San Francisco Bay Bridge

In the wake of the devastating 7.0 earthquake to hit Haiti this past week around the world television screens exploited images of crumbled buildings and poorly reinforced structures reminding us of another earthquake prone territory a little closer to home in California which is taking lengths to improve major infrastructure to a prominent landmark- The San Francisco Bay Bridge.

The Bay Area is known for its spectacular bridges,” says Bart Ney, a spokesman for the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans). “It’s part of our DNA, so naturally the aesthetics are a key part of the project.”

Caltrans ultimately decided to create a two-stage bridge, marrying a 1.3-mile Skyway to the first ever single-tower Self-Anchored Suspension (SAS) bridge. This revolutionary new structure hangs 1860 ft. of roadway from a single central tower, with the shorter western side rising from Yerba Buena Island, and the longer eastern side extending to meet with the Skyway.

The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there is a 62 percent chance that a magnitude 6.7 or larger quake will hit the area by 2032. The Bay Bridge is flanked on the west by the San Andreas Fault and on the east by the Hayward Fault — putting it right in the strike zone. Since the new bridge’s design specifications require that it last for 150 years, the engineers had to build in state-of-the-art seismic defenses. The SAS tower, for instance, incorporates deformable structural elements to absorb quake forces, much as a car’s crumple zone takes the brunt of a head-on collision. Thanks to this innovation, the structure should be able to accommodate seismically induced movement of up to 1 yard.

The National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2010 gives a comprehensive picture of the rise of developing nations in Asia, with China as the main engine, and gradual erosion of U.S. leadership. Examples:

Related: NSB Report on Improving Engineering Education – Country H-index Rank for Science Publications – Science and Engineering Indicators – Workforce (2006) – Worldwide Science and Engineering Doctoral Degree Data (2004 report)

Charlotte Watson

Charlotte Watson, CFO, served ASEE for 17 years with integrity, style and grace. She lost her fierce battle with cancer January 2, 2010, and we lost more. We lost a stalwart friend, an insightful manager, and a loyal leader. The loss of Charlotte has meant that we are all poorer — bereft of her guidance and humor and courage. We will miss her every day.

A life celebration will be held in honor of Charlotte Watson on Saturday, January 9th.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to:
Driving Miss Darby Foundation, Inc. PO Box 634 Millersville, MD 21108 or Gilchrist Hospice Care 11311 McCormick Rd, Suite 350 Hunt Valley, MD 21031

Traveling the high seas has just gotten way better! The Oasis of the Seas ready to set sail in 2010 will undoubtedly be the largest cruise liner to date with a capacity to hold over 6,300 passengers over 2,000 more than today’s average passenger ship. The 18 story high luxury liner is a design engineering first with an outdoor park, the largest at sea swimming pool and the most rooms with balconies and decks.  To build such a ship of this caliber over 2,800 people were employed to construct the ship’s design.  The ship has three 20 foot tall propellers  mounted on swiveling pods along with electric motors that deliver the equivalent of 30,000 horsepower.

“Ten years ago, we felt that 140,000 tons was as big as we could go,” says Oasis designer Harri Kulovaara. “Now that we’ve got the experience, we’ve taken a quantum leap.”

The National Engineering Design Challenge which promotes engineering by showing students ways engineers can solve social and community problems, is looking for sponsors. In the 2010 challenge, NEDC teams will put their creativity and problem-solving skills to use by designing and building an assisted technology device for a person in their community. Teams identify the problem they want to solve, work together to develop a solution and present their working prototype to an expert panel of judges.

Image provided by www.dailymail.co.uk

The Large Hadron Collider is finally up and running again after months of repairs. The $8 billion dollar collider “accelerated the machine’s twin beams of protons to 1.18 trillion volts… that surpasses the previous collider record of 0.98 trillion electron volts, set in 2001 by America’s Tevatron collider.”

An elite team of international physicists and engineers are continuing to make updates and repairs to the Large Hadron Collider in hopes of it reaching its full potential.

The theory behind a collider is simple: Send a beam of protons crashing into something, either a stationary target or a beam of particles traveling in the opposite direction, then wait and see what comes out.

As bigger and more powerful colliders were built, physicists began to uncover a plethora of tiny objects, such as quarks, which were held together by other tiny objects called gluons.

To understand the infinitesimal nature of these new objects, consider that if a quark measured an inch, an atom would stretch a thousand miles.

These discoveries allowed scientists to devise a picture of the universe at the subatomic level. Called the Standard Model, it is considered the most successful scientific theory in history, explaining how the melange of particles fits together and gives rise to the familiar forces that surround us.

One thing the standard model has not been able to do, Mark Wise (a Caltech physicist) said, is show why particles have mass and how that mass is distributed.

Scientists believe that’s because the particle responsible for mass, the Higgs boson — named for Scottish physicist Peter Higgs — can’t be produced in today’s accelerators. Because it is thought to bind weakly with other particles, “you need a lot of collisions” to produce one, Wise said.

The Large Hadron Collider is located in a 17-mile circular tunnel 300 feet underground on the Franco-Swiss border. Scientists expect to surpass their recent record of accelerating to 1.18 trillion electron volts within the coming months.

International Future Energy Challenge winners, Jonathan Baker and Christopher Hamilton created a low-cost wind turbine that transfers a maximum amount of energy to a battery. How did they do it? They contribute their success to time spent doing undergraduate research.

Baker, Hamilton, and two fellow electrical engineering majors spent over a year preparing their “low-cost wind turbine energy maximizer” for the International Future Energy Challenge in Australia last July.

The two-some invented a three-phase AC/DC converter (also known as “The Pegador” to its creators) to make the energy produced by wind turbines more efficient. The Pegador took home first prize.

After enjoying the success of placing first, Baker and Hamilton garnered success among engineering peers from universities worldwide.

Their participation in undergraduate research is what they claim to be the ultimate stepping-stone for future success within the scientific community and public-at-large.

“Going from book knowledge to tangibility experience has really accelerated my future career,” Baker said. “I’ve graduated with not only an honors degree, but an actual invention and experience.”

“Today’s engineering students want to make difference in the world … they want to make the world a better place through technological innovations that save lives and help clear the environment.” – Issa Batarseh, professor and director of the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Batarseh also oversaw the project.

There is no release date for the turbine at this time.

What do a smoke machine, a laser pointer, a fan, a piece of toilet paper and tubing all have in common? Inventor David Schwartz gave the conventional microphone a complete makeover by throwing these seemingly unrelated items together to create the latest audio tech toy: the “smokrophone”.

Photo Courtesy of AP Photo/Daniel Schwartz.

Schwartz found his inspiration for the smokrophone during dinner at an Italian restaurant in 2004 with his wife. He watched as a thin stream of smoke from a candle would waver each time his wife spoke. Shortly there after, Schwartz invested in a disco fog machine and began experimenting.

Unlike conventional microphones, the smokerophone doesn’t need a diaphragm to work. Schwartz believes that the device’s lack of a diaphragm is what could make it a “high-fidelity recording microphone, or a supersensitive long-range microphone for spying.”

The smokrophone prototype and its creator are scheduled for a premiere October performance at the Audio Engineering Society in New York.

A team of students from MIT are making the lives of the visually impaired easier with a project inspired by their course work last fall. The battery-operated 6dot Braille Labeler uses standard Dymo label tape and hopes to provide those in need of the product with a cheaper, portable alternative to other more costly options.

The 6dot’s developers aim to improve upon the everyday frustrations of those who are visually impaired by making the identification of “seemingly similar” household items such as DVD’s, CD’s and canned foods easier.

Photo Courtesy of Patrick Gillooly, MIT News.

According to a press release issued by MIT, “Blind people really wanted to see this product on the market,” Karina Pikhart, Class of 2009, said.

Development of the 6dot escalated after students from MIT’s Product Engineering Processes course won a $7,500 cash prize at last spring’s IDEAS competition.

“We worked really closely with blind people” in developing it, she says, because “you really can’t develop a product without being in close touch with the people you’re developing it for.”

According to MIT, the company created by the students involved in the project does not plan on manufacturing the device but will continue to improve the system while waiting to get the 6dot licensed within the next two years.

“The goal is to get it into the hands of as many people as possible,” Pikhart said. “We’re … looking for a manufacturer who would take this on for the long haul. We want to keep improving it.”

Courtesy of cee-neesmrit1.cee.illinois.edu

When a quake strikes, the new system dissipates energy through steel frames in the building’s core and exterior. These frames are free to rock up and down within fittings fixed at their bases. Steel tendons made from twisted steel cables run the length of each frame, keeping the frames from moving so much that the building could shear. When the quake stops, these tensile tendons pull the frames back down into the “shoes” at their bases, returning the building to its plumb, upright position.

Greg Deirlein, professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University and team lead of the project, explains, “This new structural system has the potential to make buildings far more damage resistant and easier to repair, so people could reoccupy buildings a lot faster after a major earthquake than they can now… What is unique about these frames is that, unlike conventional systems, they actually rock off their foundation under large earthquakes.”

The technology, which just completed testing at Japan’s Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center, is the culmination of more than a decade of ideas and previous-gen technologies. While many elements of the system have been tested before, this is the first time they’ve been melded into a complete system and successfully put through the motions. For testing, the team constructed a three-quarters-size model of a standard three-story office building, with a footprint 120 by 180 feet, and a mass comparable to a full-size building. Then they shook the hell out of it. Even at a magnitude 1.75 times that of the 1994 Northridge earthquake — itself a 6.7 on the Richter scale — the only damage recorded in the frame was in the replaceable fuses.

Resources:
*New design keeps buildings standing and habitable after major earthquakes via www.physorg.com
*New Earthquake-Resistant Design Pulls Buildings Upright After Violent Quakes by Clay Dillow