Meeting Minutes

12/4/2003 General Meeting Sophie’s Station Attendance – 10

The meeting was called to order at 12:05 by Chair, Ed Bargar.

Ed began the meeting with a discussion of a survey concerning the engineering curriculum of the statewide UA system. Ed had been asked to participate in the survey at two levels, as an associate professor in the UAF Mechanical Engineering department and as the chair of the Northern ASME Group. Ed asked for input from the local engineering community in response to some of the survey recommendations. The official response Ed forwarded to the university was to focus the engineering school in Fairbanks with a 2 year pre-engineering program offered at the campus in Anchorage. Also, the University should choose the option under consideration which would create a new school/college of engineering comprised of the engineering departments currently split between the College of Science, Engineering, & Mathematics and the School of Mineral Engineering.

Ed Bargar was the guest speaker for the meeting providing an overview on the hybrid electric vehicles tested for the US Army through a UAF program. This XM1124 HUMVEE was a series electric vehicle comprised of a small Diesel engine-generator set and storage batteries. The local UAF involvement in the project was to build a computer simulation of the energy generation, storage, and consumption and to test the vehicle. Test results were compared to the predicted values from the computer simulation. Ed provided pictures and graphs showing the measured power usage versus predicted values.

Dr. Das talked about continuing the petition signature drive to advance from a group to sub-section status with ASME International.

Paul Park announced the dates of the upcoming professional development course to be offered in Fairbanks. The ASME Section IX Welding Documentation Course will be on February 9,10, and 11 at the AGC building on Van Horn Road. A course description and registration form will be coming out in the next week.

A local item of interest was the Lego Robotics competition held at Tanana Junior High School in November. Several dads present had children involved in the event and described the action for others at the meeting. This seemed like a popular activity and a good place for community involvement for our local group.

Paul Park

Secretary, Northern Alaska ASME Group