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Kevin Whatley MECH 1208 Section 001 January 21, 2014 Assignment 1 1.

In todays society, engineers are faced with a handful of problems that need to be solved quickly. Some of these problems have been around for many years and have just now been prioritized as important. These issues are the most obvious; such as, developing products more efficiently for less cost and reducing pollution given of by many products and during the process of making them. It is up to todays engineers to fix these problems and make the world a better place. Of all the issues there are for engineers, I think the three most significant are trying to make solar energy economical, improving medicines, and developing better products for less money. With all the pollution given off by burning fossil fuels, there needs to be an alternative source of energy that is pollution free, such as solar power. Engineers also deal in the medical field and it is their job to create medicines that do more for humans that are in need. The final and most important problem, in my opinion, is coming up with a way to build better products that is more efficient and cheaper than the current processes. It is obvious that engineers today are faced with many problems, some of which may take centuries to fix or may not have a solution to. I think the three issues I pointed out are the most significant and realistically able to be solved within the next couple of years. These problems are always being looked upon to improve the way engineers do

things and the products created. If the three issues are solved, engineering will become one of the greatest professions in the history of mankind.

2.

A recent failure in engineering was the Big Dig ceiling collapse in July of 2006 in Boston. A 3-ton ceiling panel of a tunnel collapsed and killed a person in their car. The lack of good anchors and glue to hold the ceiling in place caused it to fall onto the car. This lack of adequate equipment made this event one of the worst engineering failures in the United States. Engineers today have learned from the mistake of this company and will not duplicate what happened in this situation. A mechanical engineer could have prevented this event from happening by simply testing out the anchors and epoxy that were used to build the tunnels ceiling. If he were to find out that the materials were insufficient, the engineer could order better equipment or try to invent a solution himself. One way to solve the problem would be to hold the ceiling in place with groups of anchors to make it more stable and strong. Another way to prevent the disaster would be to design a better epoxy that would remain the same strength through out the years, unlike the type of epoxy used for this construction. The outcome of this incident was the realization that there were no national standards for tunnel finishes and that the Transportation Department did not have jurisdiction to inspect the tunnel unless it was built with federal aid. If one engineer had done the proposed suggestions to prevent the event, many more tunnel ceilings could have cause accidents because they were not inspected after the incident in Boston.

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