SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION LECTURE 42 SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM OF SYSTEMS: TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCT SYSTEMS

1. SCIENCE ADMINISTRATION LECTURE 42 SCIENTIFIC PARADIGM OF SYSTEMS: TECHNOLOGY AND PRODUCT SYSTEMS ILLUSTRATION: INVENTION OF THE AIRPLANE SIKORSKY’S PRODUCTS FREDERICK BETZ PORTLAND STATE UNIVERSITY

2. An open system has both inputs into its environment and significant outputs into its environment. Technologies are open systems. A technology viewed as a system is a functional totality, transforming inputs from its purposive environment into means-outputs of its purposive environment. A configuration of a technology system is a specific architecture of the technology – airplane versus helicopter.

3. ILLUSTRATION: Invention of the Airplane Let us turn to the technical aspect of a 'socio-technical' system. All technologies are systems, and this idea can be nicely illustrated in the invention of the airplane -- powered flight. The first successful powered flight was made in 1904 by the Wright brothers, Wilbur and Orville. They were Americans, born in Indiana and Ohio respectively, and they spent most of their life in Dayton, Ohio. They performed their critical experiments on the airplane on the Atlantic coast at Kitty hawk, North Carolina. Wilbur Wright (1867-1912)) had planned to attend Yale, but due to an injury changed his mind and remained in Dayton. Neither brothers attended college. In 1889, Orville left high school to start a printing business, building a printing press with Wilbur’s help. In 1892, the quit the printing business and opened a bicycle repair and sales shop. WILBUR ORVILLE

4. In the 1890s, bicycles were newly popular in America and in Europe. For example, the historian Tom Crouch wrote about this excitement: “When Wilbur and Orville Wright entered the cycle trade in 1892, American journalists were already touting the bicycle as a ‘boon to all mankind,’ a ‘national necessity,’ and a ‘force that has within it almost the power of social revolution’." (Crouch, 198--) In 1896, the Wright brothers built their own brand of bicycle, and the bicycle business financed their next mechanical interest -- inventing an airplane. Also as ardent bicyclists, they appreciated the control problem of balancing and steering a bicycle. Because the spinning wheels of a bicycle act physically in motion as do gyroscopes, the impact of a force upon a gyroscope changes the direction of motion perpendicular (and not in line with the force). Thus to steer a rapidly moving bicycle one does not turn the handles but shifts balance. This subtlety about system control was to help them solve the challenge of airplane control.

5. Also in the 1890s, the brothers had seen articles about gliding by Otto Lilienthal in Germany, who made large gliders. In 1896, Samuel Langley flew an unmanned steam-powered model aircraft. Octave Chanute made gliders and tried gliding along the shore of Lake Michigan. In 1899, Lilienthal was killed in a gliding accident. In that year, Wilber and Orville Wright decided to build an airplane. The invention was not simple, because the airplane as an entity was complex and the process of flight tricky.

6. The first essential component of the airplane system is the wings. The curvature of the upper surface of an airplane wing (as opposed to a flat underside) directs airflow up and over the wing, creating an area of lower air pressure above the wing than below the wing. This difference in air pressure of the two surfaces produces lift, an upward force to raise the wing up into the air. The amount of this lift was critical to the Wright’s invention, because the lifting force had to be enough to lift not only the airplane structure but also the weight of passengers and weight of the airplane motor. The shape of the upper wing surface is that of a chord, gradually curving upward from the front surface of the wing to a high point and then more gradually descending to the back surface of the wing. How high the high-point and where the high-point was located front to back (nearer the front than the back) was the critical feature of the wing in determining the lifting force.

7. For their first glider in 1900, the Wright brothers had used calculations on the height and centering of the wing's chord (which had been published by Lilienthal on how to build a glider’s wing). They tried gliding that summer in 1900 at Kitty Hawk, a coastal island off North Carolina, where a steady breeze blew in from the ocean and sand dunes made launching and landing possible. But they found the wings did produce sufficient lift, and, clearly, Lilienthal's wing calculations were not technically accurate. Back in Ohio, the Wright brothers turned experimenters and built a ‘wind tunnel’ in their shop. They built small models of wings with different chords and measured the weight they could lift in the wind tunnel. From this experiment, they constructed a more accurate table of chord shape versus wing-lift potential. This was a part of the Wright brother’s experimental approach to invention. They understood that the system component of the wing had a process relationship to the environment of the airplane -- as air-flow over the shape of the wing produced lift.

8. For the next summer they constructed a glider with two wings, and in trails at Kitty Hawk, the new glider did provide sufficient lift to carry a person in the air. But the glider did not fly stably. Next they had to tackle the next system problem of the airplane – control. “When completed and tested on the 1902 Wright glider, their control system consisted of a for-elevator for pitch control, a wing-warping mechanism that provided a helical twist across the entire wing in either direction for roll control, and a rudder (originally linked to the wing-warping system) for control in the yaw (nose right/nose left) axis. . . . The pilot’s hips rested in a narrow cradle, which was shifted from side to side to raise or lower either wing tip. His right hand gripped an upright lever that controlled the forward elevator. The control responses would be as simple and natural as those required to ride a bicycle.” The control system had to control flight in three dimensions – forward, up-down (pitch), left-right and roll.”

9. In 1902,Orville added to the control system, the idea that the rear rudder should be movable in order to assist in controlling turning.

10. Next the Wright brothers had to add another component to the system of the airplane -- power to the glider. They built a gasoline engine and designed propellers for the engine to blow air past the wings. Again, for the design of the propeller, they used their wind tunnel to get the twisting shape of the propeller just right to push the air efficiently onto the plane. From wind-tunnel experiments, the Wright brothers had designed both efficient propellers and wings -- so the propelled air could provide wing. On December 7, 1903, the Wright brothers made the first successful powered flight in the world – 39 meters (120 feet) for 12 seconds. They had invented the airplane!

11. The later history of the Wright brothers is a business history. They established the first airplane manufacturing business and sold their flyers to military customers. Only eleven years later in 1914, the early airplanes were to play a major role in the First World War, as observation platforms for military intelligence. • We can see in this illustration how the airplane should be thought about as a technology system, involving several components: (1) a structural architecture of the plane and wings, (2) engines for power, and (3) control apparatus. And these components are connected together in the process of flight through an atmospheric environment.

12. SYSTEM DESIGN ENVIRONMENT PROCESSES STRUCTURE SYSTEM PROCESS SYSTEM STATES STATE TRANSITION FORCES STATE TRANSITION PROBALITIES SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE SYSTEM COMPLEXITY SUBSYSTEMS SYSTEM MATERIALS SYSTEM POWER SYSTEM CONTROL CONTROL STRUCTURE SYSTEM FEED BACK

13. PRODUCT SYSTEM COMPLETED, CONNECTED, AND INTEGRATED SET OF TECHNOLOGY SYSTEMS TO ENABLE AN APPLICATION AS A PRODUCT FUNCTIONALITY, PERFORMANCE QUALITY COST SAFETY SUPPLIES MAINTAINENCE APPLICATION INTEGRATIBILITY PRICE MARGINS VOLUME

14. DE VINCI’S HELICOPTER SIKORSKY’S HELICOPTER SIKORSKY’S PANAM CLIPPER IGOR SIKORSKY

15. SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE OF INTERNET HOME 1 BUSINESS 1 PC PC PC Intel SERVER Microsoft MODEM MODEM PC Cisco INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER R O U T E R R O U T E R I N T E R N E T B A C K B O N E LAN SERVER TCP/IP Standards Addresses BUSINESS 2 PC HOME 2 PC SERVER PC MODEM MODEM PC INTERNET SERVICE PROVIDER R O U T E R R O U T E R LAN SERVER

16. There are many kinds of systems. Natural systems occur in nature, such as environmental systems, meteorological systems, hydrological systems, material or energy cycles, ecological systems, and biological systems, and so on. Functional systems are ways in which humans use natural systems, such as energy systems, water and waste systems, Technology systems manipulate nature for human function. Technology systems are used within functional systems. Organizational systems, such as government agencies or businesses, implement technology systems to operate as functional systems.