Field Engineering
My last two days at work have been spent in the actual shipyard. This is what I had originally thought my summer would be like, goin out on the ship to do inspections and whatnot. Sadly this wasn’t the case and I was shoved in front of a computer for 40 hours a week instead. Right now it’s lunchtime here and this place is quite different from the one I’m normally at. Probably five out of 15 people are taking a nap! Yeah, I know… why am I typing this when I could be sleeping, right? Not my style…
Today I came up with an idea that could save the company several hundred thousand dollars a year. I submitted the idea to the Employee Suggestion Program because the company has a rewards program that could pay me for ideas like this. Anyways heres the email I sent:
“These last two days I’ve been given the opportunity to crawl around in —- and help with ship checks. I’ve noticed that the construction lights are all 100 Watt incandescent light bulbs. Incandescent bulbs are very inefficient. Only about 15% of the power usage produces light, while the other 85% produces heat (in an already very hot environment). Compact Fluorescent Lamps use 25 Watts while producing the same amount of light as an incandescent bulb. If you replaced the incandescent bulbs with Compact Fluorescent Lamps you would save energy (and also produce less heat, leading to more comfortable working environment) while producing the same amount of light. Another advantage of CFL is they last 8 times longer than incandescent bulbs. CFL bulbs do cost more than incandescent, but over a period of the year you end up saving more money than you’re spending… It’d actually be savings of about $670,000/year ($67/light bulb replaced/year).”
$670k/year is a lot of money. What would be great is that if this rewards program was on some kind of percentage system. 1% of the money saved in this case would be $6,700. Yes please!
I just got a response from the person in charge of the program: “I received your email…am in —- today in meetings…..will review what you have….my cursory glance has caught my interest…..will get back with you soon.”
I’ve also had an idea for a research topic. NASA is experimenting with morphing wing shapes for aircraft. How about apply this to propellers? Some ships have Controllable Pitch Propellers which are quite complicated. A morphing shape propeller could have several advantages, though it would have to be very strong structurally. One possible way to make them would be to use a weave type mesh (a la chinese finger traps). I’ve emailed Dr. Neu about this to see if he knows of anyone doing research on that.
This morphing airfoil shape could also be applied to hydrofoils (would be great for control) and rudders. There’s a lot of potential there.
