by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Engineering
On a hot summers day, a trip on the tube to get home can be a dreaded experience, with already hot trains overflowing with sweaty people. But how did we get to a situation where tube trains are stiflingly hot, and what’s being done about it?
A talk given by London Underground’s Head of Station Systems Engineering, Sharon Duffy, looked into the challenges the tube faces in keeping cool during the summer.
The “tube” can be split into two types of service — the tube proper which runs through tube tunnels, and the older sub-surface lines which are just below street level (pedants get very upset when sub-surface lines are called tube trains).
The older sub-surface tunnels were built for steam trains, so had loads of big holes in the ground included in the design to deal with removing smoke, and they are also much larger than tube tunnels. This has allowed the London Underground to fit air-conditioning units to its new fleet of sub-surface trains (S Stock), and as anyone who uses them appreciates, it’s a boon on hot days to get onto a cool train.
The heat from the air conditioning units is easily vented away when the trains are underground thanks to the pre-existing steam train ventilation.
The deep tube tunnels
However, it’s the deep level tube tunnels that cause the biggest problems for both passengers suffering the heat, and the London Underground in getting rid of it.
The deep level tunnels suffer a number of problems that are individually a nuisance, but collectively add up to show why there is such a huge problem cooling the Underground.
One of the biggest problems is a side-effect of what made it possible to dig the deep level tunnels in the first place — namely the very solid and nice to tunnel through London Clay which sits under the city.
In fact, when the early tube tunnels were dug, they were so cool down there that the cool tube was seen as a respite from the summer heat on the surface. Why suffer on a bus in the heat when there’s a cool tube to take instead, said the marketing men.
So why is the Bakerloo line, once the coolest place to be, now a mobile sauna?
While that heavy thick clay is lovely to tunnel through, it is also a heat insulator.
Over the years, the heat from the trains soaked into the clay to the point where it can no longer absorb any more heat. Tunnels that were a mere 14 degrees Celsius in the 1900s can now have air temperatures as high as 30 degrees Celsius on parts of the tube network.
Where does the heat come from?
Well, the passengers aren’t the problem. All those hot sweaty bodies represent roughly 2 percent of the heat in the tunnels.
Climate change is also not much of a problem. It’s an impact, but the tunnel temperatures are not much affected by what’s happening up on the surface. During a heatwave in 2006, as the surface temperatures jumped around, the tunnels were pretty much constant.
About 21% of the heat in the tunnels comes from the movement of the trains themselves, from aerodynamic drag and other frictional losses. The motor engines account for 15%, the electrical and auxiliary systems are the remaining 12%.
About half the heat in the tunnels though comes from just one source –from the trains slowing down — the conversion of movement into heat by applying the brakes.
So it can be seen that cutting the heat from applying the brakes is where the biggest win would be, and indeed, the use of regenerative braking now converts about half the heat loss back into electricity. However, that can only work where trains are accelerating and braking at the same time, on the same electricity sub-station loop.
Experiments have been underway to improve that by use of an inverting substation, supplied by Alstom, which can send unused power from braking trains back into the national grid.
Removing the heat
Anyone who has stood on the platforms will know that as the trains approach, there’s a blast of wind. This is intentional, as the trains act as air pistons in the small tunnels, and the effect of pushing air ahead and sucking air from behind soaks away about 11 per cent of the heat in the tunnels.
So when you curse as your paper flaps in the wind, think about the cooling benefits as well.
Mechanical ventilation removes about 10 per cent of the heat — that’s the big ventilation shafts that line the tunnels.
The older tunnels weren’t built with a lot of ventilation, as it wasn’t thought to be necessary — after all it’s difficult to argue that tunnels will get hot when standing in a tunnel that’s cool enough that you need to wear a jumper.
By the time the Victoria line came along, the engineers were very well aware of the problem and it was built with considerably more ventilation shafts than older tunnels would have been supplied with.
Although it varies depending on location, in general, cooler air is sucked down through the stations, and then ventilation shafts in the tube tunnels sucks out the hot air.
In two locations, they’ve added water chillers to the intake to further cool the air down. Some of you might have noticed the shockingly cold airflow on the eastbound platform at St Paul’s tube station.
Air is taken in through an old lift shaft, cooled down, then pumped down to the platforms. A similar design was recently installed between Blackhorse Road and Walthamstow Central on the Victoria line.
Ventilation isn’t just about cooling though. On newer networks, such as Crossrail, they also act as smoke control systems should the worst happen in a tunnel. During a fire, the shafts can in places reverse flow, to blow smoke in a preferred direction. The aim being that people walking down a tunnel walk towards a fan blowing fresh air down the tunnel, while the smoke is sucked away behind them.
Over the past few years, 14 of the Victoria line shafts have been upgraded, and 50 fans across the network have had their airflow doubled, with 10 out-of-action fans brought back into use.
Despite that, fully 79 per cent of the heat in the tunnels is left to soak into the surrounding clay, which is already at or near its limit thanks to decades of absorbing heat.
The difficulty of adding more ventilation is the lack of space above ground to put new ventilation shafts. This is always going to be a problem for the older tube tunnels except on rare occasions when a surface development takes place at just the right location and agreements can be made to include a shaft down to the Underground.
It’s not just the cost of adding the new shafts and the running costs of all the electricity, but ventilation shafts also need sound attenuators to reduce the noise levels, both at the surface, but also in the tunnels so that people aren’t deafened by the noise.
People tend to be wary of having a new ventilation shaft in their neighbourhood, even though the aim is to keep the volume level to that equivalent to background city noise.
Even if new shafts are installed, at the moment they represent just 10% of the heat removed from the tunnels, so you can imagine how many extra shafts would be needed to remove a meaningful amount. So much land above the tunnels would be needed that you might as well just have a surface railway.
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Engineering
Numerous construction projects that were previously off-limits to wood are now possible because to new techniques for connecting lumber together, most recently wind turbines.
Sweden, the home of wooden invention, is creating a 330-foot (100-meter) wooden wind turbine prototype to lessen the significant carbon impact of producing a wind turbine from steel.
But how can a building that is subjected to such force from gravity and wind be composed of something that a person might cut with a machete? The solution is laminated veneer lumber (LVL), a type of wood building material created by pressing together three-millimeter sheets of peeled spruce under extreme heat and pressure to produce flexible timber stronger than steel but lighter and less carbon-intensive.
The 130-foot (30-meter) prototype wind turbine tower was constructed in 2023 using LVL, which was produced by Stora Enso, one of the oldest timber enterprises in the world. Heavy curved LVL slabs are manufactured, brought to the construction site, and then cemented together to create the tall cylinder that will hold the spinning blades.
Wood may store carbon dioxide that trees have absorbed during their growth and reduce CO2 emissions from building a tower by 90%. The wood that is chosen for making LVL comes from mature trees that have already absorbed the most CO2 that is reasonably possible for them to absorb.
The wood used for advanced constructions such as wind turbine towers can be reused in new wood-based products which provides further long-term climate benefits by continuing to jail the carbon within their fibers.
Wood has a higher specific strength which enables a lighter construction. High steel towers need extra enforcement to carry their own weight—which wooden towers don’t need. And finally, modular steel towers demand a vast number of bolts that need regular inspections while our modular wooden towers are joined together with glue.
The towers would look about the same as a steel turbine, and not like a giant tree trunk due to an applied waterproof paint layer. At the moment, capturing carbon, done when the trees are turned into LVL, is more important than reducing emissions, since any reduction in emissions today won’t be felt in the global carbon cycle for far longer than any current predictions on warming or temperature changes. It’s only through actively taking emissions out of the cycle that are already there that humanity can change Earth’s climate.
Still, as long as humanity is building wind turbines to reduce emissions from energy use, we might as well reduce them from manufacturing too.
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
Smartphone users have become “human snails carrying our homes in our pockets”, with a tendency to ignore friends and family in favour of their device, according to certain studies.
A team of anthropologists from UCL spent more than a year documenting smartphone use in nine countries around the world, from Ireland to Cameroon, and found that far from being trivial toys, people felt the same way about their devices as they did about their homes.
“The smartphone is no longer just a device that we use, it’s become the place where we live,” said Prof Daniel Miller, who led the study. “The flip side of that for human relationships is that at any point, whether over a meal, a meeting or other shared activity, a person we’re with can just disappear, having ‘gone home’ to their smartphone.”
This phenomenon was leading to the “death of proximity” when it comes to face-to-face interaction, he said.
“This behaviour, and the frustration, disappointment or even offence it can cause, is what we’re calling the ‘death of proximity’. We are learning to live with the jeopardy that even when we are physically together, we can be socially, emotionally or professionally alone.”
If there’s one specific cause for that transformation, the researchers suggest it may be chat apps such as WhatsApp, which they call the “heart of the smartphone”. “For many users across most regions, a single app now represents the most important thing that the smartphone does for them” – LINE in Japan, for instance, WeChat in China, and WhatsApp in Brazil.
“These apps are the platforms where siblings come together to take care of elderly parents, proud parents send out endless photographs of their babies, and migrants reconnect with families; they are the means by which you can still be a grandparent even if living in another country.”
Unlike many explorations of smartphone use, the study specifically focused on older adults, “those who consider themselves neither young nor elderly”.
“At first an emphasis upon older people may appear strange because we have become so used to concentrating upon youth, once thought the natural users of smartphones,” the researchers wrote, “however, a focus upon older people has helped to extract the study of smartphones from any specific demographic niche so that they may be considered as the possession of humanity as a whole.”
Even with that distinct focus, the researchers find that around the world smartphones are basic necessities. “The smartphone is perhaps the first object to challenge the house itself (and possibly also the workplace) in terms of the amount of time we dwell in it while awake,” they conclude, coining the term “transportal home” to describe the effect. “We are always ‘at home’ in our smartphone. We have become human snails carrying our home in our pockets.”
The researchers also describe how this “home” can be far from being a place of respite, with work communications and social media both having the potential to encroach.
They observe: “In other ways, the smartphone may reduce the prior experience of home as a refuge. Employees may now be expected to remain in contact with their work, for instance, even after leaving the workplace. A child bullied by other pupils at school now finds little or no respite through coming back to her or his home.”
But some cautioned against an overly negative view. “The smartphone is helping us create and recreate a vast range of helpful behaviours, from re-establishing extended families to creating new spaces for healthcare and political debate,” he said. It is only by looking at the vastly different uses and contexts that we can fully understand the consequences of smartphones for people’s lives around the world.”
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
Most people are creative from birth. When we are young, we like pretend play, ask bizarre questions, and make dinosaur-like drawings of blobs. But throughout time, many of us begin to squelch those urges as a result of socialization and formal education. We get the ability to be more circumspect, careful, and analytical. There seems to be two groups in the world: “creatives” and “noncreatives,” and far too many individuals inadvertently or consciously place themselves in the latter.
But we also understand that success in every field or sector depends on inventiveness. It’s the quality that chief executives all around the world are looking for most in leaders today, according to a recent IBM survey. Nobody can dispute the role that innovation has played in the development and ongoing success of several businesses, from upstarts like Facebook and Google to industry giants like Procter & Gamble and General Electric.
Fear of the Messy Unknown
Creative thinking in business begins with having empathy for your customers (whether they’re internal or external), and you can’t get that sitting behind a desk. Yes, we know it’s cozy in your office. Everything is reassuringly familiar; information comes from predictable sources; contradictory data are weeded out and ignored. Out in the world, it’s more chaotic. You have to deal with unexpected findings, with uncertainty, and with irrational people who say things you don’t want to hear. But that is where you find insights—and creative breakthroughs. Venturing forth in pursuit of learning, even without a hypothesis, can open you up to new information and help you discover nonobvious needs. Otherwise, you risk simply reconfirming ideas you’ve already had or waiting for others—your customers, your boss, or even your competitors—to tell you what to do.
Fear of Being Judged
If the scribbling, singing, dancing kindergartner symbolizes unfettered creative expression, the awkward teenager represents the opposite: someone who cares—deeply—about what other people think. It takes only a few years to develop that fear of judgment, but it stays with us throughout our adult lives, often constraining our careers. Most of us accept that when we are learning, say, to ski, others will see us fall down until practice pays off. But we can’t risk our business-world ego in the same way. As a result, we self-edit, killing potentially creative ideas because we’re afraid our bosses or peers will see us fail. We stick to “safe” solutions or suggestions. We hang back, allowing others to take risks. But you can’t be creative if you are constantly censoring yourself.
Half the battle is to resist judging yourself. If you can listen to your own intuition and embrace more of your ideas (good and bad), you’re already partway to overcoming this fear. So take baby steps, as Bandura’s clients did. Instead of letting thoughts run through your head and down the drain, capture them systematically in some form of idea notebook. Keep a whiteboard and marker in the shower. Schedule daily “white space” in your calendar, where your only task is to think or take a walk and daydream. When you try to generate ideas, shoot for 100 instead of 10. Defer your own judgment and you’ll be surprised at how many ideas you have—and like—by the end of the week.
Also, try using new language when you give feedback, and encourage your collaborators to do the same. At the d.school, our feedback typically starts with “I like…” and moves on to “I wish…” instead of just passing judgment with put-downs like “That will never work.” Opening with the positives and then using the first person for suggestions signals that “This is just my opinion and I want to help,” which makes listeners more receptive to your ideas.
Fear of the First Step
Even when we want to embrace our creative ideas, acting on them presents its own challenges. Creative efforts are hardest at the beginning. The writer faces the blank page; the teacher, the start of school; businesspeople, the first day of a new project. In a broader sense, we’re also talking about fear of charting a new path or breaking out of your predictable workflow. To overcome this inertia, good ideas are not enough. You need to stop planning and just get started—and the best way to do that is to stop focusing on the huge overall task and find a small piece you can tackle right away.
Fear of Losing Control
Confidence doesn’t simply mean believing your ideas are good. It means having the humility to let go of ideas that aren’t working and to accept good ideas from other people. When you abandon the status quo and work collaboratively, you sacrifice control over your product, your team, and your business. But the creative gains can more than compensate. Again, you can start small. If you’re facing a tough challenge, try calling a meeting with people fresh to the topic. Or break the routine of a weekly meeting by letting the most junior person in the room set the agenda and lead it. Look for opportunities to cede control and leverage different perspectives.
by Blogger | Jul 15, 2023 | Lifestyle
For managers of large corporations, these are uncertain times. They have a poor track record of dealing with significant, disruptive change even before the Internet and globalization. For instance, only one department store—Dayton Hudson—became a pioneer in cheap retailing out of hundreds of others. In the personal computer industry, none of the minicomputer businesses were successful. It is difficult for medical and business schools to adapt their curricula quickly enough to produce the managers and doctors that the markets want. The list might continue.
Not that management at large corporations are blind to impending disruptive shifts. Ordinarily, they can. They also have the means to fight back. The majority of large businesses have highly skilled managers and specialists, robust product lines, top-notch technological know-how, and substantial financial resources. The practice of carefully considering the capabilities of their organization as well as the talents of specific individuals is what managers lack.
Finding the ideal individual for the position and training staff to excel in their assignments are two qualities that distinguish exceptional managers. Unfortunately, most managers make the assumption that if every employee on a project is well-suited to their position, then the company they work for would be as well. That is not always the case. Even if two groups of equally qualified individuals worked in different organizations, the results would be very different. This is due to the fact that organizations possess capacities independent of the people and other resources they include. Good managers need to be proficient at evaluating people’s talents and impairments as well as their general abilities in order to constantly succeed.
This article provides managers with a framework to aid them in comprehending the potential of their enterprises. They will see how, even as their company’s core competencies expand, its limitations become more clearly defined. They will be able to identify various types of change and formulate sensible organizational responses to the opportunities that each type of change presents. And it will provide some practical advice that goes against a lot of what is presumed in our can-do corporate culture: the worst course of action may be to make significant changes to the current organization if an organization is facing huge change, such as a disruptive invention. Managers risk destroying the fundamental capabilities that support an enterprise in their attempts to transform it.
Managers need to know exactly what kinds of change the current organization can and cannot handle before jumping into the fray. We’ll first take a methodical look at how to identify a company’s fundamental skills on an organizational level, and then we’ll look at how those capabilities migrate as organizations develop and mature in order to assist them in doing that.
Where Capabilities Reside
Our research suggests that three factors affect what an organization can and cannot do: its resources, its processes, and its values. When thinking about what sorts of innovations their organization will be able to embrace, managers need to assess how each of these factors might affect their organization’s capacity to change.
Resources.
When they ask the question, “What can this company do?” the place most managers look for the answer is in its resources—both the tangible ones like people, equipment, technologies, and cash, and the less tangible ones like product designs, information, brands, and relationships with suppliers, distributors, and customers. Without doubt, access to abundant, high-quality resources increases an organization’s chances of coping with change. But resource analysis doesn’t come close to telling the whole story.
Processes.
The second factor that affects what a company can and cannot do is its processes. By processes, we mean the patterns of interaction, coordination, communication, and decision making employees use to transform resources into products and services of greater worth. Such examples as the processes that govern product development, manufacturing, and budgeting come immediately to mind. Some processes are formal, in the sense that they are explicitly defined and documented. Others are informal: they are routines or ways of working that evolve over time. The former tend to be more visible, the latter less visible.
One of the dilemmas of management is that processes, by their very nature, are set up so that employees perform tasks in a consistent way, time after time. They are meant not to change or, if they must change, to change through tightly controlled procedures. When people use a process to do the task it was designed for, it is likely to perform efficiently. But when the same process is used to tackle a very different task, it is likely to perform sluggishly. Companies focused on developing and winning FDA approval for new drug compounds, for example, often prove inept at developing and winning approval for medical devices because the second task entails very different ways of working. In fact, a process that creates the capability to execute one task concurrently defines disabilities in executing other tasks.1
The most important capabilities and concurrent disabilities aren’t necessarily embodied in the most visible processes, like logistics, development, manufacturing, or customer service. In fact, they are more likely to be in the less visible, background processes that support decisions about where to invest resources—those that define how market research is habitually done, how such analysis is translated into financial projections, how plans and budgets are negotiated internally, and so on. It is in those processes that many organizations’ most serious disabilities in coping with change reside.
Values.
The third factor that affects what an organization can and cannot do is its values. Sometimes the phrase “corporate values” carries an ethical connotation: one thinks of the principles that ensure patient well-being for Johnson & Johnson or that guide decisions about employee safety at Alcoa. But within our framework, “values” has a broader meaning. We define an organization’s values as the standards by which employees set priorities that enable them to judge whether an order is attractive or unattractive, whether a customer is more important or less important, whether an idea for a new product is attractive or marginal, and so on. Prioritization decisions are made by employees at every level. Among salespeople, they consist of on-the-spot, day-to-day decisions about which products to push with customers and which to de-emphasize. At the executive tiers, they often take the form of decisions to invest, or not, in new products, services, and processes.
The larger and more complex a company becomes, the more important it is for senior managers to train employees throughout the organization to make independent decisions about priorities that are consistent with the strategic direction and the business model of the company. A key metric of good management, in fact, is whether such clear, consistent values have permeated the organization.
But consistent, broadly understood values also define what an organization cannot do. A company’s values reflect its cost structure or its business model because those define the rules its employees must follow for the company to prosper. If, for example, a company’s overhead costs require it to achieve gross profit margins of 40%, then a value or decision rule will have evolved that encourages middle managers to kill ideas that promise gross margins below 40%. Such an organization would be incapable of commercializing projects targeting low-margin markets—such as those in e-commerce—even though another organization’s values, driven by a very different cost structure, might facilitate the success of the same project.
Different companies, of course, embody different values. But we want to focus on two sets of values in particular that tend to evolve in most companies in very predictable ways. The inexorable evolution of these two values is what makes companies progressively less capable of addressing disruptive change successfully.
As in the previous example, the first value dictates the way the company judges acceptable gross margins. As companies add features and functions to their products and services, trying to capture more attractive customers in premium tiers of their markets, they often add overhead cost. As a result, gross margins that were once attractive become unattractive. For instance, Toyota entered the North American market with the Corona model, which targeted the lower end of the market. As that segment became crowded with look-alike models from Honda, Mazda, and Nissan, competition drove down profit margins. To improve its margins, Toyota then developed more sophisticated cars targeted at higher tiers. The process of developing cars like the Camry and the Lexus added costs to Toyota’s operation. It subsequently decided to exit the lower end of the market; the margins had become unacceptable because the company’s cost structure, and consequently its values, had changed.
In a departure from that pattern, Toyota recently introduced the Echo model, hoping to rejoin the entry-level tier with a $10,000 car. It is one thing for Toyota’s senior management to decide to launch this new model. It’s another for the many people in the Toyota system—including its dealers—to agree that selling more cars at lower margins is a better way to boost profits and equity values than selling more Camrys, Avalons, and Lexuses. Only time will tell whether Toyota can manage this down-market move. To be successful with the Echo, Toyota’s management will have to swim against a very strong current—the current of its own corporate values.
The second value relates to how big a business opportunity has to be before it can be interesting. Because a company’s stock price represents the discounted present value of its projected earnings stream, most managers feel compelled not just to maintain growth but to maintain a constant rate of growth. For a $40 million company to grow 25%, for instance, it needs to find $10 million in new business the next year. But a $40 billion company needs to find $10 billion in new business the next year to grow at that same rate. It follows that an opportunity that excites a small company isn’t big enough to be interesting to a large company. One of the bittersweet results of success, in fact, is that as companies become large, they lose the ability to enter small, emerging markets. This disability is not caused by a change in the resources within the companies—their resources typically are vast. Rather, it’s caused by an evolution in values.
The problem is magnified when companies suddenly become much bigger through mergers or acquisitions. Executives and Wall Street financiers who engineer megamergers between already-huge pharmaceutical companies, for example, need to take this effect into account. Although their merged research organizations might have more resources to throw at new product development, their commercial organizations will probably have lost their appetites for all but the biggest blockbuster drugs. This constitutes a very real disability in managing innovation. The same problem crops up in high-tech industries as well. In many ways, Hewlett-Packard’s recent decision to split itself into two companies is rooted in its recognition of this problem.
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