Piezoelectrics…
Watching yet another video of the Tacoma bridge swaying mercilessly in the wind our mind gets bored. Back and forth as the resonation in the bridge makes it rip itself apart. We consider what’s happening, the force of the swaying, the energy involved. If only we could harvest it…
Tacoma Bridge vs. Resonance
At the 62nd annual meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics in the Minneapolis Convention Centre Professor Yiannis Andreopoulos will reveal a new means of harvesting energy. This new means involves the use of piezoelectrics which are attached to a vibrating object. The vibration causes resonation within and this creates a voltage output. The output is extremely small but has the potential to run small electronic devices and cellphones.
The idea is to place the device onto a car or an aeroplane and allow the wasted energy of vibration to be harnessed and used. While it is very impractical at this point, as it will not allow for the replacement of engines or the like, one can see hope in this. If we had numerous methods of harvesting small amounts of wasted energy then we could combine them all and the energy we would harvest could then start to be enough to make a difference.
At the conference Prof. Andreopoulos will use wind tunnels to show the effectiveness of placement of these devices as he will mount one on the back of a truck and the other on the roof of a car. This will indicate the need for specific use design and could lead to better energy harvesting and efficiency.
Slowly scientists are breaking out of the norm and its usually in times like these that surprises hit us…
Robotic Morphing
Our quad-bot drives deep into the cave in search of life. Tracking its movements with computers and cameras we see a small opening and direct it to the opening. As we get closer to the opening we get that sinking feeling in our stomachs once again. Our quad-bot is not going to fit inside, this has happened once too many times. Why cant we get a robot that can change its shape…
Researchers from iRobot and the University of Chicago have created a robot that uses surface morphing to alter its shape. The idea is a simple one based on basic physics. A material will conform to the forces upon it unless it has enough structural resistance to withstand said force. With this in mind the team created a silicon based surface that contains multiple cellular compartments which contain what they call a jammable slurry. When certain compartments are unjammed they become non-resistive to force and thus those compartments can be morphed.
The morphing is achieved using the displacement of air pressure inside the material through the assistance of an actuator. While the blob is still very much in the early stages of becoming a machine the concept remains promising. They divide the surface into triangular surfaces which allows the formation of any shape given that the area of each triangle approaches zero. This means that this silicon surface may be used to create artificial skin over a robotic sub-structure one day; giving the robot the ability to express facial emotions. This combined with the “Smarthand” brings us one step closer to the future of mechanisation…
Cyborgs are here…
From the future Skynet sends their cyborgs to destroy one man and anyone else in their path. The story is well known and these ultra intelligent robots are incredible pieces of art. One wonders where did they come from, how did they start and what was the driving factor behind investing all the money into research for the creation of these machines…
Bionic Hand
Prof. Yosi Shacham-Diamond from Tel Aviv Universities department of engineering with a team of E.U. scientists have successfully attached a robotic hand to the nerve endings in the stump of a severed arm. Robin af Ekenstam from Sweden is the project’s first human subject. Since the hand has been attached Robin has been able to do complex tasks such as eat and write. He reports that he can once again feel his (robotic) fingers.
This is a massive step forward in terms of robotics and the application abilities are amazing. With steel being potentially stronger than bone we could create a defence force of super humans. The concept is that nerves in the arm after it has been severed remain intact and can be connected to a device with the capabilities to both send and receive impulses. This allows for you to wire a machine directly to the brain.
The “Smarthand” uses a flexible electrode that will last for 20 years once attached and with the use of 40 sensors and 4 electric servo motors the hand allows the brain to individually control the finger joints and allows for sensations to be sent back in just the same way a natural hand does. With the hand being the most complicated limb on the human body we can now expect bionic limbs and other appendages to be made. With research being put now into articifial skin the “Smarthand” can look normal and we can expect even more feeling to be incorporated. Science fiction has become reality…
Carbon Dioxide Catastrophe…
Sitting in another conference being forced to listen about how the world is coming to an end and how global warming is science’s greatest challenge our mind wanders to a time before this hype. It wanders to a time where science was non-biased and people checked the results of research themselves…
Deforestation
When it comes to global warming i personally get very upset and highly agitated. I am not saying that natural climate change does not exist. I am simply tired of all this hype about the world ending and it being man’s fault. When a scientist hears news he sits back and listens and then analyses the data and sees for him or herself whether or not the news is true. My problem is that with global warming the scientists are not being true to themselves. Instead they are pushing their own agenda’s onto the results in order to create this sensationalist hype. If the world was coming to an end and people had correct data to back that up then i would without bias agree.
New research by Wolfgang Knorr shows that the levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have stayed virtually the same since 1850. Although carbon dioxide emission levels have risen from 2 billion tons a year to 35 billion tons a year the airborne and absorbed carbon dioxide balance has been the same. While scientists have been doom-saying that the capacity for terrestrial systems and the oceans to absorb CO2 will diminish with the increase of CO2 emmisions nature has been saying otherwise.
Our forecasts have been wrong about the absorption capacity of nature and this study shows that the so called greenhouse death of the planet is not true at all. Only when scientists realise that physics always tends towards equilibrium and engineers realise that destruction is not an efficient means of energy generation will we see that planet earth is far more advanced than our systems and that we still have a lot to learn before we start sensationalising…
Is the airborne fraction of anthropogenic CO2 emissions increasing? by Wolfgang Knorr. Geophysical Research Letters, VOL. 36, L21710, doi:10.1029/2009GL040613, 2009.
LHC Facts and Figures…
We know that a behemoth of a collider is being repaired. We know it is immense and possibly engineering’s greatest achievement to date. We know it is so powerful that people are worried it will turn earth into a giant black hole. What we don’t know is exactly how big, how powerful, how immense…
LHC
- 26 659m circumference
- 9300 magnets
- 10 080 tonnes of liquid nitrogen cool the magnets to -193.2°C (80 K)
- 60 tonnes of liquid helium will further cool the magnets to -271.3°C (1.9 K)
- Trillions of protons will race around the track 11 245 times a second at full power
- 99.99% the speed of light is the maximum speed of the protons
- 600 million collisions will take place each second
- 7 TeV (terra electron volt) is the maximum energy of the protons
- 14 TeV collisions
- 10-13 atm pressure being ten times less than the pressure on the moon.
- Interplanetary pressures exist inside
- 577 799 727°C (577 800 000K) are estimated collision temperatures
- Few billionth of a second is the picture intervals
- Millionths of a metre is the precision of the particle location
- Data collected will fill around 100 000 dual layer DVD’s a year
All in all this sounds like one powerful machine. No wonder people are afraid of it…
Seatbelt Airbags…
Driving on the freeway on our way to the coast for a long awaited holiday we find ourselves relaxed. Suddenly the car in front brakes and we drive into the back of him at high speed. The airbags in the steering wheel and dashboard deploy. The children in the back seat only have the seatbelt. It reduces impact but ends up breaking their ribs…
This was the challenge facing engineers at Ford a decade ago. In that time they set out to solve the problem by means of airbag implementation in the back seats. The greatest problem was that the standard airbag deploys using hot gas technology and the deployment is rapid. This would potentially kill young children in the back and thus another solution was required.
Srini Sundararajan, the engineer chiefly responsible for the design, decided to combine a seatbelt with an airbag. This allows for storage of the device but also for safety from impact when the child is sleeping and their head is drooping. The next challenge was to make the deployment less hostile and this was achieved using cold gas technology which lessens the deployment force but still allows a deployment in under a tenth of a second.
This technological advancement is one of great value and while the technology is expensive and only a soon to be option in the Ford Explorer we can be certain that it too will become cheaper and a standard on cars within the near future…
Maze…
A historic mathematical puzzle; the maze. See if you can get your way through this one…
Labyrinth
Get yourself to the centre block by following the colour progression order of red, blue and yellow. You may not backtrack on any branch but you may use the same path more than once. You may only change colour direction on the white squares…
Ladder…
How about a puzzle to bring the week to a great ending…
Ladder
If a ladder is leaning against a building and it touches a bow which is flush against the wall of the building. If the box has a height of 64 units and a width of 27 units then calculate the length of the ladder so that it touches the wall, the floor and the box at the same time…
