (I wonder if they got additional access because of the paper’s name?)  had a behind-the-scenes article about Destiny that described how large an undertaking it was. The project was so big and so complex, with so many people working from so many different perspectives in such a big converted cinema, that they created the position of “workflow engineer”:

“The company employs a workflow engineer, Brandi House, whose job it is to mediate between the art team and the programmers. “The team kept growing so it became harder to just walk up to the engineers' desk and tell them it’s not working,” she explains. “The engineers started to say, ‘Well, we have 200 artists – I can’t get any work done!'” House has a PhD in electrical engineering and is an expert in user interfaces – now she’s applying that skill with systems to a workforce, - she is effectively debugging the development team.”

This is the wonderful thing about engineering. It is so loosely defined that it can seemingly be applied as a concept to pretty much anything. For engineering to really kick in, that something needs to be complex (yes, a pencil is complex, if you look at it from the right perspective), it needs to be definable and there need to be adjustable parameters so that an optimum can be targeted.

Once you know more or less how something is, you can define - more or less - how it could, or should be, and how - more or less, once again - to get there.

So, whether it’s sorting out your early morning breakfast workflow, or designing your low orbit home rocket - or even if you’re nominally an engineer at work and want things to be better: engineer your destiny!

Note from the future (2024): another attempt at linkblogging. There’s some humour here, but it’s a bit silly

I just love the headline from the first newspaper clipping in this BBC News article: “Engineer hits out at ‘embarrassing’ India”.

Alas, it turns out that the Engineer in question was Farokh Engineer, who kept wicket for India in the 1960s and 70s…

Still, it’s nice to imagine subcontinental sports writers deferring to the clearly superior insights of the engineering profession.

Even I recognised that India were rubbish in the last few Tests in England.

Note from the future (2024): I guess I was trying out linkblogging here, but it doesn’t look like my heart was really in it.

Flamewars in SPAAACE: cooler fires hint at energy efficiency • The Register This looks like a really interesting lead in developing more efficient combustion: burning cooler, for longer, seems to result in both improved efficiency and reduced emissions.

We only need to generate microgravity combustion chambers, and we’ll be away!

Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation is tech reverie, business book, political thriller and a superbly researched history into how some of mankind’s most profound technical innovations (semiconductors and the transistor, solar panels, lasers, communications satellites, cellular mobile and Unix…) developed from fundamental ideas into production and into normality.

It is an exhilarating and – to this engineer, at least – humbling read with an appealingly comfortable feel to it of the book almost having written itself.

A history of people, biography of a formula

The narrative follows the giants of Bell Labs from their induction into AT&T to their passing: insightful Claude Shannon and incisive William Shockley, the genial instigator John Pierce, the politically adept scientist Bill Baker and a cast of thousands working within the innovative innovation structure constructed by the angular visionary Mervin Kelly.

Kelly’s formula is the leitmotif running alongside those histories. Both culturally and architecturally, it was about ensuring happenstance. Scientists were meant to be unable to avoid engineers, chemists were meant to bump into physicists and the men who “wrote the book” to interact with those who “read it.” It was a theory of ivory corridors and canteens rather than towers.

Hearteningly for small-fry like me, those who shared lunch, labs and projects with the Giants are also called out by Gertner for their contributions as lab technicians, metallurgists, engineers, project managers, chemists or physicists. There is always that sense of perspective that the products initiated by the Shockleys and Shannons of the Bell Labs world really needed input from each and every member to take them to production.

He didn’t mention the cooks, though.

The invisible enthusiast

Jon Gertner is a journalist who has written for the New York Times and – less promisingly, perhaps – is editor-at-large at Fast Company*. This is his first book, up to now his largest undertaking by far. He spent five years building up this story - and it doesn’t show.

Not once did I feel the weight of his research, nor the burden of history, whilst reading The Idea Factory: the research and painstaking editing behind it is transparent. Gertner writes precisely yet lively, reflecting perhaps both the industrial-academic environment he describes and the local aspect of his endeavour: he grew up near the slightly mysterious, legendary Bell Labs headquarters at Murray Hill and his need to write this story comes across as being personal. Thankfully he found the energy and made the time to write it.

A monolith of innovation

AT&T enjoyed and, in pushing the boundaries of legislation, abused its monopoly position to maintain its role as “The System”. Those researchers and developers thrived within a massively integrated firm with the manufacturing might of Western Electric (which lovingly crushed or bought up many competitors in the past), the financial momentum of the phone operator (equally crushing), and the laboratories that drove the organisation to higher margins as well as higher callings (in not just the telephone sense…)

The calling to innovation as a justification of monopoly is the fascinating twist on our perception of this otherwise shimmering paragon of development. Teams that innovate need to get grubby, they need to ensure they have the best people and should “Never underestimate the importance of money.”

Without mass production, sales and distribution, no product may be considered to be innovative – so all of those tedious tasks surround, and can occasionally swamp, a product as it moves onwards to the market.

Notational Philosophy

The story behind the invention and development of the transistor would be worth the price of entry all by itself. But Gertner embellishes it with such lovely, pertinent little details that the reader can find thoughts spinning off in unexpected directions. One gem is the rigorously maintained notebooks used at Bell Labs. Each team member was required to write down thoughts and events relating to a particular case (or project, as we would call them now). Walter Brattain’s notebook, number 18194, relating to his work on semiconductors (case 38139) continued on page 40, after 4 years of interruption through the Second World War, with: “The war is over.”

There are other notational quotes in the book: from Morry Tanenbaum, as he closed in on discovering how best to manufacture layers of p-type and n-type silicone for the transistor: “will try direct approach…” (he melted an aluminium wire through the top layer) “This looks like the transistor we’ve been waiting for.”

These notebooks are - handwriting permitting - legible now, and are exceedingly well archived and organised. Will we be able to say the same of our loosely-managed files and cloudy projects in another sixty years? On the other hand – how searchable are those notebooks? Who can extract the knowledge that they contain, as well as the narrative, without knowing them intimately?

John Pierce – my new role model?

Although less well known (to me, at least) than the “transistor guys”, I felt an immediate affinity to one character that was totally new to me, John Pierce, of Telstar Satellite fame. “An instigator is different from a genius, but just as uncommon,” writes Gertner. “It was probably accurate to say that Pierce had too many ideas to actually pursue on his own, and too many interests… to focus on any single pursuit.”

Ah, I know this feeling only too well.

“’I tried to get other people to do things, I’m lazy,’ Pierce once told an interviewer. ‘Do you think this has helped your career?’ the interviewer asked. ‘Well, it was my career,’ Pierce replied.”

Pierce was a catalyst within Kelly’s formula of deliberate entanglement – wandering into offices with a bit of an idea and “just” starting things. It’s something that really should be encouraged, and perhaps remodelled in the virtual world, given how few offices are actually connected back in the real, normal world.

Moving on (looking wistfully back)

The book ends naturally with the passing of the golden generation and the fading into normality that is more poignant than any dramatic burn-out and crash. Gertner offers his thoughts on the meaning and lessons to be extracted for today’s Googles and Microsofts, for the myriad of startups gunning for their lunch – and for mere mortals like me.

Firstly, he considers whether swapping a factory of ideas (Bell Labs) for a geography of ideas (e.g. Silicon Valley) can match the muscle provided by monopoly. It’s close, perhaps, but, for all the advances that Silicon Valley has given us, in comparison with Bell Lab’s output, it has been largely incremental.

Secondly, he wonders if there is a way of escaping monopoly and government involvement in basic research at all. Here, he points out that “77 of the 88 U. S. entities that produced significant innovations were beneficiaries of federal funding.”

The concept of government involvement in anything brings with it the perception of incompetence, but Gertner summarises research into research with this:

“Creative environments that foster a rich exchange of ideas are far more important in eliciting important new insights than are the forces of competition."

White shirts and ties - the key to innovation?

Amidst all the deeply scientific and creative thinking going on at Bell labs during the “wonder years”, one constant appears to have underscored the whole process – everybody wore white shirts, and ties. Some eccentrics were known to go sockless in their shoes, but the fundamental aspect of Bell labs appears to have been the shirts.

My wardrobe consists of perhaps three white shirts, one of which is my wing-collar concert shirt for orchestra: it hardly brimming with scientific rigour.

So, when knocking on other peoples’ doors we should clearly be wearing crisp white shirts.

Hmm… a hint of sartorial determinism there? Perhaps Kelly has a better take on innovation:

“It’s the interaction between fundamental science and applied science, and the interface between many disciplines, that creates new ideas…”

This book is simply worth reading, and is worth reading again. So once you’ve got it, read it and lent it out, make sure you get it back…! 

*(5 amazing lists on the habits of 8 of the most productive ’10 of’ list writers in business today, to click you cleverer” could be a typical Fast Company headline, even if that’s only four lists)

Note from the future: this was me rebranding from On Engineering to Literally Engineering. It was fine, but I’m glad I didn’t pursue this direction for too long

An engineer who knows the difference between literally and figuratively? Very suspicious indeed! Yet here I am, proudly rebranding myself as an engineer who also deals in words (and sounds, but that’s another project). I’ve always needed to write, just as I’ve needed to nourish the technical aspect of my brain. When I’m at work, I’m, like literally engineering. At home and here in this blog I can be literally minded - thinking, reflecting and, from time to time, writing about engineering.

It’s a big topic covering an unimaginable range of products, from things that we touch and use every day - to the arcane, that we rarely, if ever, see. And yet it’s a small, parochial topic, too. Specifications, drawings, tolerances, materials - all of these need nurturing by us, the oft-unsung engineers, wherever and on whatever we work. And to do that, we need, like it or not, literally to use words.

So, here’s my fresh start, with a fresh suit - which will need some nipping and tucking as time and wear go on. Let’s see where the journey takes us…

We had a customer review today on one of my favourite topics in the whole wide engineering world - validation. Even though mentally I was gritting my teeth whilst they were being figuratively pulled, line item for line item, I think I managed to keep my friendly face on for most of the discussions. In fact, at a personal level, at least, the customer and I got on fine - and that’s most of the battle won in any aspect of business.

The ability to chat around as well as “deep dive into” the test plan helped us to skirt the realm of the kafkaesque; boxes still need ticking, and the time bomb of deadlines remains, but we could represent, or “play” our roles amicably. We touched upon the (lack of) sense of most validation testing in the automotive world and how basically inane the whole thing is, in reality, whilst accepting the fates that specifications and their authors bestowed upon us.

He wanted to see some testing in action, which is fair - it’s his product, after all, and his specs we’re testing to, so we visited the labs to see how things were going. The technician happened to be performing a vacuum seal test at the time: pull the vacuum, wait for it to stabilise, close off the valve, let the test sample stabilise, start the clock, review the pressure increase over time - finish, record and repeat. As the test went on, part after part, I started joking that normally we close the curtains for this test so that the lab tech can start meditating during the dwell times.

The customer engineer reacted nicely to this, and suggested that it would be worth sending anybody who’s overly stressed to do this test for a little while - half an hour, say. In that way, we get this actually quite pointless test done whilst simultaneously relaxing our colleagues and protecting the lab technician from ultimate boredom.

Perhaps I’ll take him up on that idea - it’s not a bad one at all. Welcome to a new hashtag: #validationzen

The picture above says to me: hydrogen vehicles are always going to be a cludge. Just look at that fuel tank! It’s an aluminium core surrounded by hundreds of layers of some plastic or other - and that’s just one of two tanks in the Hyundai ix35 demonstrator, totalling 144 litres.

I just don’t know. As you know from my previous post, I would love fuel cell cars to succeed, but the challenges to producing a sensible vehicle system and ecosystem are many, and devilishly detailed.

Challenges are what engineering is all about, and whilst I, and no doubt most engineers involved in fuel cell development, could imagine some funky carbon-fibre-clad magnesium tanks reducing bulk, their colleagues in finance will be confiscating their coffee cups until costs are driven down and infrastructure is driven up. Now, I know that separating engineers and their coffee is counterproductive, even under the best collaborative conditions, achieving both will take a few decades more.

Anyway, the article that prompted this post, in the German emobilitytec magazine, about this self-same Hyundai ix35 raised some interesting points:

• The ix35 has two H2 tanks (1 at 100 l + 40 l) totalling 144 l
• Fully tanked, the fuel weighs just 5.6 kg at 700 bar.
• Yes, that’s 700 bar.
• Consumption is 0.94 kg H2 per 100 km.
• The car includes a 24 kWh battery (same as in the new e-Golf), half charged.
  • This is because fuel cells need time to warm up (so the ix35 starts up as electro car) plus time to run down after switching off the vehicle - so the battery needs to soak up the additional charge 100 kW power, Max 124 kW with fully loaded battery, providing a decent 300 Nm
• Good for up to 600 km.

So, power, torque and range are decent, and whilst the volume of fuel being held is large, at least its weight is low. Additionally, you don’t need pumps to get the hydrogen from tank to stack, so on the tank side of things, things are relatively simple. If you discount the difficulties in sealing up the piping between tank and stack under all operating conditions.

That stack itself remains a complex, expensive and still rather fragile mystery to me. And we still need to the extract hydrogen from the environment as sensibly as possible.

Development continues, if not apace. As the European HyFive infrastructure and 110 fuel cell vehicle project shows, industry and politics can combine to prod things forward little by little.

Toyota helped to kick off the 2014 CES show by pronouncing themselves happy with the rate of development and cost reduction on Fuel Cell Vehicles: “Fuel cell electric vehicles will be in our future sooner than many people believe, and in much greater numbers than anyone expected.” Indeed, they intend to have a “vehicle” (by which I understand a car of some sorts) on sale by 2015

Now, even with my occasionally shaky grip of arithmetic, especially in German, that’s NEXT YEAR. Whilst it’s usually better to look forward rather than backwards, the history of fuel cell vehicles is long and far from glorious, so it’s worth taking such pronouncements – even from Toyota – with a pinch of salt.

Having said that, I’ve always been fascinated by fuel cell technology - as a naive young engineer, I somewhat irrationally invested in what in hindsight was a rather dodgy looking British-Belgian-Russian company called Zevco. This firm at least managed to get a fuel cell into a river boat, a taxi (a recurring theme in fuel cells, as a small fleet of taxis created for the 2010 London Olympics shows) and an airport tug - before it folded, with the best of intentions to rise again. Admittedly, I wasn’t the only dreamer out there, as Zevco managed to sign several alliances and intents of work before going under, with companies much richer than I – but there has never been a convincing commercial case for fuel cells. 

More recently, I was naturally keen to be involved in a project to develop the high pressure lines and connectors between the hydrogen fuel tank and the fuel cell. This was, alas, but from a business perspective sensibly, cancelled by our management as – well, quite simply, there wasn’t a convincing commercial case for it.   Money aside, key technical challenges remain:

• H2 infrastructure (and figuring out where the energy to extract hydrogen should come from)
• Tank and system pressures of up to 900 bar
• Operating fluid temperature -40 to + 85 °C
  • When the fuel cell is running at max power, it’s drawing the maximum amount of hydrogen from the tank, thereby reducing the pressure and cooling the feed system to sub zero temperatures
• System permeation & losses
  • Sealing all the lines and connections in such a way that they’re quick to assemble and acceptably cheap
  • Ensuring that you can leave a car in an airport car park for a week without it emptying of its own accord.
• Refuelling safety and losses

Even before sending cars out onto the roads, developing and validating the system is non-trivial as there are only a handful of test centres capable of handling the full suite of tests required. And they’re not particularly cheap.

The fuel cell endeavour seems to go in waves, with resources built up and then, like GM-Opel’s team in Mainz, Germany, discarded. I personally hope that it works out. Perhaps the competitive and commercial might of Toyota, Hyundai, Daimler as well as a range of dedicated system suppliers like Intelligent Energy and Ballard, can result in a compelling case for the technology. But I  fear that, for want of a serious infrastructure, and the insurmountability of storage issues, it won’t.

Still, give me a project working on carbon fibre fuel cell cars, and I’ll be one happy engineer…!

For a variety of reasons unknown to me, I drifted away from that most permanently cutting-edge of artisanal engineering fields - carbon composites. My research project at university was all to do with aerospace carbon composites aerospace and I still have fond memories of laying up mats of prepreg, vacuuming them, cutting out the shapes and putting them in the autoclave (a fancy word for “oven”) to cure. It was all very peaceful, a far cry from my current state of frantic dashing from quality analysis to drawing release to development activities, a far cry from steel tubing and automotive PPAPs. It was actually all too dull for me at the time, to be fair…!

I still like to keep track of what’s going on in the carbon world, and harbour dreams of re-entering that realm one day (I harbour lots of dreams…) So I enjoy such series as from The Truth About Cars on the development of the carbon fibre Lexus LFA, and what’s going on with the BMW iSeries.

I recently came across what looks like a good resource for composites news, www.compositestoday.com. There really are some interesting articles in there, but the writing is frequently offputting and consists mostly, to my eyes at least, of press-releases. This article on a patent application from Apple for transparent composites is a barely legible copy-pasting from the patent text with few attempts at refinement: it’s patent churnalese. Do we really need words like “hereinafter” and “embodiment” in an online news article?

I was particularly interested to come across an article about the recycling of the hull and mast of Oracle’s 2003 America’s Cup winner. Other than chopping pieces up into 4-foot long pieces, how exactly will such structures be recycled? What methods will / can be used? Can resin and fibres be separated? Or will they end up as chunks in low-grade plastics? Alas, the article itself remains only enticing, granting us no details on how recycling will be done.

Still, with more extensive articles on the McLaren MP4/1, the car that introduced carbon fibre into Formula One, and lots of video entries aggregated from around the internet, describing Cervélo carbon fibre bikes, knitting fibres rather than weaving them and many others, Composites Today is an interesting resource - a slightly fuzzy, slick but cheap though well stocked window into my parallel history…