Another senior Jake was instantly intrigued by the new printer.  Over a recent school break he had taken a trip to see a factory store where 3D printers are made and the resource also caught his eye when he visited the Mechnaical Engineering department at the University of Michigan. Within only a few days Jake was printing his ingenious idea: a plastic mold for a truffle lollipop for his foods class.  Now he and others can draw their ideas in a 3D CAD program like Sketchup and have a physical piece printed up within a matter of minutes or hours.

The new 3D printers are now a valuable resource for all classes in the Technology Education department and are certain to help students connect with some cross-disciplinary project ideas. The printer takes a spool of ABS plastic filament and heats and extrudes it to a platform. The extruder is similar to the print head of an inkjet printer, but the platform slowly raises as the object is being built in order to allow for the thickness of the object to be built up little by little. Although it may take a part the size of a few cubic inches an hour or a few to be printed, it is still an excellent opportunity to be able to rapidly prototype a part for a design project to a printer of a relatively low cost.

As I began to read again about the power grid on HowStuffWorks.com and Wikipedia, perhaps the most startling factor is the age of the infrastructure.  Many of the devices that bring us power from generation to distribution to the home or business are fifty years old or even older.  This factor, while it entered the minds of many during the Northeast Blackout of 2003, continues to hold the system and its reliability back.  Yet, just because something can still perform its task in a system does not mean that it would not improve the system if replaced.

Another important concept in this discussion is that of redundancy in system design.  Redundancy is a most important factor in the reliability of any system.  Voting systems include software and hardware redundancy to increase reliability.  In the case of the power grid, I imagine that more heavily populated areas such as my suburban neighborhood fare better that rural areas.  Think of it this way: if a tree falls and knocks out a power line or if a transformer explodes due to an electrical surge (check out this YouTube video), if there is redundancy in the system circuitry that allows another path for the electricity to get to your home, your lights might flicker for a moment, but your power will remain on.  As you consider the cabling around your neighborhood, you might be able to see how a suburban city layout might fare better as I suggest.  But, one should also consider that redundancy designed into a system always comes with a higher cost.

I also wonder how people with solar panels and other “off-the-grid” technologies made it through this storm.  I thought of technologies such as solid oxide fuel cells such as the “Bloom Box” as it was featured on this episode of 60 Minutes, which could eventually take us off of a grid system entirely.

A final concept for this topic is logistics.  Think about the planning and logistics that go into getting the power back on where it was lost.  Just a few hundred or few thousand people, machines, tools, and vehicles restoring systems for a few hundred thousand or a few million people takes planning and preparation.  I imagine many systems engineers and others are working behind the scenes during this time. If not for their planning, hours might turn into days and days might turn into weeks before normalcy can be restored.

So, these are some topics from this “teachable moment” as we call it in education.  Part of the ingenuity of our people and society comes from understanding of and appreciation for products, systems and topics such as the power grid, infrastructure, redundancy, alternate energy, and logistics.