Engineering: eBooks

This volume of Frontiers of Engineering presents papers on the topics covered at the National Academy of Engineering's 2019 US Frontiers of Engineering Symposium, hosted by Boeing in North Charleston, South Carolina, September 25-27. At the annual 2 1/2-day event, 100 of this country's best and brightest early-career engineers - from academia, industry, and government and a variety of engineering disciplines - learn from their peers about pioneering work in different areas of engineering. Frontiers of Engineering conveys the excitement of this unique meeting and highlights innovative developments in engineering research and technical work.

Engineering is a vast field, with dozens of specialties and countless career options. Comments from people in the industry, current statistics and forecasts, and realistic descriptions provide a useful look at engineering jobs ranging from environmental engineer to IT engineer to biomedical engineer.

Men and women interested in designing and building bridges, ships, highways, dams, airports, or other large-scale projects people use every day can find nearly endless opportunities in civil engineering. A civil engineering career can take you to the top of a skyscraper, to the middle of the ocean, to an underground tunnel, and to one day, perhaps, a colony on Mars. What the job entails, what it pays, and future prospects are discussed along with insights from industry insiders.

This book discusses the concepts, tools and applications of systems engineering. Chapter One presents the implementation of automated measuring system for measuring chromatic dispersion (CD). Chapter Two discusses the results regarding the optimisation of phase based EOM (electro optical modulator) as the most important component in CD measurement setup, then investigates the results of CD measurement characterisations based on different lengths of fiber, different wavelengths and different RF frequencies. Chapter Three provides a review on optical waveguide sensor using ion-exchange technology. Chapter Four examines silver nano particle ion-exchanged glass waveguide technology. Chapter Five highlights the major advantages of using graphical modelling languages in a Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE) context and describes the main features of SysML, the modeling language that the authors believe to be the dialect for MBSE. Chapter Six provides a complex system analysis for engineering of systemic failures.

The research presented in this book provides analytical frameworks and case studies on engineering practices in education and professional work. The studies are inspired by practice theory as well as science and technology studies. The contributions demonstrate how these practices mutually dependent in co-construction processes in different domains of engineering. In order to demonstrate these essentially dynamic features, the empirical material is aimed at unravelling the interrelatedness of educational and work practices in engineering and analysing them as inherently situated in order to understand how engineering professionalism is produced. The studies are motivated by the following questions: How can we understand different engineering practices and how do they relate? Which dimensions facilitate transitions between educational practices and work practices? Where is engineering professionalism learned and the engineering 'mindset' constituted? How does engineering professionalism change in response to societal challenges? The studies focus on the responses to societal challenges in education and professional work settings. The outcomes show how engineering has responded to challenges concerning environment, energy, sustainability, design, user interactions, community engagement and entrepreneurship. This has been done through the identification of codes of meaning and the institutions that frame the translation from challenges to professional responses. How these responses are performed within engineering professionalism is crucial for the societal role of engineering. The concluding chapter synthesizes the answers to these questions and the lessons learned from attempts to develop engineering in the different settings studied. It highlights the linkages among them, drawing on findings and details from the individual chapters as well as the literature in which they are situated, showing how the different sites interact and produce specific representations and frameworks central to engineering professionalism.