Reader Comments on The New Engineering

The reader comments below are posted on the Amazon listing for The New Engineering.

Thomas Gray is the Chairman of the ASME Oregon Section. He attended my talk on the new engineering at the section dinner meeting held on October 11, 2004. (See invited speaker list.)

Professor Van Poolen and I have been correspondents for some time. In publications and presentations, he has mentioned my work in a favorable way.

“billster-of-san-jose” was a student at my 1997 free internet seminar on the new heat transfer.

Simon Sunatori was a complete stranger when he e-mailed me a copy of his comments later posted on Amazon.com.

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review:

A refreshing way to look at things., August 11, 2004

Reviewer:

Thomas Gray (Portland, OR)

Gene Adiutori has given us a refreshing way to look at engineering problems. Linear and non-linear problems can be solved in the same manner. These concepts would have saved hours of heartache during Electrical Fundamentals courses in college.

Review of Adiutori's The New Engineering, April 6, 2004

Reviewer:

Lambert Van Poolen, Professor of Engineering (emeritus) Calvin College (Grand Rapids, MI United States)

An important book! The New Engineering emphasizes the use of potentials and flows to solve engineering design problems in electrical, heat transfer, structural, and fluid flow systems. The method appropriately negates the need for the concepts: electrical resistance, heat transfer coefficient, modulus, and fluid friction factor. They are not fundamental, measurable quantities as are the potentials and flows of direct interest to the design engineer.

Adiutori challenges us engineering educators to examine closely the analytical models of 'machines' set forth in our engineering science text books. I agree with him, for example, that the use of the friction factor obscures the reality of pressure drop potential and mass flow.

My recent work with plastics in the automotive industry has impressed upon me the non-usefulness of the modulus. Adiutori's concept of paying attention to actual, measurable variables has motivated me rather to emphasize the real variables of interest -- force and deflection.

Whether you're an engineering educator, laboratory scientist, or practicing design engineer, this work by Adiutori is a must read. I have been reading Adiutori since the 1970's and have been profoundly influenced both in my thinking about and in the doing of engineering science and design.

Separation of variables is the key, February 3, 2004

Reviewer:

"billster-of-san-jose" (San Jose, CA USA)

The typical method for solving natural circulation heat transfer problems is to calculate a heat transfer coefficient h based on the temperature difference(Delta-T). The problem with this approach is that Delta-T is part of what we're looking for! Gene Adiutori's approach avoids this silliness, and this is just one example of engineering topics explored in this book.

The key is separation of variables. Data for heat transfer are presented in the form of h versus Delta-T, when what is really measured is heat flow Q versus Delta-T. Introducing h merely puts Delta-T on both sides of the equation, requiring an iterative solution. Separation of variables not only makes the problem easier to solve, but also allows one to better understand relationships between physical properties.

Separation of variables isn't new, but Mr. Adiutori's terminology and presentation are. I see this as something of a shortcoming with this book; Mr. Adiutori's method of presentation often gets in the way of the message. Also, I found his unique approach to dimensional homogeneity to be of no special benefit.

All in all, a solid work.

Absolutely a Must-Read for Open-Minded Engineers!, January 29, 2004

Reviewer:

Simon Sunatori, P.Eng./ing., M.Eng. (Gatineau, QC Canada)

I saw an unusual full-page advertisement of a book entitled "The New Engineering" in the IEEE Spectrum (2002-05, Page 56), and quickly ordered a copy out of curiosity.

In "The New Engineering" by Eugene F. Adiutori, Ventuno Press (ISBN 0-9626220-1-X), Adiutori boldly challenges the engineering establishment. The book is full of criticisms of conventional engineering, but it offers a genuinely workable alternative, i.e., the behavioural methodology.

A glance at the proposal to abandon the concept of electrical resistance may give an impression that the book comprises crackpot nonsense. Open-minded engineers, however, should find the book refreshing and revealing, and see the light in the reasoning of the behavioural methodology that the book cleverly demonstrates. The book exposes mathematical flaws in conventional engineering, pointing out the origins of its complexity and dimensional homogeneity going back in history to Maxwell (1873), Fourier (1822), Newton (1701), Galileo (1638) and even Aristotle in ancient Greek.

I read the book from cover to cover, uncovering a few minor errors. I found that the fundamental principles of the new engineering are sound, and the behavioural methodology presented is logical and rational. The book claims that resistance (R), inductance (L) and capacitance (C) should all be abandoned in favour of the behavioural methodology because the ratios of primary parameters in non-linear behaviour are variable. Even if the new engineering were universally adopted, I think these ratios would still be useful for identifying electrical components with linear behaviour (e.g., resistor colour coding).

Before resistance (R), inductance (L) and capacitance (C) are abandoned in favour of the behavioural methodology, the implication for impedance in AC analyses, and Fourier transform and Laplace transform methods, among others, should be evaluated. Should other ratios such as electrical conductivity, magnetic permeability and optical index of refraction be also abolished in favour of the behavioural methodology?

The book dramatically illustrates the essence of the problem with the conventional engineering by mathematical analogues of plotting (y/x) versus (x) in the case of modulus analysis, and plotting (y/x^2) versus (x) in the case of friction factor analysis. These forms complicate the solution of non-linear problems because they conceal the behaviour that they are intended to reveal. The proposed behavioural methodology uses common-sense mathematics to separate (x) and (y) in order to plot (y) versus (x), allowing engineers to simply read the graph.

Although I am not qualified to verify the example problems in mechanical engineering, the book should have universally adopted SI/metric system of measurements (e.g., J/(s*m^2*K)) in order to further simplify engineering education instead of English/Imperial system of measurements (e.g., Btu/(hr*ft^2*F)). In the "NH3 Power Canada" project that I am presently working on to develop a novel hydrogen generator, I am having hell of a time trying to understand documented ammonia gas pressures in "psi", "bar", "atm" and "g/cm^2", while using only "kPa" should have avoided any cumbersome and unnecessary unit conversions. The situation is nothing but a chaos when there are more than 3 000 conversion factors on 23 pages in "CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics".

Remarkable consistency is maintained throughout the book, making corresponding comparisons among electrical phenomena (resistance), heat transfer phenomena (coefficient), and stress/strain phenomena (modulus). In its attempt to make a point, the book is rather repetitive in presenting the advantages of the behavioural methodology in various examples. The effect of "Copy & Paste" is all too evident, causing a few errors to show up.

Instead of using an arbitrary I-V curve for the electrical behaviour in some example problems, the book should have used the tunnel diode which exhibits a real non-linear I-V curve with "negative variational resistance".

Partial adoption of the new engineering would be confusing even though it is a more logical approach, so I long for the day when the new engineering is ubiquitous. The only one advantage of the conventional engineering is that it is currently used globally. Like the SI/metric system of measurements whose merit is evident to any student, I expect that the adoption of the new engineering would be slowed by stubbornness, procrastination and arrogance of the conventional engineering. The starting point for the reform of engineering education may be to have something like Schaum's Outline Series, which already publishes the "SI/metric edition", offer the "new engineering edition".

Once upon a time, my physics professor at the university said that the sun could be mathematically shown to revolve around the earth, but the equations to describe the behaviour become much more complex than cartesian or polar co-ordinates. There is an analogy of simplicity with the proposed behavioural methodology as a new frame of reference.

Long ago, I had an argument with a semiconductor physicist over a set of equations for semiconductor modelling in which the parameters were inter-dependent with one another, similar to the situation of non-linear resistance in the book. I was advocating an approach in which the parameters are mutually exclusive, i.e., separate and explicit. It would be wonderful if the behavioural methodology can indeed simplify other disciplines of science so that all scientific problems could be solved with primary parameters separated.

I have been promoting absolute simplicity and consistency myself. I feel hopeless for the future of human civilisation whenever I receive a simple meeting announcement or an invoice statement (20 lines of information) in a huge 2-MB PDF file attachment with fancy but useless graphics, or whenever I encounter a webpage which should have been a 2-kB HTML file but is mindlessly bloated (by a factor of 10) to a 20-kB HTML file produced by Micro$loth Word with a lot of duplicate data and redundant code.

In conclusion, this book is absolutely a must-read for open-minded engineers!