As a human endeavor, engineering has existed since ancient times, starting with the six classicsimple machines. Examples of large-scale engineering projects from antiquity include impressive structures like thepyramids, elegant temples such as theParthenon, and water conveyances likehulled watercraft,canals, and theRoman aqueduct. Early machines were powered by humans and animals, then later by wind. Machines of war were invented forsiegecraft. In Europe, thescientific andindustrial revolutions advanced engineering into a scientific profession and resulted in continuing technological improvements. Thesteam engine provided much greater power than animals, leading to mechanical propulsion for ships and railways. Further scientific advances resulted in the application of engineering to electrical, chemical, andaerospace requirements, plus the use of new materials for greater efficiencies.
The wordengineering is derived from theLatiningenium. Engineers typically follow a code of ethics that favors honesty and integrity, while being dedicated to publicsafety andwelfare. Engineering tasks involve findingoptimal solutions based on constraints, with testing andsimulations being used prior to production. When a deployed product fails,forensic engineering is used to determine what went wrong in order to find a fix. Much of thisproduct lifecycle management is now assisted with computersoftware, fromdesign totesting andmanufacturing. At larger scales, this process normally funded by a company, multiple investors, or the government, so a knowledge of economics and business practices is needed. (Full article...)
Anengineer is a practitioner ofengineering. The wordengineer (Latiningeniator, Ir is the term and or title of an engineer in countries like Belgium, The Netherlands, and Indonesia) is derived from the Latin wordsingeniare ("to contrive, devise") andingenium ("cleverness"). The foundational qualifications of a licensed professional engineer typically include a four-yearbachelor's degree in an engineering discipline, or in some jurisdictions, amaster's degree in an engineering discipline plus four to six years of peer-reviewed professional practice (culminating in a project report or thesis) and passage of engineering board examinations. (Full article...)
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AHalkett boat is a type of lightweightinflatable boat designed byLt Peter Halkett (1820–1885) during the 1840s. Halkett had long been interested in the difficulties of travelling in theCanadian Arctic, and the problems involved in designing boats light enough to be carried over arduous terrain, but robust enough to be used in extreme weather conditions.
Halkett's first design was a collapsible and inflatable boat made of rubber-impregnated cloth. When deflated, the hull of the boat could be worn as a cloak, the oar used as a walking stick, and the sail as an umbrella. This was followed by a two-man craft that was small enough to fit into aknapsack, and when deflated served as a waterproof blanket.
Although widely praised by Canadian explorers, Halkett's designs had a limited market, and he was unable to persuade theRoyal Navy that they would serve any useful purpose in general naval service. Efforts to market them as platforms for fishing and duck shooting failed, and they were commercially unsuccessful. Only two Halkett boats, that ofOrcadian explorerJohn Rae, and one held in the Hudson's Bay Company Museum Collection at theManitoba Museum are known to survive today.(Full article...)
Adrill is atool fitted with acutting tool attachment or driving tool attachment, usually adrill bit ordriver bit, used forboring holes in various materials orfastening various materials together with the use of fasteners. The attachment is gripped by achuck at one end of the drill and rotated while pressed against the target material. The tip, and sometimes edges, of the cutting tool does the work of cutting into the target material. This may be slicing off thin shavings (twist drills orauger bits), grinding off small particles (oil drilling), crushing and removing pieces of the workpiece (SDS masonry drill),countersinking,counterboring, or other operations.Drills are commonly used inwoodworking,metalworking, construction anddo-it-yourself projects. Specially designed drills are also used in medicine, space missions and other applications. Drills are available with a wide variety of performance characteristics, such aspower andcapacity.
Little Boy was developed byLieutenant CommanderFrancis Birch's group at theLos Alamos Laboratory. It was the successor to aplutonium-fueled gun-type fission design,Thin Man, which was abandoned in 1944 after technical difficulties were discovered. Little Boy used a charge ofcordite to fire a hollow cylinder (the "bullet") of highly enriched uranium through an artillery gun barrel into a solid cylinder (the "target") of the same material. The design was highly inefficient: the weapon used on Hiroshima contained 64 kilograms (141 lb) of uranium, but less than a kilogram underwentnuclear fission. Unlike theimplosion design developed for the Trinity test and theFat Man bomb design that was used againstNagasaki, which required sophisticated coordination of shaped explosive charges, the simpler but inefficient gun-type design was considered almost certain to work, and was never tested prior to its use at Hiroshima. (Full article...)
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Avoltage doubler is an electronic circuit which charges capacitors from the input voltage and switches these charges in such a way that, in the ideal case, exactly twice the voltage is produced at the output as at its input.
The simplest of these circuits is a form ofrectifier which takes an AC voltage as input and outputs a doubled DC voltage. The switching elements are simple diodes and they are driven to switch state merely by the alternating voltage of the input. DC-to-DC voltage doublers cannot switch in this way and require a driving circuit to control the switching. They frequently also require a switching element that can be controlled directly, such as atransistor, rather than relying on the voltage across the switch as in the simple AC-to-DC case. (Full article...)
The radius of maximum wind of a tropical cyclone lies just within the eyewall of an intense tropical cyclone, such asHurricane Isabel from 2003 Theradius of maximum wind (RMW) is the distance between the center of acyclone and its band of strongestwinds. It is a parameter in atmospheric dynamics andtropical cyclone forecasting. The highestrainfall rates occur near the RMW oftropical cyclones. The extent of a cyclone'sstorm surge and its maximum potential intensity can be determined using the RMW. Asmaximum sustained winds increase, the RMW decreases. Recently, RMW has been used in descriptions oftornadoes. When designingbuildings to prevent against failure from atmospheric pressure change, RMW can be used in the calculations. (Full article...)
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1869 Birdsill Holly fire-hydrant Birdsill Holly Jr. (November 8, 1820 – April 27, 1894) was an American mechanical engineer and inventor of waterhydraulics devices. He is known for inventing mechanical devices that improved city water systems and patented an improved fire hydrant that is similar to those used currently for firefighting. Holly was a co-inventor of the Silsbysteam fire engine. He founded the Holly Manufacturing Company that developed into the larger Holly Steam Combination Company that distributed heat from a central station and developed commercialdistrict heating for cities in the United States and Canada. (Full article...)
Nichols remained with the Manhattan Project after the war until it was taken over by theAtomic Energy Commission in 1947. He was the military liaison officer with the Atomic Energy Commission from 1946 to 1947. After briefly teaching at theUnited States Military Academy at West Point, he was promoted to major general and became chief of theArmed Forces Special Weapons Project, responsible for the military aspects of atomic weapons, including logistics, handling and training. He was deputy director for the Atomic Energy Matters, Plans and Operations Division of the Army's general staff, and was the senior Army member of the military liaison committee that worked with the Atomic Energy Commission. (Full article...)
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Overhead View of Tehachapi Energy Storage Project, Tehachapi, CA
TheTehachapi Energy Storage Project (TSP) was a 8MW/32MWhlithium-ion battery-basedgrid energy storage system at the Monolith Substation ofSouthern California Edison (SCE) inTehachapi, California, sufficient to power between 1,600 and 2,400 homes for four hours. At the time of commissioning in 2014, it was the largest lithium-ion battery system operating inNorth America and one of the largest in the world. TSP is considered to be a modern-day energy storage pioneer with significant accomplishments that have proven the viability of utility-scale energy storage using lithium-ion technology. While originally envisioned as aresearch and development project, TSP operated as adistribution-level resource for SCE and for calendar year 2020, SCE reported that TSP operated in thewholesale energy market with revenue exceeding operating and maintenance costs. In 2021, SCE began the decommissioning of TSP, which was followed by formal decommissioning by state regulators in 2022. The physical dismantlement of TSP is expected to be completed by the end of 2022. (Full article...)
Achicken gun orflight impact simulator is a large-diameter, compressed-air gun used to fire bird carcasses at aircraft components in order to simulate high-speedbird strikes during the aircraft's flight.Jet engines and aircraftwindshields are particularly vulnerable to damage from such strikes, and are the most common target in such tests. Although various species of bird are used in aircraft testing and certification, the device acquired the common name of "chicken gun" aschickens are the most commonly used 'ammunition' owing to their ready availability. (Full article...)
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A depiction of a hypothetical Dyson swarm surrounding a star
ADyson sphere is a hypotheticalmegastructure that encompasses astar and captures a large percentage of itspower output. The concept is athought experiment that attempts to imagine how aspacefaring civilization would meet its energy requirements once those requirements exceed what can be generated from the homeplanet's resources alone. Because only a tiny fraction of a star's energy emissions reaches the surface of any orbiting planet, building structures encircling a star would enable a civilization to harvest far more energy.
The earliest modern imagining of such a structure was byOlaf Stapledon in his science fiction novelStar Maker (1937). The same concept was later used by physicistFreeman Dyson in his 1960 satirical paper "Search for Artificial Stellar Sources ofInfrared Radiation". Dyson speculated that such structures would be the logical consequence of the escalating energy needs of a technological civilization and would be a necessity for its long-term survival. A signature of such spheres detected in astronomical searches would be an indicator ofextraterrestrial intelligence. (Full article...)
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Buro Happold Limited (previouslyBuroHappold Engineering) is a British professional services firm that providesengineering consultancy,design, planning, project management, and consulting services for buildings, infrastructure, and the environment. It was founded inBath, Somerset, in 1976 by SirEdmund Happold when he took up a post at theUniversity of Bath as Professor ofArchitecture and Engineering Design.
Originally working mainly on projects in theMiddle East, the firm now operates worldwide and in almost all areas of engineering for thebuilt environment, working in 24 locations around the world. (Full article...)
Baron Paul Schilling (April 16 [O.S. April 5] 1786 – August 6 [O.S. July 25] 1837), also known asPavel Lvovitch Schilling, was a Russian inventor, military officer anddiplomat ofBaltic German origin. The majority of his career was spent working for the imperial RussianMinistry of Foreign Affairs as a language officer at the Russian embassy inMunich. As a military officer, he took part in theWar of the Sixth Coalition againstNapoleon. In his later career, he was transferred to the Asian department of the ministry and undertook a tour ofMongolia to collect ancient manuscripts.
The Churchill Machine Tool Company Limited began as the manufacturing subsidiary of themachine tool importers Charles Churchill & Company Limited founded in the early 1900s by US-born Charles Churchill (1837–1916). Created out of thepersonal bankruptcy of Charles Churchill, the company developed to become one of the largest British importers of machine tools from the United States and a major manufacturer of such tools, initially underlicence and later of its own development.
The original business importing American machine tools into Britain began with Charles Churchill as sole proprietor and later as a partnership with two others. It became a limited company in 1889. In 1906 a separate company, The Churchill Machine Tool Co Ltd, was established with the purpose of adapting tools imported by Charles Churchill & Co. The former expanded, producing American tools under licence and then manufactured tools of its own design, in particular precisionsurface grinders and similar engineering machinery. In 1918 The Churchill Machine Tool Co relocated its factories onto a single site atBroadheath, nearAltrincham. (Full article...)
Bell was an energetic and skilful entrepreneur as well as an innovativemetallurgist. He was involved in multiple partnerships with his brothers to make iron andalkali chemicals, and with other pioneers includingRobert Stirling Newall to make steel cables. He pioneered the large-scale manufacture of aluminium at his Washington works, conducting experiments in its production, and in the production of other chemicals such as the newly discovered elementthallium. He was a director of major companies including theNorth Eastern Railway and theForth Bridge company, then the largest bridge project in the world. (Full article...)
Image 11Archimedes is regarded as one of the leading scientists inclassical antiquity whose ideas have underpinned much of the practice of engineering. (fromEngineer)
Image 17The application of the steam engine allowed coke to be substituted for charcoal iniron making, lowering the cost of iron, which provided engineers with a new material for building bridges. This bridge was made ofcast iron, which was soon displaced by less brittlewrought iron as a structural material. (fromEngineering)
Image 19Design of aturbine requires collaboration of engineers from many fields, as the system involves mechanical, electro-magnetic and chemical processes. Theblades,rotor and stator as well as thesteam cycle all need to be carefully designed and optimized. (fromEngineering)
Image 26A drawing for asteam locomotive. Engineering is applied todesign, with emphasis on function and the utilization of mathematics and science. (fromEngineering)
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