Ekranoplane vs Eyjafjöll

Few days ago the Eyjafjallajökull ash cloud completely paralyzed the European airlines companies for several days,  grounding mainly all the aircrafts in Western Europe, blocking all around the world people who wanted to get back home or traveled over Europe for winning business opportunity in the rest of the World. It will maybe happen again as we never know with volcano behavior, maybe not this volcano but its neighbor.

With this big mess in the skies created by one Iceland volcan ashes cloud, it is maybe time for engineers to:

• either rethink the design of aircraft engines for being less sensitive to any ash/cloud and being greener by mitigate their own pollution/carbon footprint at the same time,

• or think to increase the fundings for designing and developing new type of aircraft propulsion systems using different concept such as the MHD-gas (MagnetoHydroDynamic in ionized gas) and the Coandã effect or the WIG (Wing In Ground) concept or both.

Soviet Union/Russia  during the Cold War (and maybe recently China in Qingdao naval base) has developped and built  some weird birds, huge birds using the WIG concepts named Ekranoplanes. One of them was famous and was called the Monster of the Caspian Sea.

In the Tom Clancy’s novel and also the movie “The Hunt for Red October”, the most advanced Russian nuclear submarine is using MHD concept as Stealth propulsion technologies.

Design and manufacture a new sustainable Ekranoplane or Avrocar is one of the solution against Eyjafjallajökull and others or really invest in a technology such as the MHD and Coandã effect (as the French physician Jean-Pierre Petit did with his MHD Aerodynes).

more ekranoplane pictures here and there

a 1,000 MPH Ride

There are still projects that amaze me by trying to break physical limits and being out of the world context (economic crisis and global warming for example). The BloodHound SSC project is about design, build and run the faster “car” on Earth, a supersonic rocket car I should say,  to break away the land speed record  to 1,000 mph or 1,609.34 km/h or Mach 1.3487.

The World Land Speed record, meaning breaking the sound barrier on ground was established first in September 25th 1997 and then in  October 15th 1997 and hold by Andy Green, a former Royal Air Force wing Commander. The record of Andy Green is 763.035 mph or 1,227.99 km/h or Mach 1.016 with ThrustSCC. Andy is part of the BloodHound SCC project and for sure he will be the pilot of this ground rocket.

This project is very interesting, it will explore new areas of design and bring a lot of scientific and technological discoveries and new concepts we will retrieve one day in the common cars. As it was the case with one of the most beautiful aircraft ever designed, Concorde, we retrieve today most of the developed technologies on the current and coming commercial airplanes .

However, instead of trying to design the fastest gas engine car, why not focusing capitals an smart people to design the most efficient gas free engine car and get a 1,000 mpg or 425 km/l record?

source: BloodHound SSC

A Dimensional Walk-Through

How to understand without any calculation or equation some of Mathematics Concepts such as the 4th Dimension, the Complex Numbers, the “Fibration” from the Mathematician Heinz Hopf and the Stereographic Projection of the great Mathematician Bernhard Riemann if you’re a poet or even a non-poet who never got any points in maths?

By watching this fantastic 3D movie produced by Étienne Ghys, CNRS senior researcher, working at the ENS-Lyon, Jos Leys, Engineer turned computer graphics enthusiast, specializing in mathematical imagery from Belgium and Aurélien Alvarez, graduate PhD student in Ghys’ lab at the ENS-Lyon.

Take 2 hours of your time and watch this 9-chapter movie online or at least 15min a day for each chapter!!
It is simply amazing!!

Watch it in English, or in French, or in Spanish or in Arabic language.
Or download it and watch it. The movie is under Creative Commons license.
You will find also on the website more details on each chapter.

source: Dimensions

For my friend ChAP, with whom I had some long & interesting discussions on Topology…

Deep Sea Pink Glass Bowl

This is not a giant pink glass cup but a hot titanium half-sphere done by pressure forging.

The first pictures of the Titanic wreck far below the surface of the Atlantic ocean in the James Cameron’s Titanic Expedition documentary were impressive.

Titanic had sunk to a depth of 12,480 feet, some 2 1/2 miles below the surface of the most treacherous ocean on Earth.

There are only five submersible craft in the world capable of diving below 12,000 feet. At that depth, the water pressure is 6,000 pounds per square inch. One small flaw in the vessel’s superstructure would mean instant death for all on board.

One of them is ALVIN, the legendary Navy’s only currently operational deep-sea scientific sub that first explored the wreckage of the Titanic. ALVIN can dive 2.4 miles down. ALVIN has already over forty years of service.
ALVIN is going to be replaced by a bigger successor that could go up to four miles under which will open up 99% of the ocean floor for exploration. In fact, I should say upgraded due to raw materials cost increase since the beginning of the new submersible program. In this case, it is Titanium which has had a 5x increase in cost. 

As consequence, The next generation of ALVIN project budget has exploded and the schedule has slided and it will not be ready until 2015 for its first dive. The engineers and scientists decided to create an sub hybrid by keeping the ALVIN tail where are located the equipments system and propulsion system, and adding the ALVIN successor’s personal sphere where the crew takes place.

As the Titanic wreck pictures were awesome, the result of the manufacturing process is equally amazing. 

source: New York Times & Denver Museum of Nature & Science

Mystery of the Red Planet poles

Scientists announced the identification of a huge crater (more than 10 000 Km long ) on the planet Mars. It follows from the impact of an asteroid or a comet that is the cause of the asymmetry existing between the two hemispheres. A similar phenomenon on Earth would have given birth to the Moon, about four billion Years.

We still have for these kind of topics only 2D Drawings or Artistic view in 3D/Photo Realistic Rendering. It will be interesting to get the Realistic simulation of such phenomena using engineering tools such as CAD and FEA platform to have the 3D rendering and the physical/mechanical data at the same time. It would be great to have a 3D CAD application that can manage data from the the infinitely small to the infinitely big…

source: Nouvel Obs (FR) – Techno-Science (FR)