I have the mind set of an electrical engineer and I am stuck in that thinking framework thats typically electrical.
I had no idea of how dogmatic my thinking is till today.
What opened my eyes to that was a constant pressure pump.
The pump was on the shop floor .It was not developing pressure ie around 90 kg....! it was buiding up till 45 kgs and then that was it...no increase.
The technicians were on it..and I walked up to it and saw it all opened up. The plate controlling the pressure is called a swash plate..the plate is basically supposed to vary the area of inlet and outlet pressure.
The crux is the fact that there is supposed to be a feedback that "tells" the swash plate to adjusts itself. And I have this idea that a feedback mechanism is supposed to be an electronic ressistor/ capacitor/inductor that is compared to a set value. The difference is proportional to the "actual" and "designed" difference. Simple.
Not so.
I kept on asking the technicians "where is the feedback mech?"..but all I got was "sir, THIS is the feedback!"..I got so frustrated that I was ready to break my head. Then one of the guys took out the piston attached to the swash plate.
My jaws fell off.
It was a beauty. The "swash" plate was in actuality a piston whose angle could be varried by a set of six piston rods. The head of the piston has a groove which matches the piston inlet outlet. Very finely machined and oil tight.
Metal to metal oil tightness is not quite easy to obtain and this was a marvel.
I stared at it for almost 3 minutes ..feeling its shape and admiring the finely cut groove .
I regretted for the first time that I was not a mechanical engineer. I missed out the joy of touching and "seeing" the marvels that I could have dealt with in that field. Electrical engineering is nice but its "invisible" . Sometimes I miss that visualness of engineering.
The "visualness" of the pump feedback was a nice change from the invisible op amps that my dogmatic mind had envisaged...
Love you, swash plate ;)
PS:The pic on top is only to illustrate the design ..its not as great as the swashplate I saw today
2 comments:
Liked the engineering spirit in which this blog was written. So I am giving my feedback. You have seen the equivalent of a feedback system in mechanical engg. similarly, there might be feedback systems purely in civil engg., or in software engg. or in chemical engg. or in biological engg. or in economics, or in political science, or in humanities or our own bodies etc.. As you said a feed back mechanism is not always resistors, capacitors, Opamps etc. Once in a while some one comes across and pulls-the-thing-out-into-the-light. These moments are gr8.
@pradeep...I have an idea about the other feedbacks..but wat surprised me was not the presence of the mechanical feedback..but the fact that somehow my mind was only thinking in terms of electriacal feedback.
It never saw beyond the passive elements of electrical engineering at that moment..but when mind broke thru that barrier it was joyous..
As you had implied in your article ..the biggest jail for the mind is mind itself. :)
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