Fluid Power Roundtable ’10

Samaroo/Festo: From a pneumatic point of view, there are many engineering tools that engineers can use but people still continue to use rule of thumb instead. If you look at a pneumatic cylinder, for example, there isn’t any significant cost increase up front to move from a size 50 mm to a 63 mm bore cylinder. However, when you look at what it will cost you down the road, then you start to see the costs really add up. From an overall big picture, the machine builder is trying to reduce his costs as much as possible but, at the end of the day, that machine will cost the end-user a lot more to operate.

DE: From an education perspective, do the engineering departments in Canadian universities need to re-introduce fluid power to the curriculum or does the impetus need to come from industry first?

Burton/UofS: There aren’t a lot of universities where student engineers are being taught fluid power. The University of Saskatchewan is one of the few universities in North America that has a full undergraduate course in hydraulics. It’s the most popular elective in our program because students know that this is an applied area that they are going to be able to use when they go out to work. So it’s not a question of declining interest from engineering students; it’s just that many of them never had this type of education to begin with.

Jones/Consolidated: If you take it a step further—to the graduate and PhD level where we need engineers to do the research to provide the new innovation—it’s not going to come if we don’t have an undergraduate program that’s universal across Canada.

Burton/UofS: I agree. A number of years ago, a few people at Sun Hydraulics, through the ASME, tried to convince universities to integrate fluid power into the undergraduate program with some success. The seven universities involved in the Center for Compact and Efficient Fluid Power, for example, are gradually integrating the subject into their undergraduate programs.

It’s still a battle for them though, because they are competing with the traditional core courses, while fluid power is considered a stand-alone, application-type subject. Until universities realize the need for fluid power as an undergraduate subject on the same level as electrical drives, I’m afraid the education of engineers will be restricted to learning on the job.