Fifth Page of Career Insights From Five Decades of Teaching and Engineering

Title of a reprint from Aircraft Engineering obtained for me by Boeing engineering library staff, 1964.
Aircraft Engineering, April 1954, reprint pages 1-12, Bunhill Publications Ltd. 12 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1

Aircraft Engineering, June-July 1954, reprint pages 1-19, Bunhill Publications Ltd. 12 Bloomsbury Square, W.C.1.
These two reprints dominated many of my efforts for the next two decades. A quote from Appendix 1 titled, Calculation of G, page 15: "Its calculation must be as familiar to the stressman and third-year aeronautical student as that of a moment of inertia."

During winter of 1964-65, I taught a thermal stress class for Boeing engineers who were working on the Supersonic Transport (SST) Program. Part of my lecture notes is called "Pure Torsion of a Heated Open Cylinder". My notes differed from the Open Tube paper by Argyris in two ways. I used a vector notation and allowed a temperature distribution through the cylinder cross section.

I am intrigued by the challenge of posting contents of engineering math expressions on the Web using tools such as MathML. Unit vectors is the expressions shown have superscript carets. Some symbols have subscripts.

There are 26 pages in my open cylinder notes. If you are a student anywhere in the world who might like to take on the challenge of posting an electronic version of my notes, please feel free to contact me.

During 1966, I became a Group Engineer in the Acoustics Staff at Boeing in Seattle. One assignment was to lead preparation of a proposal to develop a computer program to be used for fuselage sidewall soundproofing treatment design.

The image at right was taken from the cover of the proposal document. It shows the Z-shaped cross section of a fuselage frame element.

In Spring Quarter 1985, I taught Advanced Strength of Materials, Eng. 420A, at Cal State Northridge. Greg Thumm was one of my students. He joined the engineering staff at Lockheed. He is shown standing as we measure cross sections of stringers and frames in a Gulfstream II test fuselage section.

THINGS FOR YOU TO DO IN THINKING ABOUT CAREER OPTIONS

Use a search engine.

1. Search Boeing and Lockheed Martin for opportunities to work on design of airframe structures. Find the B-777-300 transport. Look for a picture showing the interior of a fuselage sidewall.
2. To some engineers, working on lightweight structural design is just plain stimulating, even exciting. Use your search skills to learn about Finite Element Analysis (FEA).
3. Accept that modern airframes are designed by means of FEA. Suppose you are given an opportunity to check or verify FEA results by means of detailed traditional methods. You might be referred to as a stress checker.
4. Look for university courses which include analysis of heated skin-stiffener-frame structures subjected to coupled torsion and flexure. Make sure that cases are included where stiffener and frame elements may have asymmetric sections.
5. Russian author V. Z. Vlasov published a classic monograph on thin walled beams in 1959. The National Science Foundation sponsored the Israel Program for Scientific Translations staff member Y. Schechtman to prepare "Thin-Walled Elastic Beams", V. Z. Vlasov, NSF TT 61-11400, 1961, pages 1-493. If you have the drive to do so, obtain a copy of the translation. I obtained my copy from the Clearinghouse for Federal Scientific and Technical Publications at a cost of $3.75.
6. Search the TU-144. Look for a proposal to acquire a TU-144 for US research purposes. Did the TU-144 designers use insights gained from authors such as John H. Argyris and Vasilii Zakharovich Vlasov?
7. Search Y. K. Lin. I knew him as Mike decades ago. Prof. Lin understands thin walled structures. He had experience at Boeing, Wichita, four decades ago. He knows by first hand experience about sonic fatigue and coupled torsion-flexure. Incidentally, he is one of the smartest structures analysts who have graced industry and universities in the past four decades. Perhaps one of his students might become your ideal teacher.