When viewed from just the right position in space, you’d be hard-pressed to think that our home planet is anything but a water world. And in all the ways that count, you’d be right; there’s almost nothing that goes on on dry land that isn’t influenced by the oceans. No matter how far you are away from an ocean, what’s going on there really matters.
But how do we know what’s going on out there? The oceans are trackless voids, after all, and are deeply inhospitable to land mammals such as us. They also have a well-deserved reputation for eating anything that ventures into them at the wrong time and without the proper degree of seafarer’s luck, and they also tend to be places where the resources that run our modern technological society are in short supply.
Gathering data about the oceans is neither cheap nor easy, but it’s critically important to everything from predicting what the weather will be next week to understanding the big picture of what’s going on with the climate. And that requires a fleet of data buoys, outnumbering the largest of the world’s navies and operating around the clock, keeping track of wind, weather, and currents for us.
Data retention is a funny thing. Atmel will gladly tell you that the flash memory in an ATmega32A will retain its data for 100 years at room temperature. Microchip says its EEPROMs will retain data for over 200 years. And yet, humanity has barely had a good grasp on electricity for that long. Heck, the silicon chip itself was only invented in 1958. EEPROMs and flash storage are altogether younger themselves.
How can these manufacturers make such wild claims when there’s no way they could have tested their parts for such long periods of time? Are they just betting on the fact you won’t be around to chastise them in 2216 when your project suddenly fails due to bit rot.
Well, actually, there’s a very scientific answer. Enter the practice of accelerated wear testing.
Once upon a time, when the earliest spy satellites were developed, there wasn’t an easy way to send high-quality image data over the air. The satellites would capture images on film and dump out cartridges back to earth with parachutes that would be recovered by military planes.
It all sounds so archaic, so Rube Goldberg, so 1957. And yet, it’s still a viable method for recovering big globs of data from high altitude missions today. Really, you ask? Oh, yes indeed—why, NASA’s gotten back into the habit just recently!
In medieval Europe, many professions were under the control of guilds. These had a monopoly over that profession in their particular city or state, backed up with all the legal power of the monarch. If you weren’t in the guild you couldn’t practice your craft. Except in a few ossified forms they are a thing of the past, but we have to wonder whether that particular message ever reached Western Canada.
An electoral candidate with an engineering degree who practices what any sane person would call engineering, has been ordered by a judge to cease calling himself an engineer. The heinous crime committed by the candidate, one [David Hilderman], is to not be a member of the guild Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of B.C. We get it that maybe calling a garbage truck driver a waste collection engineer may be stretching it a little, but here in the 21st century we think the Canadian professional body should be ashamed of themselves over this case. Way to encourage people into the engineering profession!
Here at Hackaday, quite a few of us writers are engineers. Stepping outside our normal third person, I, [Jenny List], am among them. My electronic engineering degree may be a little moth-eaten, but I have practiced my craft over several decades without ever being a member of the British IEE. No offence meant to the IEE, but there is very little indeed they have to offer me. If the same is true in Canada to the extent that they have to rely on legal sanctions to protect their membership lists, then we think perhaps the problem is with them rather than Canadian engineers. You have to ask, just how is an engineering graduate who’s not a guild member supposed to describe themselves? Some of us need to know, in case we ever find ourselves on holiday in Canada!
Perhaps the most-cited downside of renewable energy is that wind or sunlight might not always be available when the electrical grid demands it. As they say in the industry, it’s not “dispatchable”. A large enough grid can mitigate this somewhat by moving energy long distances or by using various existing storage methods like pumped storage, but for the time being some amount of dispatchable power generation like nuclear, fossil, or hydro power is often needed to backstop the fundamental nature of nature. As prices for wind and solar drop precipitously, though, the economics of finding other grid storage solutions get better. While the current focus is almost exclusively dedicated to batteries, another way of solving these problems may be using renewables to generate hydrogen both as a fuel and as a means of grid storage. Continue reading “Renewable Energy: Beyond Electricity”→
Although the concept of nuclear fission is a simple and straightforward one, the many choices for fuel types, fuel design, reactor configurations, coolant types, neutron moderator or reflector types, etc. make that nuclear fission reactors have blossomed into a wide range of reactor designs, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. The story of the pebble bed reactor (PBR) is among the most interesting here, with its development winding its way from the US Manhattan Project over the Atlantic to Germany’s nuclear power industry during the 1960s, before finding a welcoming home in China’s rapidly growing nuclear power industry.
As a reactor design, PBRs do not use fuel rods like most other nuclear reactors, but rather spherical fuel elements (‘pebbles’) that are inserted at the top of the reactor vessel and extracted at the bottom, allowing for continuous refueling, while helium acts as coolant. With a strong negative temperature coefficient, the design should be extremely safe, while providing high-temperature steam that can be used for applications that otherwise require a coal boiler or gas turbine.
With China recently having put its twin-PBR HTR-PM plant into commercial operation, why is it that it was not the US, Germany or South Africa to first commercialize PBRs, but relative newcomer China?
Although spying is a time-honored tradition, the sheer scope of it reached a fever pitch during the Cold War, when everyone was spying on everyone, and conceivably for both sides at the same time. In an era where both McCarthyism and the character of James Bond enjoyed strong popularity, it should come as no surprise that a project of geopolitical importance like the development of the world’s first supersonic airliner would come amidst espionage, as well as accusations thereof. This is the topic of a documentary that recently aired on Channel 4 in the UK called Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, yet what is the evidence that the Soviet Tu-144 truly was just a Concorde clone, a derogatory nicknamed ‘Concordski’?
At the time that the Concorde was being developed, there wasn’t just the competition from the Tu-144 team, but also the Boeing 2702 (pictured) and Lockheed L-2000, with the latter two ultimately being cancelled. Throughout development, all teams converged on a similar design, with a delta wing and similar overall shape. Differences included the drooping nose (absent on Boeing 2707-300) and use of canards (present on Tu-144 and 2707-200), and wildly different engines, with the production Tu-144S requiring an afterburner on its Kuznetsov NK-144A engines just like the Concorde, before the revised Tu-144D removing the need for afterburners with the Koliesov RD36-51 engines.
Although generally classified as a ‘failure’, the Tu-144’s biggest issues appear to have been due to the pressure on the development team from Soviet leadership. Once the biggest issues were being fixed (Tu-144D) it saw continued use for cargo use and even flying missions for NASA (Tu-144LL) until 1999. Although Soviet spies were definitely caught with Concorde blueprints, the practical use of these for the already overburdened Tu-144 development team in terms of reverse-engineering and applying it to the Tu-144’s design would be limited at best, which would seem to be reflected in the final results.
Meanwhile, although supersonic airliners haven’t been flying since the Concorde retired in 2003, the Lockheed Martin X-59 Quesst supersonic airplane that is being built for NASA looks set to fix the sonic boom and fuel usage issues that hampered supersonic flight. After the L-2000 lost to Boeing so many decades ago, it might be Lockheed that has the last laugh in the race towards supersonic flight for airliners.
(Top image: Tu-144 with distinctive droop nose at the MAKS-2007 exhibition)
