ENGINEERING NEWS IN BRIEF

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                  ENGINEERING NEWS IN BRIEF
                        E-Mail Newsletter

                               No.26
             Issued by the Asian TOP Panel, February 2004

           The Chinese Mechanical Engineering Society (CMES)
           The Institution of Engineers, Indonesia (PII)
           The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers (JSME)
           The Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers (KSME)

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    According to the agreement made in the 2nd Asian TOP Panel Meeting,
the ENGINEERING NEWS IN BRIEF (E-mail newsletter) has now been edited
by the KSME for the year 2004.

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[Contents]

(1) Machinery Fair Scheduled (Source: CMES)
(2) Auto Parts Sales Enter Fast Lane (Source: CMES)
(3) Auto Production Base Emerging in Guangzhou (Source: CMES)
(4) Does Microdamage in Bone Matrix Improve Material Strength?
    (Source: JSME)
(5) Evaluation of CFD simulations in analyzing heat exchangers
    (convective heat transfer) with various software and platforms
    (Source : JSME)
(6) A trace gas detection technique using a near-infrared diode laser
    (Source : JSME)
(7) Brief News from POSCO and Samsung (Source : KSME)

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(1) Machinery Fair Scheduled (Source:CMES)

The Eighth China Xiamen Machinery and Electronics Exhibition will be
held in April in Xiamen, a coastal city in the eastern Fujian Province.
As China's largest machinery and electronics exhibition, the event
will showcase major export machinery and electronic products from both
sides of the Taiwan Straits.
The event is co-sponsored by the China Chamber of Commerce for the
Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products, the Taiwan
Electrical and Electronic Manufacturers' Association and the Xiamen
municipal government.

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(2) Auto Parts Sales Enter Fast Lane (Source: CMES)

The world's leading automotive components supplier Delphi said last
week that its consolidated sales on the Chinese mainland surged by 50
per cent to US$650 million last year.
The Detroit-based firm said its growth rate in China increased from
35 per cent in 2002.
Last year's strong sales did not include Delphi's exports from its
China operation to the other parts of its global operations according
to the US corporate accounting regulations.
Sales generated by Delphi's two joint ventures in China, in which the
New York-listed company holds minority stakes, were also not included,
in line with the New York Stock Exchange rules.
Delphi has invested more than US$450 million and runs 10 manufacturing
facilities in China, including eight joint ventures with local partners
and two wholly-owned subsidiaries.
Other major players in auto component production are also accelerating
their efforts in China to cash in on the booming vehicle market.
Germany firm Bosch signed a contract last month to establish a fuel
injector system joint venture with Weifu High Technology Co, a
domestically listed components maker based in Wuxi, in East China's
Jiangsu Province.
Bosch and Weifu will control 67 and 33 per cent stakes in the joint
venture respectively.
US-based Visteon moved its Asia-Pacific headquarters to Shanghai from
Japan, sending a strong message that it is considerably increasing its
capacity in China.
China's domestic auto components industry remains too fragmented and
weak to independently support fast-growing vehicle production.
There are more than 4,000 component manufacturers in China, most of
which are small and low-level players.

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(3) Auto Production Base Emerging in Guangzhou   (Source: CMES)

A large automobile production base has taken shape at Huadu District
in Guangzhou, capital of Guangdong Province.
It comprises one automobile manufacturing works, 40 spare parts
factories, 39 sales agencies and 13 firms dealing with car maintenance,
transport and storage. Automobile production serves as one of the three
pillar industries in Huadu District.
The combined investment of the 40 spare parts factories surpassed 2
billion yuan (240 million US dollars). Five spare parts factories, with
each having an investment of more than 10 million US dollars, have
settled in Huadu. The Dongfeng Motor Co. Ltd., a joint venture between
Dongfeng Motor Corporation and Nissan Motor Co. Ltd., has also moved
its research and development center to Huadu.
Automobile production in Guangzhou adopts Japanese technology and use
Japanese brand.
A provincial official estimated the annual output of cars in Huadu is
to reach 120,000 by 2005.

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(4) Does Microdamage in Bone Matrix Improve Material Strength?
     (Source: JSME)

     Kosaku KURATA
     Department of Mechanical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
     Kyushu Sangyo University

Bone is continuously subjected to repetitive loading, which leads to
microdamages even if the strain level is within physiological range.
The damaged site must be promptly removed by a remodeling mechanism
that is targeted to microdamages; otherwise, the accumulation of
microdamages induces bone fracture. However, very little is known about
the crucial mechanism by which osteoclastic resorption is initiated
adjacent to the damaged bone matrix. We newly established a defined
device in which osteocyte-like cell line MLO-Y4 was three-dimensionally
cultured inside collagen gel, and was subjected to local scratching
with a thin stainless steel pick. Bone marrow cells were cocultured on
the gel-embedded MLO-Y4, which allowed us to examine the effects of
damaged osteocytes on the differentiation of bone marrow cells. As a
result, the existence of MLO-Y4 had an inhibitory effect for the marrow
cells to differentiate into osteoclast-like cells: however, once
mechanical scratching damaged local osteocytes, osteoclast-like cells
were induced along the scratching path. This experimental finding
suggests that the osteocyte death caused by microdamages provides an
important mechanism by which osteoclast formation and then further
resorption can target to the damaged bone matrix. Microdamages play a
crucial role to keep bone healthy and improve bone strength.

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(5) Evaluation of CFD simulations in analyzing heat exchangers
    (convective heat transfer) with various software and platforms
    (Source : JSME)

    Akira MURATA
    Department of Mechanical Systems Engineering
    Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology

There is great demand for the development of a high performance heat
exchanger in various mechanical engineering fields. Recently
computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations have been used as a
substitute for experiments in the evaluation of heat exchanger
performance. By using two examples, we evaluated how a commercial CFD
software package and a Fortran program we wrote ourselves perform on
various computational platforms in analyzing the convective heat
transfer for heat exchangers. In one example, we simulated the
convective heat transfer in a louvered fin array often used as an
automotive radiator, and in the other, we simulated the internal
forced-convection cooling of a gas turbine blade. The former was
computed on a PC with commercial CFD software, and the latter on a
supercomputer with the Fortran program parallelized by using the domain
decomposition method with MPI functions. It was concluded that the
present high computational performance, even on a PC, is sufficient to
yield results usable in the design process for heat exchangers within a
feasible time.

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(6) A trace gas detection technique using a near-infrared diode laser
    (Source : JSME)

    Takaya ISEKI
    Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd.

In recent years there has been considerable interest in laser sensing
techniques for the detection of trace gas concerned in the fields of
the environmental science and safety management. Particularly, the
absorption spectroscopy techniques using near-infrared diode lasers
are being intensively researched.
The wavelength modulation spectroscopy is often employed with a diode
laser to achieve highly sensitive absorption measurement. In this
method, the wavelength of the light source is modulated, and the
photo-detector output is processed by lock-in detection with reference
to the modulation frequency. Moreover, if the modulation center is
locked at the absorption center and the second harmonic of modulation
is used as the reference, one can obtain a signal in proportion to the
peak absorption depth ("2f detection" technique).
Tokyo Gas Co., Ltd. has commercialized a potable remote methane sensor
using the "2f detection" technique. To the best of the author's
knowledge, this detector is world's first handheld device that provides
us with remote detection of gas leaks. This device has the detection
limit of 2-3 ppm-m and can detect gas leaks as small as 10 ml/min.

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(7) Brief News from POSCO and Samsung (Source : KSME)

POSCO announced recently that an additional factory equipped with
Continuous Galvanizing Line(CGL) that can handle four hundred thousand
tons per year will be constructed . The construction has already begun
last November and will be completed until 2006. This factory will
produce high quality, high strength, and high manufacturability steel
plates for automobile manufacture.
Samsung Corporation and Korea Midland Power Corporation announced last
December that they will jointly develop the market of micro gas
turbines. Micro gas turbines are essential parts for the 2nd generation
heat combined power generation system, which is a distributed energy
system that can simultaneously provide electricity, heating and cooling.
Samsung SDI announced last January that it has developed 80 inch Plasma
Display Panel for the first time, which would be the world largest PDP.
This 80 inch PDP has a thickness of 89 mm and a full high definition
resolution ( 1920X1080 lines ). It also boasts 1000 cd/m2 brightness
and a contrast ratio of 2000 to one.

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Editor : Professor Mansoo Choi of Seoul National University,
         Director of General Affairs, KSME
         ksme@ksme.or.kr