A letter to the Editor of the Professional Engineer which was published in the September 2014 issue.

I was extremely surprised by the unbalanced report of the forthcoming referendum on separating Scotland from the UK which you featured in the August issue of the “Professional Engineer” (Ben Hargreaves reports).

When the PE went to press the polls were not “finely balanced” as the report states. The average of the last month gives 38% in favour and 52% opposed to a change in Scotland’s position in the UK with 10% undecided. Experience of past referendums shows that the “undecided” mostly either don’t vote or vote to oppose change, widening the gap in favour of the status quo still further.

However the opening page of your report featuring the nationalist leaders smiling and holding up their manifesto, through the page of quotations and graphics from Scottish government publications (signed off by the nationalists), to the prominent Saltire and accompanying quote likening the breakup of our country to “a management buyout “, would leave the casual reader to believe that the referendum had already been decided in the separatists favour.

It is tendentious, to say the least, to quote the nationalists’ favourite figure of 24 billion barrels of extractable oil and gas remaining on the UK continental shelf as if it were a proven fact. The total oil and gas extracted over more than 40 years is only around 42 billion barrels or 6 billion tonnes of oil equivalent.

The reduction in output from the peak year 1999 — 244 million tonnes of oil equivalent (mtoes) — has averaged 7.5% per annum, to around 72 mtoes in 2013. Taken to exhaustion at this rate of decline would yield 6.4 billion barrels remaining, not 12-24 billion as quoted elsewhere in the article.

In his quotes of manufacturers’ opinion, the article is similarly selective. Jim McColl of Clyde Blowers, best described as a private equity company, with manufacturing investments in and outside Scotland, favours separation. McColl gets pretty much equal billing with Andrew Cochrane, CEO of Weir Pumps, an internationally famous FTSE 100 company with 14,000 employees which actually manufactures things in Scotland. Cochrane opposes separation.

Finally to really underline his views about the breakup of the United Kingdom, my country and home of the I.MechE as it happens, Hargreaves signs off the article with a quote which the separatists could hardly improve on: “independence is inevitable — it’s just a matter of time”.

Invited paper published in the Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers: Process Mechanical Engineering, volume 214, Part E, 2000, Special Millenium issue, ISSN 0954-4089.

S F Bush

Abstract

From slow beginnings in the 1860s, the evolution of the polymer industry has been marked in the second half of the twentieth century by rapid increases in the scales of production, by increasing power to control order at the molecular level, and by the variety and complexity γ of the resultant processes and products. The paper reviews some of the key developments over the last 100 years or so with a view to identifying themes likely to be of continuing importance in the new century.

A general model for the cost of a processing technology is proposed in terms of the factors Q and γ involved in producing a given artefact. Particular technologies are discussed in terms of the order in which basic processing functions are carried out. A major trend likely to continue into the twenty-first century is the way in which the supramolecular organization of the polymer chains is increasingly being brought under control, either directly by processing or indirectly by self-ordering properties of the polymers themselves. Self-organization of reinforcing fibres during processing to produce optimal performance of polymer composites is a parallel trend also likely to develop further into the next century. To illustrate these ideas the paper draws on examples from major polymer processes: extrusion, injection moulding, film blowing, reaction moulding, thermoforming, fibre making and coating.

Invited paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Process Industries Meeting, Managing Information for Profit, the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre

S F Bush

Background

In the twenty years from 1960 computing had an increasing influence on engineering research and the more fundamental aspects of design, but during the last decade its influence on engineering and manufacturing practice has acquired the characteristic of a revolution. Broadly speaking over the last thirty years the computer has moved from being the specialised tool of a few mathematically able engineers and scientists to being an everyday resource of the many, possibly the majority of engineers today. This immense change has come about because of the rapid reduction in the hardware cost of computing. It is worth briefly reviewing that particular change because it both determines the present and is a pointer to the future.

Paper to the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Conference, Fibre-reinforced Composites, Liverpool, 237, 27th-29th March, 1990.

S F Bush

Synopsis

The paper uses the Utility function introduced in an earlier paper (Ref 1) to analyse from an overall point of view the benefits and disbenefits of some current developments in fibre reinforced polymer composites. Given the raw materials and the end application, the chief influence over whether a polymer composite is actually used in practice is the fabrication process. A particular process is seen as a series of steps along a pathway from raw materials to end-product. Some steps, particularly those connected with fibre-organisation, will be rate limiting in the sense that they introduce a high negative Utility. The development of new processes will thus seek to quantify the disbenefit of such steps and relieve or avoid them.

References

(1) BUSH S F, Utility and complexity in the selection of polymeric materials, 2nd International Materials Engineering Conference, London, 1985, 229-236, Institute of Mechanical Engineers.

(2) GALLI E, Polymers and the IBM Proprinter, Plastics Design Forum, 1985 (May), 17-24.

(3) GIBSON A G, Rheology and packing effects in the injection moulding of reinforced thermoset systems, Composite Processing Conference, UMIST 1988, 6.1-6.15, Institution of Chemical Engineers (NW Branch).

(4) BUSH S F, Extrusion of melts containing semi-coherent fibre structures, 5th International Polymer Processing Conference, Kyoto 1989, Polymer Processing Society.

(5) BAILEY R S, DAVIES M and MOORE D R, Processing property characteristics for long glass fibre reinforced polyamide, Composites (1989) 20, 453-460.

(6) VU-KHANH T and DENAULT J, Effects of processing on mechanical performance of long-fiber reinforced thermoplastics, 5th International Polymer Processing Conference, Kyoto 1989, Polymer Processing Society.

(7) COGSWELL F N, The next generation of injection moulding materials, Plastics and Rubber International Conference (1987), 12 36-39.

Paper to the Second International Materials Engineering Conference, the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, London,  5th-7th November, 1985

Proceedings of the I.Mech.E. 229 ISBN 085298 586.
S F Bush

Introduction

The variety of commercial polymeric materials is now so great, and still increasing, that it has become difficult for engineers concerned with the design of systems and artefacts to discern the dominant trends which should guide their choice of materials. This paper is essentially concerned with the thinking involved in a major redesign of an artefact and therefore with trends in materials cost and processing technology which display themselves over a period of up to a decade or more. This timescale is seen as important: companies contemplating a major change in a product design will look to this length of time to recover the costs involved in the purchase or substantial modification of equipment and the retraining of staff in new materials, production and servicing technologies.

While the word plastics has become embedded in everyday language to describe a familiar class of wholly or partially synthetic materials, there is in fact a continuum based on the synthetic polymer principle which embraces synthetic rubber, man-made fibres, film and sheet, GRP, composites, thermoplastics and thermosets. Oddly, the familiar term glass reinforced plastic (GRP) refers to glass embedded in a rigid crosslinked thermoset matrix which is anything but plastic. The term Synthetic Polymeric Material (SPM) will be used to describe the whole family.

The purpose of this paper is to suggest a number of the basic principles which ultimately govern the application of SPMs, and to indicate how these principles might be organised into a system for optimising design choices in the sense of the first paragraph. The organising framework is that part of Artificial Intelligence (AI) known as an Intelligent Knowledge Based System (IKBS).

See also the section on Systems Design & Control.

Paper to the Institute of Mechanical Engineers Conference, Control in Process Engineering, 16th-17th May 1972.

S F Bush, ICI Europa.

Summary

Generally, the application of automatic control theory to chemical processes has not so far led to the same dramatic improvements as in electrical and mechanical systems. The paper seeks to determine the reason for this and traces the essential developments which seem to bear on this fact. It is found that in its approach to the control of chemical processes, control theory has been implicitly limited to working outside what may be termed the currency of a process. If this view is accepted, two new possibilities arise for the development of control theory and for its fruitful application: firstly, in the physico-chemical design of a process and secondly, in the design of computer control.