. . . for PE accreditation

Not something my specialty does but I figured there'd be people here who'd appreciate it.

I wrote a "find your branch" quiz... totally unscientific, and the more I thought about it the more I decided it's impossible to map personality types to the various disciplines! But no harm in trying. I picked electrical totally by chance, and consider myself really lucky that it just ended up working out and being really fun.

Anyway, the quiz is really for people *planning* to go into engineering but I thought I'd ask you all what you thought, just for fun :)

http://spacefem.com/quizzes/engineer/

 Completely NOT anonymous.

Poll #xxxx What was your college G.P.A. Poll #1763607 What was your undergraduate college G.P.A.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 24

Undergraduate G.P.A.

I got to wondering what's normal in terms of dress codes these days... my company's been allowing jeans a little more often lately and it's pretty awesome. I can't decide if we were in the dark ages with our "slacks every day" rule or if that's common. We have a factory so close-toed leather shoes are always still required, and I personally always avoided skirts and dresses just because they weren't all that conducive to crawling around getting dirty. But anyway...

Poll #1762882
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 19

What's your dress code where you work?

I have a sheet metal part (.040" material thickness) that was flexing enough that we added a sheet of .100" thick plate to reinforce the part. We have an opportunity to redesign and I'd like to replace the additional material with a flange at the end of the part.

The part is essentially a cantilevered beam supporting only its own weight. The catch is that the flange we add can be no more than .230" tall. I wanted to run some hand calcs to verify this but it's been quite awhile since my last brush with beam theory and mass moments of inertia.

It appears that my mass moment of inertia is

I=(b*h^3)/12
where
b=width of my part
h=height of the flange

This looks at the mass moment of inertia considering the cross section of the flange, not just the thickness of the part.

Then:

max deflection=(-wL^4)/(8EI)
where
w=weight of the part
L=length of the part (ie: the cantilevered length)
E=Elastic strength of the material
I=as defined above

Calculating in this manner gives me a believable deflection but I want to ensure I'm not overlooking anything obvious.

Thoughts?

A senior engineer where I work has suggested we buy a piece of test equipment I have never seen before. I cannot find it and I am not sure what the next step is.
I will describe it and hopefully one of y'all will be able to say "Oh it is one of these...".
He says that when he worked at an aerospace company (over 20 years ago) they had a milli-amp meter that was a tiny probe that you would place over a trace on a PCB to determine how much current that trace was carrying. He says it was made by HP. Agilent has nothing in the catalog like that. My contacts at a couple of test equipment suppliers cannot find it or a modern equivalent.
Anyone have any suggestions?
Thanks!

Hey there guys! I hope this is allowed, and since I didn't see anything against it, I'm going to assume it is, haha, feel free to get rid of it if I'm wrong. My name is Bee, and I'm a third year Canadian electrical engineering student. I recently came to the conclusion that maybe it would drive my friends a little bit less insane if I didn't talk to them about school all the time, so I started recording my adventures through engineering in a blog.

I've found it incredibly helpful to have somewhere to reflect on what's happening with my education, and I hope that maybe someone can learn something from my experiences. If not, maybe my trials will at least amuse you a little bit, haha. And if anyone else has a similar blog, I'd be really interested! Most of the blogs I've found written by students are med-school centric, and I think it would be great to get more engineering information out there, so let me know!

( If you're interested, I've included the link behind the cut to be just a little bit less of a spam monster :) )

A former coworker of mine passed this along to me and now I'm passing it along to all you. : ) I don't work for ANSYS, but I do live in Huntsville if you have any questions about the region. Please message or email me (see my profile) if you are interested and I will send you the email addy to send your resume/cover letter to.

( Job Info )