Engineers Focus on: Environmentally Safe Processes
Video
Report When John Sutherland joined
the Mechanical Engineering - Engineering Mechanics (ME-EM) Department
at Michigan Tech in 1991, he surveyed the academic/research landscape
in mechanical engineering to see where he could best direct his energy
and his talents.
“There were enough people
doing plain-old machining research. I made the strategic decision to shift
my efforts into environmentally responsible manufacturing,” he said.
That decision has proven to be a good one for Sutherland and Michigan
Tech.
“The area of environmentally
responsible manufacturing was just getting started here in the U.S.,”
said Sutherland. “In contrast, highly populated areas overseas, such
as Japan and northern Europe were already undergoing significant changes
as a result of environment-driven initiatives. But awareness of environmental
issues was growing in the U.S., and research was needed to tackle some
of the problems that were surfacing.”
Sutherland’s strategic
shift shortly after arriving at Michigan Tech took advantage of the university’s
strong manufacturing and environmental engineering programs. Sutherland
began collaborating with other faculty from ME-EM (Walter Olson), Materials
Science and Engineering (Karl Rundman), Civil and Environmental Engineering
(Bob Baillod, Neil Hutzler, John Crittenden, and Jim Mihelcic), and Chemical
Engineering (Dave Shonnard and Julie King). This collaboration was directed
at seeking solutions for industry-related environmental problems.
He began working with Ford
Motor Company to scrutinize the use of cutting fluids in their machining
operations.
“Cutting fluids represent
a concern because upon disposal they may contaminate lakes and rivers.
Cutting fluids also pose a health hazard to workers. Exposure to the skin
is the most frequently occurring problem, but cutting fluid mist inhalation
has been linked to serious pulmonary illnesses.
“We have been working
to quantify these hazards and benefits. We have also been working to assess
the viability of not using cutting fluids (dry machining), or using very
little (damp machining).”
Researchers have built on this
early work with Ford, examining a number of other environmental problems
related to manufacturing. For example, Sutherland and John Johnson (ME-EM)
have recently begun to study airborne emissions from a variety of manufacturing
processes with support from the UAW-General Motors organization.
“I am principally interested
in helping industry achieve an economically successful balance with the
environment,” Sutherland said. “Part of this includes raising
peoples’ awareness, because for many years environmental issues weren’t
considered at all or were simply an afterthought.
I am optimistic about the future,
since every company person I have met wants to do the right thing with
respect to the environment.”
In 1994 Sutherland became involved
with the Machine Tool-Agile Manufacturing Research Institute, a seven-university
consortium funded by the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced
Research Projects Agency. The MT-AMRI focuses on improving the competitiveness
of the machine tool and its user industries (automotive and aerospace).
“Many environmental problems
are so complex that team efforts such as those of MT-AMRI and, more recently,
the sustainable manufacturing group here at Michigan Tech are required,”
he explained. “The sustainable manufacturing group is interdisciplinary
in nature, pulling together researchers from across campus.”
Recently, the National Science
Foundation sponsored a global benchmarking initiative where a group of
scientists, including Sutherland, investigated the environmental challenges
being faced by other. countries.
“Ten of us visited such
places as Japan, Germany, Denmark, Belgium, and Switzerland,” Sutherland
said. “We found that people in the Far East and northern Europe were
much more informed about environmental matters than people in the U.S.
Environmental considerations were a national priority and it was clear
that industry and the populace were getting the message.”
This priority, he says, is
in part due to many of the nations simply running out of space to put
their waste.
To illustrate the differences
between how waste is handled in the U.S. and overseas, he notes that,
in Japan and northern Europe, products are already being returned to the
manufacturer at the end of the use part of the life cycle.
“There is simply not enough
landfill space for them to just junk or landfill a product at the end
of its life,” he said. “Consider the automobile. It is perhaps
the most successfully recycled product in the U.S., with about 75 percent
of the material in a vehicle recovered for use in new products. Roughly
25 percent of the material in the vehicle currently ends up in landfills.
With about 13 million vehicles ending their lives every year, that’s
a tremendous amount of waste. Laws on the books overseas call for the
landfill percentage to drop from 25 percent to 5 percent.”
“What worries me is that
our overseas competitors will leapfrog us in terms of technology development,”
he said. Foreign companies are gearing up to produce more environmentally
benign products with greener, less wasteful processes that will make U.S.
products less competitive. This sort of phenomenon is not new.
“Back in the late 1800s,
the failure of some companies to adopt the scientific management principles
pioneered by men such as Frederick Winslow Taylor led to their collapse,”
he said.
“In the 1970s a similar
thing happened. Everybody was competitive at the same quality level until
Japanese industry started playing by a different set of rules, practicing
such principles as continuous improvement that had been popularized by
individuals such as W. Edwards Deming. The companies that didn’t
quickly adopt these principles went out of business.
“There is a danger that
this cycle will repeat again, this time with a new set of competitors
having a green manufacturing philosophy. To stay competitive in the marketplace,
a company must maintain technology leadership. I am afraid some U.S. companies
have forgotten this.”
In his 10-year career at Michigan
Tech, Sutherland has advised or co-advised nearly 40 graduate students
and has written well over 100 technical papers. In addition to the research
activities of the sustainable manufacturing research group, he is currently
working with Donna Michalek (ME-EM) on an NSF-funded project that seeks
to eliminate the cutting fluid mist problem through the use of a novel
fluid application scheme.
He is also collaborating with
Sudhakar Pandit (ME-EM) on a grant from the U.S. Department of Education
directed at producing future leaders in the field of environmentally responsible
manufacturing.
Sutherland and John Gershenson
(ME-EM) are developing initiatives that consider the environmental design
of products and processes across the entire life cycle.
John Sutherland (left) in his lab to study cutting fluids,
with Siddhartha Kinare, a master's student in mechanical engineering
at Michigan Tech.
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