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

The group of engineers, led by Assistant Professor Lupita D. Montoya, was one of four student teams nationally to win a highly competitive Summer Engineering Experience in Development (SEED) grant from nonprofit volunteer organization Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW).

The project aims to help the Langui and Canas community in southern Peru by developing affordable, solar-powered pasteurization equipment. Many families in the region have dairy cows and produce milk, yogurt, and cheeses on a small scale, but cannot obtain certification to market these products because they lack proper sanitation equipment. The new pasteurization systems will allow these families to meet governmental regulations and begin selling their dairy products and earning additional income.

“Currently farmers make dairy products for personal consumption and trade with neighbors. During our first trip people told us that they were looking to sell products beyond their town but needed certification,” said team member Tara Clancy, an environmental engineering major at Rensselaer who graduates this week. “Obtaining certification will enable farmers to strengthen their economic independence, but they won’t be able to be certified without direct access to water, energy, and sanitary facilities. That’s where we can start to implement appropriate technologies.”

This summer, Montoya, Rensselaer mechanical engineering doctoral student Erin Lennox, and rising junior Anna Cyganowski will volunteer their time in Langui and Lima, Peru. Along with working on the design and engineering of pasteurization devices, they will partner with students from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) to investigate the social and economic aspects of creating a dairy enterprise. This effort will include examining how the community currently produces dairy products, looking into local manufacturing regulations, and studying the local marketplace. The student team also plans to work with microfinance experts in Peru to make small loans to families to purchase the equipment and improve facilities. A student supported by the Office of the Vice Provost for Entrepreneurship at Rensselaer will also join this team.

Lennox said. “It will be exciting and challenging for us to apply our engineering know-how to help them attain this important goal.”

“It’s rewarding to be involved with a real-world project and know that your hard work can have a direct positive impact on not just one person, but an entire community,” Cyganowski said.

The project builds on past humanitarian engineering work by Montoya to challenge students to develop new, affordable technologies to help improve the quality of life in rural Peru. These student innovations are currently installed or housed in the project flagship Ecological Home for the Andes, which serves as a community training site in Langui and aims to showcase the technologies for nearby communities.

Founded in 2001, the ESW is “an engaged technical community with the vision of changing the world through engineering education, innovation, and practical action,” and seeks to stimulate and foster an increased and more diverse community of engineers, as well as infuse sustainability into the practice and studies of every engineer.

Read more about the efforts.

Read: Engineering a Better World – High School Inventor Teams @ MIT – Engineers Without Borders – Kiva Fellows Blog: Nepalese Entrepreneur Success – The PlayPump System

The instructables web site provides how to guides on many topics. The origins of the site trace back to the MIT Media Lab. Solar Thermal Water Heater For Less Than $5

This project will create a DIY solar hot water heater for less than five dollars (if you have access to a garbage dump). It will allow you to see the principles of solar water heating in action, and is highly customizable.

Its a great way to learn about using the renewable energy of the sun to produce useful effects, in this case hot water. You can use these instructions to build a device that will actually heat enough water to use in the home, but it would require modifications.

Materials needed:

* Water
* 2 buckets
* Drill (with both drill bits and screw bits)
* Some scissors
* A saw (a simple hand saw will do)
* Some wood
* A pane of glass.
* The back of a small refrigerator.
* 12 feet of air pump hose used in fish tanks
* Backing material (we used an old door mat)
* A box of wood screws
* Aluminum Foil
* Role of duct tape
* Angle Cutter (or hack saw)

Time:

This project took about 3 hours of constructions time. It took a couple weeks to find all the parts.

Related: Dissecting an IP Phone ‘Magic Cable’ – Engineers Without Borders – Cost Efficient Solar Thermal Dish by MIT Students – Engineering at Home (AC) – Make blog

How can you get a photo of lightning without predicting when it will occur? This engineering solution automatically triggers your camera to take a picture when a lightning strike (or fireworks) appears and allows you to capture a picture of that strike. Lightning Activated Camera Shutter Trigger:

In a nutshell, the photo darlington converts light pulses into electrical pulses, the first LM324 section amplifies the electrical pulses, the second LM324 section is a high pass filter that only passes quick changes (lightning). The third LM324 stage is a comparator that allows only large pulses to pass through, and the 4047 one-shot stretches out the length of the pulses so that they are long enough to drive the relay and trigger the camera.

The 2N3904 drives the reed relay, which in turn triggers the camera’s electronic shutter switch. The VN10KM prevents the circuit from triggering the camera when it is first turned on. The LM324 GND Ref circuit divides the 9V power into two for a 4.5V ground reference. The other op-amp circuits use this reference value.
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Lightning storms can be extremely dangerous, and are potentially fatal. It is best to use the circuit to photograph storms that are many miles away from the photographer. Always keep an eye on the sky, storms can reform overhead fairly quickly. Never sit on top of a hill or in an open field when storms are nearby. It is possible to use this setup from inside of a house or car, just make sure to turn off all of the lights.

Researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering have uncovered a missing link in scientists’ understanding of the physical forces that give DNA its famous double helix shape.

“The stability of DNA is so fundamental to life that it’s important to understand all factors,” said Piotr Marszalek, a professor of mechanical engineering and materials sciences at Duke. “If you want to create accurate models of DNA to study its interaction with proteins or drugs, for example, you need to understand the basic physics of the molecule. For that, you need solid measurements of the forces that stabilize DNA.”
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They tugged on individual strands that were tethered at one end to gold and measured the changes in force as they pulled. The AFM technique allows precise measurements of forces within individual molecules down to one pico-Newton – a trillionth of a Newton. For a sense of scale, the force of gravity on a two-liter bottle of soda is about 20 Newtons, Marszalek noted.

As discussed at lunch, I have long believed the Polycom Power-over-Ethernet cable to be a fiction: at best, a misunderstanding on the part of the sales agent; at worst, a ploy to make extra money off customer ignorance. So I decided to take apart one of the magic cables and see what mysteries it held. Unfortunately, the cables didn’t show up with the phones. So I dissected the next best thing: one of the power cables that was bundled with the phones.

Here are the interesting results of my investigation.

Warning: these pictures show graphic dismemberment of a relatively expensive power cable. No otters were harmed during the filming of this investigation.

I began by stripping off the plastic sheath that protected the four pairs of wires.

Then I began to remove the hard plastic shell around the part of the cable where the wire from the electrical cord connects to the cable.

At this point, we can see four wires connecting from the Ethernet cable to the power socket, on a small printed circuit board.

I had to clip those wires to continue removing the plastic casing. Having noted what connected where, I cut them, and was able to see more of the delicate internals.

A little more work with the exacto knife, and I was able to remove all the black plastic from the bottom of the circuit board, revealing the wire traces and a basic circuit.

With yet more work, I was able to remove the top part of the plastic case, revealing two inductors (removed in this picture) and the rest of the circuit.

Topside:

Underside:

The circuit, once exposed, was easy to figure out.

In fact, this is exactly the wiring standard for 802.3af Power Over Ethernet. It was exactly the opposite of surprising. This was exactly how it should work. The power is delivered over the spare set of wires.

But our new HP switches (2650-PWR and 2626-PWR) are 802.3af Power Over Ethernet compliant. So why, why, why didn’t the phones work when we plugged them into the switches? We should have been able to plug them in, and the phones should have powered up immediately. But we could never get that to work.

Many furious minutes later, after downloading and reading HP’s Power Over Ethernet Manual Supplement, the answer became clear:

Our switch delivers power over the data wires. The phones look for power on the spare wires. The two don’t fit together.

And there is the explanation for the mysterious, fabled cable of Polycom. It must be a cable that converts “power over data wires” to “power over spare wires”. And that is a sufficiently complicated operation that I can see whay they cost $40. And they’d be hard enough to make that there’s no reason for us to try to make them ourselves.

So, a little investigation led to understanding. Now we understand the phones and the switches better, and understand why we need these magical cables that we are still waiting for, and understand how the whole voice network operates with all the pieces plugged into each other. Not a bad result for a few hours of dissection.

A quick picture that demonstrates how power is delivered over the data pair of a CAT5 cable, and then extracted:

This is basically what the magical cables from Polycom will have in them, I warrant. A small transformer to separate power from data.