CS_Su2012_03

Help some, let's see. So I found this — you Google, wonderful, or Wikipedia — this is just for your information. Um, in 1907 they called him Johansson blocks. I actually brought in Weber blocks which are made by, uh, can't remember who. The Starrett, okay, Starrett CA and Weber blocks, because I guess they didn't have the — they don't historic — go back to Johansson. But Johansson was the guy in 1907 who found that you could ring these together, and there's about twenty of them all rung together to make some length, and that's essentially what you do when you need to make some reference length. You're going to compare things.

And it points out the gauge blocks are calibrated 68°, and that's the temperature you should use to make your measurements. So well, you can make it at 70° as long as everything is at 70°, right? If it's steel and steel; if it's aluminum then you need to do it at 68, because the gauge blocks were calibrated for 68. Actually I should take that back — the gauge blocks I brought in were chromium carbide, which is not steel. Looked like steel, but it's a lot harder and so it doesn't wear, it's a better quality block. But the thing is, unless you're making a measurement on something of the exact same material, you really do have to do it at 68°, because that's where it was designed for, right? And if it's a different material, they're going to have different coefficients of expansion and stuff. Okay, are we on? Yep, okay.

Any questions, anybody? I should be here tomorrow. I don't think I'm going to be here Monday, so you can watch another video, I guess. Okay, um, so last time we were talking — started talking a little bit about, um, well, both the last times about properties. I handed out these little unknown uh um/inch diameter spheres. There are limits to properties, and I'm not going to spend a lot of time going through things, but I just — because actually in your material selection lectures I kind of go through some of the properties and you'll see some of these types of Ashby plots.

Mike Ashby was a professor at Harvard for a while. Before that, I can't remember where he was, then he went back to England and now he's retired, 'cause in England you can still force professors to retire at age 65. But uh, he actually has made quite a business. He started out writing some books in the 1980s called Engineering Materials and Material Selection. He's sort of a mechanical engineer and a materials engineer, both, but a very broad thinker and actually an engaging speaker and everything else. So he wrote a number of these books, um, and he started making some money, like this book goes for $300, or it did twenty years ago, okay. But in it you get this handy-dandy pamphlet. And the pamphlet has no copyrights, okay. This has a copyright; this doesn't. And he did that on purpose so that people could copy this.

Well then in the '90s, when he went back to England, he decided that he would start developing computer programs. And now for $50,000 you can buy a computer program that will help you select a material for some product you might want to design, okay. And he started out with what are now called Ashby plots, named after him, where he would plot two parameters of a material against one another. I want to stay on automatic focus. Uh, know, the focus is — problem is here. Okay, well that's part of the focus problem.

Anyway, in this case he's plotted density versus Young's modulus. But he's got a whole series of these, and it turns out these are very useful plots to get some 4,000-foot view of material selection, which you're going through right now. But if we plot Young's modulus — is related to the strength of the bonds between the atoms, okay. And I'll talk about — on the videos you'll hear me talk about that. Density just related to those number of protons and neutrons in that nucleus and how closely they pack. Cork is one of the lightest materials. Polymer foams are down here. You can see why cork kind of occupies a unique position among materials, 'cause it's low density and low modulus. Good for wine bottle stoppers, okay. But there's only so many cork trees in Portugal, and they're getting to be short on cork trees and stuff, and we have plastics that sort of do it that we use for wine bottle corks. Metals are up here, ceramics are up here.

If we look at these two parameters, um, if I want to look at some other parameters — I'm not going to go through all these necessarily, but this is Young's modulus versus strength. And these should be correlated, because Young's modulus is related to the strength of the bond, and the tensile strength is also related to the strength of the bond, but not perfectly correlated. And these other lines on here relate to certain types of design parameters, whether you're looking for, as he calls them, design guidelines — what your criteria for failure, whether it's buckling, or whether it's buckling of a plate or a sheet. You have different ratios of strength versus modulus. So basically Ashby went back to a lot of these basic mechanical equations for strength of materials and said, um, let's plot that strength versus something else.

Here we have thermal diffusivity and thermal conductivity. They should be very strongly correlated, which you see they are. And you've got diamond up here because it has the strongest chemical bonds, or second strongest chemical bonds. It has very good thermal conductivity, and that has to do with how heat energy or wave motion, mechanical motion in the — on the lattice transfers through the material. And down here you have rubbers and stuff, cork again, very good insulators if you will. But most of them are closely correlated. Anybody know why this thing is so closely correlated? Well, it's actually because — this is not the most clever way to — uh, no chalk today. Okay, um, there's not any chalk in the back, is there? Oh, I know where I have chalk. I usually have some chalk sitting on my bench here.

[Tom retrieves chalk.] Okay. Turns out the thermal diffusivity — which we usually have alpha for thermal diffusivity — is equal to the thermal conductivity divided by the density and heat capacity. So to find that these two are correlated is not a big surprise, is it? Okay, just dividing by the density and the heat capacity. So anyway, those are Ashby's material selection plots. But the main reason I wanted to put them up right now is in terms of codes and standards and ultimately design of something, there are limits to what can be achieved.

For example, when they wanted to build — anyone ever hear the National Aerospace Plane? This was twenty years ago, but it was maybe — it's twenty-five years ago, in the time just after the Reagan Star Wars defense buildup of the mid '80s. And after they had designed the space shuttle at NASA and stuff, they decided they wanted to build a National Aerospace Plane to compete with a British Concorde jetliner, okay. And anybody know what the Concorde is? I mean, it's out of business now, right? What's the Concorde? Or, supersonic commercial jet that would go from London to New York in less than five hours, and it would go about — I don't know, I don't remember — Mach 2. I flew it once. I paid the extra 2500 bucks out of my own pocket just to say I could fly on it. One of the filthiest planes I ever flew on. The service was lousy. Everybody thought they were in first class 'cause they were — there is always — it was called a super first class ticket, and everybody was first class. So when it came to boarding, everybody wanted to board first. It was just a cattle car. But I flew it.

And the thing is, we left London at 5:00 p.m. London time, and we arrived in New York at 4:30 same day — half an hour earlier than we took off. Of course a few time zones in between, but nonetheless. But the really interesting thing about flying supersonically: no jet lag. You know, I started out in Vienna, flew to London, got back to New York, and then there was a rainstorm and so I didn't get back to Boston until like midnight. And I'd been in Europe for a week, so I was in Vienna time, which like six time zones ahead. And I work all day and get home at 1:00 a.m. and I get up — 'cause I just always get up with the sun. Um, I got up 7 or 8:00 in the morning, got a little bit of sleep, but I was working out in the garden about 4:00, and I thought, any other time I'd gone to Europe, you know, by 4:00 in the afternoon, you know, you just — jet lag hits you. I was out there in the garden, I just realized I wasn't jet-lagged. And everyone had told me, when you fly supersonically you don't get jet lag. And you don't. And I don't know if it has to do with not being on the plane as long and being dehydrated in that cockpit, you know — or cockpit, but inside the plane — or what, but you don't get the same jet lag.

Okay, so that was — I don't know if that was worth 2500 bucks, but it was. Anyway, now you can't do it unless you become an Air Force pilot or something, or a Navy pilot, to fly above Mach 2 or whatever it was. They did have a great big sign in the front that told us what Mach number we were flying at, not that you could tell anyway.

But anyway, the National Aerospace Plane, they decided the goals of that were — they were going to have to fuel it with hydrogen 'cause it's a light fuel and you need lightweight. And so they're going to have liquid hydrogen in the wings, and they were going to have a copper skin, a copper alloy skin of some copper alloy they didn't know to think about. So you got liquid hydrogen at 20° Kelvin on this side, and over here you would have, whether it's a half an inch or an inch away, you would have the Mach, you know, wind blowing by at about 3,000 Fahrenheit. Or, you know, well, say like 2,000 Kelvin, okay. So this was the temperature gradient between hot air and liquid hydrogen, with a material in between that, if it failed, guess what happens? Kaboom, right? I mean, this is fuel and oxidizer — hot air.

Anyway, they had no idea what material they're going to build this plane out of. Okay, so they never did build the plane. But the idea was you could go from New York to Tokyo in like three hours or something, 'cause you'd actually get up into the lower reaches of the — or the upper reaches of the atmosphere, and you would be going like 15,000 miles an hour once you get up there. But the interesting thing, you know, that five-hour flight from London to New York — about an hour and a half each way was just getting up to altitude and getting up to where you could go speed and start breaking the sound barrier over the Atlantic, and then you had to start slowing down. So sort of most of your time was accelerating and decelerating. There wasn't that much time where you were going full speed, okay. By the way, the dinner service was also terrible, okay, on the thing.

Student: [inaudible question]

Yeah, well, I said that everybody wants to be first class. Turns out I was in seat 1B, okay, and that's because I'd made my reservation like four weeks ahead of time. Everybody else on the plane were these high rollers, and the guy sitting next to me was the number one frequent flyer on British Airways. He was 23 years old. His typical weekly thing was to fly around the globe. His father was a Greek shipping tycoon. He was 23 years old, he graduated from Cambridge or Oxford, I can't remember. He spent most of the dinner explaining to me how I should put all my money into the Bahamas or somewhere so I could avoid all the taxes, okay, how to launder your money and avoid taxes — which I thought, well, that's a good way to go to Leavenworth. Um, anyway. And the other thing he was doing was holding the tray table for dinner with one hand as he tried to eat with the other hand, because the tray was broken, okay. They only had a couple of these planes, they never had time to do maintenance, that's why it was filthy. Which wasn't very comforting, frankly, to know they didn't have time to do maintenance.

Um, which by the way is another reason why you should never take one of these helicopter tours around Hawaii or someplace like that. They never have time to do maintenance on those helicopters. If you talk to the helicopter companies, they will tell you — the guys who work at the helicopter companies will never take one of those flights, because they know the incidence of failures is higher in that business than any other. These are little things that you need to learn.

Anyway, the problem here is — the great thinkers, since we have an Air Force person here — in the Air Force still have these grandiose plans. About five or six years ago I was on this committee for propulsion and how the Air Force should spend $300 million a year in their propulsion budget, research budget. And they said they wanted to have — they had two goals. One was to fly 25,000 miles without stopping. I said, why do you need 25,000 miles? Why isn't 12,000 good enough? I mean, half of a great circle will get you anywhere on the Earth, right? And we can actually do 12,000 miles with the latest 747s and things, or the Dreamliner will go half a great circle. And they said, well, we don't think we can ever depend on bases anywhere except in the continental United States. And I thought, huh.

Student: We got aircraft carriers.

Well, no, they just want to have something take ordnance somewhere. And the other goal, they wanted to have something that would go about Mach 5, which I think — that's anyway 17,000 mph in the air. And if you start looking at the frictional heating, you're getting up to like 5-6,000 Kelvin. I said, well, there's only so many materials that have melting temperatures. Um, I don't know if I brought one of the Ashby plots for melting temperatures, but there's only — you can start counting on your finger, on one hand, the types of materials that you use that can sustain that type of temperature. And I said, well, why do you need to go — this is not man-rated aircraft. They said no. And I said, well, why do you need something — and this was about seven or eight years ago — they said, well, we once knew where Osama Bin Laden was, but we had to get the ordnance there within fifteen minutes. And because it had to be from a carrier, right? And they said, in order to do it we needed something that would go 17,000 mph in the air. Okay, so it's just sort of a fancy cruise missile. However, the limits on the materials —

Student: Pardon me, I — that's pretty typical of the military, screw something up and be like, let's come up with some ridiculous long-term corrective action. 17,000 mph plane?

Yeah, well, it wasn't really a plane, it could be a small thing. You know, you can put a lot of explosive into a small — anyway, you know, cruise missiles basically have engines that are designed to last for one or two hours, right? I mean, they're made out of carbon composites and they just burn up, okay. But if it only has to last for one or two hours and it only cost two or three million dollars, so for the cruise missile, so, big deal.

Um, anyway, where am I going? So there are limits to materials, and you'll get some of that material selection and limits to the properties of materials. Now getting back to observables. So I'm going to change tack and go back to observables. Observables, I told you, were energy interacting with matter, okay. And it turns out that there are only certain types of energy — you know, to take, I call it, the MIT 50,000, 40,000, 50,000 foot view of something — there's only certain types of energy that you can deal with. There's electromagnetic energy, which is basically light and X-rays and microwaves, okay, it's the electromagnetic spectrum. There's mechanical energy, and there's a fundamental limit to that. There's a limit to the electromagnetic energy in the sense that you get up to cosmic rays and you get to energies that are kind of beyond anything we can afford. Um, chemical energy, the strongest bonds are about three electron volts, and so we can talk about what you can do or can't do with chemical energy observing things. And there's thermal energy, which is really just mechanical vibrations, at least in solids, okay. And there's nuclear energy.

And it turns out, in order to observe materials, we use each one of these, and in many of them we look at specific spectra or frequencies. If you want to look at the electromagnetic spectrum — I don't know, I got various things here, this is probably not bad. So here's the electromagnetic spectrum. Um, I don't know that I know anyone using gamma rays for non-destructive testing, and I'll go over some of these things in this set you're going to be doing on non-destructive testing. But we certainly use X-rays — at least at the lower intensity X-rays — for most for inspection. Ultraviolet rays, it turns out the 1 to 3 electron volts falls in the energy of ultraviolet, and that's why you get a sunburn when you go outdoors. So, talk about practical things you've learned today: what it is, the ultraviolet light, in the intensity of the sun, will break down the chemical, the primary chemical bonds inside your skin, and essentially burn you.

In fact, I don't know if I can do it with this one. The old — the old lasers — if I've got a regular old flashlight here, but you take a regular flashlight and you can actually shine it through and see through your skin. Anyone ever done that, your fingers? Okay. Your skin is somewhat transparent to certain wavelengths within the visible. But in fact you can get burns because the ultraviolet rays on a sunny day are sufficient to break down the chemical bonds inside your skin. Infrared is used for thermal analysis, and of course you know what radar and other things are used. There actually are little bands in here, like there's the terahertz band right in here between infrared and radar, that really isn't used much. There's some guys over in electrical engineering who are trying to figure out how to do it. But the hard thing is to control things, but now we're talking about electrons moving several millimeters, so how do you do anything with that? In the terahertz regime, that wavelength, you basically are talking about submillimeter wavelengths, and it's hard to figure out what to do with things. Although if you could, in terms of developing devices that can generate those types of rays efficiently — and anyway, we use everything in that spectrum, almost everything in that electromagnetic spectrum, to observe materials in one way or another, and use those things also to, uh — um — uh, I can't remember what I was going to say. Anyway, we use it to do non-destructive testing on things.

Now, mechanical energy — the slide I had said that there's a limit, which is the Debye frequency. And the maximum speed at which two atoms can interact is the distance of separation divided by the speed — the speed of light or velocity of sound divided by the distance of separation. So the frequency is equal to — you might know what the approximate speed of sound in a solid is. And — 5,000 m/s, okay. Three thousand. And at sea level it's 343.50 m/s in air, okay. Now this is an important thing to actually start thinking of the physics. Anybody know what the distance of separation of the atoms is in a gas at standard temperature and pressure, in, like, in this room? How many atomic distances separate the gas molecules?

I've never thought about — these things, these little rules of thumb that I've picked up over the years are useful. The density difference between air and a condensed phase like water — so if we're talking steam versus water — is at room temperature is about a thousand. It might be 1800, it might be 800, it might be 1200, but it's about a thousand. So what's the distance of separation? Well, in the water molecule, in liquid water or ice solid water, basically they're touching, the molecules are touching. If in the gas phase at room temperature they're — have a density of thousand times less, what's the distance of separation in the gas phase? Molecular distance of separation, how many molecule distances between atoms if the density is a thousand times less?

Well, you've got to go to linear dimension rather than volumetric — take the cube root of a thousand. Does that make sense? Okay. So it's a distance of ten molecules is the distance of separation between these atoms, okay. So if that's in the — in a solid, if the velocity is — I now got lots of chalk — okay, 5,000 m/s, and the distance of separation is 10⁻¹⁰ m, we've got a frequency of interaction of 5 × 10¹³, okay. Um, that's called the Debye frequency. Some people use 2 × 10¹³ because not every molecule is — uh, an angstrom across, some of them are bigger than that. But in any case, that's the maximum frequency that you can have, okay.

But it's important — well at least I found it's important — in trying to engineer real things, to have certain types of numbers that kind of make sense. And in my field, kind of knowing the relative density between a solid and its vapor at room temperature is a useful thing. Because if you now say I want to do it 2,000 degrees rather than 400° or 300° Kelvin, I just have to multiply by six, right? And so if I'm talking about a gas at 2,000 Kelvin as opposed to 300 Kelvin, it's 6,000 — approximately — difference in volume between solid and vapor, okay. Now why would I care about that?

Well, for example, um, there's something called hot isostatic pressing. Anybody ever heard of hot isostatic pressing of materials? Oh, okay. So if you're going to build a turbine disc or something, um, you might make it out of powder metallurgy. And there's a good reason for that, in terms of the uniformity of the composition of the powders. But then you end up with pores all through the structure, and those pores, just like a perforated piece of paper, will weaken the material. You'd like to get rid of the pores. So right after World War II, at Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, they built the world's first hot isostatic press. The second one was located in 4-131, right where you — next to where you're eating breakfast, okay. But they basically make a furnace that will go to 2,000 degrees or so, and will go to 20,000 — or about 2,000 atmospheres, about 20 or 30,000 PSI.

Well, why? And they do it in argon. And so the argon, the high temperatures and the argon pressure, isostatic pressure of the gas, just squeeze the pores out of the material. So you take a high temperature alloy, some superalloy you're going to make a turbine disc out of for a jet engine, and you squeeze the pores out of it. Do the same thing for Harley-Davidson aluminum cylinders, 'cause you don't want one of those to fracture. Where's that cylinder located when you're riding the motorcycle? Right between your legs. And if it blows up, it's not a good day, okay. So it's more critical than the piston engine in your car, because if it blows up in your car, well, you'll probably slow down, hopefully you won't have an accident. But if you're on a motorcycle and it blows up, you're right there, you're intimately involved. So when critical things, we will take the time to get rid of all the porosity by squeezing it out.

Well, by knowing — why do they limit it to 2,000 atmospheres? Because you can't squeeze the gas any tighter. At that point those gas molecules are not ten atomic distances apart, they're right on top of each other as if they were a solid or a liquid. In fact, if you know anything about thermodynamics and you start looking at the phase diagram for a one-component system, the materials, it gets to the point where you can't tell the difference between a gas and a liquid thermodynamically if you go to high enough pressures. If anyone's ever seen that type of plot — some of you have to be mechanical engineers and studied some of that in the steam tables, okay. Yeah, so you know what I'm talking about, that little hump, and where you get to the point above the critical point where the liquid and the gas become one, okay. It's Nirvana for phases, okay. The two phases become the same phase. Pardon me, for the first time. Yes, it's just wonderful.

Anyway, so we do lots of things to try to measure the properties of materials and whatnot. So let's get back — I'm going to change again, I'm not going to spend a lot more time, because when you go through the non-destructive testing I'll go through a lot of these things. I've told you — there, the practical limits on electromagnetics is once you get up to hard X-rays, you're getting lots of energy per photon and it's just too expensive, and it's also kind of dangerous, you start killing people with those X-rays. Um, although people do design things like neutron bombs and X-ray bombs and things that would kill people without damaging buildings, right. Mechanical, there is a limit to the frequency. Chemical, there's a limit to the energy, the bonds. And it turns out, in terms of electromagnetic interacting with chemical, that's somewhere in the ultraviolet. And thermal is just a subset of mechanical vibrations, and nuclear is a whole different science that I don't know much about.

So let's go now back to codes and standards. I've given you lots of introduction over the last day and a half. Um, and I handed out this, I think, the very first day on codes and standards, and I don't know if you had a chance to read it, but it goes through and it talks about these codes and standards and how they are many different codes, specifications, recommended practices and everything else. And these things historically come up through various industries.

Um, in the aviation industry, what are some of the agencies or societies that come up with standards for codes, standards, specifications in the aviation industry? Anybody know any of them?

Student: NTSB.

The NTSB, yes, okay.

Student: FAA.

FAA. Now the NTSB, let me say, is not just aviation. We think of it as just aviation because they're most prominent. But pipelines and everything else, anything — when you transport something, they're responsible for trucking, pipelines, aviation, they've got everything. They don't really write standards so much as investigate accidents to try to improve the standards. It's sort of like the difference between OSHA and the National Institutes of Health. Anybody know the difference between those two? The National Institutes of Health does research on what the health standards should be. OSHA sets the health standards, okay, for the workplace.

So the NTSB actually works with the FAA. Actually, the FAA sets the regulations and enforces; the NTSB provides the information that goes to the FAA so that they can set more intelligent standards, okay. So in terms of standards, the FAA is really the standards body. The NTSB is sort of doing research on real accidents, in many cases, so that they can help the FAA improve the standard to avoid accidents in the future. And there's a number of those things in the government, okay.

And we'll talk about some others. What about industry standards or agencies? Or actually, there's another government — another big government one. NASA. Okay. Others?

Student: [aviation question]

Uh, well yeah, if you're talking nuclear — there's, this — I was thinking of aviation, but yes, I mean, certainly if you're in the Navy and you're talking ships, this is something you're going to have to worry about, is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is going to tell you how to run your reactors, to a certain extent. Except the DoD can always claim national security interest and they can tell all these other agencies go pound sand until they get to congressional level. And sometimes Congress will tell the military to go pound sand, um, such as tributyl tin. Does anyone know what tributyl tin is?

You don't know about it? Well, twenty years ago — actually twenty-five years ago — the Navy discovered if you put tributyl tin in the paint on ships, you don't get any barnacles grow. And so this was great to save money on maintenance of ships. The only problem is not only do they not grow on the ship, they don't grow in the harbor. Parts per trillion of tributyl tin wiped out every mollusk in every harbor in the United States. And finally the oystermen and the clam diggers and others sort of decided they would go to Congress, 'cause the Navy kept on saying, oh well, for national security we need to put tributyl tin in our paint. Well in the '90s Congress said no, take your tributyl tin out and get out your scrapers and start scraping again.

Student: Pardon me, it creates jobs.

Yeah, it creates jobs, it increases cost. You know, I mean, there's lots of things that it does, but anyway.

Uh, what about — pardon me?

Student: [DOT]

Oh, uh, yeah, DOT regulates a lot of things. I was trying to get you into things like SAE. Anybody know what SAE is? Society of Automotive Engineers. But they carry all the aviation engineers, okay. The Aerospace Material Standards, AMS, are standards of the SAE. SAE got into the regulation of aviation before other people did. So if I go to the Aerospace Material Specification index, okay, um, it's promulgated by the Society of Automotive Engineers. But that's a historical thing that comes out of that. And if you look at this — thickness about a centimeter of this — has got all the specifications as a single line on the page for every specification. So look at this, I got a centimeter thickness of text, and this is titanium alloys, sand castings, aluminum bronze, okay. And it will list these specifications. Many of them, it will list the purchase price, and they're all 59 bucks. So for every line on here there's about a 20-page specification that goes with that. So how many — we're talking how many feet on the shelf? You know, probably 40 or 50 feet of shelf space if you owned all the AMS specifications. And at $59 a line, and you have to buy most of them every year, it gets to be kind of pricey, doesn't it? Which is something I'm going to get to in a little bit.

But anyway, so for Aerospace — we don't have to dwell on Aerospace too much. Um, so you had the three that I had, NTSB, FAA, and SAE. The automotive — what do we have for automotive? Anybody know any of the agencies, federal agencies?

Student: National [Highway]

National Highway — National Highway Transportation Authority, NHTSA, okay. So if Ford's got a defective widget, then they have to report to NHTSA, and NHTSA can force Ford to do a recall, which might cost them $100 million. Um, and whatnot. Um, there's the DOT, and DOT regulates not just automobiles but pipelines, ships, railroads. And we don't have our Coast Guard person here yet, do we? Okay, he's not until the fall. He could come this summer, I said anyway, I told you that, right? But he's still working. Oh, okay, well they won't pay tuition for them, so who cares. Um, we'll deal with it in the fall.

But the Coast Guard has to deal with the DOT — actually, Coast Guard, is it under the DOT? I think it is. Yeah. Oh, it's Homeland Security. It used to be Department of Transportation, but now they've moved it to Homeland Security, so I can't keep track. Yeah, well, I always think it's interesting that when the Navy has a ship that's too old to use, they give it to the Coast Guard, and to them it's a new ship. Turkey, anyway.

Um, for the energy and utilities business, there's the American Petroleum Institute. There's the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code. For ships, since you're Navy folks — commercial ships — what are the three big classification societies?

Student: ABS.

American Bureau of Shipping. I know I am, uh, I'm actually not even familiar with them, they may be — they may do something. But the classification societies are American Bureau of Shipping, which I think at one time had 70% of all ships in the world were classified under ABS. And then there's the next largest is DNV. You want to know what DNV stands for? Det Norske Veritas, which is in Oslo, it's a Norwegian company. And norske, okay, Norwegian. And it's truth, I mean, veritas is basically truth, okay. Um, so they classify like 20% of the ships. And then in France there's Bureau Veritas, okay, which classifies about 10% of the shipping in the world. This is the non-military shipping in the world. But in general, Lloyd's is not going to give you insurance unless you had a classification society certify to Lloyd's Register of Shipping. You know, Lloyd's of London — that actually is Lloyd's Register of Shipping. Oh, no, Lloyd's is basically — they will use ABS and DNV and Bureau Veritas to essentially go into the shipyard, do the same types of things that you guys do in shipyards to make sure that the shipyard is building it properly, okay.

So you are sort of the ABS of the US for the US Navy when you go in as a SUPSHIP — they still call it SUPSHIP, right? Okay. So when you go into SUPSHIP, you're acting just like ABS for a commercial operation, and you're looking over the shoulders and you're arguing with them of, did they meet this non-destructive test specification or this standard? And, um, you have some of the same authority, which is you can shut the whole thing down if you want. But it's probably not a good idea, just — it didn't — gives increases jobs, right, when you shut everything down, right. So you got to be a little judicious about it. Okay.

Um, bridges and highways, what's the federal agency? Federal Highway Administration. Okay. Uh, the American Institute of Steel Construction, if you're a civil engineer, the guys who regulate bridges and buildings, are the Steel Construction Manual, or the Manual of Steel Construction. This is eighth edition, this is third edition, this is ancient technology. This is new types of calculations of doing the design calculations. But the civil engineers do something. Um, and building, you have local building codes, you have a National Building Code. Um, and anyway, I could go through a couple of other agencies and types of things, but the point of going through a lot of these — and by the way, if you keep going through, and this is just the Welding Society, this is sources of standards, this is in your handout — and so American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, AASHTO, so they write standards. American Bureau of Shipping we talked about, American Institute of Steel Construction we talked about, American National Standards Institute — now they don't write any standards, they try to promote standards.

If you actually get an ANSI specification for your standard, let's say — your ASM, and let's see, I hand it out, or I will hand out — if I haven't handed it out, I will hand out. Yeah, okay, I might as well hand this out, we're going to deal with this one in a little bit. [Tom hands out a sample standard.] But here is an ASTM standard for pipe. You've seen pipe before, it's a piece of steel pipe, da-da-da, right? It's in your basement, you know, with your furnace and stuff. It also comes in 20-inch diameter, it comes in all kinds of sizes. This happens to be seamless carbon steel. The more general one for this is actually A53. This is A106. It's ASTM, American Society for Testing of Materials. And it's an American National Standard, okay. Used in US DOE NE Standard, which means DOE — that's the Department of Energy — that's probably something with the nuclear engineering of the DOE. So you can actually put this stuff in a nuclear reactor, okay.

So we got different agencies here. These are private agencies, this is a federal agency. But the American National Standards Institute, they don't write any standards themselves. They will review a standard, in this case written by ASTM, and say, oh we bless your standard, okay, it's a wonderful standard, and we will list it, and we will sell it, and we will promote it, and we'll collect a little money on the side, if we — not doing anything except helping you market your standard, okay. And marketing of standards gets to be a very important thing. We're going to talk about this standard later, but anyway.

American Railway Engineering — we talked about American Petroleum, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, American Waterworks, okay, there's a lot of infrastructure out there to bring water to your home. American Welding Society, which is what this came out — American Association of Railroads, Compressed Gas Association. You can read some of these things, these are just some of the associations that if you're a welder you have to deal with, okay. Well, why am I going through this? Well, they don't always agree with each other, okay. And it turns out some of them have the force of law.

So if you're out trying to design something — let's say you decide you're tired of Northrop Grumman and Electric Boat. Are they the same company now? I don't know. Uh, everybody keeps consolidating, um, ripping off, you know, the government on contracts. And you're going to start building submarines, okay. Do you think you can just enter the business? There's a huge barrier. You've got to know all these standards. And how many standards go into building a nuclear submarine? Well, you got the NRC standards, you got the Navy standard, you got thousands and thousands of standards which call out the other standards, okay.

If you look on this standard that I just handed out, it gives you what typically a standard has. It will start off with scope, okay. It will tell you what the standard covers. This specification covers blah blah blah. It will tell you what it doesn't cover, in many cases — I'll go through that in a little bit, okay. It will talk about reference documents, which are a bunch of other standards it calls out as reference. And in order to understand this standard, you also have to be familiar with all these standards. And each one of these standards calls out a similar number of standards. So one standard ends up becoming a thousand standards that you have to follow, right.

Student: Does anyone ever miss the standard, like forget one?

Yeah.

Student: Who checks that?

Checks it depends on whether they have a failure or not. It happens all the time that people miss a standard. And if no failure occurs, no harm, no foul, right. But if a failure occurs because they missed the standard, then I get to put a grandchild through college, okay, by helping someone figure out the standards, okay.

So there's a huge barrier to entry in any industry. I'm not just talking about the military, I'm talking about any industry. If you wanted to go and build a washing machine, okay, there are thousands of standards out there, and it's going to be hard to enter that business. About the only way you can enter a business today that's manufacturing something is to hire someone who's been in the industry for twenty or thirty years and they know what the practice is. And a lot of times people don't know that a standard even exists that covers them, because there are so many standards.

Now where do we get all these standards? Well, I got a little history story here that hopefully will be fun for you to read, um, about lightning protection standards. Anybody here? Ben Franklin in 1752, he got out there with his kite and his key and almost killed himself, right. Well, this is a history, which you can read on your own, of lightning protection systems, okay. So it goes through, and it's written by a guy at the US Army in one of their labs in New Jersey. He's an electrical engineer. And the US Army is really interested in lightning protection. Anybody know why? They have a lot of ammo dumps, okay. And if you get hit by — and it has happened before — lightning has struck an ammo dump and you now have something that looks even worse than the Brockton shoe factory, okay.

Student: Yeah, we had —

Yeah, you have to be the tallest thing in the ocean no matter how short you are, right, unless you're a submarine. There is — actually, I have it, I could have brought it — there's NFPA, National Fire Protection Association, 780, which is about a half an inch thick, and it is lightning protection systems. There are books written on lightning protection systems, but it all started with Ben Franklin, okay. And it turns out, even in by the 1780s or whatever, you can read the history, people were starting to specify that you should have lightning rods on top of your house, okay. But in fact it's gotten a little more complex. Instead of Ben Franklin saying put a lightning rod and run a wire to the ground, you now have to specify what size wire, okay. It actually has to be multi-stranded wire.

Do you know why it has to be multi-stranded? Any of you an electrical engineer? Or not an electrical engineer? There's actually physics in this. Um, it turns out at lightning frequencies, the electricity is only carried on the outer surface, the skin of the metal, because the magnetic field — Maxwell — let's go back to some basics. If I got a conductor, Maxwell taught us that when current's running through this conductor there's a magnetic field that goes around like that, right? You ever heard how a motor works, okay, Faraday's law, anyway. Um, and that magnetic field takes time to penetrate into the conductor. And so during the frequency of a lightning strike, which is on 10⁻⁵ seconds, it doesn't penetrate very deeply. So the inside atoms of that conductor don't even know they're being hit by lightning. It's only the outside surface. So it's called the skin effect, okay. It's only the outside surface.

You can have a conductor 2 inches — copper conductor 2 inches in diameter, and all you got to carry the current is the surface area. Who cares about all that stuff in the middle? Okay, it's worthless. At DC, that 2-inch copper conductor will carry a lot more current than a half-inch conductor or a little wire. But it's the air, it's the surface area. Franklin didn't know this, of course. Franklin thought the charge was positive too, okay. That's why current is positive, but electrons are negative, okay. He thought that it was positive charge that carried the current. He was wrong. So we now confuse students between, when we say what's the current, the current goes this way but the electrons go that way. Did you know that? Okay, you knew that, okay. That's Ben Franklin, leave it to Ben, okay. But Ben was a great — actually a great scientist of his day.

And so there's early observations, and in this article — I think in this article — I have a longer article that was written for the Defense Department, commissioned this work between NASA and DOD and the Department of Energy. Um, but it goes through and talks historically about qualification of the standards, how they developed historically, and laboratory testing. And they basically concluded that, while almost everything we know about lightning protection systems were developed historically by empirical — people tried it and if their barn didn't burn down, it was a good system, okay, and they wrote it into the standard. But what they conclude is, in fact, there's good science behind these empirical observations and how the standards develop. But this is an article that if you're interested in lightning, um, or Ben Franklin, I'd encourage you to read it, because it gives you kind of the outline of how one of the oldest standards that we have, which is like lightning protection, came about. And how it was — it Michigan, Minnesota, anyway, it was some Midwestern state, Iowa — the Iowa fire marshal records from 1926, they were burning down barns all over Iowa full of corn, yep.

So going back to the standards, what happens if you don't comply with the standard? Are you just civilly liable, are you criminally liable, what is the enforcement of that, is it just wouldn't want to bid on your product?

Yes to all of those. So what if you didn't comply with the standard, but nothing bad happened? Are you criminally liable for not complying?

Student: No, because there's no foul there, right? Who's going to hold you to that?

Unless some prosecutor who's trying to make a name for themselves, okay. I'm just asking, by the way, of criminal law, is it just — it depends on the standard. And if it's OSHA, it can bear criminal — if someone dies in a factory because they didn't follow the OSHA regs, then it can carry criminal liability for the managers of that plant.

Student: If you're buying a product, you just write it into the contract that the product that you're buying complies with all standards, and then that way you're in violation of your contract.

So yeah, you could do that.

Student: Is that usually how it — I guess I'm just unsure about how the enforcement of the standards — if you don't enforce them they don't really exist. So, and where do you end up enforcing that?

Well, there's a debate right now among the presidential candidates about, you know, enforcing the standards. And this — some of them, the Republicans, will say it's a millstone around industry's neck, and the Democrats say if you don't do it you're going to be killing people in the workplace, right. So there's not a simple answer to your question, and it depends on a specific case. And did it have force of law, and what law is it, contractual law, or is it regulatory law? Is this something came down from the federal government? And did someone get hurt, which is usually — or is there significant property damage? The BP oil spill, okay, they're all over that. But I mean, there have been plenty of, uh, BOP, which is — uh, boiler — not boiler, uh — bre— pardon me, blowout preventer. Yeah, there you go. It's also basic oxygen process in steelmaking, but anyway. Um, anyway, the blowout preventer that failed — or the multiple ones that failed — they fail all the time, okay. I had three of them fail in Louisiana about a year and a half before the one in the Gulf, um, and something that I looked at.

And I looked into the design by the manufacturer, and it all come up empirically. You had a bunch of — anybody from Texas? I don't want to offend everybody. Uh, but it had a bunch of good old boys. In the oil industry, you have to start as a roughneck. I don't care if you got a college degree, you got to start as a roughneck if you're going to rise to top management. That's the culture in the oil industry. And so there's an attitude of, it really is good old boys, you know, we're going to do it because this is the way they've always done it, and there's not always a lot of good science behind it. And when I looked at the design of these BOPs, this company was selling things that cost hundreds of thousand — valves basically cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. And they had hired two engineers in their 20s, and they said, oh, let's try to build it this way. And all the guys in the company who had all the experience never even looked at it. They put this into a critical well, and it didn't — first time you had to operate it, didn't work. Second time you had to operate it, they used the second one, didn't work, okay. And the third one didn't work. And they lost $100 million.

Well, in the Gulf with BP it was a little more pricey. And so now Congress is on top of that, right. So who's going to enforce it? Hey, the one I was involved with, it was just a lawsuit, okay. The owners were enforcing it against the others through a threat of going to court. Well, they settled for about half — 50 cents on the dollar, okay, 50 million rather than 100 million. But they redrilled the well, and it's a screamer they call it, okay, it's just got all kinds of gas. And so they're making money, anyway. But um, there was just a lot of bad engineering that went into the design. Who's responsible? Well, that's only property damage. The insurance companies pay off, other people pay off, uh, they have a settlement. But when people start dying, that's when — or get maimed — uh, that's when things get interesting in terms of the government regulators coming in. I mean, in general the government regulators, hey, you lost a $100 million well, tough luck, you know, they don't care, it's only money. But if they killed some people, they will come in, OSHA will come in, and they will start fining people, and you get into nasty things. Does that sort of get to your question, okay? I mean, there's not a simple answer to all these things.

Student: I guess I was just wondering sort of how it plays out most commonly. Is it that when you're bidding on a contract you try to prove how your product complies more heavily with the standards than someone else's? Is that a factor in it, or is it just assumed that you have complied to the standard until you find out otherwise?

In military procurement, they don't really care about the standards, they care about performance and exceeding the standard, okay. Which is another point: standards are the minimum acceptable design. That doesn't mean that you win good contracts by exceeding the minimum, okay. Uh, there are other people — I mean I was involved in Army brake shoes for, when the Army used to use Jeeps, okay. Someone in Ohio bid on making the replacement brake shoes, and they were doing a terrible job. And the government inspectors came in, they said, this is unacceptable. And so they started segregating the pallets of brake shoes, and they put the good samples on top and the bad ones in the bottom, so that when the Army inspectors would come in and they were too — they wouldn't take the time to go get one from the bottom and they would do it on the top — they were missing the specifications completely. And they knew it. And they were hiding it from the inspectors, okay. I mean that's not, you know — kind of, I'm trying to build a new helicopter or something, where I'm trying to — Boeing's going to compete with Bell or McDonnell Douglas, or who — not McDonnell Douglas anymore, they've spun it off and someone else, or Sikorsky. But they're trying to exceed specifications, okay, meet and exceed. Other people making replacement parts are just trying to meet the specification and be the lowest bidder. I mean, isn't it wonderful to know, in the military you're always dealing with the lowest bidder, right? And so if someone can shave cost somewhere — well, this company on Army brake shoes, they were getting the lowest cost because they were doing the cheapest job. And a lot of it, the Army came in, inspected it and said, no good, we won't buy it.

And so then the company got smart, and they knew what they were doing wrong, and they put the bad ones on the bottom and the good ones on the top. Well that ended up as a criminal investigation, okay. Uh, the Army decided they wanted to get this supplier out of the accepted Army suppliers, okay. They were the — the government was unsuccessful. And it turns out it was because when they got to the judge, there was a conflict in the specification. The drawing said one thing and the procurement contract said something else. And the Department of Justice says, oh Army, you know, if you can't tell them exactly what to do, they can do it any way they want, basically, even though it could kill somebody, right. But that's how the law's written, okay. So does that kind of get you an example? I was going to give you some other examples, I wasn't going to bring up the Army brake shoes, but I have a couple of other examples that kind of anecdotally tell you how these things go and where some of the conflicts are.

Student: So did the Army just continue to buy them, but purchase working ones from someone else?

They just did more inspection, okay. They put them — you know, they — okay, you can screw us this way, but we'll screw you that way, right. It's a great relationship, isn't it, okay, when you have to work with your suppliers that way.

Well actually, in the time left, let me go over one of the — well, I can do — well, I'll save that one for tomorrow. Let me tell you about the aluminum tanks, because these are pressure vessels that went on cement trucks. Um, but let me first back up and just kind of — I was trying to go through the history of who writes the codes. The codes are written by the government, they're written by not-for-profits like the National Fire Protection Association, and they're written by industrial associations or industry associations. And let me point out that there is a difference in price, okay.

Um, when you go to these different people — this is part of what used to be MIL-Handbook-5. You can get it online for free, 'cause it's promulgated by the US government, and all you have to do is download. You can have it for free. On my shelf it takes up this much space in my office, there's about twelve volumes. This I brought in was the chapter 3 on aluminum alloys. And if you're going to design — this was written by — um, at the FAA, this is the — I'm sorry, this is not the one I wanted to show you. This is volume one, chapter one, this is the introduction. Uh, fairly thick introduction. But in here it says, um — maybe this isn't, maybe it was the foreword I wanted. Anyway, it is the foreword, and it says it was done by the Federal Aviation Administration, all departments and agencies of the DoD and NASA. So those guys got together and they said, if you're going to build something for the Aerospace business, um, you need data. And here's the data on this particular one is tensile and compressive moduli of 2024 aluminum.

So if you're going to design something, they're going to call out in the procurement that you have to build it to what used to be MIL-Standard-5, MIL-Handbook-5, but now is MMPDS-05. Because it's — and it's actually part of — it's got an FAA stamp up here, okay. Um, so that's an example of who writes the code, that I can buy the whole set for 100 bucks or 108 bucks or something. That's basically Government Printing Office cost.

The NFPA on the other hand — I have here somewhere my 921 — no, it's right here, yeah, you're right. So here's NFPA 921. It actually started at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in 1989 as a guideline for conducting fire and explosion investigations. The National Fire Protection Association, which is not-for-profit, down here in Quincy, Massachusetts, picked it up, and you can buy this for like $110. That's not bad, okay. It comes out every three or four years in a new edition.

There's also the Structural Welding Code of the American Welding Society, which is an example of a standard which everyone who's building a bridge or a building out of steel in the United States needs this code, okay. It's got the design guidelines, the inspection guidelines, welder qualification, you name it, okay, it's all in here. Costs you $400. It's more than the printing cost. And for a while they were coming out with a new one every year, because you had to have the current edition. So this is American Welding Society. It's officially not-for-profit, but let me tell you, once they started upping the price of their codes back in the early '90s — you could buy this thing for 60 bucks, okay, it wasn't quite as thick — but they weren't thinking of their standards as a way to generate revenue. And what's happened in the last 15 to 20 years is where the Society of Automotive Engineers and the ASM[S — AMS] Aerospace Material Specifications, where they'll sell you a 20-page document for $59, okay, and you need a couple hundred of them. Or whether it's ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code, right here, which is $12,000 a set, comes out every three years.

There's a big difference between the government, who's selling it to you at reproduction cost, which could be zero if you download it from the internet, or a not-for-profit, who can't make too much profit or get in trouble with the IRS, or a for-profit, who's going to gouge you. Nowadays, this has all occurred in the last 10 to 15 years, gouge the people who have to follow the codes, okay. So anyway, that's — it's one of my pet peeves. In fact I said this to ANSI, I said, you guys need to do something about this, because they are responsible for codes and standards. And ANSI said it's going to get to the point — and the American Welding Society, which used to have $5 million back 15 years ago in their total assets — I just read it last month, they publish it every year, they've got 60 million in their current assets, and they took another 10 or 15 and put it into a long-term investment. They're making money hand over fist. Now, and they're even a not-for-profit, they have to set up foundations and stuff to hide their money, right. So codes and standards has become big business. I mean, there's a company — there's companies that make this product which is gas piping, and they wrote a standard half an inch thick, 600 bucks, okay.

So you need to understand that goes on. But let me tell you a little bit about the aluminum gas tanks as just a story to end this today, okay, because it brings up the different bodies and stuff and how they regulate things. So this is an aluminum gas tank, goes on a cement truck. It was a 200-gallon tank if I remember. So if you ever seen the oil tank in someone's basement, um, for heating, that's about a 275-gallon tank. So this was, if I remember correctly, a 200-gallon tank.

Um, officially, if you look in the scope section of the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code — and this tank was just on the truck, cement truck, to supply water to hose down the truck, so you don't have concrete harden on the outside of the truck. You deliver it, you know, your trough has got concrete that's now exposed to the air, is going to dry out and harden. You spill it on the fender or the bumper, and you want to wash it off. So all this — they were running it off the air brakes on the truck, which were operate 55 PSI. It's got a capacity of about 200 gallons.

And ordinarily you would say this aluminum tank, which just holds water — but it only holds water, it's going to be compressed air on the top. It's going to have air up here, which is compressed, and water down here. No one cares about compressed water. Compressed liquids are not harmful, they don't store energy. Compressed air stores lots of energy, okay, even at 55 PSI. And so if you look at the scope for the boiling pressure — Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code — the scope says, "For the scope of this division, pressure vessels are containers for the containment of pressure" — by the way, this is Section 8 — "for the containment of pressure either internal or external. This pressure may be obtained from an external source or by application of heat by a direct or indirect source." Which means if I'm going to do that hot isostatic pressing, I might pump it up to 100 atmospheres of argon in this vessel, then I'll close all the valves, and then I'll turn the heat on and I'll bring it up to 2,000 atmospheres by just heating it internally, okay. That's how — I don't have a pump that's operating at 2,000 atmospheres, okay. So you can pressurize it externally or by some internal or external source.

It's then they go on and tell you what it's divided into. Then they go on and they tell you what the exceptions are, okay. "The following classes of vessels are not considered within the scope of this division." And this goes on for over a column. Uh, and just to read the last, number 10 is "pressure vessels" — it excludes pressure vessels for human occupancy. So submarines don't apply, even if it's a commercial submarine, okay, they don't apply here. So it gives you a bunch of exclusions, but it also tells you what the limits are. If you have a design pressure of 300 PSI, or a temperature of 210, or a hot water supply tank with a heat input of 200,000 BTUs, a water temperature of 210, a normal water capacity of 120 gallons — this basically excludes your home hot water tanks, okay. So this is in here to exclude the home hot water tanks. They'll be regulated by someone else anyway.

So the code will tell you — well, what happened with these aluminum tanks. If you looked at this tank and you looked at those exclusions, comes under the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code. And the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code will tell you — wish they'd give me chalk — um, the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code will tell you that if you have a circular opening like a nozzle in your tank — so here's your hole — you have to put a reinforcement around that, which we call a doubler plate, okay. And — that money. Okay.

And so the company — little, actually it's a big company — they started out as a little company in Kansas but they were bought by somebody else. But this is the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code for a nozzle opening. And you may or may not be required to have this doubler plate right here. So here's your shell, here's your nozzle, here's a fillet weld, here's a fillet weld, and you may have this doubler plate. And it gives you all the dimensions and all the formulas on how to design that in the code. Well, the company, which did not have a single engineer in the business, okay — they hired a consultant once, but he died, okay — um, they write — and get — they write to, um, actually they didn't even write to the Boiler and Pressure Vessel guys. Um, I got to remember how this happened.

They first wrote to, I think, the Department of Transportation, because it's a cement truck, it's controlled by the DOT because it goes down the highway. The DOT looked at it and said, uh, this is an add-on, it's like, you know, carrying a gas tank in the back of your pickup truck, you know, for your lawnmower, that's not part of the vehicle. And so the DOT said, we don't cover this tank, it's only there for carrying water to hose down the machine when it's not running down the highway. It doesn't have any function when it's going down the highway, so we don't care, okay, it doesn't come under our jurisdiction. Which is probably a fair assessment.

So these guys said, oh well, if it doesn't come under DOT, we don't have to meet any code. Now it turns out that's not exactly true, because the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code actually would include this. If the DOT doesn't want it, the states will take it, because the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code is written by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, but every state in the country has adopted it in one form or another into their laws. So the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code has the force of law. DOT has the force of law, it's in the Code of Federal Regulations, you can look it up at CFR. But they went to DOT, and DOT says, oh, it doesn't apply, it's not part of the operating vehicle on the highway, okay, it's just something you're carrying on the vehicle like your lunch pail.

These guys decided on their own, because they had no engineering expertise whatsoever, that well, if DOT doesn't regulate it, we don't have to worry about it. They didn't bother to look at the state laws or ask for any opinion from ASME as to whether, if it's not regulated by DOT, it should be regulated by the states. So they decided, well we don't want to bother with these doubler plates, we're making it out of aluminum because we're trying to save weight. These trucks are at the load limit of the highways, and so you got to make them as light as possible so you can carry more cement. Uh, we can make it cheaper, we just won't put a doubler plate on.

Well, anybody know anything about stress concentrations? How much stress concentration for putting a hole in a flat sheet, a lot? Three. This was the first stress concentration ever calculated. In 1880, a guy worked out mathematically that if you put — you take a flat sheet of paper and you cut a circular hole in it, and you pull it in tension, the edges of that hole at 3:00 and 9:00 will have a stress concentration of three. So you lose two-thirds of your strength by making — you know, it's sort of like a perforated piece of paper, if you line them up. But you lose significant strength, okay. So the ASME code I showed you, they tell you under what conditions you have to put a doubler plate on in order to strengthen that area that you weakened, okay. These guys decided, nope, don't want to do it, okay. Or maybe they didn't even know, it wasn't clear if any of them — I mean, these guys had business degrees. You know, I mean they knew how to sell cement trucks, but they didn't have much else.

So it turns out, when they build these things, they actually would pressurize them to, I think, 100 PSI, and they would pressurize them with air. Duh, dumb, okay. If something's liable to fail, you don't pressurize it with air on a test, you pressurize it with water, because if the water fails it goes [splat], okay. If it's air and it fails, it goes Kaboom and blows up your building, okay. And you'd be surprised, with a 200-gallon tank with 55 PSI of air — with how much energy. You can calculate it by, you know, integral P dV, but it's a lot of energy. And it would blow up the building. Well, they had one fail, and a guy lost a leg in the plant. These rocket scientists didn't even worry about it. You know, they just paid the insurance on the guy's leg, and they just kept making these things. And they didn't look into why it had failed. They didn't know they're supposed to have a doubler plate on there.

So they built 100,000 of these cement trucks, they're all over the country, okay. And it turns out, because of the lousy design and the high stresses, they would get fatigue cracks in these things. And so um, they encouraged people, if you had a leaking tank, to buy a new one, okay. Good business, right? These are marketing guys. Don't, you know, don't repair it yourself, buy a new one.

Well, there's this little shop in Pennsylvania, and they decided they were going to repair it themselves. And so the guy repairs it, does the weld repair, it'd been repaired several times before. And he's pressurizing it. He's supposed to be pressurizing it with 5 PSI, except he doesn't have the regulator in the line. He's using shop air at 100 PSI. And it goes Kaboom, and they find him in four pieces about 30 yards away, okay. Uh, so he died.

And so we go in, we start looking at the tank, and it was corroding on the inside, and there was fatigue, and there was lots of things wrong, bad welds and other stuff in some of the original welds and stuff. But in any case, we knew why it failed. And we also knew that it didn't meet code, it didn't have an — we said, where's the ASME stamp? Because we're looking at this thing, we know the code, and it says 200-gallon tank, 55 PSI, comes under the code. And the company says, no, we asked the DOT and they said it doesn't come under the DOT.

Well, it's true that there's something called preemption in the law, that if the feds regulate it the states can't. It's in the Constitution, okay, that the federal government has preemptive rights over the states for regulating things. But if the feds don't regulate it, the states may. Turns out under Pennsylvania law, which is where the guy died, um, it turns out the Pennsylvania law says even if it doesn't come under the code, if you're going to build a pressure vessel that's exempted by the code, you must follow the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code if you're going to operate that in Pennsylvania. Because the state of Pennsylvania says, even if the ASME excludes something — which they didn't in this case, but even if they had — we want you to use the good manufacturing practice, the good design rules that have been built up over 100 years by the ASME code. And we are going to require every pressure vessel in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania — it is Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. There's only four commonwealths, anybody know what they are? Massachusetts, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Kentucky. And you can throw in Puerto Rico if you want to argue whether there's five, okay. But those are the commonwealths. Um, hey, I've lived in three of them, so what can I say? I just haven't lived in Kentucky. Uh, anyway.

So the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania would have required this by law. So they were violating the law, okay. But they're violating the law all over the country, okay, not just in Pennsylvania. Why did it come to fight? Because the widow wasn't, and the children weren't, happy to lose their dad, okay.

Student: Wasn't he also violating the law? He was operating it in state Pennsylvania.

He was repairing it, he was a welder in the repair shop, he wasn't operating it. Now, he was violating the law in the sense that there are OSHA standards that you shouldn't pressurize with 100 PSI air, okay. So yes, he was partially responsible for his own death. If he had done it with 5 PSI air, it wouldn't have happened. It might have killed the next guy when it failed in the field — a guy hosing down the truck and it might have gone okay and killed him. It was an accident waiting to happen, because it hadn't been designed according to the code, even though it should have by law been built to the code. But the companies thought, well, if the DOT doesn't require it, then we don't have to look any further. I mean, this is sort of answering several of your questions, isn't it? The story, okay, about what happens.

Well, the next thing that happens is the guy I'm working with, uh, Roger — Roger's between 75 and 80 now, but he used to be one of the six or seven people on the ASME Boiler and Pressure Vessel main committee. I mean, they got committees with hundreds of people, and they divvy it all up, and these people get together and write new portions of the code, but it all has to go up to the main committee, which are six or seven old fogies who know the stuff and been working in the history for 30 or 40 years. And Roger had been one of those old fogies. He's actually a very nice guy, okay, love to have him as a grandfather. Um, anyway, Roger looks at this, and he's the code guy in this, not me, I'm the welder. Um, and he looks at this and he says this should have been, under Pennsylvania law, built to ASME code and inspected to the ASME code. 'Cause the ASME code tells you how to build it, but the ASME also and state laws require that people inspect it every three years.

Pre-ASME vessels in Massachusetts have to be inspected every three years by an authorized inspector. Now, that authorized inspector can be a state official, or it can be someone from Hartford Steam Boiler. Hartford Steam Boiler is an insurance company in Hartford, Connecticut. And they have a whole bunch of inspectors because they insure these vessels, okay. Hartford Steam Boiler, right, that kind of — that's sort of their niche market in the insurance. And so they have people who can go in and inspect it, 'cause they don't want it to blow up either, it can cost them a lot of money. Um, and then there's also the National Board of Pressure Vessel Inspectors, which is actually another part of the ASME.

So the Boiler and Pressure Vessel Code committee tells you how to build it, and also how to repair it, okay. They've got repair stamps, okay. If you get — they call it having a stamp, and in the old days they used to put a metal stamp on the vessel that showed U for an unfired pressure vessel, or B for a boiler, and it was inside their little logo. But you can't always stamp the vessel, and so a stamp can actually be a piece of paper in your file cabinet signed off by the ASME inspectors and stuff. Anyway, after you've built it or repaired it, the inspection comes under the National Board of Inspectors, and they have a code that's this thick, okay, on how to inspect these things.

Well, no one was inspecting these 100,000 aluminum tanks out there. So Roger, who's retired from the committee, he goes back to one of his friends at the National Board, and he says, hey, we just discovered there are these cement trucks running around the country that need to be inspected. One of them killed somebody, and we don't want it to happen again. I mean, Roger has to follow his own professional engineering ethics, and he was really concerned about this. Because his number one — the code of ethics for engineers in Canada and the United States is, your primary duty is to the public, not to your company. If someone's going to get killed because of something your company made, you have the duty, the ethical duty, to notify the proper people, the authorities, that there's a problem. And you cannot, under the code of ethics, hide this responsibility that you have. Your primary duty is to the public.

Well, so Roger's primary duty was to the public. Even though he's involved in a lawsuit, and so he had to be discreet about this, because the other side in the lawsuit might say, oh, he's interfering with the lawsuit, it's called tortious interference, and they can sue him criminally for interfering with their business until the lawsuit's over, okay. In the meantime, Roger doesn't want to see someone else get killed. They had a near miss where a guy lost his leg, now they killed a guy, and there's 100,000 of these bombs out there, okay. Well, the guy at the National Board says, we don't have enough inspectors to inspect 100,000 tanks.

So I don't actually know what they finally did, but the — this case got settled for lots of money, okay, um, but um — and I'm sure they finally did something, and I suspect that they now have doubler plates on the nozzles of some of these tanks, okay. Because, you know, like I say, I don't really know what happened after they settled the lawsuit, okay.

But the story brings out a number of the questions that you were asking me, okay. The federal government preempts the states. If the federal government doesn't want responsibility, the states can take it. If someone ignores the states, that doesn't mean they're not liable. But someone's got to blow the whistle on them, and there's usually a reason like someone getting killed or blowing up a building or something, that someone blows the whistle and finds out there's a problem.

That's what I mentioned yesterday or two days ago — Henry Petroski wrote this book To Engineer Is Human, okay. This is like 20 years ago. He was elected actually the same time I was to the National Academy of Engineering, um, mostly because he wrote this book, not for any scientific things. Um, what is the copyright date on this? 1982, okay. He's a professor at Duke University. He's a very accomplished spokesman. He goes around giving talks all kinds of places about what it means to be an engineer, and the ethics of engineering. And there's things like the Hyatt Regency collapse, which I may go through, is one of my examples.

But, um, I find it's easier sometimes to answer all these questions through an example like the aluminum cement truck tanks, okay, of all the things that happen. And I don't even know the end of the cement truck tank story, other than I'm sure that company's insurance company is not allowing them to build tanks the way they used to, okay. Even if they can't understand it, it's likely that their insurance company is going to require them to hire another engineering consultant or hire a real engineer to take responsibility within that firm. Many of the things I get involved in are because they don't even have engineers in the company, okay. There's no one who has — can make a technical judgment. A bunch of business people get together, say, oh, let's build a nuclear reactor, okay, why not, okay. But that's the way it works. And if it didn't work that way, I wouldn't have been able to put all seven of my kids through college and now my grandchildren, okay. So there are certain advantages to this, okay. Thanks.