Engineering / Manufacturing
Engineers and manufacturing experts for prototype development, pilot plants design and construction, manufacturing processes, machinery and equipment design, construction and use.
Engineering and manufacturing experts are lumped together because their technical disciplines are closely aligned. How do you prototype, build, test and commercially manufacture something? These experts are needed in all manufacturing processes. From a bio pharmaceutical to robots; from chemical process design to semiconductor manufacturing; and, for improved food processing machine to de-water product with lower energy costs and less product damage.
Engineering practice areas are vast and very specialized. In many areas CECON has just the manufacturing expert you need. In other cases, our expert staff will network with the technical consulting community to allow us to quickly locate the expert that is right on your target.
What follows is a discussion of three engineering consulting areas of CECON, to illustrate the breadth of this technical subject.
Chemical Engineering
What does the chemical engineer do?
Rather, what doesn't he do! Take the experience in the career of one of CECON's chemical engineering consultants as an example. He worked with chemists in the lab and took their preliminary new product information to the pilot plant stage. For this he had to invent and design new machinery, lay out basic data and work with project engineers to build the pilot plant. Then he started up the pilot plant, did trouble shooting to iron out the bugs, and prepared product for market development and data for scale-up. Then he laid out basic data and worked with the engineering division to develop the plant. And he did this not for one product, but for more than a dozen during his career.
How is the chemical engineer trained?
A chemical engineer today not only knows the fundamentals, called unit operations (heat transfer, fluid flow, mass transfer, distillation, etc.), but must be conversant with related fields: organic chemistry, instrumentation and process control, computer software, etc. He/she must interface and talk the language of chemists, other engineers (electrical, mechanical), marketers, etc.
What is a Professional Engineer, and when is one needed?
Most chemical engineers who worked in the chemical industry, as opposed to those building public works, probably haven't needed the "P.E." Certificate. It is like the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval. Today, the Certificate is issued after two grueling examinations: The first is a test of general engineering knowledge; the second a test of complex engineering problems. CECON has a Professional Engineering registration in Delaware and many "P.E.'s" in our consulting data base.
Forensic Engineering
When one hears the word "forensics" it brings to mind the medical examiners on a TV trial or DNA testing of blood. Forensics Engineering is the investigation of why bad things happen around us; e.g., fires, auto accidents, machinery breakdowns, protective equipment failures, etc. CECON forensic experts have investigated many breakdown cases. Here are a few examples:
A motorcyclist's helmet split open in a crash. Lab tests, as supervised by CECON, examined the crack and our expert found a non uniform mixing of the plastic and filler.
A skylight in a mall fell after shattering. CECON's glass expert demonstrated that the glass was of the type used in auto windshields. Its shattering into small pieces would not have caused the alleged injury from a big chunk hitting the victim.
An emergency stop switch intended to stop a conveyor allegedly was not installed. It would have prevented an injury by the machinery. CECON's electrical engineer found bite marks on the conveyor. The marks indicated that the switch had been installed but had been removed.
A person ingested a sharp object in a restaurant. CECON's packaging machinery expert determined the object was a piece of a cutoff knife from a food conveyor.
A roofing contractor scam on an elderly lady was uncovered by a CECON roofing expert. The fly-by-night contractor had merely applied a cheap paint, not a roof sealer.
CECON's nationally recognized expert in protective clothing reviewed a case in which two firemen died. Allegedly the SCAB face masks used in the fire were defective. The expert found possible causes of their failure.
A car smashed into the barrels at a highway off ramp spilling antifreeze on the highway. The next day a car skidded and crashed on the still wet road. CECON's auto safety expert conducted friction tests on antifreeze soaked macadam in defense of the tire company. He found that the tires alone were not to blame.
In a closely related field of toxicology, CECON toxicologists have investigated many cases involving chemical exposure, allergic reactions, implants, etc.
Machine Builder - Gadgets to Factories
An example from the career of one of our current mechanical engineering consultants is illustrative. He was given an assignment to increase productivity and uniformity on a plastic film stretcher. The film is oriented to align the molecules in the plane to increase its strength. This machinery takes a melt cast film after quenching, first stretching lengthwise on rolls with differential speeds, then grabs each edge with automatically closing toothed clips on an endless moving chain. The chains diverge to stretch the film in the cross direction. First the engineer built a pilot plant to study the problem, no mean task. Heating the film uniformly was a primary but difficult requirement. So, studying the limitations of the then current method, the consultant found an entirely new way to perform the lengthwise stretching by confining the stretch zone. He then addressed the transverse stretch and noted that the rather massive metal clips were controlling the heating pattern. He then came up with an entirely new heating method which alleviated the problem. It was then a simple task to translate his findings to a plant scale unit, which was successful.
The Science of Mechanical Engineering?
Take designing a heat exchanger, a vessel through which many tubes are placed. Choose a case where a fluid enters the tubes cool and goes out hot. On the other side of the exchanger's tubes another fluid enters the vessel hot and loses some of its heat and goes out cooler. Heat exchange is variously by convection and radiation and conduction. Flow turbulence affects the rate of heat transfer and it is not uniform, especially on the outside of the tubes. To make matters more complex, the tubes may reenter the exchanger several times before exiting. This is one of the design problems that mechanical engineers can solve reliably using theoretical algorithms proved by experience.