Category: Engineering

Origami the Great

By Anupum Pant

There’s much more to origami than you must have thought. Origami has contributed so much to engineering that it would to tough for me to enumerate all of its practical applications here.

It has been used to determine the best way to flatten an airbag – origami played a part in developing the algorithm for it. Self assembling robots coming from researchers at MIT and harvard were inspired by origami too. Here’s how they work.

Now, in another fantastic engineering application where an object was too huge to fit into a rocket, mirrors of the James webb space telescope have been designed to fold into a much smaller package.

Besides that origami has greatly contributed to architecture, nano-devices and retinal implants.


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Solar Power For Humanity

By Anupum Pant

This is a solar collector developed by the engineers at IBM which you could call a concentrated solar collector. It consists of a huge mirror for concentrating sun onto a semiconductor chip and can convert it to electricity. Of course solar panels do the same, but this one can sustain the deathray and make an extremely high power density source. So much that if 2% of the sahara gets covered by this device, it could power the whole humanity (2% of sahara BTW is 188,000 km²).

Also, the device produces intense heat which can melt the semiconductor chip. So it has to be cooled. The water which is used to cool it takes away the heat and this energy is used to desalinate water. And that’s just the by-product of this awesome device.

A Material That Does not Burn Even When it is Red Hot

By Anupum Pant

HRSI tiles are an amazing feat of engineering. HRSI, or High-temperature Reusable Surface Insulation tiles are pieces of ceramic made from extremely pure form of silica and is about 94% air – which is also the reason it is very light, can weigh as less as 9 pounds per cubic foot. But that’s not what the most amazing part about this material.

These tiles dissipate heat extremely quickly. Also, they don’t expand or contract a lot on heating and cooling. So, even if a red hot tile is quenched in water, it doesn’t get damaged. The best part is you can pick these tiles up with your bare hands even after they are freshly out of a 2300 degree F furnace. Imagine picking up red hot ceramic tiles without burning your hand.

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600 Miles Per Hour Tape

By Anupum Pant

The next time you are flying to your home town, you look out of the plane window only to find a flaw in the wing that has been repaired using a tape, do not panic. Patches of engine housing and other tiny external flaws are often corrected using a tape – also known as the speed tape.

The speed tape (more expensive than your normal scotch tape), or the 600 miles per hour tape, is a specially designed adhesive tape that can be used to correct minor aerodynamic (dents, dings etc.) flaws on the body of a plane. It of course is used only for a quick temporary correction, which is often replaced by permanent corrections. Airliners use it regularly. In fact it is also legal because FAA allows high speed tape as a temporary patch for punctures, scrapes, or surface damage.

The tape is made up of Aluminium and is resistant to water, solvents, and flames. It also reflect heat and expands with the body of the plane for a wide range of temperatures. It is applied to a clean surface and is so strong that it doesn’t come off till it is removed manually. However it should not be used as a fastener to stick loose parts. Neither should it be used in line with the engine inlet.

[Source]

The Oxygen Stealing Material

By Anupum Pant

If you rely on and make your judgement on just the editorial titles being passed around on the internet, then you got to look more carefully. A few days back, when a few researchers from Denmark announced that they had developed a material, a tiny volume of which could store huge amounts of oxygen, the whole internet saw a headline floating around that said something like:

A new material, just a spoonful of which can suck up oxygen of the whole room.

That sounds like a material which every serial killer on the planet would  be waiting to get their hands on. However, the real story is quite different, from what the headlines make it look. Which is also not to say that the invention is any less remarkable.

Think about it like this – A single spoonful of this material (more like a bucket actually) sure has enough space to store the amount of oxygen that normally is available in a single room. But, unlike what headlines tell you, it can’t spontaneously pull all the oxygen from the whole room in a few seconds.

Since a tiny volume  of it can hold so much oxygen, this new material, made by tinkering of the structure of cobalt, will probably, in the near future, be a boon for patients who have to lug around heavy tanks of oxygen with them. Deep sea divers will benefit from it too, not serial killers. The video explains.

A Scientist’s Way of Making Super-Strong iPhone Cases

By Anupum Pant

Bulk Metallic Glasses (BMGs) A.K.A Amorphous metals, give you the goodness of both metals and glasses. They literally are glasses made out of metal. Unlike the most crystalline metals, BMGs are made by cooling certain liquid metals very quickly to lock the disordered glassy structure in place. They aren’t crystalline like your everyday metals and instead have a structure like that of glasses – disordered.

Some of these BMGs have amazing properties. Like super high hardness, about 3 times the hardness of steel is one of the most alluring properties they have.

They’ve been around since the 60s, and mass producing them has always been tough. Until now, BMGs were never used for something as ordinary as a smartphone case. But the recent innovation in manufacturing coming from a Materials scientist at Yale will probably soon bring to the market these new iPhone covers that’d be 50 times harder than plastic, or 10 times harder than Aluminium, and almost three times the hardness of steel.

A Simple and Elegant Cloaking Device

By Anupum Pant

In the year 2011, UTD NanoTech unveiled their carbon nanotube invisibility cloak, making us move one more step closer to realizing a piece of magical cloth which fictional characters often use to turn themselves invisible. And then there was a 3D printed invisibility cloak too.

A few researchers at the University of Rochester have now created their own elegant version of an invisibility cloak. It’s, in principle, a fairly simple optical device which uses just four lenses to cloak objects behind it, keeping the image behind it still visible.

In fact, whatever it does, it does it in 3 dimensions. That means, the viewer looking through the device can actually pan to change the viewing angle and can still see the image of the background, undistorted, as if there were no lenses in between, in real-time. And it is probably the first ever cloaking device to be able to do that.

The device has a blind spot (sort of). In a way that It doesn’t cloak anything that lies in the axis of the lens system. The cloaking area is in the shape of a dough nut. Any part of the object that accidentally enters the axis area becomes visible and conceals the background. The device is simple and cheap enough to be easily scaled to cover greater area, as long as lenses of that size can be made. The video explains it better.

via [Quarks to Quasars]

Shot Towers

By Anupum Pant

The way of making lead musket balls before 1782 involved a lengthy process. And if you had a huge army, then you were in for a massive task. To make each ball:

  • A chunk of lead was melted in a crucible
  • Poured into a mould
  • It was let to stand to solidify
  • The mould was broken
  • Final finishing of each ball was done
  • and each ball was checked for roundness by rolling it on an inclined plane

Then everything changed in the year 1782, when a plumber from Bristol William Watts, got this seemingly simple idea – Drop molten lead from a long tower and let the surface tension do the work.

He got this idea by observing raindrops, which formed perfect spheres while they were free-falling. Before telling anyone about it, he tried implementing his idea. He dropped molten lead into a bath of water from the tower of his local church. It worked perfectly.

He did a couple of other experiments at home and finally patented his idea by the end of the same year. It wasn’t long until shot towers started sprouting all over the world. William made a good fortune out of this.

A shot tower is a long hollow building, like a light house, which has the machinery to melt lead at the top point. The molten lead is dropped into the long hollow shaft through sieves, and the bottom part of the building has a bath of water to catch lead balls. The free falling lead turns into a sphere due to surface tension and solidifies in air due to flowing air. After shots are made, they are lifted from the water and checked for roundness by making them roll on an inclined plane. Defective ones are sent back to the top.

The tallest shot tower ever built was 263 meters long and was constructed in the year 1882. It still stands in the Melbourne suburb of Clifton Hill in Australia. There are several others around the world which are still standing. While many others have either been destroyed by men or nature.

via [PSSA]

Reproducing Sound From a Video of Leafs

By Anupum Pant

Sound is a series of compressions and rarefactions travelling through a medium. It is actually a physical entity. When sound moves, physical object, like the molecules of air move. So, when sound hits an object, it makes the object move.

But the movements a normal volume sound can produce in an object are really very tiny. Most times the naked eye sees no difference. However if the tiny movements can be sensed by a very sensitive algorithm by processing data from a video of that object, the sound can probably be reproduced to some extent.

A few researchers at MIT did just that. Now they’ve been able to set up an algorithm that can extract data from the video of a plant, which is making tiny movements due to the sound around, and can reproduce the sound to certain extent. They can do the same with almost any other light weight object, like a bag of chips maybe.

Plastic Material Out of Banana Peel

By Anupum Pant

Banana peel is the most useless part of a banana, or is it? At least, not for young Elif Bilgin from Turkey. Elif, a 16-year-old girl from Istanbul, Turkey saw something useful in something as ordinary as a banana peel and sought to fight petroleum-based pollution by creating a bio-material from it which could probably be used as a replacement for plastic.

Experimenting for more than 2 years, and after numerous failed attempts, Elif was able to develop a simplified method involving very little equipment to create a new plastic from banana peel. She dreams that this bio-plastic will completely replace petroleum-based plastic some day and will probably used to make cosmetic prosthesis and in the insulation of cables.

Liquid Nitrogen Experiments

By Anupum Pant

Short of time and keeping up with a busy schedule, I looked around for something interesting to learn today and I found this cool video of very interesting experiments that were done with liquid Nitrogen on ScienceDump. There are 11 such experiments that are shown in the video…

The first one is a Liquid Nitrogen explosion, something like this professor did some time back. To demonstrate his students how Liquid Nitrogen expanded, he blew up a container of Liquid nitrogen to toss 1,500 ping-pong balls. [Video]

Is an Aeolipile, or a rocket styled jet engine made using liquid nitrogen A.K.A Hero engine. Liquid nitrogen heats up inside a container, expands and comes out of tiny orifices to create a jet that makes the container spin. A simpler version of it can be done using a ping pong ball (again). [Video]

The third one simply is a demonstration of what happens when you eat a biscuit dipped in Liquid Nitrogen.

Fourth one again is something you’ll have to see to get really impressed by what some solids at very low temperatures can do. A nice demonstration of something similar is done on this video. [Video]

Fifth one! Oh, the Leidenfrost effect. We’ve talked enough about it already. [Here]

Others are all pretty interesting too. The eight one probably takes the cake – brings back a dead creature to life, or does it…. But I won’t spoil them for you. Watch the video now…

It’s So Easy To Make A Speaker At Home!

By Anupum Pant

While doing a random experiment with the ordinary motor, a youtuber Andy Elliott who runs the channel mist8k (known for his awesome videos) mistakenly touched the 3.5 mm jack of a speaker cable to the motor’s wires.

This resulted in something very interesting. The sound being transmitted through the cable started coming from the motor. And consequently, he invented the very basic speaker. Then he made a video of him explaining how to make a speaker at home using just a copper wire, magnet, tape, jacks and a disposable plastic cup.

I first saw this on Gizmodo and I thought it deserved a mention in the engineering section of this blog. I can’t wait to try it myself and probably improve the “very basic speaker” to make a nice iPod dock in the future…

Here is what he does –

  • Uncoils a copper wire from a component of an old PC, turns it into a small circular coil of the size of the circular magnet and then tapes it to the back of a disposable plastic cup.
  • Then, makes a larger coil by winding it around a bottle cap and tapes it on top of the smaller coil.
  • Connects one end of the larger coil to the tip of the 3.5 mm jack and the other end of the coil to the base of the jack. The other end of this wire having the 3.5 mm jack is also a 3.5 mm jack, which goes into the computer’s (or any player’s) speaker plug.
  • Places a strong neodymium magnet on top of the coils and plays the music. That’s it!

The computer turns the sound signal into an electric current. This current flows into the jack and then into the coil. Thus, the coil produces a magnetic field of its own. This varying magnetic field coupled with the static magnetic field of the neodymium magnet makes the coil move. Which in turn moves the back of the cup (as it’s taped on it) and makes the air vibrate. As a result, sound is created.

Here’s the video where he teaches how to do it…

A Fan With No Blades

By Anupum Pant

Fans have always had blades which chop up the air and send a turbulent gush towards you. Also, “you can’t put your head or hand through the traditional fan”. Although these things aren’t big problems that the device says it’d solve, I still like how different and innovative this thing is. Certainly worthy of sharing in my engineering section…

This one, one of the many amazing things invented by sir James Dyson, is a blade-less fan. Or as the man likes to call his invention – an air multiplier. As the name suggests, the device has no blades and yet it is capable of shooting out a steady stream of air on your face.

It’s amazing how it works. Watch Sir James Dyson himself explain it to you.

A Man-Made Leaf

By Anupum Pant

Julian Melchiorri, a graduate student from Royal College of art, claims to have fabricated the first ever man-made biological leaf which absorbs water & carbon dioxide, just like a leaf does, and produces oxygen.

It looks like a promising first step towards enabling longer distance space travel – in a way that the artificial leaf made by him could be used to supply oxygen in micro-gravity, in which terrestrial plants have a hard time growing.

The artificial leaf he made for his project involves extracted chloroplasts from plant cells laid on a matrix of silk protein.

The “first man-made biological leaf” could enable humans to colonise space from Dezeen on Vimeo.

Coldest Spot in The Universe

By Anupum Pant

Where do you think is the coldest spot in the universe. Like many would have guessed, somewhere in the deepest places in space, the temperature would be coldest than anything else. After all, space being so massive, the probability that happening is so high outside of Earth. Probably the Boomerang Nebula is the coldest. At least that is what Google says:

At a positively frigid one Kelvin (that equates to –458 degrees Fahrenheit or –272 degrees Celsius), the Boomerang Nebula in the constellation Centaurus is officially the coldest known place in the entire Universe. It’s even colder than the background temperature of space!

No!

Behold, the coldest temperature ever recorded anywhere in the universe is in a laboratory, here on Earth – at MIT! It is extremely close to what the coldest temperature can be theoretically.

They call it the Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). and the temperature reached has held a record since the year 2003 and in numbers, it is 10 trillionths of a degree F above absolute zero.

And the process ironically involves heating up to 700 degrees celsius to obtain a lots of free sodium atoms. Then, ironically again, they are hit with a laser to make them move lesser. And finally a special kind of evaporative cooling is done to reach nano-kelvin levels. That is how, extremely cold temperatures are reached.