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Showing posts from July, 2011

Why Good Engineering Education and Research Are Inseparable? Part II - Research and Technology

Has anyone heard of foreigners clamoring to emulate the U.S. K-12 school system?  I certainly haven't.  I do receive, however, foreign delegations that want to learn how we organize academic research and graduate programs at UT Austin.  This happens at least once a month.  People around the world correctly perceive that most Tier 1 academic institutions in the U.S. are second to none and worthy of emulation. And how about premier U.S. corporations?  Do they come to UT Austin or to the local community colleges to hire their top engineers and scientists?  Do they set up research campuses and incubators around UT or the Austin Community College?  (Please do not get me wrong, ACC is a very fine and vastly underfunded institution, which treats the most difficult cases of acute high-schoolitis and online-learnatis .  My youngest daughter, a BS graduate in premed from UC Santa Cruz, is a nursing student at ACC, and I am pleased with the quality of her program.) Thus, it astounds me th

Why Good Engineering Education and Research Are Inseparable? Part I - Teaching

Here are two other questions related to the title: What unique benefits are given to students at all levels - from freshmen to PhD candidates - by a good engineer and scientist, who also happens to be a decent teacher?  How are these benefits different from those delivered by a credentialed, but scientifically incompetent teacher? We keep on hearing the loud and stubborn voices that call for a strict separation of teaching from engineering practice and research. I think that these voices are tragically mistaken. By the way, when I say "tragically," I am thinking of Euripides , Aeschylus , Sophocles , and Shakespeare. In a good Greek tragedy the audience knows the inevitable fatal outcome, but the protagonists don't. For 22 years, I have been a teacher at two top public universities in the U.S.: UC Berkeley and UT Austin. Over time, I have taught some pretty large classes, so my statistical sample is sufficiently broad to justify the statements I shall make next.

Ethanol in fuel - Up close and personal

Five years ago, I published a short letter to Science about the real biofuel cycles.  The letter was published after a long struggle with the journal's Editor of Physical Sciences, Dr. R. Brooks Hanson, who limited my letter to 150 words, and tried to prevent me from putting in a link to these supporting materials . The whole fight was for not, because the link has been broken since I left Berkeley.  In these supporting materials, I made the following two statements: Furfural in an impure ethanol mixture will gradually dissolve almost any rubber or elastomeric seals or ducts in storage systems and car fuel systems. (Page 13) Finally, ethanol dissolves a large number of substances insoluble in water and acids, such as many inorganic salts, phosphorus, sulfur, iodine, resins, essential oils, fats, coloring matters, etc. (Wright, 1994).  Therefore, the metal-rich sludge in fuel tanks of most older cars will dissolve in ethanol-containing gasoline and accelerate corrosion of fuel

Energy, Ignorance, Lies and Bullshit

By reading some of my posts on energy, you now understand that a modern society cannot exist without huge amounts of energy flowing through it day and night.  In fact, I have argued, the modern society fails if these energy flows diminish , just like a starved mammal becomes sick and eventually dies from lack of food. Further, I have explained that almost all of your electricity and transportation fuels comes from fossil fuels, uranium, and water behind dams.  I showed graphically that renewables are but a small addition to our daily energy portfolio. Finally, I compared the energy sources and energy use in two important U.S. states, Texas and California.  These states are perceived quite differently.  California's image is synonymous with progress and clean energy, while Texas is regarded as overly conservative, and prone to using fossil fuels.  Yet, as I demonstrated, electricity sources in these two states are not that much different, and Texas produces 1/3 more renewable

California versus Texas - Fuel Consumption

In the previous post I compared electricity production and imports in California and Texas. I told you that renewables generate about the same fraction of electricity in both states. Texas produces all of its electricity, while California imports coal and gas - as electricity and for electricity generation - almost five days a week. It is important for you to understand that California will need to import a lot of carbon as natural gas to continue "decarbonizing" its economy by, for example, switching to plug-in vehicles. Without all that extra carbon, California's economy will undergo a miracle slimming diet . Such are the laws of physics. What I didn't tell you in the previous post is that roughly half of all natural gas in California is used to generate electricity. The residential sector uses 22 percent of the other half. Of that amount, 88 percent is used by space and water heating.  So, if there are problems with imports of natural gas to California, not on

Texas versus California - Electricity Production

Using the approach introduced in the previous post , I will now investigate how electricity is produced and imported in Texas and California.  I choose these two states because I have strong ties to both of them, and they also enjoy very different public images.  Texas is generally viewed as pro-oil, gas, coal and nuclear power, while Californians appear to oppose all of these sources of electricity in their outlets, while touting the green and renewable sources.  It is therefore instructive to look at the main sources of your electricity when you live in Texas or California. For the record, last year, Texas produced twice the amount of electricity imported and produced in California. Most of the difference was caused by air-conditioning everything in Texas, but also by Texas' large base of heavy industry, which is already gone from California, perhaps forever. I start with my home state,Texas, because it is very simple to describe its electricity sources.  Basically, Texas has

Where is my energy coming from?

To keep our internet, telephones, computers, television sets, refrigerators and lights going, we require electricity 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. It is therefore instructive to know what sources of energy provide electricity in our outlets day-by-day.  The data from the U.S. Department of Energy are plotted below as days of electricity per year supplied to the U.S. customers from each major primary energy source. It turns out that between 1997 and 2008, coal supplied between 176 and 200 days of electricity to all U.S. outlets.  Coal fuels the base-load power stations and its consumption has been remarkably constant. Similarly, in 2008, natural gas supplied 79 days of electricity, nuclear power 72 days, and hydropower 23 days.  The electricity share of natural gas grew from 50 days per year a decade ago, to almost 80 days in 2008.  No new nuclear reactors have been built in the U.S. since late 1970s, but the nuclear power industry has learned how to manage their reactors better

Things we say and do

Four years ago, in September 2007, I participated in a ministerial conference of OECD in Paris.  This conference was attended by the ministers of transportation and environment from the European Union, the U.S. observers, as well as a few invited industry people and faculty. OECD stands for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It was conceived as a counterweight to OPEC. The largest contributor to OECD is the United States, which provides nearly 24% of the budget, followed by Japan. As a consequence, the U.S. exerts some influence on OECD. At that Paris conference, I was asked to make a dinner speech .  [Reading this topical speech is essential to your understanding of my arguments against the serious public confusion surrounding issues of big energy.] Halfway through my speech everybody in the room stopped eating and you could hear a fly, because no forks and knives were clicking. There were but a few questions afterwards. It appears that this speech has di