Solution seekers find ASME division faster than Web 

Tom Libertiny
Design Engineering Division

Since its formation in 1945, the Design Engineering Division has functioned as a bridge between academia and industry that connects ASME members with the types of engineering resources that many of us — especially during our college careers — crave at 3 a.m. while trying to finish a design project.

Not that that's ever happened to me.

But what ASME members should know — especially those who are still in college or were recently graduated — is that it's much easier to get the needed technical expertise through the division than it is through the World Wide Web.

The expertise that is available to members through the division is organized by the division's five technical committees: Education, Manufacturing, Mechanisms, Theory & Methodology, and Vibration & Sound. The Design Engineering Division, in turn, is one of seven technical divisions that report to the Systems & Design Group. This technical group is one of the 11 groups that report to the Council on Engineering.

Meetings held by the division and its committees are lively due to the diverse nature of its membership. Academia, government and industry are represented by members who live in the Americas, Africa, Asia, the European Union and India.

The global nature of the division adds to the benefits that a diverse team of engineers can offer when the search begins for the solution to a problem. All you need to know is who to contact.

That is where the division is particularly helpful, compared to what's available through the World Wide Web. The Internet offers a glut of information and non-information. And it takes a lot of time to wade through the material you don't need to get to what's useful.

Say you have a design project and even after running the calculations out to 16 decimal places, the correlation between your closed form solution, the finite element analysis results and the actual strain gage test results are still off by 30 percent. What do you do?

On the Web, you could use one of the many search engines available and eventually narrow the 60,000 sites available to a more manageable 4,000. From those 4,000 sites, fewer than 10 percent will likely have any relation to your design problem. So, the search for answers will go on. And on. And on.

But, if you contact the Design Engineering Division chair (Ken Waldron, at waldron.3@osu.edu or Crispin Hales, past chair, at crispin@triodyne.com), your search will be whittled down to, say, five key contacts who have personal knowledge of the subject on which you are working.

In this very situation, members of the division gave me access to actual fatigue data from the likes of Boeing, Ford and NASA. All it took were a few keystrokes in my e-mail system, and I was able to finish my senior design project.

Could I have completed the work without the help of the Design Engineering Division? Absolutely, if I had a much longer deadline.

What the members of the division did was to jump-start my project and expedite its completion. A combination of their many hundreds of years in combined experience coupled with their network in industry, research and education was the key benefit to being able to finish my project on time.

For more about the Design Engineering Division, visit: www.me.umn.edu/~trchase/dedWebPage/ index.html or contact Tom Libertiny at libertinyt@asme.org.

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