MODULE 3

Contents

Engineering as Experimentation
Engineers as responsible experimenters
Codes of Ethics
Plagiarism
A balanced outlook on law
Challenger case study
Bhopal gas tragedy
Engineering as Experimentation

The development of a product or a project as a whole may be

considered as an experiment.
Before manufacturing a product or providing a project, we make
several assumptions and trials, design and redesign and test several
times till the product is observed to be functioning satisfactorily.
We try different materials and experiments.
From the test data obtained we make detailed design and retests.
Thus, design as well as engineering is iterative process.
 Engineering projects versus standard experiments
Similarities
1. Partial ignorance: The behavior of materials purchased is uncertain and may vary
with the suppliers, processed time, and the process used in shaping the materials.
2. Uncertainty: The final outcomes of projects are also uncertain. Unexpected risks,
such as undue seepage in a storage dam, leakage of nuclear radiation from an
atomic power plant, presence of pesticides in food or soft drink bottle, an new
irrigation canal spreading water-borne diseases have been reported in the past.
3. Continuous monitoring: Needed before, during and after execution of project and
during the use by end-user.
4. Learning from the past: The Titanic lacked sufficient number of life boats. It had
only 825 boats for the actual passengers of 2227. Forty years back, another
steamship Arctic met with same tragedy due to the same problem in the same
region.
 Engineering projects versus standard experiments
Contrasts
1. Experimental control: Practised in medicine but not in engineering.
(In medical experiments, members for study are selected into two groups namely A
and B at random. Group A are given special treatment. The group B is given no
treatment and is called the ‘controlled group’.)
2. Humane touch: Social experimentation - Engineering experiments involve human
souls, their needs, views, expectations, and creative use.
3. Knowledge gained: Not much of new knowledge is developed in engineering
experiments.
Engineering experiments at the most help us to
(a) verify the adequacy of the design
(b) to check the stability of the design parameters
(c) prepare for the unexpected outcomes, in the actual field environments.
4. Informed consent:
2 elements of informed consent:
a) Knowledge: The subject should be given all relevant
information needed to make the decision to participate.
b) Voluntariness: Subject should take part without force, fraud or
deception.
For a valid consent, the following conditions are to be fulfilled:
1. Consent must be voluntary
2. All relevant information shall be presented/stated in a clearly
understandable form
3. Consenter shall be capable of processing the information and
make rational decisions.
4. The subject’s consent may be offered in proxy by a group that
represents many subjects of like-interests
Letting the customer know the following:
(a) the knowledge about the product
(b) risks and benefits of using the product
(c) all relevant information on the product, such as how to use and
how not to use (do’s and don’ts).
Engineers as Responsible Experimenters
The engineer, as an experimenter, owe several responsibilities to the
society
1. A conscientious commitment to live by moral values.
2. A comprehensive perspective on relevant information.
3. Unrestricted free-personal involvement in all steps of the
project/product development (autonomy).
4. Be accountable for the results of the project (accountability)
 1. Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness means
a) Being sensitive to full range of moral values and responsibilities
relevant to the prevailing situation
b) The willingness to develop the skill and put efforts needed to reach
the best balance possible among those considerations.
In short, engineers must possess open eyes, open ears, and an open
mind (i.e., moral vision, moral listening, and moral reasoning).
Should respect foremost the safety and health of the affected, while
they seek to enrich their knowledge, rush for the profit, follow the
rules, or care for only the beneficiary.
2. Comprehensive perspective

The engineer should grasp the context of his work and ensure
that the work involved results in only moral ends.
One should not ignore his conscience, if the product or project that
he is involved will result in damaging the people.
A product has a built-in obsolete or redundant component to boost
sales with a false claim. In possessing of the perspective of factual
information, the engineer should exhibit a moral concern and not
agree for this design.
3. Moral autonomy

The responsibility to answer an unexpected result, influences an

engineer to involve himself personally into the work.
Such responsible actions lead to great outcomes.
 4. Accountability
Accountability means:
1. The capacity to understand and act on moral reasons.
2. Willingness to submit one’s actions to moral scrutiny and be responsive
to the assessment of others. It includes being answerable for your
decisions, actions and outcomes when required by the stakeholders or by
law.
In the engineering practice, the problems are:
a) The fragmentation of work in a project lessens the responsibility of the
employee.
b) The responsibilities diffuse into various hierarchies and to various people.
c) An employee is more interested in adherence of tight schedules rather than
giving personal care for the current project.
d) More litigation is to be faced by the engineers.
Story example- Accountability
This is a story about four people named Everybody, Somebody, Anybody,
and Nobody.
There was an important job to be done and Everybody was asked to do it.
Everybody was sure Somebody would do it.
Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it.
Somebody got angry about that, because it was Everybody’s job.
Everybody thought Anybody could do it but Nobody realized that
Everybody wouldn’t do it.
It ended up that Everybody blamed Somebody when Nobody did what
Anybody could have done.
Code of Ethics
The ‘codes of ethics’ exhibit rights, duties, and obligations of the
members of a profession and a professional society.
The codes exhibit the following essential roles:
1. Inspiration and guidance
2. Support to engineers
3. Deterrence (discourage to act immorally) and discipline (regulate to
act morally)
4. Education and mutual understanding
5. Create good public image
6. Protect the existing state of affairs
7. Promotes business interests
 Limitations
1. General and vague wordings
2. Not applicable to all situations
3. Often have internal conflicts
4. They can not be treated as final moral authority for professional
conduct
5. Only a few enroll as members in professional society and
non-members can not be compelled
6. Even as members of the professional society, many are unaware of the
codes
7. Different societies have different codes -NSPE, IEEE, ASCE, ASME
8. Codes are said to be coercive
Engineering code of ethics
Every engineer in their line of duty is expected to:
1. Uphold the safety, welfare and health of the society at all times
2. Be truthful and honest when issuing public statements
3. Offer their services in their areas of expertise only
4. Be honest and trustful with their employers and clients
5. Be honorable, responsible, lawful and ethical in their professional
capacity to ensure good reputation and honor among the society
6. Treat all people with fairness with respect and dignity regardless of
their personality, gender, race or other personal identification issues
7. Use their knowledge and skills for the improvement of humanity
8. Anticipate the current needs of society and fulfill them
Plagiarism
As per Oxford university, plagiarism means “presenting work or
ideas from another source as your own, with or without consent of
the original author, by incorporating it into your work without full
acknowledgement”.

Plagiarism can occur in many forms besides writing: art, music,

computer code, mathematics, and scientific work can also be
plagiarized.
Types of Plagiarism
Complete plagiarism - occurs when one copies an entire body of
work, word-for-word, and does not give credit to the original source.
Deliberate or direct plagiarism - specific sections or paragraphs are
included without crediting.

Paraphrasing - involves presenting someone else's ideas in your own

voice, changing words, altering sentence structure, and changing parts
of speech.

Patchwork plagiarism- Stealing words and ideas from multiple

source text and patching them together.
Mosaic Plagiarism - occurs when a student borrows phrases from a
source without using quotation marks or finds synonyms for the
author's language while keeping to the same general structure and
meaning of the original.

Self-plagiarism- Using your previous work without knowing that it is

wrong, it is still classified as plagiarism.

Accidental Plagiarism – neglects to cite their sources and/or

unintentionally paraphrases from a source.
Source-based plagiarism - occurs when a writer cites a source
incorrectly, whether intentionally or unintentionally.
Industrial Standards
Industrial standards are important for any industry.
Specification helps in achieving interchangeability.
Standardization reduces the production costs and at the same time,
the quality is achieved easily.
It helps the manufacturer, customers and the public, in keeping
competitiveness and ensuring quality simultaneously.
Bureau of Indian Standards, International Standards Organization
Types of Industrial standards
A balanced outlook on law
The ‘balanced outlook on law’ in engineering practice stresses the
necessity of laws and regulations and also their limitations in
directing and controlling the engineering practice.
Laws are necessary because people are not fully responsible by
themselves and because of the competitive nature of the free
enterprise, which does not encourage moral initiatives.
1. Code for Builders by Hammurabi
Hummurabi the king of Babylon in 1758 framed the following code for the
builders:
“If a builder has built a house for a man and has not made his work sound and the
house which he has built has fallen down and caused the death of the householder,
that builder shall be put to death.
If it causes the death of the householder’s son, they shall put that builder’s son to
death.
If it causes the death of the householder’s slave, he shall give slave for slave to the
householder.
If it destroys property, he shall replace anything it has destroyed.
Since the house has fallen down, he shall rebuild the house from his own property.
If a builder has built a house for a man and does not make his work perfect and
the wall bulges, that builder shall put that wall in sound condition at his own
cost.”
2. Steam Boat Code in USA

Laws are meant to be interpreted for minimal compliance.

Laws which are amended or updated continuously would be counter
productive.
In the early 19th century, a law was passed in USA to provide for
inspection of the safety of boilers and engines in ships. It was
amended many times and now the standards formulated by the
American Society of Mechanical Engineers are followed.
 Proper Role of Laws
Good laws establish minimal standards of professional conduct and provide a
motivation to people.
They serve as moral support and defence for the people who are willing to act
ethically.
1. The rules which govern engineering practice should be of responsible
experimentation.
2. Precise rules are needed in case of violation of established engineering
procedures, which affects the safety and the welfare of the public.
3. In situations where the experimentation is large and time consuming, the rules
must not try to cover all possible outcomes, and they should not compel the
engineers to follow rigid courses of action.
4. The regulation should be broad, but make engineers accountable for their
decisions.
5. Through their professional societies, the engineers can facilitate framing the rules,
amend wherever necessary, and enforce them.
Space shuttle challenger disaster
On January 28, 1986, the Space Shuttle Challenger
broke apart 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven
crew members aboard.
The crew was scheduled to deploy a communications
satellite and study Halley's Comet while they were in
orbit, in addition to taking school teacher Christa
McAuliffe into space.
The cause of the disaster was the failure of
the O-ring seals in a joint in the shuttle's right solid
rocket booster. The record-low temperatures on the
morning of the launch had stiffened the rubber
O-rings, reducing their ability to seal the joints.
Engineers of Morton Thiokol (manufacturer of O-ring
seals) expressed their concern of failure chance but
management decided to continue with the launch.
Case study: The Challenger
The orbiter of the Challenger had three main engines fuelled by
liquid hydrogen. The fuel was carried in an external fuel tank.
During lift-off, the main engines fire for about nine minutes,
although initially the thrust was provided by the two booster rockets.
These booster rockets are of the solid fuel type, each burning a
million pound load of aluminum, potassium chloride, and iron
oxide.

The casing of each booster rocket is about 150 feet long and 12 feet
in diameter. This consists of cylindrical segments that are assembled
at the launch site. There are four-field joints and they use seals
consisting of pairs of O-rings made of vulcanized rubber. The
O-rings work with a putty barrier made of zinc chromate.
The engineers were employed with Rockwell International
(manufacturers for the orbiter and main rocket), Morton-Thiokol
(maker of booster rockets), and they worked for NASA.
After many postponements, the launch of Challenger was set for
morning of Jan 28, 1986.
Allan J. McDonald, an engineer from Morton-Thiokol and the
director of the Solid Rocket Booster Project was skeptic about the
freezing temperature conditions forecast for that morning, which
was lower than the previous launch conditions.
A teleconference between NASA engineers and MT engineers was
arranged by Allan.
Arnold Thompson and Roger Boisjoly, the seal experts at MT
explained to the other engineers how the booster rocket walls would
bulge upon launch and combustion gases can blow past the O-rings
of the field joints.
From the past data gathered, at temperature less than 65 °F the O-rings failure was
certain. But these data were not deliberated at that conference as the launch time
was fast approaching.
The engineering managers Bob Lund and Joe Kilminster agreed that there was a
safety problem. Boisjoly testified and recommended that no launch should be
attempted with temperature less than 53 °F. These managers were annoyed to
postpone the launch yet again.
The top management of MT was planning for the renewal of contract with NASA,
for making booster rocket. The managers told Bob Lund “to take-off the
engineering hat and put on your management hat”. The judgment of the engineers
was not given weightage. The inability of these engineers to substantiate that the
launch would be unsafe was taken by NASA as an approval by Rockwell to
launch.
At 11.38 a.m. the rockets along with Challenger rose up the sky. The cameras
recorded smoke coming out of one of the filed joints on the right booster rocket.
Soon there was a flame that hit the external fuel tank. At 76 seconds into the
flight, the Challenger at a height of 10 miles was totally engulfed in a fireball. The
crew cabin fell into the ocean killing all the seven aboard.
 Moral/Normative Issues
1. The crew had no escape mechanism. Douglas, the engineer,
designed an abort module to allow the separation of the orbiter,
triggered by a field-joint leak. But such a ‘safe exit’ was rejected as
too expensive, and because of an accompanying reduction in
payload.
2. The crew were not informed of the problems existing in the field
joints. The principle of informed consent was not followed.
3. Engineers gave warning signals on safety. But the management
group prevailed over and ignored the warning.
 Conceptual Issues
1. NASA counted that the probability of failure of the craft was one in
one lakh launches. But it was expected that only the 100000th
launch will fail.
2. There were 700 criticality-1 items, which included the field joints. A
failure in any one of them would have caused the tragedy. No
back-up or stand-bye had been provided for these criticality-1
components.
 Factual/Descriptive Issues
1. Field joints gave way in earlier flights. But the authorities felt the
risk is not high.
2. NASA has disregarded warnings about the bad weather, at the time
of launch, because they wanted to complete the project, prove their
supremacy, get the funding from Government continued and get an
applaud from the President of USA.
3. The inability of the Rockwell Engineers (manufacturer) to prove
that the lift-off was unsafe. This was interpreted by the NASA, as
an approval by Rockwell to launch.
Bhopal Gas Tragedy
The Bhopal gas tragedy was a chemical accident on the night of 3rd
December 1984 at the Union Carbide India
Limited (UCIL) pesticide plant in Bhopal.
The owner of the factory was the Union Carbide Corporation (UCC)
of the United States.
The Bhopal plant had a license to make methyl isocyanate-based
pesticides.
The poisonous methyl isocyanate gas leaked into the air and spread
over 40 sq. km.
About 600 people died and left 7000 injured and the health of about
2 million people was affected adversely.
 The cumulative effects of the following factors caused the tragedy in Bhopal.
1. Maintenance was neglected and the trained maintenance personnel were reduced
as economy measure.
2. Training activities for the supervisory personnel were stopped.
3. Periodical Safety Inspection teams from U.S. which visited previously were also
stopped.
4. Vital spares for equipments and machineries were not available
5. Absence of capital replacement led to the stagnant economy of the plant.
6. The high turnover of the experienced engineers and technicians, who were
demoralized by the lack of development.
7. Lack of experienced personnel to operate and control the vital installations.
8. They have not conducted a thorough process hazards analysis that would have
exposed the serious hazards which resulted in disaster later.
9. No emergency plan was put in practice, during the shut down and maintenance.
10. Above all, the commitment of top-level management to safety was lacking.
 Technologically, the tragedy was caused by a series of events listed:
1. The safety manual of Union Carbide prescribed that the MIC tanks were to be filled only
up to 60% of the capacity. But the tanks were reported to have been filled up to 75%.
2. The safety policy prescribed that an empty tank should be available as a stand-bye in case
of emergency. But the emergency tank was also filled with to its full capacity.
3. The storage tanks should be refrigerated to make the chemical less reactive. But here the
refrigeration system was shut down as an economy measure.
4. The plant was shut down for maintenance two months earlier. The worker who cleaned the
pipes and filters connected to the tanks and closed the valves, was not trained properly. He
did not insert the safety disks to prevent any possible leakage of the gas. This led to the
build up of temperature and pressure in the storage tanks.
5. When the gas started leaking out, the operators tried to use the vent gas-scrubber that was
designed to reduce the exhausting gas. But that scrubber was also shut down.
6. There was a flare tower that was designed to burn-off the gas escaping from the scrubber.
That was not also in working condition.
7. The workers finally tried to spray water up to 100 feet to quench the gas (which is water
soluble). But the gas was escaping from the chimney of 120-feet high.
8. The workers were not trained on safety drills or emergency drills or any evacuation plans.