The First Facility Management Blog

Staircases are just staircases, right? Well, not always. Sometimes, a clever designer taps the talents of a diligent engineer, and the results can be pretty impressive. Take a look…

This one would be confusing at first. Start with the wrong foot and you are in trouble.

Here’s a practical idea…the two bottom steps both open up for additional storage.

Unnaturally natural….

Another great use of space (my personal favorite)…
Going up:

And going down:

Better on paper than in practice?

Another example where footing is essential.
Going up (left) and down (right):

Colorful, but nauseating. Does this one come with a sick bag?

Does this pass code?

Or this?

This looks more like a sliding board than a staircase.

Perhaps this is what it looks like inside the condo for the Keebler elves?

Many thanks to Evelyn Schwartz for submitting this post.

A new textbook designed to double as a reference manual that allows engineers to build on their knowledge of HVAC design procedures and methods has been published by ASHRAE. Principles of Heating, Ventilating and Air-Conditioning builds on much of the basic information in the 2009 ASHRAE Handbook—Fundamentals and contains the most current ASHRAE procedures and definitive, yet easy to understand, treatment of building HVAC systems, from basic principles through design and operation. Co-authors are Ronald Howell, Ph.D., P.E., William Coad and the late Harry Sauer Jr., Ph.D., P.E.

The book may be used for/by:

• Undergraduate engineering courses in the general field of HVAC;
• Similar courses at technical institutes;
• Continuing education and refresher short courses for engineers; and
• Adult education courses for non-engineers.

There are several significant changes in the new edition, including new values for climatic design information; new values of heating, wind and cooling, and dehumidifying design conditions; improved values of thermal conductivity and resistance for common building and insulating materials; and an extensively revised chapter on residential heating and cooling load calculations.

Additionally, the chapters on system design and equipment have been significantly revised to reflect recent changes and concepts in current heating and air-conditioning system practices.

Also available is Principles of HVAC Solutions Manual, which contains revised solutions to most of the problems in the Principles book.

The cost of Principles of HVAC is $89 ($76, ASHRAE members; $58, ASHRAE student members), while the cost of the solutions manual is $59 ($50, ASHRAE members).

To order, visit the ASHRAE.org Bookstore.

It’s the end of Summer ‘09, and people are starting to get back to reality. Kids are going back to school, manufacturing is gearing up for a tenuous economic recovery, and engineers are doing what they do best–”MacGyver”-ing whatever they can to keep things chugging along.

Check out these humorous examples (from ThereIFixedIt.com):

Many thanks to Kirsten Roos for providing this collection of images.

In the early hours of Saturday, June 27, 2009, something seriously wrong happened to a nearly completed 13 story block of residential flats in the suburbs of Shanghai. No, it wasn’t destroyed by Transformers (as depicted in the photoshopped image); experts speculate that the building’s stability was compromised by an excavation project taking place close to the building’s unreinforced concrete piles.

From Reuters:

Exposed pilings stood in the remains of the building’s foundations. It appeared to be almost complete with fitted windows and a finished, tiled facade. Other similar-looking blocks in the same property development were still standing nearby.

Shoddy construction and the use of sub-standard materials is a concern in China’s construction sector as the country scrambles to build out cities and finish massive infrastructure projects to keep pace with fast economic growth.

Construction-related accidents last year included the collapse of a steel arch on a new railway bridge, which killed at least seven and a crane which fell on a kindergarten killing five. The collapse of dozens of schools during last year’s Sichuan earthquake, sometimes when buildings around them withstood the tremor, also led to a wave of public outrage about corrupt officials and construction firms.

Stephen Kennett of Building Answers reports, “It is understood workers were excavating beneath the block at the Lotus Riverside development to make space for an underground car park at the time of the collapse. With little or no reinforcement in the piles, they wouldn’t be able to resist the lateral loads and as a result have sheared.”

Only one worker was killed—noteworthy in a collapse of this scale. Authorities are still investigating the cause of the accident.

Typically, facility managers appreciate the classic Murphy’s Laws (which go back as far as 1841, according to Wikipedia, but were formalized in 1877 at a meeting of an engineering society). The most common example, “anything that can possibly go wrong, does” made its first modern appearance in 1952, although the origins have been claimed by two sources (Jack Sacks, a mountaineering author, and Anne Roe, an author quoting a physicist).

This week, we have Peter SJF Bance to thank (again) for these lesser known laws from Murphy.

1. Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

2. Change is inevitable, except from a vending machine.

3. Those who live by the sword get shot by those who don’t.

4. Nothing is foolproof to a sufficiently talented fool.

5. The 50-50-90 rule: Any time you have a 50-50 chance of getting something right, there’s a 90% likelihood you’ll get it wrong.

6. If you lined up all the cars in the world end to end, someone would be stupid enough to try to pass them, five or six at a time, on a hill, at night, in the fog.

7. The things that come to those who wait will be the scraggly junk left by those who got there first.

8. The shin bone is a device for finding furniture in a dark room.

9. A fine is a tax for doing wrong. A tax is a fine for doing well.

10. When you go into court, you put yourself in the hands of 12 people who weren’t smart enough to get out of jury duty.

Danfoss announced recently that its president and CEO, Jorgen M. Clausen, has retired and that his successor, Niels B. Christiansen, has assumed these positions. Clausen will become chairman of the company after Danfoss’s annual general meeting in the spring of 2009, its board of directors said. 

Christiansen joined the company in 2004 as its chief operating officer and a member of its executive committee. In May, 2007, he earned a promotion to the position of vice CEO. 

“Niels will lead a young, dynamic team, and I have great confidence in their collective ability to succeed and drive Danfoss forward,” Clausen said. “During his time at Danfoss, Niels has shown that he is highly capable of renewing our business while affirming the company’s values and history. As a socially responsible innovator in the manufacturing industry, we are committed to engineering technology that conserves energy and slows climate change, and this approach will not change at all.” 

Christiansen will head the company’s executive committee, which consists of the executive vice presidents Kim Fausing (COO) and Frederik Lotz (CFO). 

“I am excited about our opportunities and challenges that lie before us,” stated Christiansen. “We are completely focused on driving our business forward and meeting the needs of our customers in tackling global energy efficiency and conservation issues.” 

Jorgen Clausen is the eldest son of Danfoss founder Mads Clausen, an engineer who established the company in 1933 in his parent’s attic in Nordborg, Denmark. 

“Now is the best time for me to retire from the company’s day to day operations and concentrate on my directorships, which include both the chairmanship of Sauer-Danfoss and membership of the board of the Bitten and Mads Clausen Foundation, the charitable organization established by Danfoss’s founder and my father,” Jorgen Clausen concluded.

Danfoss, a company focusing on the research, development. and production of mechanical and electronic components and systems, celebrates its 75th anniversary this year. Danfoss products and components have focused on providing the control and efficiency to suit the application and customer requirements. Worldwide, the company has 70 factories in 25 countries, 114 sales offices, and 23,000 employees.

Early this morning, science was made in a remote part of Europe. Some of you may have seen the video last Friday, and others may have heard about it on the news, but today was the day when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) did its thing…with a bang.

Anticipation today in the LHC control room, as the first test is run (9/10/08).

For facility managers, the LHC is a fascinating, um, well I’m not really sure WHAT to call it. It’s not just a building or a lab, it’s actually a complex populated with all sorts of different structures. Really it’s a huge underground ring of tunnels (nearly 17 miles long) filled with cables, pipes, tubes, machines, detectors, magnets, and just about everything that could satisfy the wildest dreams of any mad scientist.

Built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the LHC is situated near the Swiss/French border near Geneva and cost between €3.2 to €6.4 billion. The site opened its doors on April 6, 2008 and ran its first test today: September 10, 2008.

Opening day at the LHC, April 6, 2008.

While I am still waiting for some additional facility oriented information about the LHC, I thought I’d share some weird and wonderful facts about the project (compiled by Hazel Morris April 2004):

That’s a lot of cable: The combined strands of the superconducting cable being produced for the LHC would go around the equator 6.8 times. If you added all the filaments of the strands together they would stretch to the sun and back 5 times with enough left over for a few trips to the moon.

That’s a big fridge: Part of the LHC will be the world’s largest fridge. It could hold 150,000 fridges full of sausages at a temperature colder than deep outer space.

It really sucks. The vacuum in the LHC is comparable to outer space, if it were a car tire with a leak, there are so few gas molecules that it would take 10,000 years to go flat.

How big is it? The ATLAS (one of several “detector” caverns) could hold the nave of Notre Dame cathedral.

So far, but yet so close. When the 27km long circular tunnel at CERN was excavated between Lake Geneva and the Jura mountain range, the two ends met up with just one centimeter of error.

She blinded me with SCIENCE! CERN is the world’s largest laboratory dedicated to the pursuit of fundamental science.

Faster than a speeding bullet. On October 1, 2003, CERN and the California Institute of Technology set a new Internet Land Speed Record by transferring 1.1 terabytes of data in less than 30 minutes across 7000km of network (that’s the equivalent of transferring a full length DVD movie in 7 seconds).

Dress up days. Since 1962, 38 heads of state have visited CERN.

In case of emergency… The CERN Fire and Rescue team covers 40km of underground tunnels, radiation, and chemical risks as well as the buildings above ground. CERN firemen train in abseiling and rope rescue techniques in preparation for a tunnel emergency. There are firemen of nine different nationalities, Bulgarian, British, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Spanish, and Italian tackling fires with the CERN fire brigade. When they are called out, they only speak in French over the radio.

Kate McAlpine at the LHC. Credit: Telegraph

Back in October 2006, FacilityBlog wrote about the ASHRAE video, “Licensed To Chill“–a hip “rap” tribute to the field of HVAC&R engineering. More recently (August 2008), we covered the first industrial rap song, created by ITT employees to highlight the importance of workplace safety.

All of this leads me to the conclusion that engineers are just natural born rappers, particularly when you consider this next story. It’s even grander (in terms of engineering) and more popular in a kooky way (no offense to the folks at ASHRAE or ITT).

Now hold onto your seats, because I’m not even sure how to explain it. Thanks to Wikipedia, I’ll start with a definition of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC):

The LHC is the world’s largest particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of 7 TeV protons. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the current theoretical picture for particle physics (aka the “Standard Model”). The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) and lies under the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland.

As the highest energy particle accelerator, the LHC is funded and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over 85 countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories. The idea of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), began in the early 1980s. The first approval of the project by the CERN Council occurred in December 1994 and the first civil engineering construction work began in April 1998.

That ends your 60 second physics lesson and provides a bit of background for this Friday Funny—an extremely popular YouTube funky love tribute to particle physics. Yes indeed, there’s a rap dedicated to the Large Hadron Collider! Along with the good beat, the rap explains the theory behind the project much better than my 60 second physics lesson.

From Universe Today:

Puzzled about particle physics? Want to know what the inside of the Large Hadron Collider looks like? Like music, fun and science? Want to know for sure the LHC won’t create a black hole that will swallow the Earth? Find all of the above in a rap Kate McAlpine, 23, who used to work in the press office of CERN, where on September 10, the LHC will be powered up. The song has been a hit on You Tube, and has been downloaded over 400,000 times. Physicists say the science in the song is “spot on” and provides a rhythmic tour of the mysteries of modern physics and the workings of the LHC, while noting that “the things that it discovers will rock you in the head.” Without further ado [but with subtitles, for those of us too old to understand the language of rap], here it is:

This video has more than a million hits on YouTube, and it was first posted just a few months ago (July 28, 2008). Unbelievable!