Engineering

562 Articles

To See Within: Detecting X-Rays

April 23, 2025 by 20 Comments

It’s amazing how quickly medical science made radiography one of its main diagnostic tools. Medicine had barely emerged from its Dark Age of bloodletting and the four humours when X-rays were discovered, and the realization that the internal structure of our bodies could cast shadows of this mysterious “X-Light” opened up diagnostic possibilities that went far beyond the educated guesswork and exploratory surgery doctors had relied on for centuries.

The problem is, X-rays are one of those things that you can’t see, feel, or smell, at least mostly; X-rays cause visible artifacts in some people’s eyes, and the pencil-thin beam of a CT scanner can create a distinct smell of ozone when it passes through the nasal cavity — ask me how I know. But to be diagnostically useful, the varying intensities created by X-rays passing through living tissue need to be translated into an image. We’ve already looked at how X-rays are produced, so now it’s time to take a look at how X-rays are detected and turned into medical miracles.

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Deep Drawing With Ultrasonics

March 9, 2025 by 17 Comments

Small cylindrical parts are often formed through deep drawing — a process by which a punch forms the finished piece from a flat sheet of metal using a forming die. If it sounds like that stresses the metal, it does. But researchers at Fraunhofer have found a way to reduce friction protecting both the material and the tools that do the forming. The process — known as VibroDraw — uses ultrasonic vibrations at around 500 Hz.

Researchers claim a 20% reduction in friction now, and it may be possible to go even further. With less friction, it is possible to do a deeper draw in a single stage. It also creates less heat which is good for tool life and prevents overheating lubricant. The process has a patent if you want more details. You might need to brush up on your German, though. Unsurprisingly, the vibrations are from a piezoelectric transducer.

Copper is soft enough to use 3D printed dies. We don’t know if this technique would help with that or not. Then there’s hydroforming. If you have any results using ultrasonics with these or any other techniques, be sure to let us know.

Big Chemistry: Glass

March 5, 2025 by 12 Comments

Humans have been chemically modifying their world for far longer than you might think. Long before they had the slightest idea of what was happening chemically, they were turning clay into bricks, making cement from limestone, and figuring out how to mix metals in just the right proportions to make useful new alloys like bronze. The chemical principles behind all this could wait; there was a world to build, after all.

Among these early feats of chemical happenstance was the discovery that glass could be made from simple sand. The earliest glass, likely accidentally created by a big fire on a sandy surface, probably wasn’t good for much besides decorations. It wouldn’t have taken long to realize that this stuff was fantastically useful, both as a building material and a tool, and that a pinch of this and a little of that could greatly affect its properties. The chemistry of glass has been finely tuned since those early experiments, and the process has been scaled up to incredible proportions, enough to make glass production one of the largest chemical industries in the world today.

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LTA’s Pathfinder 1: The Dawn Of A New Age Of Airships?

March 4, 2025 by 37 Comments

Long before the first airplanes took to the skies, humans had already overcome gravity with the help of airships. Starting with crude hot air balloons, the 18th century saw the development of more practical dirigible airships, including hydrogen gas balloons. On 7 January 1785, French inventor, and pioneer of gas balloon flight Jean-Pierre Blanchard would cross the English Channel in such a hydrogen gas balloon, which took a mere 2.5 hours. Despite the primitive propulsion and steering options available at the time, this provided continued inspiration for new inventors.

With steam engines being too heavy and cumbersome, it wasn’t until the era of internal combustion engines a century later that airships began to develop into practical designs. Until World War 2 it seemed that airships had a bright future ahead of them, but amidst a number of accidents and the rise of practical airplanes, airships found themselves mostly reduced to the not very flashy role of advertising blimps.

Yet despite popular media having declared rigid airships such as the German Zeppelins to be dead and a figment of a historic fevered imagination, new rigid airships are being constructed today, with improvements that would set the hearts of 1930s German and American airship builders aflutter. So what is going on here? Are we about to see these floating giants darken the skies once more?

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Tech In Plain Sight: Magsafe, And How To Roll Your Own

February 25, 2025 by 7 Comments

Apple likes magnets. They started out with magnetic laptop chargers and then graduated to a system that magnetically holds the phone, charges it, and can facilitate communication between the phone and a charger or other device. Even if you are like me and have no Apple devices, you can retrofit other phones to use Magsafe accessories. In fact, with a little work, you can build your own devices. Regardless, the technology is a clever and simple hack, and we are just a little sorry we didn’t think of it.

Terms

Using a magnet to attach a phone isn’t a new idea. But, historically, the phone had either a metal back or an adhesive metal plate attached that would stick to the magnet. This wouldn’t necessarily help with charging, but was perfectly fine for holding the device. The problem is, it is hard to wirelessly charge the phone through the metal.

Magsafe can do several different things. Obviously, it can attach the phone magnetically. However, since it is a ring shape, you can still have a charging coil in the middle of the ring. Better still, the Magsafe system will align the phone and charger with a satisfying click when you put them together.

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The Importance Of Current Balancing With Multi-Wire Power Inputs

February 24, 2025 by 87 Comments

In an ideal world, devoid of pesky details like contact resistance and manufacturing imperfections, you would be able to double the current that can be provided to a device by doubling the number of conductors without altering the device’s circuitry, as each conductor would carry the exact same amount of current as its neighbors. Since we do not actually live inside a simplified physics question’s scenario, multi-wire powering of devices comes with a range of headaches, succinctly summarized in the well-known rule that electricity always seeks the path of least resistance.

As recently shown by NVidia with their newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards, failure to provide current balancing between said different conductors will quickly turn it into a practical physics demonstration of this rule. Initially pinned down as an issue with the new-ish 12VHPWR connector that was supposed to replace the 6-pin and 8-pin PCIe power connectors, it turns out that a lack of current balancing is plaguing NVidia GPUs, with predictably melty results when combined with low safety margins.

So what exactly changed that caused what seems to be a new problem, and why do you want multi-wire, multi-phase current balancing in your life when pumping hundreds of watts through copper wiring inside your PC?

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The “Unbreakable” Beer Glasses Of East Germany

February 17, 2025 by 80 Comments

We like drinking out of glass. In many ways, it’s an ideal material for the job. It’s hard-wearing, and inert in most respects. It doesn’t interact with the beverages you put in it, and it’s easy to clean. The only problem is that it’s rather easy to break. Despite its major weakness, glass still reigns supreme over plastic and metal alternatives.

But what if you could make glassware that didn’t break? Surely, that would be a supreme product that would quickly take over the entire market. As it turns out, an East German glassworks developed just that. Only, the product didn’t survive, and we lumber on with easily-shattered glasses to this day. This is the story of Superfest.

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