Engineering

How would crews get to Mercury? Is there any way we can beat the high delta-V penalties for classic style ballistic flights? Yes, there is: Cyclers. Mercurys orbital period is 87.97 days. Earths is 365.25 days, or 4.15 Mercury years. A cycler deployed to a 351.5 day orbit, with Earths orbit as the aphelion and Mercurys orbit as the perihelion, will encounter Mercury every time it (the cycler) reaches perihelion. Crews departing Earth would still have to generate a high delta-V. In fact, cycler missions would require a delta-V around 9.5 km/sec. while some standard (Hohmann) transfers can be done for 6-7 km/sec. The difference is that a cycler mission puts most of the …

As far as I'm aware lead acid batteries have to be maintained in an upright position. Well, perhaps I'm wrong because upon disassembling my large recently expired rechargeable torch, I discovered its battery mounted on its side. Which I'd have thought not conducive to the liquid being able to cover the cells. I might add that the torch is not very old (it wasn't cheap either), and my thinking is its premature death is because of the battery mounting. Has anyone any thoughts?

How many square feet of solar panels would be necessary to power a bicycle? I'm imagining a bike with little solar trailers.

I have an old leaf blower with a 25cc 2 stroke engine. The plastic casing cracked making the leaf blower useless, but I took the out the engine and it is perfect condition. -Any ideas on what I could do it (besides sell it)? I don't have ALOT of tools so I can't mount it on a bike but that would be hella sweet though. -Thanks ~EE

We have been watching and playing with personal drones for the past decade. I even have a toy helicopter to play with. There is now talk of having pizza's delivered via drone, although I expect every kid with a BB Gun is holding his breath for that day. Here is something nobody talks about. Lets pretend you buy a Drone with a 30 minute battery capacity. What is to prevent you from adding photo recognition to the camera and a tiny sawed off shotgun type attachment. People will be able to kill each other simply by showing a photo to a machine and sending it off in the right direction or hover in your driveway. All of this technology exists and has likel…

ok Water boils and transform in to steam in room temperature at full vacuum. why can't we use this method to desalinate seawater. we don't need any fuel for heating water but just only energy need for maintenance ,pump water ,make water containers full vacuum

Hi all Just an interesting thought. Would it be viable to extract the energy in a dam as an aside to running the turbine with it. Just how efficient is it now ? Since the water is already being dropped on the turbines , would it be efficient to use part of that process to run the same technology as we use in our homes to create heat for different generation at the same time. I would imagine the heat to be extracted from the dam body and the same water as runs the turbine to run the heat pump. I'm not claiming to know a whole lot about heat pumps except they are extremely efficient. Cheers iseason

Extreme events such as impacts, ballistics, explosions and blasts, which occur at very high pressures, and very high speeds, is difficult because of the highly specialized diagnotics, really involved physics and the computational methods which are generally very niche. The one major advance in recent years is the advent and ever increasing availability of very high frame rate and high spatial resolution cameras in combination with the ability to store and process rapidly the very large amount of data generated, together with the development of batch image processing techniques as well as free software such as imagemagick, gimp, ifranview and many, many others. Thi…

What's more powerful the human brain or a quantum computer? And by how much?

I am designing a dream boat approx 100' in size and likely to use Junk Rig sails for ease of use as I would like to sail/power around the world and visit more archeological interesting countries. I am now imagining a 45° angle of a wide and deep reinforced transom below the water line to add thrust from pitching. The idea is based upon other wave power models Example video... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWpxtfmpVD4 Instead of using the rear wing as in video I would only capture the downwards pitch in my design. There is a Wave Powered boat that has crossed The Pacific (to Hawaii from Japan). Any ways to stop the bow from having reverse thru…

Why do I not see these being attempted more often? A plasma railgun works the same as a regular railgun, except the armature (and projectile) is ionized gas instead of anything physical. Now, the differences I would imagine are thus: -The voltage would have to be very high - typical Jacob's Ladders take about 6 kV from a transformer to ionize air. - Because the projectile isn't solid, it has a lot less friction (and therefore a lot better acceleration and force?) Would the capacitor bank be different? I'm not sure whether plasma would need more or less energy...

Does anyone know about these methods of harnessing energy? I've seen "wigglers" that generate power from surface waves. How about these 2 ideas: WAVE POWER - Standing on a pier at the beach looking down at the water, you see the waves surging towards shore and then the backwash flows back out. Suppose you built a pier-like structure parallel to the shoreline, maybe a mile or more long and about 50 feet wide. Suspend paddle turbines over the water just touching the water. As the water flows towards shore it spins the paddle turbines one way, and the water flowing out spins them the other way. TIDAL POWER - If you build a wall along the shoreline to the height …

Since the parachutes may be too heavy for each seat, why they don't provide each passenger with inflatable balloons? The airbags would be strapped one in the front and one in the back, front pack plus back pack, this wouldn't assure 100% survival of the victims, but at least it can soften the impact on the ground.

say i have 500 cfm flowing thru 2" pipe and i have an adapter to 3" pipe will that change the cfm or velocity or both and what equation(s) would i use to calculate the pipe diameter change?

I was reading an article about space based solar power and it got me thinking how useful wireless power could be for planes. So how plausible do you think the title of this post is? Ground stations connected to the grid along the launch path from the space port transmit wireless power to a microwave rectennas in the wings. I tsucks in air to ionise into plasma for tyhe first stage up to about mach 6 in the upper atmosphere then it switches to its own tanks for reaction mass to propel it to orbit still powered by microwaves from the ground stations. Not needing any fuel in the atmosphere and need no oxidizer and having the high impulse of VASIMR to orbit it should have a h…

We Now From Information Theory That Entropy Of Functions Of A Random Variable X Is Less Than Or Equal To The Entropy Of X. Does It Break The Second Law Of Thermodynamic?

is Burning wood directly or making wood into wood gas more energy efficient ? i made a wood gasifier in home but i read some articles saying syn gas have very low heating value and i'm little bit confused which process can give more heat burning 1 kg air dry wood or making 1 kg wood into wood gas then burn

Hi guys and gals, I play guitar occasionally and sometimes hear a local radio station playing from my amp while I am plugged in. I'm no engineer nor do I have a clue about magnetism off the surface. My question is: what is it about the magnetic pick-up in my guitar that allows it to transmitt radio waves through my speakers? And secondly (2): can it be replicated with an isolated magnetic pick-up with a biological electrical source like a potato or something? Thanks.

Why haven't they made not even see able factory's or machines and to revolutionize us then being able to have small things or the first nanobot that would then duplicate, even one that a little bigger and just use that multiplying jem for now...? ***Anyhow more importantly, indeed, why haven't they made a bigger than wanted nanobot that is still small and can't see, even almost in the wanted size range, but morrrreee bigger so well we can build one for now, and then have it multiply and cure lots of stuff including ageing...And then just have the fisrt little bigger nanobot, by wireless commands, duplicate....?????

I remember reading about a new form of communication where lasers are used in place of radio waves with one of the proposed applications being transmissions between space probes and such. For one it would not be faster. But would it be more accurate? Could it carry more information than radio? Why or why not?

Does solar power get feed back into the grid ? Why does the power co. send you a check ? If if it feeds to your neighbor how does the power meter know which is from you or the power co. ? Help needed to settle argument.....

I was wondering if anyone knew of any obstacles that researchers or scientists ran into when designing machines to manipulate the pressure at the bed of the ocean into energy. I though of a design and then did a search of the internet for any designs similar to see other obstacles that may have been discovered and ran into this site http://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Using-Water-Pressure-at-the-Bottom-of-the-Ocean-to-Store-Energy.html which uses the same concept as mine but mine integrates other machinery which already compensates for their issue.

Hi, I am a student looking for a material for a project at school. I am currently studying mechanical engineering so the chemistry and materials aspect is a bit over my head. We're working on a concept to develop a more ergonomic chair and would like to find a material that would be comfortable to sit on. My vision would be a bunch of gel-like spheres that could be electrically stimulated and move around due to a current passed over them. Also maybe create heat as a by product. Basically a comfortable thing to sit on that would be able to vibrate a bit. I've been trying to find stuff online but my limited knowledge of gears and beams isn't helping too much. Any h…

I was wondering about what would happen if an air cushion hovercraft had an air-intake fan that spun at 500,000 RPMs. Would that cause the craft to malfunction, or would it give it more lift and faster acceleration?

Hello everybody! I imagined and prototyped this brake long ago for the deployment mechanisms of a satellite I never built. In essence, it's clean, it can work in vacuum and in a wide temperature range, and it can wait for long without maintenance, so other uses must be possible, like semiconductor, food, optics processing... It compresses a viscoelastic element and lets it roll to brake the relative movement of two parts, so that an alternate deformation results and dissipates energy. My viscoelastic element was a seal ring and the other parts were cylindrical - but feel free to make them flat or elliptic if it brings anything. Two gentle slopes help a lot in…