Wednesday, August 30, 2023

For the threads that bind...


 

On the threads that bind…

Happy xxxx is a greeting often seen in social media, and today’s feed was no different. A day spent to honest materials research under a hot shop floor with cutting edge materials and a data logging laptop was interrupted with a happy Onam. Yes happy Oman I messaged back. Happy namo came another response. Sure he is I thought and got back to work. The day done; a cool Uber took me to an air-conditioned metro which took me to Chennai central.  Happy Onam the lady greeted to someone over the phone. That done her phone with a Jesus Saves as the DP buzzed, her tone was more than a tad respectful. What did you eat? Was the Avial OK? He is on a call, right? I will take a metro and come home. Not to worry. Ah. Ah. Sure. Thanks. Tomorrow is Avani Avittam? Oh yeah. Are we going to make payasam? Sure. The person next to me was juggling cultures and schedules. Unfettered by healthy diet, I waved out when ice-cream vendor passed by, cutlets, avoided cold dosas with rivers of chutney and dozed off. My school group buzzed. There was an argument between free speech loving American desis and anti-preached desis. Happy Raksha  bandhan and happy Avani Avittam said another thread. While these are well intentioned events, with the former supporting some interaction between genders when it was all frowned upon, while the latter is a brahmin male’s ritual committing to learning and piety, marked by the changing of sacred thread, to mark  the  retrieval of Vedas stolen by demons back to Brahma – however this tradition excludes women and men who are not brahmins by birth.  Hence the debate, to put it mildly.

The best interpretation of the Raksha Bandhan is that women are vulnerable, and the men protect them tying what is a platonic knot symbolised in the form of a thread. Who are they protected from? The nameless underworld? A frustrated lumpen? Or those who belong to any other? And why not the other way round. The men who are vulnerable to myriad pressures, including being robbed, mugged, cyber duped? I That only the males offer protection is a stereotype.

Avani Avittam is the day when Brahmin males change their sacred thread. A morning spent in gentle male bonding within the clan, with shlokas narrated, Ganesha propitiated, an hour spent cross legged in front of a smoky fire, verses narrated without comprehending the meaning.  The girls don’t get to partake, they can of course cook dishes to mark the event.  People from other castes are not a part of this ritual.   A tradition that is kept alive partly out of belief, and partly because other good traditions are under assault.  Well, others are not equipped to understand is the refrain.  The shlokas, even the more profound ones are not too complicated. If high school kids can solve differential equations and perform matrix inversions and multiplications they certainly will not blank out when asked to narrate the meaning of Gayatri Mantra. While these rituals are replete with meaning and symbolism, connecting us to the divine, exclusion is the only problem.

So here is a simple appeal to make all threads universal.

Switching to the corporate world, threads have become a buzz word. Especially a digital thread. In such a magically connected world, the digitised design process would interface with CAD drawings and on to production and on to production records and on to service records. The digital thread becomes the nerve Centre of organisation learning and memory. To lend complete meaning one needs to have a digital twin that connects changes to a component in service to how it got there in the first place, the manufacturing parameters, supplier heat numbers, quality records,and operating conditions including life limiting locations. Getting those threads connected is more that appending files, but getting to really understand material response to service conditions. Such a philosophy can be applied  to anything that is manufactured and put to use.   From implants to airfoils to batteries. A thread built on rigor. But like all engineering proclivities this such an approach tends to  be reductionist in nature, trying to simplify the complex. The unknowns are not dug further. But mashed under a probabilistic response. The focus has shifted more towards the digital thread and digital twin.  In some ways the systems response is like solving a multiple choice tough exam.  The toughest of the problems is left unsolved, while those that find traction are solved.   The corrosion condition that pushed the material to pit and crack gets ignored; the failure of a seal upstream in allowing the hotter gas flow to reach critical locations is ignored too.  The digital twin supports decision making for typical conditions while transients and upset events which are life limiting often get ignored.  But like a college kid who could ace the exam without knowing everything, initiatives like the digital twin continue to allow the organization to live the 80 – 20 rule without comprehending that when the bad 20% catches up one could be caught napping.

Therefore we engineers, have not quite gotten ourselves to say happy digital thread day..: today is Avani Avittam. Time to reboot the computers and data.  Partly because engineers on the ground, except for  the super ambitious are grounded. They are quite aware of the physics that is missing, in not being able to predict that corrosion fatigue failure, that fatigue interaction, that flutter induced damage event. With so many unknowns, the ones who are honest say, well the digital twin is great when the entire physics is nailed, but we need money to nail the entire physics.  However, the lure of a digital twin, that combines probabilistic algorithms with an 80% understanding of physics, to predict machine performance and failures, caught the upper leadership and drove a culture where the physics need not be completely understood.   The digital thread falls short of the ideal and needs to be further tuned.

Which gets us back to other threads in the society that bind and divide; Can all other societal threads be tuned too. To produce a twang that sounds inclusive