Posts tagged ‘engineering’
Southwest 812
April 25th, 2011 at 11:41 pm by Dr. Drang
The National Transportation Safety Board put out a press release today, summarizing its initial findings in the investigation of Southwest Flight 812. That was the flight that had make an emergency landing a few weeks ago because a five foot long hole ripped through its fuselage during a flight. It’s a very well written summary—better,…
Cracked
April 6th, 2011 at 12:50 pm by Dr. Drang
Hey, there’s something in the news that I actually know a good deal about! The roof failure on Southwest Flight 812 is being blamed on fatigue, which is the fracture of a part under repeated loadings. Fatigue is one of those words, like stress and strain, that engineers have appropriated from everyday use and given…
Soil liquefaction
March 11th, 2011 at 9:33 am by Dr. Drang
Several days ago, Cory Doctorow posted this video on Boing Boing. It’s a cute demonstration of soil liquefaction in a wheelbarrow. Not so cute is what soil liquefaction can do. The maker of the video got the soil from his garden in Christchurch, New Zealand, where last month’s earthquake did a lot of damage through…
Balls
February 28th, 2011 at 8:45 am by Dr. Drang
It’s never been my goal to become America’s most beloved shower curtain blogger, but we go where our talents lead us. I’m staying at a Radisson with one of those nice outward-bowing curtain rods and I noticed a slight design variation. The variation isn’t in the rod but in the curtain hooks. These have four…
Oil canning and coffee makers
February 24th, 2011 at 7:26 am by Dr. Drang
Electric drip coffee makers for the home got popular in the ’70s. The Engineer Guy, Bill Hammack, has a nice video describing how the pump works. In this post, I’m going to talk about the engineering behind another part of the coffeemaker, the hot plate that keeps the carafe warm. In the process, we’ll revisit…
Oil can what?
February 12th, 2011 at 3:38 pm by Dr. Drang
I’ve been working on a nonlinear finite element program for the past week or so, and to shake out the bugs, I run it on a few test problems. One of my favorites is an example of snap-through buckling. It’s a simple little toggle structure with surprisingly rich behavior. The toggle looks like this: Two…
Daniel Bernoulli is in your toilet
February 1st, 2011 at 11:55 pm by Dr. Drang
With the Chicagoland Snowpocalype ’11 in full swing, and the wind howling outside my window, my thoughts have turned to the effect of Bernoulli’s principle on my toilet. Wind is so strong the water in the toilet bowls is rising and falling from the pressure changes in the vent pipe. #yesimanengineer8:41 PM Tue Feb 1,…
My curtain calls
January 28th, 2011 at 7:58 am by Dr. Drang
To me, the greatest piece of technology to hit hotel rooms in the past decade isn’t WiFi,1 it’s the curved shower curtain rod. This week I came across—for the first time—a minor failure of this wonderful innovation. You know what I’m talking about, right? The standard hotel tub/shower combo is kind of narrow, and in…
Coke cans, pull-tabs, and the class struggle
January 8th, 2011 at 3:45 pm by Dr. Drang
Yesterday, my wife sent me a link to this video. Bill Hammack, the self-styled Engineer Guy, has several cute videos like this posted on his web site, his YouTube channel, and his Facebook page. I think I saw one of them—the one where he takes a copier apart—on Boing Boing many months ago. Hammack’s an…
The Metrodome collapse and internal pressure
December 12th, 2010 at 10:39 pm by Dr. Drang
You’ve probably already seen this video, but here it is again. That’s the Metrodome in Minneapolis, home of the Minnesota Vikings and former home of the Minnesota Twins and the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers football team. The roof is—or was, before the collapse—an air-supported structure. It’s made of fabric with a set of criss-crossed…
