American engineering enterprise

A visit to the Shuttle Pavilion at the USS Intrepid Museum on the Hudson River in New York City is an excellent opportunity to ogle and admire up close a great technical marvel of scientific achievement and American engineering superiority the Shuttle Enterprise. Although it never flew as part of the shuttle fleet, it is an excellent tribute to NASA s success, and also a painful reminder of two of its worst failures that of the Shuttle Challenger and the Shuttle Columbia. 

In 1940 the British Purchasing Commission of the Ministry of Supply arranged with American Cyanamid for the erection of a 1625-ton/month plant at Welland, Canada. The application of American chemical engineering design teams made this a successful enterprise which was in full production by 1941 and its output by 1943 had been raised to 2300 tons/month. The production of cordite N using this picrite was investigated in the United States and Canada and led to the adoption of picrite propellants by the United States in 1944. 

Smalley, H. E. (1982), Hospital Management Engineering, Prentice Hrill, Englewood Qiffs, NJ. Steinwelds, B., and Sloan, F. (1981) Regulatory Approvals to Hospiteil Cost Contmnment A Synthesis of the Empirical Evidence, in A New Approach to the Economics of Health Care, M. Olsin, Ed., American Enterprise Institute, Washington, DC., pp. 274-308. 

The focus of the Roundtable is on the major institutional, organizational, and policy issues affecting American science and engineering. The stewardship of the research enterprise is the Roundtable s brief, and it was organized on the premise, innovative in 1984, that all sectors—federal and state governments, universities, and industry—share the responsibility for that stewardship. 

In 1992, Zion Bar-El, Boris Zlotin, and Alla Zusman, along with two other partners, established Ideation International Inc. in the United States. Zion Bar-El was a very successful entrepreneur and became fascinated with TRIZ. He strongly believed that the next engineering revolution would be the TRIZ revolution, and therefore he decided to invest his life savings in this new enterprise. One of his first decisions was to move the Kishinev School of TRIZ. The Ideation team used their knowledge and deep understanding of TRIZ to create the Americanized version of TRIZ and to use it successfully it for commercial purposes. Also, Ideation International continues the TRIZ research. 

As it has in the past century, the chemists and chemical engineers of ACS s Industrial and Engineering Chemistry Division will continue to add to the story of innovation and enterprise that is die history of the American industrial gases industry. They and the industry they participate in will grow as they rise to meet the needs of 21 -century society. 

It can be easier to recognize a social enterprise than to define it. The Goodwill, the Boy Scouts, the American Heart Association, and a local soup kitchen are all easily recognizable examples of social enterprises. For bioengineers, organizations like PATH, Project Impact, Benentech, and Engineering World Health typify the social enterprise. 

This book is derived, in part, from a Symposium held in Boston, April 22-23, 1990, sponsored by the Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering Division of the American Chemical Society). Acknowledgment is made to the Donors of The Petroleum Research Fund, administered by the American Chemical Society, for partial support of the symposium from which this book is derived. Additional financial support was provided by the Polymeric Materials Division, Sci-Tec Symposium Associates, Inc., Allied-Signal, Inc., Rohm Haas Company, and Anatrace, Inc. The Editor wishes to thank the individual authors for their fine contributions to this book. The book was typeset by CG Enterprises. 

This is a rapidly changing area of research and new developments will no doubt change some of the conclusions reported in these chapters, but much of this research will ultimately lead to many new applications of polymers in the biological and/or biomedical environments, both of which are of considerable practical human importance. The Editors wish to thank the American Chemical Society Division of Polymeric Materials Science and Engineering who sponsored the symposium from which this book was derived. Likewise, we wish to thank the individual authors whose excellent research has made this book the challenging volume that it is. Finally, we wish to thank our wives, families and/or friends for their help and patience while we were bring this book into existence. This book was word-processed by CG ENTERPRISES. 

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