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IIRC they cancelled Christmas at Bell when they made that discovery. Can't see that happening in our heavily unionised industries.
Post Your Favourite Piece Of Engineering
- Thread starter p4radox
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KizZ said:Internal combustion engine
I raise you
The Wankel Engine. Obviously it hasn't had the impact that the internal combustion engine did, but it's pretty damn clever really.
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You work for Arup?
Ricochet J said:
I don't. Its the Architect that imagines and designs these buildings, not the engineer. Basically it works like this, Architect comes up with the design, then its handed over to the engineer to calculate that it will stand up. Then the Architect/s project manage the build to completion.
But then I'm biased
(I'm not an engineer thank God! 
)
Soldato
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I don't think the World Trade Center towers were the first skyscrapers to use a central core and curtain wall construction, but they were the first to have a central core capable of sustaining the full load of the building. Unfortunately this design feature is one of the factors which contributed to their collapse — the façade was constructed from lightweight materials, the lack of pillars allowed the planes to travel further into the towers and the lack of a reinforced concrete core had disastrous consequences for the evacuation effort.Ricochet J said:
That said, the World Trade Center towers were still an engineering marvel, in my opinion. The excavation of the Bathtub, the slurry wall construction and the sky lobby elevator system to mention but a few incredible engineering feats. Skyscraper architects have learnt a lot from the construction and subsequent collapse of the World Trade Center towers — the recently completed 7 World Trade Center is a real testament to this — and this is why I cited them as my favourite earlier in the thread
*av
Soldato
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Raider said:MCF? Dead-end tbh
ICF? That's where it's at baby!
Had a pic of the National Ignition Facility lined up to post, but it merely depicted the scale of the target chamber. Bit bland to look at. Are you serious about thinking magnetic confinement is a dead end?
Fusion said:
Well I'm working on the ICF-side so i'm contractually obliged to keep our end up
It'll be a while yet before we know which path will be more practical. Small experiments are one thing, a test-reactor is another!
You work at Culham then?
Click for details.
Think of the age it was built and the country its in.
Intresting fact is that the 4 towers lean out so if one was knocked over by earthquake they wouldn't hit the onion dome! Clever thinking for 1650!
Photo taken myself last year as the first rays of light hit the dome making the white marbel glow pink.
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Absolutely. Following on from that...BillytheImpaler said:
The Central Processing Unit. Hundreds of millions of transistors turning on and off millions of times per second. Incredible feats of engineering.
The harddisk is another incredible feat of engineering. Much as i dislike them for their mechanical nature i think the engineering expertise required to produce and develop them is amazing.
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tuftyfella said:
Ive been to JET for a day, obviously they wont really let you very near the reactor as it becomes radioactive after a while of use. It was quite an interesting day though, they have a full scale model of the reactor which we could see inside and huge robotic arms for working on it. I saw the control room and the people didnt appear to be doing much tbh
- maybe it was lunch break. To the person that questioned safety, fusion is very frequently confused with nuclear fission which is what is currently used to create energy from various sources and produces nuclear waste. Fusion is actually quite safe (except obviously for the huge amounts of electricity it requires for ignition, it also requires lithium which is quite volitile for the reaction). As has been said if the plasma in a fusion reactor becomes unstable it will touch the wall and literally stop with no other effects. The only waste product from fusion is helium but even that can be used to create further energy.