CS_F2012_06

Um, we do need to know what your, what modules you want to take and what's required. Is, I think that we're going to be finishing up. Um, I'm going, I've got to go down North Carolina uh this afternoon, visit some of my grandchildren, uh but I have to be there for something else tomorrow. I should be back on Friday, but I've asked Dr. Belmar to start his lectures uh tomorrow and the next day. Um, I have a an x-ray thing over at 9, 8:00 on Friday, on Monday, so I have to check with Dr. Belmar. We'll let you know whether we have class on Monday or not, okay. And Tuesday I know I have to be in Minnesota, but Thursday and Friday, Wednesday and Thursday of next week I should be here. Friday you can have off, it's Yom Kippur, right? They didn't used to give people Yom Kippur off, but anyway, actually MIT doesn't give you off, but they, it's not — is it, what's, uh well okay is it, Rosh starts this Sunday night, Monday?

Oh okay. Well what it is, MIT always is very big on saying we don't give religious holidays, like Christmas you don't have, you know, you don't have anything scheduled at Christmas. Um, but then they said they didn't give religious holidays, but then they always found a way to some excuse to give a holiday on Yom Kippur for the last few years. So that they messed it up again this year, huh? So they're going back to being a-religious, okay. I don't know, anyway. So anyway, the 21st is a holiday, the Friday. Um, but hopefully I will finish by about the 25th or so on things, maybe a little bit before, we'll see.

Um, and I told you we would finish these modules, but you have to do two other modules. And so if you will email me um what modules you want to do, if you have some questions you can come see me. Um, what you're going to be required to do, I will then, when we finish up this stuff, you're supposed to be doing a presentation on a code or standard, and I passed out A106 to give you an idea of a standard you can look at. A106, and you can see, um, you don't have to give me the history of A106 necessarily, but some people actually kind of gave the history of some of these things. Um, there's this thing that I handed out in the first day which are some of the things you could consider. You don't have to do them all, but when you look at a standard — and I don't want you to take the whole boiler and pressure vessel code, which is 32 volumes, and do a 10-minute presentation on 32 volumes. I'd like you to take a simple standard. Like actually A106 may be a little too complex, okay, but it tells you what the scope is, it tells you what the limitations on the scope are, it tells you other references, it'll probably reference another 10 or 20 other standards that relate to that.

Um, and then it goes through the standard and you can make a presentation on the standard. But the questions is: the standard, um, what's the scope and limitations? Um, does it have the force of law, okay? Who requires it? Why do they require it? Is it a product purchase and sale type of specification, like a lot of ASTM specs, or is it an installation, manufacturing, construction spec? What type of spec is it? Who calls out the things, is it the federal government — or, we're going to talk about some of these things — or the state government? Um, and tell me, tell us something about the spec, okay. You get 10 minutes maximum, 15, to tell your classmates about the spec. And then we're going to ask you some questions for 10 minutes, and we can probably do about two a day. And we'll start scheduling those after uh the middle part of October. So after we finish all this stuff in September, you have about two weeks to prepare your presentation. In the meantime you need to be starting these modules.

There's nothing you have to do on these modules. The only real requirement for this class, other than coming to class or watching the videos, is to do this presentation, okay. I have to give you an assignment. The Institute requires that I grade each student individually, I can't grade you as a group, okay. So you get to do a presentation. Actually the presentation has been sort of fun. Um, if you want to talk about the presentation, uh I'm, you're welcome to come and see me after class or at some other time and we can discuss the presentation. Don't take something very big. Take something simple and do it well and completely with some depth to it.

Um, what you're going to find is even the simplest spec calls out other specs, and some of those — even though the simplest spec itself might not be, have force of law or be required under something else, another spec might, okay. And if anything like OSHA cites this thing, all of a sudden it has force of law if OSHA requires it, okay. Even though ASTM specs, um, or National Fire Protection Association specs, it's a private foundation, they don't have any force of law. But if the State Fire Marshal requires it, okay, in the state fire code, or some local building code, or OSHA requires it, all of a sudden it has force of law and you have to follow it, okay.

So what I'm trying to get you to uh get an appreciation for is how a simple code gets more and more complex when you start looking at all the references, whether it somehow ends up with force of law so it's required. Which means, if you were in manufacturing, let's say you wanted to open up a business — we are taping now, right, okay — uh, let's say you wanted to open up a business. There are a, lot of codes and standards and regulations that you have to meet. In fact in the political debates people talk about, you know, are there too many regulations that are stifling small businesses or big businesses. But it turns out it's easier for a big business with lots of people to be able to follow all these codes. It's very difficult for someone like yourself who has, doesn't have experience, to be able to say I'm going to hang out my shingle and I'm going to go into business, 'cause there are thousands if not tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of requirements out there, some of which have force of law, some of which are part of the tax code, okay. I mean, not just engineering codes but any codes. You have to know all these things in order to go into business.

And I started out this course saying, well I'm going to talk about manufacturing, and I want to talk about codes and standards because no one ever told you that you're going to have certain limitations to what you can do. We tell you in school, oh you need to design such and such, and you just, you know, you kind of free-form design, you can do anything you want. Well no you can't. For example, do you know how many new polymers have been designed into the human, you know, implants for the human body since 1972? Zero. How'd you guess.

Um, and the reason is the Food and Drug Act of 1972 grandfathered in a bunch of polymers that had been used, like polylactic acid, okay. Um, and you can imagine, you know, poly-lactic acid, it degrades into milk, right, you know, or something that's in milk. Um, uh, but polyethylene, okay, had been used in the body before, um, and it's basically like paraffin wax. Surgeons have been putting paraffin wax on wounds and stuff for years, okay. But there's been a lot of advances in polymer science, and a lot of things that probably are a lot better, but you can't use them in the human body unless you certify them to the 1972 Food and Drug Act. Well guess what, the regulations with that act are so onerous that no one wants to spend the 100 or 200 or billion dollar, million dollars, you know, or billion dollars that it would cost to qualify new polymer. So everyone designs with 40-year-old polymers, okay. It has stifled a certain type of innovation because no one wants to take a chance.

The boiler and pressure vessel code, which we've talked a little bit about, we're designing with 70-year-old steels. People have spent, the federal government and industry has spent several hundred million dollars over the last 30 years trying to qualify nine Chrome one moly as a high temperature steel. If you go up and operate at higher and higher temperatures, you can — from carbon steel, which is not good much for a pressure vessel above more than 3 or 400 degrees Fahrenheit — you can get higher and higher temperatures by adding more Chrome and more moly. Well we have two and a quarter Chrome one moly, we have five Chrome two moly, I mean we got a bunch of different steels. The next one people would like to have, without going all the way to stainless steels which are very expensive, is nine Chrome one moly. And they could make a little bit higher temperature boiler or generator um uh of steam. And why do you need that? For thermodynamic efficiency. But it hasn't been qualified, it hasn't been certified, and because it's not certified for use by the code — well actually it is now to a certain extent, but it's taken 30, 40 years before people actually can start to use these things, and hundreds of millions of dollars.

So while the codes are a wonderful historical design guideline, they also are a design hindrance. And so when you're doing your little survey of a code, I'd kind of like you to do a critique with it of whether you think that code is good and has helped, you know, decrease costs, save lives, improve quality, whatever, or whether it actually is now a burden, an albatross around the neck of the industry, okay. And the answer to both questions may be yes, okay. Uh, don't assume that one thing or the other. Any questions? Oops, what did I do? Uh, I hit positive negative is what I did.

Um, so one of the things that uh I wanted to talk about, I mentioned yesterday increased cost. I was wrong about the boiler and pressure vessel code. Here's the catalog um from 2011. Now if you want to buy the whole, this was the 2010 boiler and pressure vessel code, as it says an international code, it's now you can get it $14,500. Or for another $600 they'll give you 32 binders to go with it. What a deal, okay. So every 3 years they get to sell probably 50,000 of these at $15,000 a piece. Now you start multiplying that out — not a bad business, right? Very profitable. But if you went back, and I don't have catalogs going back 20 years ago, but the price was considerably less, okay.

When I showed you Section 8 the other, yesterday — big notebook like this — you can buy division one of Section 8 for a mere $680, okay. There are actually three divisions, and division 2 is 680, division three is a bargain at $600, okay. So this is, I mean if you want to talk, students might complain about the price of textbooks, okay, start looking at the price of codes. I mentioned code stamps. This is the ASME symbol, okay. It's uh registered trademark. U means unfired, N probably means nuclear, I don't even, you know. U2 is some, it's not a spy plane but it's uh something else. There's an R stamp, they call it stamps, this is a U stamp for unfired pressure vessel, that's division 8. Um, there's a boiler stamp, anyway there's a bunch of these different stamps with a letter in them. Uh, an R stamp is a repair stamp, and I'm going to talk about something today where someone came up with a pressure vessel.

Now there's a lot, lots of societies. And I happen to have this one which is, this just index of Aerospace material specifications. SAE is the Society of Automotive Engineers. This basically started probably in Detroit, I don't know the history of it. I used to be a member, I don't remember if I'm still a member or not. But the SAE was the Society of Automotive Engineers. Um, they were dealing with standards for cars, but I think they also do, they may do some railroad type things, but they certainly got in with aviation. And so rather than ASTM standards for materials like a piece of pipe or a piece of titanium or something, there are ASTM standards, there are also SAE standards. Now hopefully the two organizations, professional societies, get together and usually the standards are identical, okay.

It turns out the um ASTM standards, and I can't remember which one is materials for the boiler and pressure vessel code, but the volume is essentially a bunch of ASTM standards. Um, materials section two, that's what I thought. So um part A of the boiler and pressure vessel code is materials. Uh, ferrous materials is part A, $670. Part B is non-ferrous materials. Part C is welding rods and electrodes. This one will be mostly ASTM steel standards. This might be ASTM copper and nickel and titanium standards. This will be a bunch of American Welding Society standards. The ASME has adopted them essentially, and they're coordinated, okay. They collaborate, they're not usually conflicts between them. Um, but you got to make sure that you're using, 'cause they might be slightly different, you have to worry about that.

In any case the SAE came up and they started writing Aerospace material standards, AMS standards, and this is just the index, okay. So every line here is probably a 15 or 20-page standard. It may look very similar to an ASTM standard, but it's not exactly the same. And every one of them here, if you look at it, is $59. You can't read it, but anyway, $59 per line, okay. So if you're Boeing, how many copies of this do you have to have for your thousands of engineers, times how many of these things in a book this size? I mean the cost of standards to a company like Boeing has got to be in the millions if not tens of millions of dollars a year, okay. So it turns out standards have become — what happened here — um anyway, a big business, okay, an increasingly big business for government, nonprofit, and for-profit.

Uh, things like the National Fire Protection Association, their standards are not too expensive, you can still buy one for 100 bucks. But the for-profit professional societies, they've jacked up their prices in the last 15 or 20 years. I consider this becoming a national crisis. One of you pointed out, I think you were the one pointed out, they don't have the digital copy of all the ASTM standards anymore or whatever in the library. Why? It's probably a $30,000 bill. And they have a new set of standards every year, even though many of them haven't changed for four or five years. They'll publish a new set of standards every year, and they'll sell you the whole set of standards for, you know, anyway. Um, why can they do this? Because many of these things have the power of law. You can't be in business — this is overhead that you have to have if you want to get into certain types of businesses.

It used to be that, if you wanted to get in, do business with the defense department, they had military standards and they were maintained by different government laboratories. The Department of Defense or the Department of Energy would have their standards. Back in the early 90s when peace was breaking out with former Soviet Union, um, the Clinton Administration decided that we were going to have dual-use technology, and they wanted to get rid of most of the federal standards. And it took them about 10 years, but most of the military standards no longer exist, okay. They've been incorporated by various um professional societies or not-for-profits. Um, and so the military has saved some money, or the Department of Energy in some cases uh has saved some money uh on these standards.

I handed out the other day a section from the American Welding Society welding handbook, has chapter 13 which is basically just a listing of some of the standards, codes and standards and societies that the welding industry has to deal with. Um, you know, welding was my specialty for many years, and one of the reasons I liked it is I could work on anything because most manufactured products need joints and stuff. And so whether you're talking about uh railroads, or uh water, uh works infrastructure, uh the ASTM standards, ASME mechanical engineers, here's another railroad thing, American National Standards Institute, American Petroleum Institute — this is all the uh um all the oilfield goods and stuff — highways, State and Highway Transportation, the shipping, the shipbuilding business. There are a huge number of professional organizations that are related to huge industries. They write codes and standards, as well as the government writing codes and standards.

If you look at it by industry — what happened here — way too much, okay. Oh, not enough. This thing has terrible time delay, okay. Yep. Oh wait a second, I'm trying to do transmission right now. There you go, keep hitting the buttons over here. So the Aerospace industry, you have, what's the FAA? Federal Aviation Administration, right. So they have force of law. They actually have a dual charter. They are charged with regulating the aviation industry, they are also chartered with promoting aviation, okay. So they want to regulate safety, but they also want to promote the use of airline travel and things like that. So they have what some people consider a slight conflict um in their charter. And they are constantly trying to balance their requirement for safety versus their requirement that they don't put unnecessary burdens on the industry.

When they come out with a regulation, they propose it, they publish it in the Congressional Record, and so everyone in the country is on notice that they're coming up with a thing. And they are mandated by Congress, they must estimate how much this new regulation will cost the industry, okay. And so you read these things and, you know, you'll find it'll cost $100,000 to make this change throughout the industry of some safety regulation on certain types of aircraft or something. Other times it'll cost $100 million to make the change. And so they actually have to be accountable for what the cost of their regulations are.

There's a little switch here. The FAA regulates building and safety of aircraft. The National Transportation Safety Bureau, uh, Board, on the other hand, is, they don't have codes and standards, but when a plane crashes they go in to investigate it and they come up with a finding of fact — not of who's guilty but what caused the crash. The FAA is then responsible for, regulate, putting in regulations to keep it from happening again. And actually the system works pretty well. Uh, also in Aerospace there are the industry folks: Society of Automotive Engineers, the Materials Property Council which is part of that, the Aerospace material specifications which is all part of this, and there are plenty of others too, but these are kind of the ones that are writing codes and standards.

Automotive, you got the federal government, National Highway Transportation Safety Authority, the Department of Transportation, um. And the DOT does automobiles and trucks, but they also do pipeline, ships, railroads. Uh, you got the Coast Guard, uh, gets involved in transportation. The utilities, you got the American Petroleum Institute, which is a private body, ASME boiler and pressure vessel code, they have big boilers and, you know, pressure vessels to generate the energy. Again over here you have the Chemical Safety Board, which is only about seven or eight years old, but it's patterned by Congress like the National Transportation Safety Board. When you have a big explosion — most of you probably don't remember, but seven or eight years ago we had a big explosion up in Danvers Massachusetts, just wiped out a couple city blocks, you know, blew the windows out of neighbors' homes and stuff — Chemical Safety Board came in there, and they actually take over control just like the National Transportation Safety Board. They have the same, they're modeled in the same way. They come in to an accident scene and they say, and they're in charge until they release it to the other authorities. Uh, and they determine what happens, okay.

Um, and they usually get partnership. I told you about the bearing manufacturer who put their own attorney on because the Navy didn't want to participate and they wouldn't let any of the other manufacturers participate. Chemical Safety Board doesn't have enough people. There's only like 20 investigators for the entire country. And every time you have anything that causes a death in a refinery or something like that, they almost have to go in and investigate those things. And um they don't have enough investigators. They'll put one guy on the, on a huge thing, maybe two guys. And so they're looking for all the help they can get from anybody anywhere. You have to follow their rules, okay, but they're looking for all the help they can get from various suppliers and stuff. And so they basically become sort of a sifting organization in doing the failure analysis, sifting all the information. And there's interesting politics among the different participants. They want to participate because they don't want to get sued, or have the cause be determined that they were the cause, okay.

Uh, ships, there's Lloyd, Lloyd's Register of Shipping, which is — we now know the bigger thing is Lloyds of London insurance company, but for hundreds of years the British have been insuring ships on the high seas. Uh, there's American Bureau of Shipping, which I think is larger than Lloyds now. There's DNV, and it goes by DNV but it used to be Det Norske Veritas from Norway, and Bureau Veritas from France. So they're the four big classification societies for shipping in general. You can't build a ship unless you build it with these people as the inspectors in the shipyard.

If you want to build a ship for the US Navy, the US Navy will have some officers who will be assigned to the shipyard. Or if you want to build a helicopter for the US Air Force, they will have a DOD resident representative is what they usually call it, and they give them an office. And that person is going to go around sniffing out all the problems they can during manufacture, getting involved in arbitrating, you know, what does this standard mean, what are we going to accept, um, halting production if they want, okay.

Um, I got a call once uh um from uh Raytheon, because they were building, they were welding some aluminum for the Aegis missile system. Raytheon was designing the control system, and they were just welding this aluminum that was going to hold a bunch of electronics. And some Navy inspector was walking through the shop, and a guy had a torch on a piece of heat-treated aluminum alloy straightening it, and the Navy guy says where's your procedure on that? There was no procedure. There was no standard way to perform that task. And the Navy shut down the whole plant. There, like a thousand employees were being paid to sit there and twiddle their thumbs for a few days. And this was back 25 years ago. I was busy. I got a call, since I'm the welding guy at MIT, because they wanted me to come in and help solve the problem.

Well I sent over a young assistant professor who's now head of the department in Switzerland. But he got tenure here and became a full professor, but he was the Alcoa Professor. I figured the Alcoa Professor would be able to solve this problem for him, 'cause I was too busy. He didn't have a car, so they sent a cab to pick him up to take him over to Waltham, the plant. Um, and I was busy doing my stuff here at MIT. And I get a call back at about noon time, because they were in a big hurry, it had a thousand people being paid to do nothing. And uh they said, well he went out there, they'd come over, sent a cab over to take him to Waltham, he looked at, he says you ought to talk to Tom Eagar. Great. So I go by at 6 o'clock that evening on my way home, uh because I live in Belmont, Waltham's not that far out of the way. Anyway, so I look at it and I analyze the problem, and I go home and I write a letter. I then go off to Penn State University for some contract uh review or something. And uh anyway, that was on a Wednesday, um, the Navy reviewed my letter, and on Friday they started production again, okay.

Uh, there's someone there watching the henhouse, okay. You don't leave it to just the foxes watching the henhouse. Um, you're going to have someone there. If you're building a ship, you're going to hire one of these and they will send people in. These people, because shipbuilding has decreased in the world, like DNV, they've become a major national, international consulting firm, and you can hire them, they'll spend millions of dollars solving $100,000 problem for you, okay.

Um, the nuclear industry is sort of interesting, because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission sort of has a monopoly on all this mess, okay. Um, which is actually good, you don't have multiple things. Bridges and highway, you got the Federal Highway Administration, you got the American Institute of Steel Construction, the American Welding Society. Buildings, oh, you got local building codes, you've got the Building Owners — I can't remember what BOCA stands for, it's sort of a national code. It's used a lot in rural areas where you don't have local codes. A lot of local codes will reference part of the BOCA code. In a lot of places, you know, middle of Alaska they don't have a code, okay. You can put up anything you want, okay, and the natives do, okay. Um, but anyway, um so there are all kinds of different codes and standards.

Um, and I want to now tell a story about a cement truck, okay. And a mixup in codes and standards. I couldn't find a good picture of a cement truck, so this is a picture of a toy cement truck, okay, that I found off the web, okay. Hey, you know, the web is actually great. I mean it used to be I had to go searching through books, but this has what I need. And what it has is, um, it has a water tank okay up here. That's about a 200, on a regular cement truck that's about a 200-gallon water tank. And the water is there because after you, when you're using the cement you slop it all over everywhere at the construction site, including on the vehicle. And so you want to wash down the vehicle before the cement hardens, otherwise you end up with a cement truck that's got a bunch of dried cement on it. It's not good.

So it turns out the best thing to clean off the trucks is actually hydrochloric acid, muriatic acid, because it will dissolve all these basic minerals. Um, it's a good acid, good strong acid will dissolve away the things. And I've had cement trucks that had problems because they started uh squirting the muriatic acid on the brake system, okay, and sort of corrodes the steel, okay. Anyway, this one guy had no brakes and he goes over a bridge and kills himself in a cement truck. That's another story.

But in this particular case, um, there was a company — in this particular, company was from the Midwest. They made all kinds of specialized safety vehicles, ambulances, uh fire trucks, um cement trucks. They had a division that made military trucks, although that was much bigger division and was sort of separate of this division. But basically there were a lot of people that decided to start designing their own truck. They might go buy a Ford or a GM truck and then they would start modifying it, to put the appropriate equipment on it for a fire engine ladder, or a pumper, or an ambulance or whatever. Um, and so they would sell the kind of completed things. It's kind of a secondary outfitting of things. And this company had gone around the Midwest buying up these little mom-and-pop operations making all kinds of specialized trucks. And so they had like, I, 30 or 50 different operations all over the Midwest making different types of specialty vehicles.

And this one in Iowa, if I remember it was Iowa, was making cement trucks, and they actually had a pretty good design for a cement truck. And they needed to have this 200-gallon tank of water on the truck. And basically when the truck has stopped, you could leave the engine running and there's an air brake on these big trucks, and the air brake actually has a compressor that runs at 55 PSI. So they were going to use a typical hose. Water pressure at your house is about 55 PSI. It might be 40, it might be 80. It's very rarely more than 100 PSI for the distribution pressure within your home. If you have more than 100 PSI everything starts leaking, all the valves and the gaskets and stuff. So typically 60 PSI is typical for your garden hose, okay. And that's basically what they did. They just took up a garden hose, they didn't to pressurize this thing, they filled the thing up with 200 gallons. Um, but they made it out of aluminum, because cement trucks have a problem, they're heavy and they're trying to save weight wherever they can, so you can carry more cement and less water and steel and whatnot. So they made the pressure vessel out of aluminum.

Well, they knew it was a pressure vessel at 55 PSI. So they um, they went to the Department of Transportation and said, okay we're going to put this pressure vessel on our cement truck, and what are your requirements? And the Department of Transportation said we don't have any requirements, because that's just something you're carrying on the truck. It might be bolted to the truck and not easily removed, but it's not something that's used when you're running down the highway. And we regulate the safety of things going down the highway, and we don't care if you're, you know, if it had been a removable thing that you used a forklift to put it on and off, like a pickup, you put something in a pickup truck we wouldn't regulate that. So they said we don't regulate it, okay.

And um, the reason they went DOT first is because there's a law called preemption, and the federal government always wins a fight with the states. It's in the Constitution. If a federal law conflicts with a state law, the federal law always takes precedent, okay. So the Department of Transportation is the federal agency. Um, and so they went there and uh they said no we don't regulate it. The person who was head of their Regulatory Affairs at this uh truck company was an attorney, he wasn't an engineer, he was an attorney. He had to sift through all these regulations for all kinds of things, and so he knew, he started with the Department of Transportation.

For this 30 or 50 little mom-and-pop shop people building different types of trucks, the company had one consulting engineer, okay, to help them build all these trucks with all their specialized systems of hydraulics and pneumatics and whatnot. Basically what they relied on is they'd buy a basic vehicle from Mack or Ford or GM or whatever, and then they would add things to it. And if they needed hydraulics they would go to a company like Parker Hannifin that makes hydraulics, and they'd say what do you recommend for the system that we want to put together. And Parker Hannifin [Hannifin], big company, does hydraulics for aircraft and things like that, lots of engineers, knows all about uh hydraulics, they would essentially do the engineering for this little mom-and-pop truck company. So the mom-and-pop truck company was saving money by not having all these high-powered engineers like General Motors had, or somebody else like Mack Truck or somebody. And so they had this little niche market, and they went to the DOT, said we don't regulate it.

So then their legal eagle attorney goes and looks at the boiler and pressure vessel code, um, division 8, because this is not a fired pressure vessel, you're not heating the water up, it's an unfired pressure vessel. And he says, he looks at the scope in the very beginning, for the scope of this division: pressure vessels are containers for the containment of pressure. Well, his little water tank was that, either internal or external blah. And then he looks at the exclusions. And some of the things that are excluded are a design pressure of less than 300 PSI, a design temperature of less than 210 degrees Fahrenheit, or a hot water tank. Well he didn't even have hot water tanks, these are fired vessels. He read the exclusions and he says oh, I'm not covered by the ASME code, because I don't have a high enough pressure, big enough volume, or there's all kinds of, this goes on for two, for a full page of all the exclusions, but he was a smart enough guy to read it. He says I'm not covered by the boiler and pressure vessel code, I'm not covered by the DOT and they told me that I wasn't covered by DOT, I'm not regulated by anybody. And so I can build my aluminum tank just like I want, I don't have to follow anybody's design rules, okay.

Well, sort of the fair use of these types of things like the boiler and pressure vessel code, there are a lot of good rules for design of things, okay. And you know, this water tank had some holes in it, you had to cut some holes to put water in and take water out and for valves and things like that. And the boiler and pressure vessel code knows, and the engineers have known for what, 120 years, that if you put a hole in a plate it creates a stress concentration. How much stress concentration for a hole in a plate? This was the first stress concentration calculation ever done, about 1870 something. Anybody know? What's the stress concentration factor at the edge of a hole, just a simple hole in a big plate? Three. Okay, it's three. You can prove it's exactly three for a perfectly cylindrical hole in an infinite plate, okay. There's a whole book called Stress Concentration Factors, and people used to actually measure these things by photo-electric — they take a not photo-electric, photo-elastic techniques, they take a piece of plastic and put polarized light on it and you could actually see patterns. I should have brought that in, this book. And this is how people did it in the 1940s. Then when we got computers, people now do a finite element analysis and you can calculate the stress concentration value, okay.

It's the concentration of stress at some discontinuity, a sharp notch, simple hole which is not a very sharp notch. Anyway, a simple hole is a factor of three. Well the boiler and pressure vessel code requires that you use what we call a doubler plate. Well I looked for a doubler plate, actually there are doubler plates if you Google it but I couldn't find a good doubler plate. But here's one from Avery reinforcements. If you actually put in uh hole reinforcements, you're going to get people trying to sell you these little rings that keep you from ripping your paper through the uh through the three-ring binder. Well in fact, that's a doubler plate. You increase the thickness around the stress concentration of the hole, okay. This is a doubler plate, okay. Um, and so the size doubler plate is calculated.

I did actually find one among doubler plates in their photos. It's not the one I like. This is actually sort of a finite element analysis thingy that — like to stay on focus. Anyway no wonder it didn't like, stay on focus at all. Anyway, so here's two pipes intersecting, and here's a doubler plate on top of this one. I was looking for one actually showed a hole going all the way through, okay. Here they do it for a stress concentration of the intersection of two pipes. But in fact if you want to flow something through, you'd actually have a bigger doubler plate. And typically the doubler plate will go out to um maybe an extra one and a half times the radius, okay. It at least be one times the radius. And I think the code will tell you exactly how big and how thick the doubler plate has to be if you're going to cut a hole in something.

Well these guys making a cement truck decided doubler plates just add weight, okay. So they decided we don't need doubler plates. If they had followed the code, they would have had to have had a doubler plate. And they said well we're excluded by the code. They didn't ask every state whether they were covered by the code or not. Well what happened is, these things would fatigue in service. You know, they'd be pressurized once, and then they'd use it, and then they pressurize it again. It might be used three times a day, uh, when they're washing down the truck, maybe half a dozen times a day. After about a year and a half they developed fatigue cracks.

If it was a boiler and pressure vessel code and it had an ASME stamp, you would have to be an approved shop to do any repairs on it. Any old welding shop could not — if a welder sees that it's got a stamp, ASME stamp on it, and he's not a code quality certified welder, or the shop is not a certified welder, he knows he can't touch it by law, okay. Uh, you can't repair an ASME vessel unless you're a certified shop and meeting the quality control requirements and the annual audits that the ASME does of all the shops, which is another little business for them. Um, well, it didn't have an ASME stamp. So various shops around the country, they, you know, their construction companies doing cement work and stuff, they had guys who could weld, and they just weld up, repair the cracks on these things.

Well one guy in Pennsylvania is back from the Iraq War, and he'd survived three years over in Iraq, um. And uh, he's welding on this vessel, and then he goes to pressurize it to see if he's got any leaks. He should have only used 5 PSI pressure to, you only need 5 PSI to find the leak. But he used, for whatever reason it's not exactly clear, um, they got the full shop pressure of 100 or 125 PSI behind this thing. The vessel which was designed for 55 PSI and could probably take 100 maybe if everything was good and didn't have any bad repairs on it, um, got the full 100 PSI, it blew up, shot him 100 yards across the parking lot uh into a dumpster, and he came in he was in three pieces afterwards. So he had survived Iraq but he didn't survive doing repair work on uh on a pressure vessel.

It turns out, as we got into this, the state of Pennsylvania requires that any pressure vessel — whether it's used for the scope of the boiler and pressure vessel code — any vessel of certain sizes and stuff to be built and maintained to the ASME boiler and pressure vessel code. So the fair use is, the state of Pennsylvania recognizes the ASME code as good manufacturing practice that should be followed. That those design rules have been there for a hundred years, they're continually updated by hundreds of engineers looking at this, and the state of Pennsylvania did have force of law. So it turns out this vessel was illegal in the state of Pennsylvania, okay.

So it turns out the guy I was working with used to be one of the seven members of the main board of ASME um code. I mean, there's seven guys to sit at the top and review all the work of all the committees underneath them. And so when Roger found out uh what was going on here, he says I have a duty as an engineer to report this to the ASME, because they're illegal vessels. This isn't the only truck in Pennsylvania. In fact, they had sold 100,000 of these trucks all across the United States and Canada, probably Mexico too. And so he was at a conference or a convention, and he went up to the guy who was head of the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors.

You have the ASME code which deals with designing the vessel and designing that code. There's also a part of ASME, a separate part, which is called the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code Inspectors. And this is a business the ASME runs. Uh, Hartford Steam Boiler insurance company does something like this, but you have to, the state laws will require that you have your vessels inspected from time to time. It used to be in Massachusetts, if you had an air compressor in your lab you had to have someone come by once every 3 years and inspect it. They got rid of that, they got rid of that, I mean you blow up a little building and that might be no big deal, okay. Um, so we don't inspect the air compressors at MIT anymore. But 25 years ago, every 3 years, the, you know, the uh people at MIT would hire someone to come in and inspect these things. Well there are people who go, come in and inspect these other things, on big things on a regular basis, for the state of Massachusetts, state of Pennsylvania.

And one of these is the National Board of Boiler and Pressure Vessel Inspectors. And the guy was just aghast, 'cause he says we don't have, because Roger's explaining you need to go out there inspect these things, you could kill somebody else tomorrow, right, which is why he had to uh inform somebody. And the guy says we don't have enough inspectors. We can't inspect another 100,000 vessels that are all over everywhere. Um, so anyway, they had to work to resolve that.

In the meantime, as we looked into things, this company — with it turns out their consulting engineer had died, okay. So they decided well we didn't really need them anyway, so they didn't even have a consulting engineer. And after they started building these things, while they were checking them in the plant, they were doing some test on one of them and one of them blew up and took a guy, just took both of his legs off, okay. Didn't kill him, but it took both of his legs off uh when the vessel blew up. So the company was sort of on notice that even a brand new vessel when over-pressurized might blow up. And ordinarily a pressure vessel should have a factor of 2 and 1 half, three and a half safety, depend, it's in the code depending on the uses of the vessel, but you should have a big safety factor. Dr. Belmar is going to talk about safety factors. But they didn't even have a factor of two safety on a brand new vessel. They didn't really do an investigation to see why it blew up, they just kept making these things.

So now they've killed a guy in Pennsylvania. They had, they were on notice two years before when they took their own employees' legs off. Um, they're in trouble, okay. But why are they in trouble? Because you didn't have any qualified engineers minding the store. I mean, a qualified engineer that had any experience with pressure vessels would have known that you don't have doubler plates, you would not have a vessel with holes in it and pipes welded into it that didn't have doubler plates around the hole. I mean, it may not be something you're familiar with right now, but if you had been working for 6 months in any pressure vessel shop or with any pressurized containers you would have seen doubler plates all over, okay. Um, so it's, it's sort of an obvious thing, and no one paid any attention to it, okay.

So that's a story of, uh, tells you a little bit about preemption. The feds, DOT, didn't want to take responsibility. Um, an attorney decided he could save some money by not taking, not using good manufacturing practice, 'cause the code is good manufacturing practice, it's proven technology and there's good science behind it. And anybody, there's a whole group of engineers out there, whether they be Shell and Exxon or Bechtel or whatever, they're looking to ways that can safely reduce the cost, okay. But in order to do that reduction in cost, they got to get a whole board of other engineers who are going to review what they designed, okay, if they're going to change the code.

So the code, this is the good part of the code, it gives us a history of failures, and we fix things after the failure. After the 2000, or not 2000, the 19-whatever-it-was Northridge earthquake in Los Angeles, they revised all kinds of parts of the building code for seismic loading, okay. There was no problems with buildings being able to support their weight and everything in a static situation. But when the ground starts shaking like Jell-O and the buildings start wobbling from side to side, some of those, what they called moment connections, where, you know, you have a T intersection between the floor beams and the columns — well now when they're wobbling like this in the earthquake, they just popped, okay, and buildings collapsed and bridges collapsed. So in the 1990s the civil engineers were doing a huge amount of redesign of the code for um seismic applications, okay. That's one of the reasons the codes get thicker and thicker with time, okay.

That's all I'm going to do today, but I do want to remind you, we talked at the beginning of class, a couple of you came in afterwards, we're going to finish up.