Category: Engineering

By Anupum Pant

Molasses is a thick dark liquid that is obtained while refining of sugarcane into sugar. It can be fermented to produce rum and ethanol, and is also a key component in the manufacturing of munitions. Now who would have thought that something so sweet, before having put into ammo, could actually be deadly.

Just after the Redsox had won the world series in the year 1918, and Boston was full of energy, something unexpected happened.

It was January 15th 1919, the weather was pleasant and there wasn’t any snow. On Copp’s hill a massive steel tank 240 feet in diameter and 50 feet in height had been filled with fresh molasses which would later be used for what it was used – making rum and ammo.

At 12:30PM a loud roar was heard. It was the sound of that tank exploding. 2.3 million tonnes of molasses, which was chilled before had expanded and exploded the tank. The tank too probably wasn’t very well built. According to researchers, the steel used to make it had a bit too much manganese in it and the walls were just too thin to hold that much molasses.

A 50 foot wave crushed everything in its way. It destroyed about 2 city blocks of everything. 21 victims stuck in there got crushed and suffocated.

more [onenewengland]

 

By Anupum Pant

Did you know? You can actually go to Amazon right now and buy a potato clock for just $4. The science experiment kit includes electrodes, wires and a digital clock with all the instructions you’ll need to assemble it. Of course the kit doesn’t include potatoes. You’ll have to get them separately.

Instead of using batteries to power the digital clock, this little science kit allows you to use two potatoes. On two good potaotes this clock will work for about two months, by that time your potatoes will start growing shoots too. When the potatoes become dry, your clock stops. Then you replace the potatoes. Here’s how it works.

By Anupum Pant

Remember the gravity light I told you about a few months ago? Well, now it has a tough competition in the market. Although I still think gravity light is slightly better than this one, this one still is a very innovative utility that works pretty well in real life.

There are too many places things like these are needed and too less of these innovative pieces of technology that people have been able to make really work. This is one of those few.

I’m talking about a light, a table lamp of sorts, that runs on just on water + salt. Instead, a glass full of seawater works just fine too. They call it SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting). It’s one great thing for the 1 billion people out there who have no access to electricity.

It works because it uses a galvanic cell (with electrodes inside) and no electrolyte. That salty water you put in is the electrolyte. One pour of salty water gives out 8 hours of light. It can run for 8 hours every day for about 6 months. It has nothing burning inside of it that might cause a leakage and then a fire, just your average LED lights.

What’s more?

The contraption is so designed, that while giving you light, it can also charge your phones. However, not a very thoughtful facility to put into something that will be tested among the poor who don’t have access to electricity, forget smartphones.

By Anupum Pant

As sneaky as the name sounds, sneakey in reality too is a very sneaky piece of software designed by computer scientists at UC San Diego which can use a picture, taken from about 200 feet away, of your keys and create identical keys.

So, the next time you are sitting at some cafe’s table with your keys placed on the table, you might want to put them in your pocket.

[More]

By Anupum Pant

Inherently, the telegraph system had a short coming. Messages had to be transcribed into text and the then the messages ultimately had to be delivered by hand. And like any form of communication, a time had come for telegraph too. It was no longer fast enough.

Then in big cities like London, Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Chicago, and Saint Louis a new system of sending across messages started to develop, somewhere in the 1890s. This was the pneumatic tube mail.

The system consisted a network of several miles of subterranean pipelines which were big enough to carry a cylindrical box  full of physical messages across the city. The canisters could travel at about 35 miles per hour with the help of compressed air. It was fast. But then it was an expensive way of communication too.

Nevertheless, it had become a full blown emergency system to carry mail in the aforementioned large cities. This sounded like medivial sci-fi or something taken off a cartoon series. I had no idea these things were real, until today.

In fact, the system was pretty successful. It was used in New York till even the 50s. In Paris the system was used until the 80s!

For further reading – [Source 1] [Source 2]

Even today, much advanced cousins of this system are being used in a wide range of workplaces like hospitals, supermarkets and banks.

Hospital installations are not just pipes from A to B, but networks with junctions and computer-controlled switches. Some are vast: Stanford Hospital in California has 124 stations…

The major advantage of using these in a hospital for instance, is that the canisters, besides just physical letters, can also carry various other objects like blood samples,  specimens, medicines etc. Following is a video explaining the Stanford hospital’s pneumatic mail system…

Thanks to the relatively new developments in extreme sports videography, we can have a first person view of these canisters while they are travelling through one of these tubes.

By Anupum Pant

Diesel locomotives have diesel engines, of course. But the overlooked fact about these locomotives is that the diesel engines in them aren’t exactly there to power the wheels. Instead, the diesel engine turns an electric generator with a constant speed and the electricity produced is used to power traction motors. So, in reality these locomotives have hybrid engines, not exactly diesel.

The reason for this is pretty straight forward. The massive diesel engines of a diesel locomotives can only turn at slow RPM. So slow that about 1000 RPM is the red line for these engines. That means to keep producing the maximum torque and horsepower and reach high speeds, in a hypothetical engine like that one, which had to turn wheels directly, there’d have to be about 30+ gears.

30+ gears would make the gearbox massive. And something that could take thousands of units of horsepower would make it a very inefficient one. Hence, hybrid engines…

source [HowStuffWorks]

By Anupum Pant

Nuclear power plants need have a massive intake of water to cool down their scorching hot interiors like fuel rods and turbines. So, they are preferably built near the coast where water can be sucked up from the sea in big quantities.

The intake valves located at the coast create a suction that can make tiny and simple, yet menacing creatures like jellyfish and sea salps can clog the pipeline very easily. Especially when there’s a group of them hanging around the intake.

This has caused several nuclear power plants around the globe to shutdown several times and is often detected when there’s a serious difference in pressure at the intake pipelines.

It happened to a nuclear power plant in San Luis Obispo, California in the year 2012 [Link]

In Japan’s Reactor #3 of the Ooi nuclear powerplant, in 2012 [Link]

An Israeli nuclear power plant at the coast in 2011

Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in southern Sweden in the year 2013.

And probably many others around the world…

For 130 long years we’ve moved on wheels that have air filled inside. These are called pneumatic tires and they come with a lot of hassle just because they need to be filled with air. You have to keep checking them if they have enough air, they can get flat and cause a big headache, even a bad accident sometimes and what not. Some time back people thought they could change this. That was when the NPT or non-pneumatic tires came into picture.

At first they were seen on military hummer vehicles and now are slowly becoming mainstream. Michelin now offers a tire called tweel that can be used for slow moving vehicles like those used in agriculture. They need not make sharp and fast turns and don’t care much about speed. So Tweel works.

Hankook however started to dream of NPT tires for vehicles on the road. A concept of their tire from some time back looked like this.

Hankook has apparently found a way to make their manufacturing process scalable. That means there’ll be lesser steps involved in their manufacturing and that signals these tires could soon come to road.23

By Anupum Pant

The host of this channel called “OskarPuzzle” has created a toy, which is not exactly a toy but an engineering marvel. This amazing contraption is a gear reduction device which can achieve a whopping 1:11 million gearing ration in an extremely compact package.

To be exact the ratio achieved here is exactly 11373076:1 – slightly more than what is advertised. He calls it extreme gear reduction and achieves it using basically 3 stages:

The first stage has two sets of planetary gears with a reduction of 24 : 1 and 25 : 1, respectively.
Second one has two subtractions, 26×26-25×27=1 and 25×25-24×26=1, respectively.
And the third is also a subtraction, namely (25×26+1×25)-(24×27+1×26)=1.

Watch the video here where he explains what he has done…

By Anupum Pant

Flathead screwdrivers are probably the worst kind of screwdrivers, it’s very easy to hurt yourself with them and their design is flawed because they slip very easily. In fact, that is how the square shaped screws intended to be driven by a Robertson screwdriver were invented when Peter L Robertson cut his hand while using a flathead screwdriver.

While this one is arguably the best screwdriver design, it was not and still is not very popular across the world, besides Canada, where Robertson lived

By Anupum Pant

Momofuku Ando, a Japanese entrepreneur saw a huge queue of people waiting out in the cold to get ramen and had this epiphany to invent instant noodles and said

“Peace will come to the world when people will have enough to eat.”

By Anupum Pant

In a fluid (air in this case), when there is a blunt object obstructing the flow, there is a beautiful and dangerous pattern of turbulence created behind the blunt object. It’s called the Von Karman vortex street. And it has been considered a problem in civil engineering because it has caused failure of many designs of bridges and high-rises.

But a company from Spain, vortex bladeless has vowed to utilize this effect to create a technology for a more efficient production of wind energy than the traditional windmill.

Engineers at Vortex Bladeless have designed a turbine to take advantage of this effect. The design consists of a thin, cone-shaped turbine which is made of carbon fiber. It has a motor at the bottom instead of the top (like traditional turbines) to improve sturdiness.

By Anupum Pant

A few animal rescuers found a turtle in Turkey whose beak was totally damaged by some boat’s propeller. The turtle seemed lifeless. But those good people fed it and saved it.

A turtle like this one, with no working beak, who has to be fed can’t be sent back to the wild just like that. It would die. So it was given a brand new 3D printed beak!

A company called BTech innovations used titanium and CT scans of the turtle’s beak area to create a personalized beak for it. It was then surgically attached to its face. And was then sent out to the wild.