Overview

All engineers are changers and improvers, by virtue of their professional mission. If you formally devote most of your time and effort to looking for useful ways to change, however, you're a development engineer or possibly an engineering researcher. These people seem to become more numerous every year. In one large technically oriented company about three-quarters of their several thousand engineers are in "R and D" work.

Two chapters back we saw that most engineering activity is built around the design function. A designer continually needs new, creative ways of accomplishing his purposes. A development engineer's function is to provide new ideas that the designer can use.

But it is not enough for a designers to have new ideas. They must also have sufficient confidence in them to be reasonably sure that their designs will work when they are included. The step from a new idea to enough confidence to include it in a design is often long and expensive.

Turbine engine automobiles are a good current example of engineering development work. Are they really feasible? Many problems must be solved in order to design such an engine within the constraints of today's automobile market. Beyond the engine itself, what are the performance characteristics of a car so powered? How will the using public react to it?

Large automobile manufacturers have spent millions on the technical problems in the last few years. Recently one of them began to put a number of trial cars into the hands of consumers...