Posts tagged ‘engineering’
Steel in Extremis
May 20th, 2013 at 9:00 am by Dr. Drang
I saw Iron Man 3 with my family Saturday night. It was fun (Ben Kingsley was especially good), but there was a part that bothered me a bit. I tweeted about it later: Iron Man 3 was fun, but that water tower in Tennessee should’ve fallen long before its leg melted.— Dr. Drang (@drdrang) Sat…
White House reconstruction
February 26th, 2013 at 10:52 pm by Dr. Drang
Mashable and the National Journal have posted a wonderful series of old photos of the inside of the White House during its gutting and reconstruction in the Truman administration. The exterior walls were braced and left standing while the interior timber framework was replaced with steel. Photo from Mashable I was particularly struck by this…
Revisiting Castigliano with SciPy
January 6th, 2013 at 2:16 pm by Dr. Drang
On Friday, a colleague asked me if I had a quick solution for determining the spring stiffness of a tapered leaf spring. Yup. This may be the first time I’ve been able to use an old blog post directly for work. But as I read through the solution, I realized I’d done the numerical integration…
Lego towers and the Menai Straits Bridge
December 7th, 2012 at 11:02 pm by Dr. Drang
You’ve probably seen this BBC News Magazine article on the maximum height of a tower of Lego bricks. I read it yesterday through a link from the indispensable Seth Brown (@DrBunsen), and was immediately reminded of this 1826 paper on suspension bridges by Davies Gilbert. That Gilbert paper is my white whale. I first saw…
Beams and potato chips
November 21st, 2012 at 11:57 pm by Dr. Drang
At Ryan Irelan’s request, @drdrang I really want to see a blog post about potato chips. — Ryan Irelan (@ryanirelan) Sun Nov 18 2012 9:47 PM CST here’s a post about the structural design of potato chips by way of Euler-Bernoulli beam theory.1 Let’s start with a straight prismatic beam. We use the word “beam” to…
That dangling tower crane
October 29th, 2012 at 6:37 pm by Dr. Drang
It’s possible that by the time I get this posted, the “dangling tower crane” in Manhattan that’s been threatening to fall in Sandy’s winds will have already carried out its threat. The best photo of it I’ve seen is this one from a Pennsylvania TV station. Source: WJAC-TV And here’s a detail of the crumpled…
Mohr’s circle and the march of time
October 15th, 2012 at 12:06 am by Dr. Drang
A couple of months ago, I mentioned an analytical technique called moment distribution, a method that dominated structural engineering for most of the 20th century, but which doesn’t make much sense in a world in which every structural engineer has a computer. Back when I was a freshly minted assistant professor—before engineering students had computers,…
The mirror crack’d
July 15th, 2012 at 11:46 pm by Dr. Drang
Last week, on a bike ride into work, I passed a big round mirror sitting on the ground off to the side of the path. I stopped, went back to it, and found that the mirror itself was in perfect shape. It was the mounting hardware on the back side that was broken. I popped…
Accelerometers
May 27th, 2012 at 9:28 pm by Dr. Drang
Gabe linked to this recent video by Bill Hammack in which he talks about the workings of the accelerometers in our smartphones. You may have also seen it on Boing Boing. This is one of his best videos. It’s an especially good introduction to how silicon etching is used to create tiny machines. But… But…
Mustard
May 22nd, 2012 at 9:58 pm by Dr. Drang
I took this photo last week while making a sandwich. The three mustard containers all have mustard in them, but it’s all stuck to the sidewalls and can’t be squeezed out. I’ve resorted to unscrewing the caps and digging in with a knife, just like everyone did when I was a kid and mustard came…
