Tomorrow’s Builders

Posted on September 6, 2011 by engineerzero

Seen on a park sidewalk:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Space Elevator Conference Robots

Posted on August 24, 2011 by engineerzero

The 2011 Space Elevator Conference was held on August 13 in Redmond, Washington at the Microsoft Conference Center. I dropped by to take a few pictures of various types of robots that space elevator advocates hope might someday climb their ribbons in the sky. I wish I had taken notes, then I’d have captions, but anyhow here are the pictures:

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Been a while since I’ve seen one of these

Posted on August 17, 2011 by engineerzero

This is what a ‘calculator’ looked like when I was a kid. Only AFTER I had finished grade school did they come out with pocket calculators.

Back in the 80s, I attended an employee orientation session at Boeing. An engineer-instructor told the story of how back in the 1950s he had entered a room full of engineers working hand-crank calculators for a whole month to produce an airflow simulation graph. Then in the 80s, he entered a room and a gal was sitting at a supercomputer and pressed a key and the screen instantly generated the same kind of graph in multiple colors. He glared at her and she laughed.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Soldering is easy and fun . . . .

Posted on August 5, 2011 by engineerzero

I’ve been putting off a minor soldering project for over a week now. I don’t know why I’m inflating it into something huge. It’s just one more example of my procastination superpower.

Anyhow, rather than do anything constructive, I wrote this:

ODE TO SOLDERING!

Oh joy of doing things!
Oh joy of hardware hacking!
Oh joy of circuit fabrication!

The pieces are arranged
The iron heats
The rosen melts
The circuit is complete

What is creativity
But the combining of elements?
Soldering is creativity
A poetry of components and currents
(With a funny smell).

Oh come, let us to solder!
Oh plug in the iron!
Oh wait for it to heat!
Oh do it already, for crying out loud!

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Crop Circle Maker 1.0

Posted on August 3, 2011 by engineerzero

The red mark indicates how many perimeter-lengths the roller has traveled. The hook is for attaching ropes to pivot around poles.

A crop circle pattern 100 feet in diameter would have a surface area of 7800 square feet. Assuming that 2 sq ft are stamped per second, it would take little over an hour to make such a crop circle using this device.

Of course, complicated patterns would requiring calculations and surveying (not shown). Also, a board might be nice for trimming edges.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

How to go back to the Moon, cheaply

Posted on April 14, 2011 by engineerzero
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

American Soyuz/Delta Heavy Lunar Mission

Posted on April 13, 2011 by engineerzero

As shown at far right in this diagram from wikipedia, the Delta IV Heavy is a US rocket vehicle capable of placing 23,000 kg into low earth orbit.

This happens to be almost one fifth of the payload capacity of the Saturn V Moon Rocket of the 1960s which placed American astronauts on the Moon. So . . . could six Delta Heavy’s do the work of one Saturn V in orbiting the components of a present-day lunar mission?

If so, then we don’t have to develop a new heavy-lift launch vehicle — and as a consequence have to spend tens of billions of dollars over the course of a decade or more — before going back to the Moon. We can use the existing Soyuz design for an American space capsule, and existing Delta Heavy hardware to place lunar mission components into low earth orbit, and it can all happen for a few billion dollars in the next few years.

The main thing is building a new lunar lander module, but that shouldn’t take long. Because if it does, the Chinese will beat us!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

An American Soyuz

Posted on April 12, 2011 by engineerzero

The 50th anniversary of the first human flight into space comes with the United States about to retire the Space Shuttle. This means that the US will no longer have the ability to place humans into space on its own. Instead, American astronauts must hitch a ride aboard the Russian space capsules known as Soyuz.

Speaking as an American, I find this situation to be rather embarrassing. So I thought, why doesn’t the US buy some Soyuzes and place them atop American-made rockets, such as the Delta 4? And since the patents — if there were any — have long expired, couldn’t we reverse-engineer a Soyuz and make our own version? This is what the Chinese did with their Shenzou capsule.

Since this is a proven design, it would be inexpensive to develop and American astronauts could again be riding American spaceships into orbit within a couple years.

We Americans could of course decide that it is too humiliating to admit that other countries can come up with good ideas. So instead, we will spend years and billions of dollars building a new spacecraft that will probably be more expensive and less reliable than a Soyuz-derived design.

And yet, with the money we would save by going with the experience-proven Soyuz design, we could be circumnavigating the Moon again within five years.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Fukushima coolant recirculation with siphon

Posted on April 11, 2011 by engineerzero

This design avoids damage to recirculation pumps from sea water sediment. A gravity siphon is used to draw water out of the building into a pit where sediment is collected into a shipping container.

Water is then pumped from the shipping container into the coolant pump cascade. A filter blocks the passage of sediment from the container to the pumps.

When the shipping container is filled with sediment, it can be swapped by crane with an empty container. A valve in the feed line stops flow during changeout.

(Description and illustrations are simplified, of course.)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Coolant Recirculation System at Fukushima

Posted on April 9, 2011 by engineerzero

They’ve been using sea water to cool the rods, but when the level threatens to overflow the reactor buildings, they’re flushing the water back into the ocean (ref here and here). This is an obvious radioactivity hazard to the environment, so an auxiliary coolant recirculation system is required.

(For simplicity, only one pump cascade is illustrated.)

The small housings contain pumps. A shipping container is used for a sediment trap. When it fills to the top, it can be swapped out and buried at a waste site.

The pump on the right will get a lot of sediment passing through it, and will consequently have a short life. Maybe a filter can be placed in front of it too.

The hose on the right will likely get clogged and have to be swapped. But instead of being buried, perhaps it can be flushed and reused.

The equipment will eventually have to be buried too, as it will become highly radioactive from the sediment, which will have become highly radioactive from association with the fuel rods. Teleoperated robots will be handling a lot of these operations, but in the short-term perhaps the low-tech solution is grappling hooks.

If there’s a significant sediment build-up already, it’s essential to start recirculation and filtering coolant water immediately, even before the coolant pump cascade is in place. Sediment in sea water could potentially erode the casings on the fuel rods, allowing fuel to collect at the base of the cooling pools and reactors. That would raise the possibility of accumulating a critical mass and causing refission even with boron in the coolant.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment