Category Archives: Engineering

Internet Underwater Fiber

Laying undersea cable systems is a monumental process. After surveying landing sites, studying seabed geology, and assessing risks, engineers plot a route. A company like Corning delivers strands of fiber-optic glass to a manufacturer say, Tyco Telecommunications which encases the fiber in metal. Then gigantic spools of cable, repeaters that transmit signals long distances, and other gear are loaded on cable-laying vessels. For months, the ships lower the cables thousands of feet to the seabed. In congested spots, engineers use robots to dig trenches for the cable that protect it from wayward anchors and fishing nets. Then crews haul the cable ends above water and connect them to land-based stations.
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Engineering experts say the Taiwan incident should persuade all operators to do more to prepare for quakes. It’s not good enough if you have a variety of routes but then bring them into shore at the same location–especially if, as in the Taiwan case, they’re crossing a fault line right there.
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But there’s another lesson: The global telecom network really is quite resilient, even in the face of such a crippling blow. Within 12 hours of the undersea rock slides, at least partial service had been restored to most of the affected networks. This was done by rerouting traffic via land and sea through Europe to the U.S.

2007 Draper Prize to Berners-Lee

Timothy J. Berners-Lee will receive the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize for Engineering from the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for developing the World Wide Web.

Also, Yuan-Cheng “Bert” Fung will receive the Fritz J. and Dolores H. Russ Prize — a $500,000 biennial award (since 1999) recognizing engineering achievement that significantly improves the human condition — “for the characterization and modeling of human tissue mechanics and function leading to prevention and mitigation of trauma.”

Timothy J. Berners-Lee imaginatively combined ideas to create the World Wide Web, an extraordinary innovation that is rapidly transforming the way people store, access, and share information around the globe. Despite its short existence, the Web has contributed greatly to intellectual development and plays an important role in health care, environmental protection, commerce, banking, education, crime prevention, and the global dissemination of information.
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Boiling Water in Space

Bizarre Boiling, NASA:

The next time you’re watching a pot of water boil, perhaps for coffee or a cup of soup, pause for a moment and consider: what would this look like in space? Would the turbulent bubbles rise or fall? And how big would they be? Would the liquid stay in the pan at all?

Until a few years ago, nobody knew. Indeed, physicists have trouble understanding the complex behavior of boiling fluids here on Earth. Perhaps boiling in space would prove even more baffling…. It’s an important question because boiling happens not only in coffee pots, but also in power plants and spacecraft cooling systems. Engineers need to know how boiling works.

I had trouble seeing what was happening in the first video. Try this video first.

Because a smaller volume of water is being heated, it comes to a boil much more quickly. As bubbles of vapor form, though, they don’t shoot to the surface — they coalesce into a giant bubble that wobbles around within the liquid.

Engineers Week Ideas

Ideas for engineers to use during engineering week, from the Engineering Education Service Center (on the USA engineering week):

Engineers week is a unique time that takes place every February during Presidents week. 40,000 engineers go into classrooms to promote the profession and give students a better understanding of engineering. This is our chance to show the world that engineering is an exciting career and that engineers really can do anything!

If you know of other similar activities in other countries please add a comment.

Lean Enterprise Value Student Publication Prize

I received an email on the Lean Enterprise Value Student Publication Prize, I don’t see the announcement online, so I’ll include the information I was sent below. For more information on lean thinking see our Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog: lean manufacturing posts.

Lean Enterprise Value Foundation, Inc. Student Publication Prize Call for Submissions

The Prize will consist of $500 and an engraved memento to be presented at the Lean Aerospace Initiative Plenary Conference in Cambridge, Maryland on April 17–19, 2007

Eligibility
Author: Any student at a US university. There may be co-authors and co-researchers but the entrant should be the principal author.
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Personal Water Wheel Power

Personal Water Wheel

Scots inventor cracks centuries-old puzzle

Ian Gilmartin, 60, has invented a mini water wheel capable of supplying enough electricity to power a house – for free. The contraption is designed to be used in small rivers or streams – ideal for potentially thousands of homes across Britain. It is the first off-the-shelf water-wheel system that can generate a good supply of electricity from as little as an eight-inch water fall.
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The water wheel produces one to two kilowatts of power and generates at least 24kw hours of sustainable green energy in a day – just under the average household’s daily consumption of about 28kw hours. It will cost some Â£2,000 to fully install – and pay for itself inside two years.
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A “high head”, such as a traditional water wheel, is large, expensive and needs civil engineering. But with low heads of under 18 inches, no-one had invented a method of successfully recovering the energy generated – until now. A conventional water wheel allows the water to escape prematurely as the wheel rotates, but the Beck Mickle hydro generator contains the water for the full drop of the device, converting about 70 per cent of the energy into electricity.

Related: Cheap energy hope from waterwheel (photo from BBC) “Mr Gilmartin is an electrician by trade, but does not own a TV and has never lived in a house with electricity.” – Electricity Savings – Engineers Save Energy – Wind Power – Safe Water Through Play

Northwest FIRST Robotics Competition

photo of FIRST robots competition

The Pacific Northwest FIRST Robotics Competition challenges teams of young people and their mentors to solve a common problem in a six-week timeframe using a standard “kit of parts” and a common set of rules.

Newport High students look to future with robotics venture by Terry Dillman:

Founded in 1989 to “inspire young people’s interest and participation in science and technology,” the not-for-profit, New Hampshire-based FIRST designs “accessible, innovative programs” to encourage students to pursue education and career opportunities in science, technology, engineering, and math, while simultaneously building self-confidence, knowledge, and life skills.
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Teams build their robots using the parts kit for the basics, and procuring other parts as needed to augment the kit and make the robot do what’s required in competition.

Mixing Memory: Coolest Experiment

Coolest… Experiment… Ever

In short, change blindness is an issue of attention and representation. If we fail to represent an object in a scene either before or after a change, then we won’t notice the change, and we tend not to represent objects that aren’t important to the meaning of what we’re looking at, because we’re just not paying attention to them (though paying attention to them doesn’t guarantee representation).
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At this point, you’re thinking, “This is insane! I would notice if the stranger I was talking to suddenly looked like a completely different person!” I thought the same thing, and we’re not alone. In fact, this disbelief is so common that it has its own name: change blindness blindness.

Robot Heading for Antarctic Dive

Robot heading for Antarctic dive, BBC News:

Isis, the UK’s first deep-diving remotely operated vehicle (ROV), will be combing the sea-bed in the region in its inaugural science mission. Researchers hope to uncover more about the effects of glaciers on the ocean floor, and also find out about the animals that inhabit these waters. The mission begins in mid-January and will last for about three weeks. While the scientists and engineers begin their long journey to the Antarctic at the start of January, Isis left the UK shores in November and has only just arrived at its destination.
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Ten kilometres of cable connect it to its “mother ship”, allowing scientists to control the vehicle and receive the data it collects in real-time. On the ROV, Mr Mason said, were lights, cameras to produce high-quality video and still pictures, sonars for acoustic navigation and imaging, and two remotely controlled manipulator arms to collect samples or place scientific instruments on the sea-bed.
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“We are hoping to see a whole bunch of large creatures such as star fish, sea cucumbers, sea fans, sea pens, etc, that inhabit the deep shelf slope and abyssal depths.” He added: “Essentially no-one has explored Antarctica using a ROV at these depths.”

Delaying the Flow of Light on a Silicon Chip

IBM Milestone Demonstrates Optical Device to Advance Computer Performance

IBM today announced its researchers have built a device capable of delaying the flow of light on a silicon chip, a requirement to one day allow computers to use optical communications to achieve better performance.
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“Today’s more powerful microprocessors are capable of performing much more work if we can only find a way to increase the flow of information within a computer,” said Dr. T.C. Chen, vice president of Science and Technology for IBM Research. “As more and more data is capable of being processed on a chip, we believe optical communications is the way to eliminate these bottlenecks. As a result, the focus in high-performance computing is shifting from improvements in computation to those in communication within the system.”

Additional information on silicon nanophotonics