Today's Interesting Engineering

[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

New HD camera waterproof drone is aiming to revolutionize underwater photography

Up until now, little progress has been made in terms of underwater photography. If it is possible to obtain good quality images underwater, it is also important to remember that this type of technology is still not accessible to many people due to its high cost. But with a new drone that is absolutely blowing up on Kickstarter – reaching more than 10 times it’s $50,000 goal – it seems that this is about to change.



The OpenROV Trident is nothing more than a waterproof drone, which allows anyone to capture great quality images up to 25m underwater. Just throw it in the water and choose from pre-determined routes (like zigzag) or remotely control it. But more than just entertain amateur users, the small drone can also help in ocean exploration through photogrammetry.



Because radio waves do not propagate in water, Trident uses a neutrally buoyant tether to communicate to a towable buoy on the surface which connects to the pilot via Wi-Fi signal. If you’re interested can already get yours through their crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter for a not-so-friendly US$ 949. But even if you are willing to shell out that amount, you still have to wait til November 2016 to get your hands on drone.



Source: Kickstarter

Via: Engadget

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[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

Brazilian wave energy generator enables the country to assess potential capacity

Brazil’s first marine energy device was deployed at Porto do Pecém on the coast of Ceará in the northeast of the country on June 24th 2012. The prototype device was operated by the Research and Technological Development Program of the Brazilian Electricity Regulatory Agency (ANEEL) for 10 minutes, during which it generated 50 KW of power for lighting and air conditioning systems. This enabled an assessment amounting to around 87 GW of potential wave energy capacity. Of this, COPPE believes it possible to convert about 20 percent of it into electricity. This would be equal to 17 percent of the country’s total installed capacity.

[Image source: YouTube]

The project was part of an R&D project called “Deployment of Onshore Waves Converter Prototype on Sea Conditions of the Northeast of Brazil” which was first initiated in March 2009. It was funded by Tractebel Energia S.A., the main company involved in the project, through the Program for Research and Technological Development of the National Agency of Electrical Energy (NAEE), and supported by the government of Ceará. The University of Rio de Janeiro’s Foundation of Project Coordination, Research and Technological Studies (COPPE) also played a major role in the project, particularly with regard to its Submarine Technology Laboratory which was used to develop the device. The project ran for 36 months and cost R$14.4 million or US$3.6 million.


The prototype device consisted of two modules, each incorporating a buoy, a 22 meter long arm and a pump connected to a closed fresh water circuit. The motion of the buoys and the arms activated the hydraulic pump which then injected fresh water kept under high pressure via a hydro pneumatic accumulator and a hyperbaric chamber. This then released a stream with a pressure equivalent to a 400 meter water column which in turn operated the turbine. The device was also capable of desalinization by reverse osmosis in order to produce drinking water from the sea.

According to COPPE’s Professor Estefen Segen, the Brazilian device differs from others in that it uses a high pressure system to operate the turbine and generator, an approach developed and patented by COPPE.



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[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

galeri

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[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

galeri 2

The post galeri 2 appeared first on Interesting Engineering.

 

[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

Watch the world’s largest airliner in a scary crosswind landing

Last weekend the Düsseldorf Airport in Germany, was the scene of an extremely tense moment. That’s because an aircraft of the Airbus A380 type, the largest airliner in the world, landed in the midst of an intense windstorm that hit the aircraft sideways during the arrival of an Emirates flight coming from Dubai. The moment captured on video, can be seen in the video above.



It may seem that the aircraft slides only slightly to the left, but the landing was much more complicated than that due to the length of the aircraft compared to the total length of the airstrip. The maximum weight for landing the A380 is 434 tons, which means that at sea level it needs about 1.5 kilometers of airstrip space to land in normal weather conditions.

The shorter of the two runways at Düsseldorf is 2.7 kilometers long, and less than 45 meters above sea level. However, it was raining and the runway was wet when the A380 was landing and the plane touches the airstrip a little later than it should. Therefore, the pilot needed every bit of the the airstrip to slow the aircraft down to the appropriate speed to taxi towards the arrival gate.

As you can see it was quite an impressive crosswind landing, kudos to the pilot!

Via: Flight Club

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[DaveM]

In today's Interesting Engineering we have the following

How ASL assists neurosurgeons and robots

[Brain deformation simulation]

Free and open source multiphysics simulation software package ASL (Advanced Simulation Library) was successfully utilized in the cognitive and diagnostics module of the medical robot developed within the framework of the ACTIVE project. Simulation of the brain shift process during a craniotomy procedure was implemented to facilitate robot-assisted awake neurosurgery.

Despite the fact that it incorporates many physical effects into the underlying mathematical model, operates on a large simulation domain with high resolution – it is 100 times faster than the real time even if deployed on a regular laptop. This remarkable performance allowed to determine unknown patient and operation specific model parameters intra-operatively “on the fly” through iterative smart guessing and subsequent calibration of the intermediate results with the stereo camera observations.

[Skull with brain immersed into cerebrospinal fluid]

This way a full picture of brain deformation was generated, which is otherwise not available to the surgeon through direct examination by means of ultra sound, video cameras or MRI. This synthesized information, as common in image guided surgery, is used by the robot and/or physician for navigation, operative planning and identifying the target location.

[Skull with an opening]

Advanced Simulation Library is a free and open source multiphysics simulation software package. Its computational engine is based, among others, on the Lattice Boltzmann Methods and is written in OpenCL which enable extraordinarily efficient deployment on a variety of massively parallel architectures, ranging from inexpensive FPGAs, DSPs and GPUs up to heterogeneous clusters and supercomputers. The engine is hidden entirely behind C++ classes, so that no OpenCL knowledge is required from application programmers. ASL can be utilized to model various coupled physical and chemical phenomena and employed in a multitude of fields: computational fluid dynamics, virtual sensing, industrial process data validation and reconciliation, image-guided surgery, computer-aided engineering, high-performance scientific computing, crystallography, etc..



[Multicomponent flow]

ASL is distributed under the free GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) with an optional commercial license. Following its recent source code release ASL entered all major Linux distributions in record time.

Source: ASL

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