Engineers in Germany are combining old and new solar technology into what may be the biggest solar energy project ever.

They plan to erect solar collectors in the Sahara Desert, where there’s lots of sunshine. And lots of room. More than three and a half million square miles. That’s as big as the continental United States. A solar array big enough to supply the whole world with electric power could fit into 35-thousand square miles. One percent of the Sahara. About the size of the state of Maine.

Maybe the coolest thing about the planned project is that most of the technology has been around for years and we know it works. They’ll collect the sun’s heat with something called parabolic troughs. A parabolic trough is like a big pipe split in half lengthwise that focuses sunlight on glass tubes that run above the trough’s center.

The tubes carry special oil that’s heated to more than 700° Fahrenheit. The hot oil turns water into steam to spin turbines that’ll drive electric generators. Simple. The project’s first goal is to meet 15 percent of Europe’s electricity needs by 2050. The only real catch is getting the electricity from the Sahara to Europe, but they think they’ve got that one solved, too.

We’ve got solar energy solved for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,664842,00.html

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/desertec-sahara-solar-power-project-produce-first-electricity-2015.php

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/3347892/Sahara-sun-could-power-all-of-Europe.html

The problem started about 150 ago. That’s when the first transatlantic cable connected the east and west shores of the Atlantic Ocean.

Now, people could send telegrams across the ocean in minutes instead of letters by ship that took weeks. It doesn’t sound like much today, when you can call anywhere from anywhere on your cell phone, but back then it was a big deal.

It didn’t last. The cable failed a few weeks after the first message was sent. A group of engineers met to figure out what went wrong. Then they discovered they had another problem. Electricity carried the messages from one side of the ocean to the other. But nobody had words yet to describe electricity yet, especially the important ideas of current and resistance.

In the end, they borrowed the names of scientists who’d done important research into electricity to describe what they needed. You’ll probably recognize the words, even if you don’t recognize the people. Ampere, from Andre-Marie Ampere, to describe electric current. Ohm, from Georg Ohm, for resistance in a wire. Watt, from James Watt, available power. And volt, from Alessandro Volta, the amount of electrical – pressure – in a system.

We do have the words we need to get out of here, so we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more, visit:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transatlantic_telegraph_cable

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/cable/

http://www.history-magazine.com/cable.html

When you saw the Terminator movies or Star Trek, you know that mixing up computers and humans is standard stuff in science fiction. But now, engineers are doing the next best thing. Computers and insects. Beetles.

They’re putting electrodes into the nervous systems of immature beetles. When the beetles grow up, they add a tiny battery and a computer microcontroller. The whole assembly can be connected to a laptop computer through a wireless link. And they’re ready to go.

Flying a beetle is pretty straightforward. A joystick attached to the computer can send an electric current into any of the electrodes. If the operator, pilot?, wants the beetle to fly to the right, an electric pulse to the left-side electrode gets the muscles on that side working a little harder and the beetle makes a right turn. You get the idea.

The Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, is paying for the research. It’s not clear exactly what the Pentagon wants radio-controlled beetles for, but we can make some guesses. They’re also looking into flies, moths and dragonflies. Other researchers say the cyborg beetles are a good way to learn more about the dynamics of flight.

The beetle we’re watching is getting ready to head out the door, so we better be close behind. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Hybrid automobiles have been around for quite a while. Honda introduced the first gasoline-electric hybrid to the United States in 1999. In 2004, Toyota started selling the Prius and Ford’s Escape hybrid S-U-V came on the market. Now, it seems like everybody’s got a hybrid. Even Cadillac and Mercedes-Benz.

Everybody sees why driving a hybrid makes sense, mostly great gas mileage. Some, more than 50 miles per gallon. And then there’s the hybrid bulldozer. Yep, bulldozer. You know, the big yellow machines that push dirt around construction sites. Caterpillar has brought out a hybrid bulldozer, a diesel-electric version of its D7 dozer.

It’s the first one, and it seems to do the same for dozers that the Prius and its automotive brethren do for automobiles. The D7E, for electric, dozer offers better fuel economy than its non-hybrid counterpart. Between 25 and 30 percent better. And it’s quieter. None of this comes for free, of course. Like automobiles, the hybrid dozer is more expensive than standard diesel dozers. About 20-percent more expensive than a comparable D7 diesel. The contractor that bought the first one says he’s happy with the way the hybrid dozer performs, and he expects it to pay for itself in less than three years.

Our dozer is at the door and we’re out of here. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

For more:

http://enr.construction.com/products/equipment/2009/1222-CaterpillarHybridDozer.asp
http://greensource.construction.com/news/2009/090805Hybrid-Bulldozer.asp

If you’ve ever taken a physics course, you know that nothing can go faster than the speed of light. A hundred-86-thousand miles a second. Seven-hundred – million – miles an hour. Everything physicists know says you can’t go faster. But some physicists and engineers think they can do an end run around the speed-of-light limit.

They say that ideas developed about 50 years ago by a German scientist named Burkhard Heim suggest that we could use a very strong magnetic field to push spacecraft into another dimension. A dimension where the physical laws that make the speed of light as fast as anything can go, don’t exist.

The idea sounds like science fiction. And a lot of top physicists say that’s all it is. But if it’s real, it could mean traveling to Mars in three hours or to a nearby star in three months. The interesting part is that the Department of Energy has a device – the Z-machine – that could produce the kind of ultra-powerful magnetic field we’d need to see if the idea might work. If it does, researchers could be testing a working engine in five years.

Even if everything turns out the way the visionaries think it will, it’ll be a long time before you can buy a ticket for a day trip to Mars.

So, beam us up, Scotty. We’re through here for now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too.

Visit us at http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

When the Apollo astronauts were on the moon, they only stayed a few days at a time, and batteries or fuel cells did them just fine. But now NASA is talking about astronauts staying for weeks or months. Batteries just won’t do it. They’re going to need a long-term source of power for their exploration and scientific activities.

Space experts are proposing all sorts of power sources, from solar panels to king-sized fuel cells. One of most popular ideas is a small nuclear reactor.

NASA engineers are working on an ultra-compact nuclear power plant that should generate enough electricity to run an average American house. Or a lunar exploration base. And do it for eight years. Or longer. The reactor itself is about the size of a big wastebasket. The whole thing would fit into an 18-wheel trailer with room to spare and would weigh about the same as an armored humvee.

Not everybody is convinced sending a nuclear reactor to the moon is a good idea. Protestors objected to launching NASA’s 19-97 Cassini probe, which carried 72-pounds of plutonium fuel. But the NASA engineers are convinced the lunar reactor is safe.

Our reactor is still powered up, but it’s time to go. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web.  http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

It’s not Paris, but people in the French city of Toulouse still like to have their streets lit at night. There’s a problem, though. The city’s electric bills are high and climbing. So they’re trying a new way pedestrians who walk the city’s streets after dark can help. It’s easy. Just keep walking.

What they’re doing is to install sensors in the lampposts that hold up the streetlights. When the sensors detect the body heat of an approaching pedestrian, the light clicks from dim to bright. When the pedestrian moves on – between 500 and 600 yards away – the streetlight dims its light again.

They’re testing the sensor-operated streetlights now, and if it works on a short stretch of mostly residential street, they’re going to start by installing the sensors along a stretch of busy street between the city’s sports stadium and the university campus. If it works there, they plan to take it citywide. They expect to cut electricity consumption by streetlights on busy streets in half.

City administrators across France are watching what happens, and others around the world are watching, too. A group of city council members from Osaka, Japan, visited a while ago to see firsthand how it’s done.

Our streetlights are still shining, so we’ll leave before somebody dims them. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s one of the goofy things about modern war. Personal armor, air evacuation and better field medicine mean that many wounded who would have died in previous conflicts, live. But they live with the effects of severe burns, brain injuries, blindness, spinal damage, amputations. Since 2001, almost 700 have lost at least one limb.

This is where technology lends a hand. Meet CAREN, the computer-assisted rehabilitation environment. CAREN is a dome that helps soldiers with artificial legs or arms learn to use them in different situations. Walking down a busy street? See other pedestrians around you. See the buildings. Hear and see traffic. A walk in the woods? See the trees, hear the wind and the birds, feel the trail twist and turn under your feet.

Computers linked to sensors on the body move a treadmill to match the ground you’d be walking over and adjust video images all around to what you’d see as you walk. There’s more to CAREN than helping injured troopers learn how to deal with their wounds. Medical researchers also use the simulator to study problems like balance disorders and how stress affects people with post-traumatic stress disorder.

There’s no clever way to end this one. Hang in there, guys. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

People in the United States have always been a little skittish about nuclear energy. Accidents at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl in Ukraine didn’t help. Construction on the most recent nuclear power plant was started in 1977, and it didn’t go online until 1996.

Then came climate change, and environmental policy-makers took another look at nuclear energy. Unlike coal-fired power plants, nuclear plants produce no carbon dioxide and – get this – even less radiation than coal-fired power plants.

Engineers are working on designs for new reactors that they say should be simpler and safer than existing reactors, and should even deal with nuclear waste. The spent fuel should be a two-fer, the engineers say. Recycle it into new fuel that could go back into the reactor. This reduces the amount of waste we have to store. The technology to do this already exists, and what we now call spent fuel still has about 95 percent of its energy.

New reactors should be safer, with fewer ways operators could accidentally cause something to go wrong. And more automatic safeguards against accidents, like cooling systems that rely less on pumps and more on gravity to keep coolant where it needs to be for safe operation.

Our power plant is humming along, and we’re done. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Time never stops. We’ve been keeping track of it for a long time, and we’ve done it a lot of different ways – sundials, dripping water, candles with marks on them, springs and gears and pendulums, quartz crystals and electricity.

All of these timekeepers have one thing in common. They keep track of the interval between one tick and the next. And they all have a problem — the same problem. The intervals they measure aren’t always the same. They’re probably not that different, but they vary – a little or a lot. If you need to measure time exactly – to navigate a space probe or use a global positioning system – they’re not good enough.

This is where special clocks called atomic clocks come in. Instead of pendulums and gears or even quartz crystals, atomic clocks use the vibration between the nucleus and electrons of atoms – usually cesium atoms – to set the interval we use to measure time passing. Even this interval varies a little. But not much. The atomic clock at the Naval Observatory near Washington, D.C., is accurate to within about one second in 20 million years.

If you think this is accurate, clocks based on hydrogen atoms do even better over the short term. But over longer periods of time, cesium is better.

Time’s up. We’ve got to go now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. EngineeringWorks! is on the World Wide Web, too. Visit our web site. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

It’s easy to think of big ways to keep down how much electricity we use. Compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of regular ones. Energy Star washers, driers and refrigerators. Programmable thermostats to use your heating and air conditioning efficiently. It all helps and more of us are using them.

But we’ll bet you’re wasting a lot of electricity, too. Little things. Laptops. Cell phone chargers. iPods. Game consoles. Power engineers estimate that these little power hogs make up 15-percent of household electric demand. And that’s expected to double in the next 20-years. Worldwide, it’ll take the equivalent of five-hundred-60 coal-fired power plants or two-hundred-30 nuclear plants, just to keep up with it.

Try this some time. Wait ’til it’s dark and turn out all the lights. Then start counting how many little green lights you find. You know, the little green LED that shows your computer or TV is on standby. The average American household has about 25. Each one of them is slurping up electricity.

You can cut some of this energy hogging by unplugging them when you’re not using them, or using smart power strips. Some of them just use a lot of electricity, like the cool new plasma and LCD TV sets. Some use more power than your refrigerator.

We’re unplugging our little green light and we’re gone. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

If you’ve been to a big concert, or a ball game, with a big crowd of other people, you know what happens when it’s time to leave. No matter how big the exit is, everybody gets jammed up and it goes really slowly.

Engineers in Japan have been looking at what’s going on and how to fix it. What they found makes no sense to us, but it seems to work. At least in experiments.

They started with what we’ve all seen. Even when exits are wide open, people seem to jam up in front of it. Then they tried something goofy. They put something in the way of the people trying to get out. Not so big that it blocked the way, but big enough that people had to detour around it. And it had to be in just the right place. Guess what? Everybody got out faster.

Here’s why. Usually, so many people get to the exit at the same time that it turns into a people traffic jam. Everything slows down. When there’s an obstacle, it slows some people down just enough that the congestion in the exit never happens. Even though they’re getting there slower, more people get through the exit faster than before.

Our way to the exit is clear now, and we’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Image: Travelin’ Librarian

Transistors, the things that make your iPod and computer possible. We’ll look back in history. Today, on Engineering Works!

If you look around at all the things we have that use transistors, it seems like we always must have had them. We haven’t, of course. An engineer working at Bell Laboratories invented the transistor in 1947. It was a big deal, even if nobody realized it at the time. Some folks say it was the most important invention of the 20th century.

Before transistors, we used glass vacuum tubes to process electrical signals for things like radios and the earliest computers. They did the job, but they were bulky, heavy, hot, and they broke. Easily. It took the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the race to put a man on the moon to show us how important transistors are and what they can do.

Now, transistors are the basic ingredient for computer chips. Think about it. In 19-61, a single computer chip cost more than $30. By 1971, that price had dropped to $1.25. Today, that same chip is less than a nickel.

There was a time, in the 1960s, when a radio with six or seven or 10 transistors was a big deal. Now just one high-end microprocessor chip has a billion or so. Fire up your computer and printer and print two or three periods. Each one of them could cover two million transistors.

We’ve covered transistors for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:

Engineers in Germany are getting ready to turn the electric power industry inside out. We’ll see how, today on Engineering Works!

Everybody knows how we get electricity. Big generating plants powered by coal or nuclear energy or water. It sizzles along power lines to where we use it to light our houses and power our washing machines and computers and stuff.

Maybe there’s another way. How about a really small power plant in your basement? And your neighbors and the folks down the street. Engineers at automaker Volkswagen are getting ready to build small natural gas-powered generators intended to go into people’s basements or garages.

This isn’t what you probably think. The electricity coming from your basement won’t light up your house. Not directly. It’ll go back onto the power grid as a backup for green generating systems like wind or solar power. The idea is to reduce demand on backup generators and let the power company get by with smaller and less-expensive generators.

Everybody should come out ahead. The power company because these little generators are almost twice as efficient as conventional power plants. Homeowners because heat that’s wasted in conventional generating plants heats their houses in place of conventional central heat.

Not everyone thinks it’s going to work. We’ll see. In the meantime, watch your electric meter.

We’re shutting down our power for now. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:

The hammering that Hurricane Katrina gave New Orleans isn’t news anymore. Engineers are building something they say will keep it that way. It’s a pump. A big pump. Today, on Engineering Works!

People who live in New Orleans found out the hard way that the city can be a bad place to be when a big hurricane comes. Most of the Big Easy is below sea level and it filled up with floodwaters from the storm surge when the levees broke.

Engineers are installing a big new pump they say should keep the city dry in case another big hurricane blows in. In engineer-talk, they call it the West Closure Complex, or WCC, and they say it’s the biggest pump station ever built. If everything stays on schedule, it should be completed in 2011.

The West Closure Complex will protect the city from storm surge in the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway with two layers of defense. Protection starts with steel floodgates sturdy and tall enough to block a 16-foot storm surge. Then they’ll fire up the pumps. These are big pumps, big enough to empty an Olympic-sized swimming pool in less than five seconds.

They’re built solid, so they won’t collapse under pressure, the way the city’s levees did last time. The WCC is built to stand up to 140 mile-per-hour wind. Even runaway barges can’t dent it.

The wind sounds like it’s rising, and we’ll see you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: EPA/Maurizo Gambarini

Sometimes engineering doesn’t work out the way we planned. We’ll take a look, today on Engineering Works!

Top brass in the German army are raving about some new equipment that they say will give their soldiers a big advantage on the battlefield. The soldiers who use the new gear aren’t so enthusiastic. They say it’s too bulky, too heavy and unreliable.

The new equipment package, the – infantryman of the future – looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Think Robo Cop.

The new combat gear starts with a protective vest. Plus a built-in mini-computer, new radios and protective goggles. The whole package costs almost 30-thousand-dollars. Each.

And guess what? A lot of the German soldiers who have used it for real in Afghanistan hate it. The body armor is so bulky that soldiers wearing it have to scrunch down whenever they get into a vehicle. Really uncomfortable. The goggles tend to fog up at anything more than a brisk walk.

Then there’s the computer, which includes a satellite navigation system and electronic maps. It doesn’t have enough memory, and sometimes just plain gives wrong answers. The new radios don’t have enough range, and their earpieces tend to fall out of soldiers’ ears.

One fed-up field commander has suggested that the army start over and replace parts of it with off-the-shelf equipment that would work better and be cheaper, to boot.

We hope our engineering words are working better than that. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Image: National Human Genome Research Institute

Just when you were getting used to the idea of genetic engineering, there’s something new. We’ll take a look. Today, on Engineering Works.

If you’re at all interested in new technology, you probably know that inserting a gene or two into a plant and getting something useful back is no big deal any more. That’s genetic engineering as we now know it.

But listen to this. A new breed of genetic engineers are inventing a new field. They call it, synthetic biology. They aim to use the technology pioneered in genetic engineering to build whole new organisms. One new organism these guys are working on is a plant we could harvest and process into petroleum. Not ethanol, like people are talking about to replace gasoline, but good old oil. Growing in a field instead of miles underground.
ne ambitious group of researchers is aiming eventually at reprogramming trees to grow into the shape of a house instead of leaves and branches. It sounds like science fiction, but they’re serious. We think.
All this will be pretty neat, if it works. But there’s still a long way to go. So far, the longest DNA sequence duplicated in the laboratory is about 35-thousand units long. Compare that to human cells that duplicate a sequence three-billion, with a B, units long.

Where will it all end? Hard to tell from here. But we’re out of time, and we’re ending here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: Wikipedia

Most of the time when we think about engineers, we think about the nifty things they’re designing and building, now. But a lot of what they do now started a long time ago. We’ll take a look back, today on Engineering Works!

The engineers we know design and build new fuel-efficient cars, ultra-fast computers, tall buildings. Cool stuff. But many of the principles they use are thousands of years old. Consider the lever. You know what a lever is. It’s a bar of something that pivots over something else. It’s a powerful idea. Every geometry student knows what the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes said about levers: give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I’ll move the world.

If we think about levers at all, we probably picture playground teeter-totters or prybars. But these are only the beginning. Hammers, the oars in a rowboat, wedges used to split wood. They all use the principles of the lever. Then there’s the wheel and the pulley. And the screw. They’re levers, too.

Archimedes gets a lot of credit for understanding the lever. But he wasn’t the first to think about how levers work. The earliest recorded discussion of levers appeared at least a generation before Archimedes and his famous statement. So the next time you see something really neat that an engineer did, take a minute to wonder a little. It all started a long time ago.

Long time or short, we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Thomas Hawk/Flickr.com

We’re going to listen to some big words. Engineers know what they are. Today, on Engineering Works!

Engineers use numbers all the time. Sometimes these numbers are really big. Consider power engineers. Power engineers design and build the systems that make and deliver the electricity that lights our homes. They routinely talk in terms that include millions and sometimes billions. Over time, scientists and engineers have invented some nifty words to describe big numbers.

Here’s an example. Your utility company charges you for the number of kilowatt-hours of electricity you use. A kilowatt-hour is a thousand watts of electricity used for one hour. A kilowatt will light a 100-watt bulb for 10 hours.

In the world of big number words, kilo, or a thousand, is pretty puny. A kilogram only weighs a little more than two pounds. Utility company generators regularly produce power measured in millions of watts – megawatts. Many nuclear-powered generators have outputs of more than 200 megawatts. Even this is pretty small when you talk about electric power consumption around the world. That stands at just under two terawatts, two trillion watts. Makes your electric bill seem pretty trivial.

Even this isn’t the end of it. An experimental laser getting ready to go into operation will produce pulses that measure more than one petawatt. Now we’ve got a really big number. A million trillion. And there are words to talk about numbers even bigger than this. But not today.

Our number is up, and we’re quitting. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: geoftheref/Flickr.com

If you look around, there’s plastic everywhere. We’ll look, too. Today, on Engineering Works.

You see a lot of plastic because it works. It’s lighter and cheaper than metal and it’s more durable than cardboard. A lot of it can even be recycled.

In fact, engineers have designed some plastics especially to be recycled or to break down safely, quickly, completely. Biodegradable. This is the easy part. Now it gets complicated. Different biodegradable plastics need different treatments to break down as they’re supposed to.

For instance, hydrobiodegradable plastics. They’re made from food or plant starch, sometimes with oil-based polymers. Micro-organisms break them down into water, carbon dioxide, methane and biomass. This is good, but it needs an industrial composter to work. Most folks don’t have one.

Oxobiodegradable plastics are made from petroleum byproducts, like traditional plastics. Most of them have a built-in self-destruct, and they start to break down after a preset period of time. Much more quickly than traditional plastics. Sunlight, heat and what engineers call mechanical stress – basically, stomping on it or cutting it up – do the trick.

Here’s the point: getting plastics to decompose isn’t as simple as it sounds. For instance, some plastics that break down easily in the open air last forever in sealed landfills. If you recycle plastic – and we hope you do – check out what each kind of plastic you have needs to break down.

Our time today is about broken down. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Bruno Girin/Flickr.com

Everybody knows the Egyptians used huge stone blocks to build their pyramids. Some engineers aren’t so sure. We’ll listen to the argument. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody learned in school that ancient Egyptian engineers used thousands of huge limestone blocks to build the pyramids. What we didn’t learn was how the Egyptians got those blocks from the ground to the top of those pyramids.

Archaeologists and engineers have speculated for decades about how they did it. Sloping ramps. Rollers. Gangs of sweating slaves. You’ve seen the movies. But nobody knows for sure.
Now, materials engineers have come up with a new explanation that has the archaeologists in an uproar. Maybe some of those huge limestone blocks weren’t really limestone. And maybe those gangs of slaves didn’t push them up the ramps after all.

The engineers think just maybe the Egyptians invented an early kind of concrete from crushed limestone and binders that work just like the Portland cement in modern concrete. Since the powdered limestone would be just like the limestone in limestone blocks, it would be really hard to tell the difference.

So maybe instead of thousands of slaves pushing huge blocks of stone around, they were carrying bags of wet concrete and pouring it into forms on top of the half-built pyramids. Not as mysterious and romantic as big blocks of stone, but it could have worked.

We haven’t been pushing stone or carrying concrete, but we’re still done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Francois Lariviere/iStock

Photo: Darrel Ronald/Flickr.com

Here’s a question you probably never thought to ask: what should your car sound like? We’ll listen for an answer, today on Engineering Works!

We’ve all listened to cars, all our lives and we’ve always heard them. The clatter of an old VW bug. The rumble of a high-performance muscle car. But those sounds may be fading into the past. As hybrids and all-electric cars become more common, the sound of cars is changing. Hybrids and electric cars make almost no noise at all, especially when they’re moving slowly.

Some engineers think this could be a bad thing. Think about it. You’re walking across a parking lot, minding your own business, and suddenly there’s that almost-silent electric car. Right on top of you. You never heard it coming. And imagine what it would be like at night. Or any time if you can’t see.

Engineers are working on ways to fix the problem. By adding sound back into electric cars. Some are going the simple route. Just plain noise. One possible added sound is a little like a jet engine with some added static. Kind of hard to miss.

Another possibility some engineers are exploring would allow you to change the sound of your electric car or hybrid to fit your mood. Anything from that jet to a superstock Dodge or an 18-wheeler.

Our car isn’t electric or silent. It’s just plain noisy. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:EPA/islamizationwatch

Here’s a strange thought to start your day: You probably have something in common with a terrorist. We’ll think about that, today on Engineering Works!

We usually don’t think of terrorists as firing up the grill for a backyard barbecue. That’s something folks like us do. But the chances are pretty good that when you hit the switch to light your gas-fired grill, you’re using technology terrorists use for what they do.

Sounds scary, huh? It’s not, really. Here’s what’s going on. When you push that button to ignite the gas to grill your steak, the pressure from your finger bends a small crystal down in the switch. Just a little. Engineers call it a piezoelectric crystal. That bending causes stresses in the crystal and out comes an electric current. Enough to make a spark to touch off the gas.

One of terrorists’ favorite weapons is a rocket launcher called an R-P-G. If you were an explosives expert, you could take apart the warhead of an R-P-G rocket. Don’t try this at home, kids. Inside, there’s a thing called a detonator that makes the explosive explode when the rocket hits something.

Inside the detonator is a piezoelectric crystal, a lot like the one in your gas grill. When the rocket hits something, the force bends that crystal, and the electricity it makes touches off the warhead.

Our crystal has taken about all the pressure we can stand, so we’re out of here. We’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Beacon Power Corp.

One of the newest ideas for storing a lot of electricity is also an old idea. We’re going around in circles. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody knows about electricity, even if all you know is that we use a lot of it.

Here’s the problem. We use a lot more electricity at two in the afternoon than we do at two in the morning. This means we need enough generators to give us the electricity we use during the day. At night, when businesses are closed and most of us are asleep, we use a lot less electricity and we need a lot fewer generators. But they’re still there and they’re not doing anything. That’s expensive and wasteful.

Power engineers think we can use some old technology to solve the problem. It’s called a flywheel, and the idea has been around a long time. Think potter’s wheel. The engine in your car has a flywheel, too. It stores some of the energy the engine produces to help it run smoothly, especially at slow speeds.

The new flywheels are really high-tech. And really heavy, more than a ton each. They spin on magnetic bearings. At twice the speed of sound. The idea is to spin them up when power demand is low and use the energy they store to turn generators when demand is high. That should help even out the load on generating systems.

Our flywheel is running down, and it’s time to leave. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Euchiasmus/Wikipedia

Sometimes, they say, life imitates art. So does engineering — sort of. We’ll see how, today On Engineering Works!

If you’re a fan of campy science fiction movies, you might remember the 1966 flick, Fantastic Voyage. In the movie, a submarine with a crew of medical experts is shrunk and injected into the bloodstream of a guy in a coma. Except for Raquel Welch, the movie is pretty forgettable. Of course, shrinking the submarine is pretty neat, too.

Now, biomedical engineers have pulled off something like the shrinking submarine, except it’s real. This time, it’s a miniature camera in a capsule. No Raquel Welch. Sorry, guys. Doctors use this camera capsule to examine the inside of the small intestine, one part of the body that’s hard to reach with more conventional diagnostic tools. The capsule is bigger than the fictional submarine — about the size of a big vitamin capsule. It carries a camera on a computer chip, light source, radio transmitter and a battery.

Here’s how it works. You swallow the capsule and it passes through your stomach to your small intestine, taking pictures as it goes. The images are transmitted to a receiver on a belt, powered by its own battery pack. In a day or so, the capsule passes on through the rest of your digestive system and your doctor collects the images from the receiver and analyzes them. Pretty cool.

Our capsule has gone where all capsules go, and we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Chaim Zvi/Flickr.com

Turn on the tap and the water comes out. No big deal. We’ll drink to that. Today, on Engineering Works!

Most of the time, most places, in the United States, getting enough water is no big deal. Kitchen sink, bathroom shower – turn them on and the water comes out. Making that happen is more complicated – and less certain – than you think.

Consider this. It takes a million miles of pipe to get the water to everyone who takes that drink. Plus 24,000 storage tanks and more than 14 million valves. Almost seven million fire hydrants. And water experts estimate that there are about 25 breaks in every hundred miles of water main. At an average cost of $3,000 each, fixing those breaks is an expensive job.

Getting the water to you is only the beginning. It has to be clean and good to drink. Water spends a lot of time in storage before it gets to you. And the longer between when it’s purified and you drink it, the more opportunity it has to pick up germs and other nasty stuff.

Water quality engineers are working hard to come up with the best ways to get that water to you and be sure it’s clean when it gets there. But it’s a truly complicated problem. Solving it involves everything from construction and understanding how water behaves as it moves to chemistry and microbiology.

Somebody just closed our tap and we’re through. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Huw Pritchard/Flickr.com

Hold onto your hat! This one’s going to go by fast. High speed, today on Engineering Works!

High fuel prices are driving most automotive engineers these days to find ways to give you better gas mileage. But not all of them. Some are looking for speed.

The ultimate in all-out speed are top fuel dragsters. These vehicles are – fast. Like 300 miles an hour fast. Like getting from one end of a quarter-mile strip to the other in about four and a half seconds. About as long as it took to read that sentence.

Here’s how they do it. Horsepower. Lots of it. A 500-cubic-inch Hemi engine turns out so much horsepower that we don’t have the instruments to measure it. Engineers calculate it at about 5,000 horsepower. That’s more than the first four rows at Indianapolis on Memorial Day.

These engines are hot. The fuel burns at more than 7,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By the end of the run, the spark plugs have pretty much melted and the engine keeps running by itself. The only way to stop it is to shut off the fuel.

And talk about gas mileage. Going flat out, a top fuel dragster burns a gallon and a half of nitro methane fuel – every second. That’s as much as a 747 airliner uses. But the dragster produces more energy.

The timer here is running down and our light is green. We’re out of here.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Wendy Longo/Flickr.com

This one’s going to be rough. Or maybe it’ll be smooth. Engineering what you feel, today on Engineering Works!

Think about something nice to touch. The smooth wood of fine furniture. A freshly laundered towel. A baby’s cheek. We all know what they feel like, but try to tell somebody what that feeling is. Hard to do, isn’t it?

Maybe this explains why a new field engineers are exploring is so difficult. It’s called – haptics – from the Greek word for touch. More and more products feature haptic technology. In a simple way, the tiny motors that make your cell phone vibrate in your pocket are haptic technology.

Cell phone makers are hinting that new phones may have haptics built into their touch screens. Maybe the feel of a switch clicking on or off. Or pushing a button. Some visionaries are dreaming about adding the right vibrations to music, to make listening to your iPod more like being at a live concert.

One of the most interesting applications of haptic technology is also one of the most useful. It’s a simulator that helps nurses and medical technicians learn how to start an I-V or draw blood from a vein. It looks and feels like a human arm, and you can actually feel when you’ve gotten the needle into the vein. Or missed it. We don’t know if it says ouch!

Even if it’s not haptic, our timer is buzzing and our time is up. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo by: LostBob Photos/Flickr.com

We’re going to listen to the music. Today, on Engineering Works!

Guitars, especially electric guitars are an important part of modern popular music. Imagine the Beatles without George Harrison’s guitar. Or Jimi Hendrix without distortion. Electric guitars made it work.

Guitar players started experimenting with electricity to amplify their instruments during the 1930s, when big band swing was big. The guitar was getting lost in all that brass.

The first pickups for guitars were pretty simple – a magnet the size and shape of a tube of lipstick wrapped lengthwise with wire. Simple, huh? But basically, that’s it.

Here’s how it works. The magnet is surrounded by a magnetic field. Think elementary school science class: Iron filings; a magnet; and a sheet of glass.

Put that wire-wrapped magnet under the steel strings of a guitar and you’re ready to go. As the strings vibrate, they disturb the magnetic field and create a small electric current in the wires wrapped around the magnet. Feed that tiny signal into an amplifier and you’ve got the sound that made electric guitars with names like Fender, Gibson and Rickenbacker famous.

The sound those early pickups produced wasn’t that great. They tended to pick up noise from room wiring, too, but they worked. And engineers and musicians have made them lots better over the years, since. The pickups on today’s guitars provide cleaner, stronger sound, but they’re still basically magnets and wire.

It’s time to wrap up this gig. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo by: FogCityFog/fklickr.com

Break out your flowery shirt and digital camera. Today, we’re tourists, on Engineering Works!

Seeing new places is one of the big reasons tourists are tourists. They want to see and find out about things they’ve never seen before. Let’s go to Rome and see the coliseum. Or ride the cable cars in San Francisco.

There’s one problem, though. If you’ve never been in San Francisco, you might have trouble figuring out where all the neat stuff is. Engineers have come up with the perfect tour guide. This one knows the important things to see, knows all about them, and won’t get lost trying to find them.
This tour guide combines a special two-seater rental car, a GPS system and a computer. Pick the attraction you want to see, turn the system on and you’re off. The G-P-S keeps track of where you are and tells you where to turn to get to where you want to go. Along the way, the GPS keeps track of where you are and the computer describes what you see around you.

When you get where you’re going, say, San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, it tells you what’s there to see. Pretty neat!

The only problem is that so far the GPS tour system only operates in three cities. But at least you don’t have to remember to tip the guide at the end of the day.

Our tour is over for today, but we’ll see you on down the highway.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: rawkus/stock.xchng.com

What would the Fourth of July be without fireworks? Today, we’ll ooh! and ahh! over those spectacular aerial displays, on Engineering Works.

From pom-pon bursts to sparkling flares, there’s nothing like fireworks to captivate a crowd. For centuries, we’ve celebrated royal weddings, baptisms and other special events with lavish productions that light up the night sky. Today fireworks shows set to music have become big entertainment spectacles for sports events, theme parks and holidays.

Your basic firework is a shell, filled with explosive powder and stars – pellets made of metallic salts and other chemicals. The pellets make the shape, and the chemicals in the pellets make the colors. When the powder ignites and bursts – anywhere from 400 to 1,000 feet up – the explosion pushes out the stars. Then the stars themselves explode into the shapes that draw oohs and ahhs – a glittering ring, a weeping willow, a starburst. The pattern you get depends on how you arrange the stars in the shell.

Thanks to advances by experts in pyrotechnics – “fire art” – fireworks get fancier every year. Instead of lighting them by hand, technicians switch on an electric current. They use computers to control the timing of music and fireworks to create displays that seem impossible. With such excitement, it’s enough to keep all eyes on the fireworks show at the Super Bowl unless there’s another … wardrobe malfunction.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: iko/flickr.com

The engineers are at it again. Recharge your iPod from your swimsuit. We’ll look into it. Today. On Engineering Works!

One of the biggest problems with portable high-tech equipment like cell phones and iPods is that the batteries keep running down. It’s hard to recharge a fading iPod at the beach.

Some engineers in Germany may have an answer for you. A solar-powered swimsuit, complete with a miniature plug-in for your MP3 player’s power cord. And you can even swim in it.

Engineers at an energy company in Hamburg are working with a German fashion house to design and build a swimsuit with banks of photovoltaic cells to convert all that seaside or poolside sunlight into electricity. You have to let the cells dry off before you plug in after your swim, but it’s the idea that counts.

In case you’ve forgotten, or didn’t know, photovoltaic cells are those little solar cells on the front of your calculator. Bigger versions produce electricity that powers traffic signals and streetlights in some places and satellites in orbit.

Photovoltaic cells use sunlight to produce electricity directly from sunlight. The process works because flat layers of semiconductors in the cells absorb energy from sunlight. This energy knocks loose electrons in the semiconductors and they move around. When they move, we get electricity. Someday maybe enough to run our houses or cars.

Our swimsuit seems to be running down and we better turn off the mike. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Mike Small/flickr.com

Let’s talk about water, floods, and one way engineers deal with them. Today, on Engineering Works!

Humans have been trying to figure out what to do about floods for a long time. Most of us are thinking more about floods now than we used to, ever since Hurricane Katrina drowned New Orleans in 2005.

One of the oldest ways of dealing with floods is to build levees to keep the water out. Levees are earthen walls along rivers that usually keep flood water in the river and out of your house. That’s what was supposed to be protecting New Orleans.

Ancient engineers built the first levees about 3,000 years ago along the Nile River. Today, you can find levees all over the world — Germany’s Rhine River, the Po River in Italy, and the Danube. The Mississippi River has about 3,500 miles of levees, all by itself.

Levees are more complicated than they look. They’re more than just piles of dirt along the riverbank. Levees need to be able to resist floodwaters, and they’ve got to be protected against erosion by the river.

The first levees around New Orleans were built in 1718. By the time Katrina got there, there were 350 miles of levees along the Mississippi and Lake Pontchartrain.

Now, engineers are busy figuring out what went wrong with the New Orleans levees and working on ways to keep them from failing again.

The rain has stopped, so we’re going to get out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Neerav Bhatt/Flickr.com

Engineers are finding design inspiration in new places. We’ll find some, too. Today on Engineering Works!

When most of us think of engineering design, we picture computers and high-tech laboratories. A lot of engineers do, too. But some are finding inspiration in odd places. Like the Australian outback. A spiky inch-tall lizard called the thorny devil that lives in the dry, 100-degree-plus desert is giving engineers ideas for efficient ways to move traces of water from one place to another.

This lizard doesn’t even have to open its mouth to get a drink. All it has to do is step into water and the water wicks up its legs and disappears. Researchers don’t understand how this works, but it could give important clues to designing emergency gear to help humans collect water in the desert.
Other engineers are studying everything from beetles than can detect forest fires burning 60-miles away to the way flies buzz through the air and how geckoes scamper up and down walls.

They don’t want to build artificial beetles or flies or geckoes. They do want to understand how these creatures do it so they can use the same principles to build things humans can use.
An artificial fly, for instance, could be sent into a collapsed building through passages too small for humans to find and report on survivors buried in the rubble.
We’re not an artificial fly, but it’s time for us to buzz on out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Walter Groesel/stock.xchng

Getting your heart healthy again after a heart attack can be complicated. Engineers think they can help. We’ll see how – today, on Engineering Works!

More than a million people suffer heart attacks every year in the United States. Most of them survive, but that’s just the beginning. Just because you survive a heart attack doesn’t mean your heart is healthy. In fact, chances are that it’s been damaged – a lot or a little.

If you pull a muscle playing softball on the weekend, getting it healthy again isn’t hard. The first thing is don’t play softball for a while. Getting your damaged heart healthy again is more complicated. It can’t just stop pumping blood while it heals.

Biomedical engineers are working on a way to help your heart take it easy after a heart attack. It’s a device they call a direct cardiac compression device, or DCCD.

A DCCD is like an inflatable bag that fits around your heart and inflates and deflates as your heart beats. The bag inflates and presses in on your heart at the same time your heart contracts to pump blood. The extra pressure from the inflating bag means the heart muscles don’t have to work as hard to move blood through your veins and arteries.

For your heart, it’s like sitting on the bench instead of stepping up to the plate before your hamstring is healed.

Our heart feels fine, so we’ll wrap it up for today.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Francois Lariviere/iStock

Some people aren’t so sure using more ethanol fuel is a good idea. We’ll see what engineers think. Today, on Engineering Works!

If you’ve been paying attention at all, you know that not everybody thinks producing more ethanol fuel is a good idea. It’s not that most of them have anything against alcohol. They’re worried that since ethanol comes from corn, more ethanol means less corn for food. Especially for poor people around the world.

Engineers say people questioning the wisdom of using corn for fuel instead of food are asking the wrong question. Instead of choosing between fuel and food, they say, we need to be deciding what’s the best material to make alcohol fuel from. Guess what? It isn’t corn.

Chemical engineers are hard at work on processes that produce fuel-grade alcohol without a cornfield in sight. They’re using everything from sorghum and sugar cane to municipal solid waste and something called – water hyacinth – to produce alcohol. Sometimes more than from the same amount of corn.

In fact, one Texas A&M University chemical engineer is working out the details of an agreement to help the city of Laredo, Texas, produce alcohol fuel for its city vehicles – from sewage sludge.
Most of these non-corn alcohol production methods are still not ready for prime time. But they’re getting closer all the time.

We don’t know if we’re powered by corn or sewage sludge, but we’re done for now. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo:

It used to be that you could only find the bionic man or woman in science fiction. Biomedical engineers are changing that. Stay tuned.

If you wanted to see bionic arms or legs in action, you used to have to look back to 1970s television shows or Star Wars movies. Now, those fantasies are moving off the screen and into real life.

A young woman who lost an arm at the shoulder in a motorcycle accident is using a computer-controlled, electric-powered arm to do almost everything her own arm could do. Peel and eat a piece of fruit. Fold clothes. Even wash the dishes. And maybe best of all, all she has to do is think about what she wants to do, and it happens.

It works like this. Doctors moved the ends of the nerves that used to connect to her mangled arm to her chest. Electrodes on a harness detect tiny electric signals from those nerves and transmit them to a miniature computer. The computer translates them into signals that control small electric motors in her new arm and hand. When she wants to pick up an apple from the kitchen table, she thinks it and her arm, hand and fingers do it.

One problem — the arm and hand have no sense of touch. But everything else seems to be working fine.

Our arm isn’t computer controlled, but it’s still time to close the mike and leave. See you next time.

Photo: Jeff Hire

We’re so used to the wonders of high technology that it’s easy to forget there’s any other kind. Low-tech wonders, today on Engineering Works!

High technology seems to drive a lot of things these days, from the way we do business to who’s got the hottest new phone. But if you live in a remote village in the developing areas of Africa or Latin America, that super-fast new processor is pretty much irrelevant. You’ve got other things on your mind. Like shucking the corn that’s going to feed you and your animals until the next harvest.

Folks like these are getting help from engineers that are thinking about new ways to apply old-fashioned low technology to problems that have nothing to do with computers or new high-rise office buildings. This isn’t stepping backward in engineering. It’s understanding how to think about problems in a new way, understanding that sometimes the simple way works better.

Like a portable pedal-powered corn shucker built from worn-out bicycle parts. The idea came from a conversation with a bicycle mechanic in Tanzania. It had to be easy to build, cheap, and something farmers could move from one farm to another. Or the two-dollar charcoal briquette maker. The whole thing is about two inches long and can mold briquettes from almost anything that’ll burn. Rice hulls. Ground up cornstalks. Sawdust.

Our watch is a complicated way to figure out what time it is, but we’re still running out of it. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Jay Simmons/stock.xchng

Let’s listen to the sound of radiation. Today, on Engineering Works!

The first time most people heard of radiation was probably when we dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The destruction and death they caused made radiation scary.

But radiation has been around for as long as there’s been an earth. Millions of years.

Each of us is bombarded every second of every day by radiation from space. From the ground. Cosmic rays. If you like to tan by the pool, that’s radiation, from the sun. If you stay in the shade, you’re still getting radiation from the ground. In central Texas, where we live, it’s about 23 millirems a year. In Denver, it’s about 90 millirems.

In case you’re wondering, a millirem is one-thousandth of a rem, a Roentgen Equivalent Man. Rems measure radiation exposure. Like using inches to measure distance.

Ready for more? If you travel a lot, you’ll get about 1 millirem for every thousand miles you fly. Don’t travel? A year’s worth of watching TV adds one millirem. Smoke detector in your house? That’s eight-thousandths of a rem. Got an x-ray with your annual physical? 40 millirems more.

Live near a nuclear power plant? Compared to the other stuff that bombards you with radiation, it’s pretty puny – nine-thousandths of a rem. About like your smoke detector. A coal-fired power plant gives you more than three times as much, but it’s still pretty small.

We’re ready to stop radiating words. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Jesper Noer/stock.xchng

How many engineers does it take to make a better light bulb? We’ll find out, today on Engineering Works.

The round incandescent light bulb we all know hasn’t changed much since Thomas Edison invented it 125 years ago. Thin wires, called filaments, inside the glass bulb glow when electricity zips through them. That glow gives us light to see by. But there’s a hitch. Only about a tenth of that energy gives us light. The rest just heats the bulb so we can burn our fingers. Ouch!

Fluorescent lights – those long tubes that light offices and other commercial spaces – appeared in 1938. Instead of filaments, fluorescent tubes are filled with a gas that glows when electricity passes through it. They’re lots more efficient.

Fluorescent lights are cool. Really. They don’t get hot, and they need just one-fourth the energy incandescent bulbs need to produce the same amount of light. And fluorescent bulbs last 10 times longer than incandescent ones. They had problems, though. They didn’t fit a lot of places regular light bulbs did. And they hummed.

Then, compact fluorescent lamps entered the picture in the 1980s. They solved a lot of the problems regular fluorescents had: they screw into regular light sockets; they’re small enough to fit most places a conventional bulb will fit; they don’t hum; and they’re as stingy with the energy they use as regular fluorescent bulbs.

Guess it’s time to turn out the lights for today.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Husqvarna

Be honest. Nobody likes to cut the grass. But what if your lawnmower did the lawn by itself? We’ll take a look. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody likes their lawn to be green and neat. But if your lawn is a big one, you can spend hours keeping the grass trimmed to the height you like. Not fun.

Engineers don’t like to spend time following a lawnmower around the yard any more than we do. So they figured out a way not to.

Enter the robot lawnmower. We’re not kidding — a lawnmower that starts up by itself, mows the lawn and goes back to where it lives. All by itself, once you’ve set it up. It’s not especially complicated — no electronic maps of your yard, no GPS receivers. Just a grass-level antenna and a receiver that keeps track of where the mower is in relation to that antenna. And the ability to follow a pattern it’s cut before.

Robot lawnmowers are electric, so they’re quiet. And since you’re not watching where the mower is going, you could program one to mow your yard while you sleep, if you wanted to.

They’re not cheap. Robot mowers run about $1,500 each. But some people are willing to pay a lot for the extra time they’ll gain from not having to mow their lawns each weekend.

Our lawn is getting shaggy and the only robot pushing our mower is us. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: G&A Scholiers/stock.xchng

Everybody knows about cloth. Fabric. It’s that stuff your jeans are made of. Engineers are turning fabric into stuff Levi Strauss never dreamed of. We’ll do more than dream. Today. On Engineering Works!

Cloth. Fabric. Textiles. Whatever you call it, it’s been around a long time. As long as civilization, probably. Mostly it’s been used for clothes. It’s also carpets. Furniture upholstery. Sails for boats. Now, engineers are weaving threads into stuff you’d never imagine.

How about a knitted bag that helps a failing heart pump blood? A jacket that conducts electricity through its threads and keeps you warm. Or valves in automobile engines, braided from carbon fibers.

Using cloth in unusual ways is nothing new. Roman engineers used burlap to help stabilize their famous roads. Automobile tires use fabrics to make them strong and durable. That hasn’t always worked quite the way the engineers planned.

Nylon fabric in tires in the 1960s used to flatten out if they stood still for a while. Then the flat spot in the tire thumped until it warmed up again. Oh, well. The reinforcing fabric in today’s tires don’t bump. They also get 80,000 miles before they wear out.

New fabrics pretty much define high-tech. A German company has invented an outdoor jacket that plays MP3s. NASA is developing a spacesuit fabric that acts like a mousepad to control computers.

The fabric of this week’s show is just about worn out. We’ll see you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: Library of Congress

That’s the sound of iron turning into steel. With some help from your plastic water bottle. We’ll explain. Today, on Engineering Works!

Steel makes possible a lot of things we take for granted. Cars. Girders for big buildings. Knives that keep a sharp edge. Useful stuff, steel.

To make steel from iron, you mix the iron with processed coal – known as coke – and heat it. Really hot. That gets rid of impurities that make iron weaker and less durable than steel. Making steel uses a lot of coal, and materials engineers are looking for ways to replace some of it. Maybe as much as half – with plastic. Like your old water bottle.

Sounds goofy, huh? Not really. Plastic doesn’t look much like coal, but inside it’s almost the same. Hydrogen. Oxygen. And carbon. It’s the carbon that counts. Carbon – from coal or plastic – snags the oxygen in iron ore and takes it away. What’s left is steel. The problem is that the oxygen – in the form of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide – ends up in the air. Raw materials for smog and acid rain. Plus other bad stuff, like mercury.

Replacing coal with plastic sidesteps most of this. You still get some carbon dioxide when you replace coal with plastic, but it’s a lot less. And you get rid of a lot of plastic in the process, too.

We’re through processing our show for today. See you next time.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Image: European Space Agency (ESA)

We’re going to talk trash like you’ve never seen — space junk. Today, on Engineering Works!

The next time you go outdoors, stop a minute and look straight up in the air. You can’t see it from here, but there’s a whole junkyard floating up above your head. It’s the stuff we’ve left behind from almost 50 years of space exploration.

Think about it. There’s so much junk in orbit up there that nobody knows for sure how much there really is. At least 100,000 pieces of stuff, maybe millions. More than 7,000 of them the size of a baseball or bigger. Some as small as chips of paint. In fact, a lot of it is chips of paint, from rockets and satellites. A few – broken down or worn-out satellites – are as big as washing machines.

Don’t snicker at those orbiting paint chips, either. They don’t sound like much, but they’re moving at more than 17,000 miles an hour. Anything moving that fast can do real damage if it hits something. One chip hit a window on the space shuttle. It gouged a crater as big as your thumbnail. Imagine what one of those dead satellites could do.

Engineers are designing shields to protect against collisions with orbiting junk. It’s a tough assignment – shields have to be strong enough to stop the junk before it hits anything important and light enough to lift into orbit.

Time to take out our trash. See you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

If you’re going to talk on your cell phone, you’ve got to keep the battery charged. Engineers and bugs may help. We’ll see how, today on Engineering Works!

Everybody has a cell phone these days. They’re everywhere. Some places, they’re the only phones there are. Consider Uganda. In rural Uganda fewer than one household in 100 is connected to the utility grid. No electricity. No landline telephone. But more and more people have cell phones. In developing countries, it’s cheaper and easier to build a cell network than a conventional landline system.

Of course, this brings another problem. How to recharge cell phone batteries without electricity to power the charger. This is where the engineers and the bugs come in.

Some engineering students have come up with a way to capture the energy that bacteria produce as they chow down on plant wastes to get electricity. It’s called a microbial fuel cell, or MFC. MFCs would be a perfect fit for electricity in rural areas of developing countries.

But don’t look for MFCs at your local big box store any time soon. The inventors are still early in the development process, and their prototype is kind of slow. It would take about six months to recharge a cell phone battery. But you can connect several together to get more power, and the engineers say future versions are likely to be more powerful still.

Our batteries are going flat, so we’re out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Everybody does it. Nuke it! Today on Engineering Works, we’ll find out how the biggest microwave oven you ever thought of makes food and other things safer.

Microwave ovens and food just seem to go together. They’re pretty handy. A minute or so and last night’s leftover fried rice turns into a tasty lunch today.

Food engineers are using a device sort of like a microwave on steroids to rid all kinds of food of unpleasant bacteria like salmonella and E-coli that can make us sick. It’s called irradiation.

Irradiation is causing quite a stir in the world of food. Some people think it’s a great idea. In one simple process, they say, food can be made safe from contamination by bacteria. And you can store irradiated food almost forever.

Other people think it’s scary. As soon as you say irradiation, they start thinking about things that glow in the dark.

Actually, we’ve been irradiating food for a long time; more than 90 years, in fact. And no one’s been contaminated yet by irradiated food. All the food the astronauts eat while flying the space shuttle or circling the globe on the international space station has been irradiated. And you’ve been using irradiated spices and cosmetics for years.

So the next time someone mentions irradiated food think of fried rice and astronauts and dig in. You’re in good company.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Old McDonald’s farm was never like this. We’ll spy on how satellites and other new technology are helping farmers keep track of their cows and corn — today on Engineering Works!

McDonald never heard of the global positioning system – GPS. But if he was farming these days, he’d probably be using global positioning system technology to keep track of his cows and all the other animals. GPS satellites, computers, new sensors and other high-tech tools are helping farmers “harvest�? information from their fields – information they can use to harvest more crops.

Sensors in this cornfield, for instance, are measuring how fertile the soil is.

GPS satellites overhead read where the sensors are, and the farmer’s computer puts the data together and draws a map to show which areas need more fertilizer, and what kind.

Other sensors “see�? where pests are chowing down on tasty crops, and map out where to apply insect killers. It’s all about making farming more efficient, doing the right things at the right time.

If you know exactly how much fertilizer and pesticide you need, and where you need it, you can be sure you’re applying enough without putting down too much. The same technology can also warn you about water pollution and other environmental problems before they get out of hand.

Bet Old McDonald wishes his farm was high-tech.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College
Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Computers are getting smaller all the time. Some engineers are taking this idea to extremes. We’ll check it out – today on Engineering Works!

These engineers are looking into a new field of science, or technology, called synthetic biology. The idea is to use living cells to do many of the things computers based on silicon chips do now, plus some other things – detect hazards, build structures, repair tissues and organs inside the body. It sounds like something out of a bad movie, but these guys are serious.

For instance, some electrical engineers have already programmed bacteria cells to glow red or green when they get a chemical signal from other bacteria cells. When they sense a high concentration of the signaling chemical, they glow green. When there’s less of the chemical, they glow red.

But that’s not all. One engineer has programmed cells so they make a red-and-green bull’s eye around the chemical that’s signaling them. Red close in where there’s more chemical. Green farther out, where there’s less.

The researchers are pretty excited about that bull’s eye. It could be the first step on the way to using programmed bacteria to build stuff, maybe fix things inside your body. If they can program the cells to turn colors, they think they can get them to deposit other stuff when they get the right signals.

We don’t know about our cells, but our program is just about over for this time. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

People have been building bridges for thousands of years, but there’s never been a bridge quite like a new one in Germany. We’ll check it out, today on Engineering Works!

Think about famous bridges and what do you get? The Golden Gate Bridge. The Brooklyn Bridge. Verrazano-Narrows. If you’re an engineer, you might come up with the Tacoma Narrows bridge. Some are beautiful. Some cross spaces that are especially wide or deep.

The new bridge in Germany is pretty strange. First, instead of pavement, it carries water — over a river. The Elbe River. And instead of cars and trucks, it carries barges, big cargo barges with loads of anything from fuel oil to gravel or grain. This water bridge connects two important canals in central Germany and it lets the barges avoid having to motor along the Elbe River, which can be slow because parts of the river are pretty shallow. Sometimes the water is too low for the barges to move at all.

Building it was a huge project. It’s about half a mile long and deep and wide enough to float barges loaded with 1,500 tons of cargo. Engineers first started thinking about it in 1919. Then World War II and later the Cold War got in the way. But once the German engineers got started, they only spent six years in construction. And $600 million.

Well, our barge is here and it’s time to cross our bridge. See you on the other side.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: stock.xchng/Mario Alberto Magallanes Trejo

There must be a joke here somewhere, but engineers are working on a better way to look into holes in the ground. We’ll see what’s going on, today on Engineering Works!

Unless we’re planting shrubs in the yard, most of us don’t spend much time thinking about holes in the ground. Some engineers think about them a lot. Most of the big things that engineers design and build start with a hole in the ground. These holes – for foundations, footings and things like that – are pretty simple as far as holes go.

It’s when you start excavating tunnels, mines or big underground chambers, that things get interesting. Being able to understand what’s going on with these holes is important. You want the holes to stay holes and not collapse on top of whatever you put into them. Not easy. It’s hard to see through rock and dirt.

Now engineers and computer experts are working up a way to use computed tomography – the same technology that goes into a CAT scan in the hospital – to get a clear look at what’s under there. The whole thing should be able to run out of a handheld personal data assistant, or PDA, that engineers on the site could carry with them.

They’re also working on a virtual reality program that will let the engineers walk through the hole they’re excavating before they’ve dug it out.

It’s time for us to get out of this hole. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s a new kind of war. Fighting with bits and bytes instead of bullets and bombs — cyberwar, today on Engineering Works!

The tiny Baltic country of Estonia seems to be the first battlefield in this new kind of war. Computer engineers and security experts have worried about cyberwar for years. But nobody had ever started one — until now.

This war started when computers in Russia and around the world started flooding Estonian computer networks with data. So much data that many of them crashed. Imagine everything in Microsoft’s newest operating system downloaded onto your system, every six seconds — for 10 hours.

The attack almost shut down Estonia’s digital infrastructure. That’s saying something. Estonia is one of the most wired countries in the world. People there use the internet for everything — vote, pay taxes, shop, pay for parking.

The president and prime minister’s web sites crashed. So did computer systems at the parliament and other government departments. It was a near thing for the country’s biggest bank.
Good computer security and emergency planning seems to have saved Estonia from being shut down by this cyber attack, but security experts are worried about the next time.

What started the war? If you’re not Estonian or Russian, it seems pretty silly and we’re not going to go into it here. The Estonians say the Russians did it. The Russians say they didn’t. We don’t really care.

Nobody’s attacking our system, but we’re still out of data. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Andy Shaffer/stock.xchng/

Today, we’re going to get into the zone – the construction zone – on Engineering Works.

Everybody likes a smooth commute. Nobody likes to see traffic backing up for a construction zone. Even when construction crews are busy repairing or improving roads and streets, we still need to get the kids off to school and get to work ourselves. But it seems like everywhere we drive these days, we run into highway construction.

Well, not exactly. Engineers spend a lot of time and trouble making sure we don’t run into the construction. Portable concrete barriers are one way to keep traffic moving alongside the jackhammers and asphalt spreaders and protect construction workers from wayward vehicles.

For years, these concrete barriers were 32 inches high – about the height of your desk, at work. These barriers worked well for one-way traffic through the work zone. But when you added oncoming traffic, the number of crashes went up.

Here’s why. When the traffic is two-way, drivers pulling out of side roads and driveways couldn’t see over the 32-inch-high barriers. And at night, oncoming headlights were hard to see.

Engineers at the Texas Transportation Institute found that shorter concrete barriers could still do the job. They developed a low-profile design – only 20 inches tall. The shorter height makes oncoming and cross traffic easier to see. The result? Fewer construction zone crashes.

That’s the end of the road for today. See you on down the highway.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Patrick Moore/stock.xchng/

Engineers have always been willing to think big. We’ll look at one of the biggest ideas ever. Today, on Engineering Works!

Big problems often need big ideas to fix them. Probably the biggest problem facing us today is global warming. And engineers around the world are thinking of some really big ways to deal with it. Like re-engineering the earth to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Science fiction writers have written for years about re-engineering, or terraforming, Mars and Venus so people could live there. That’s fiction. The engineers are serious about the stuff they think we might try here on Earth. Here’s a sample.

How about fertilizing the oceans with iron? Some scientists think more iron in the ocean could lead to more plankton. More plankton might take a lot of the carbon dioxide out of the air. That might slow or stop global warming.

A really science-fiction-sounding idea is to use high-powered lasers and radio waves to spin carbon dioxide out into space from over the South Pole. Or how about spraying clouds with seawater so they’d reflect the sun’s heat away from Earth.

Most of the other ideas sound pretty goofy, too. Some might actually work. But there’s no way to tell from here. Or what else might happen that we wouldn’t like.

Oh, well. At least they’re thinking about it.
We’ve used up our supply of good ideas for the day and we’re through. See you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: www.stock.xchng.com

Listen close. If you’re a kid, or you’ve ever been one, chances are you know what this sound belongs to. Do you know? We’ll find out if you’re right, today on Engineering Works!!

Did you guess? You’re right, of course. It’s that silly engineering marvel, the Slinky.

The toy generations of kids know as the Slinky was born by accident on a U-S Navy ship during World War II. Naval engineer Richard James was trying to design a way to use springs to insulate fragile shipboard instruments from shocks and vibration. He got the idea for the Slinky when one of his experimental springs walked off a shelf and down onto the deck. As it turned out, the Navy never used James’ idea. But when he got home after the war, he and his wife perfected the steel ribbon spring toy we all know today.

The Slinky was an instant success. The Jameses sold their first four-hundred Slinkys within an hour and a half of when they offered the springy toys for sale.

Most of us still think of Slinkys as toys. But they have their serious side, too. The springy steel spirals have been used to build everything from radio antennas to light fixtures and pecan pickers. Physics teachers use them in class to demonstrate cool stuff like – wave properties – forces – and – energy states.

The Slinky has even made it to the big screen, in the “Toy Story” movie series.

Time’s up. It’s time for us to slink away.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FMin College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Photo courtesy U.S. Air Force

They’re the ultimate in radio-controlled model airplanes. UAVs. Today on Engineering Works!

Almost everyone played with model airplanes when they were kids. Powered by wound-up rubber bands or tiny gasoline engines. Some of our friends really got into it and flew them by radio control. UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, are the ultimate radio-controlled airplane. They’re powered by engines like snow mobiles, and they navigate with autopilots and GPS and look around with video cameras and advanced radar. Some can stay up in the air for 24 hours at a time.

UAVs look a lot different from the model airplanes we flew as kids. Not too surprisingly, they’re a lot bigger. Some are 30 feet long and have wings almost 50 feet across. The military uses UAVs a lot in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan. Technicians flew the little aircraft into inaccessible areas to find enemy troop concentrations and guide coalition troops to their locations.
UAVs also have launched missiles at terrorists. UAVs are important to the military because they can watch or attack enemy troops without risking a live pilot. We’re still a ways from being able to replace manned military aircraft with UAVs, but that’s where planners are headed. They also can be used to patrol borders and conduct research.

It’s time to fire up our UAV and fly on out of here. We’ll talk to you later.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo courtesy Istock.com

We humans think we’re pretty smart. Sometimes we can use help from the animals. Animalbots, today on Engineering Works!
Many – maybe most – robots in use today have a big problem. They work fine in the lab or on a factory floor. But when you try to move them out into the real world, they get into trouble.
Engineers are finding that animals can give them valuable suggestions on how to make robots that work.
The idea is not that the new robots look like animals or solve problems the same way, but that they do the same things. It’s a big difference. For instance, a robot designed to move like a crab uses only four motors to control each leg. Engineers had expected they’d have to use 18 motors because crabs use 18 muscles to move each leg. Four is simpler and accomplishes the same thing.
Likewise, most robots depend on high-powered computer processing and arrays of sensors to understand and deal with the environment around them. Animal-inspired robots often use a simpler approach. When a sophisticated robot gets into a tight place, its computer tries to figure out what’s going on and what to do about it. When animals get into tight places, they don’t think much. They keep wiggling and squirming and eventually they get out.
Animalbots do the same thing. They just keep moving until they get free.
You can’t see us, but we’re starting to wiggle. Time to go. We’ll see you later.
Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Konrad Mostert

Engineers are getting serious about another green way to generate electricity. Green and wet. Waves and tides. Today. On Engineering Works!

Walk along the beach and watch the ocean. There’s a lot of power out there. Just ask the people whose beachfront houses get washed away in big storms. Engineers are looking hard at using that power to generate electricity.

It’s not a new idea. Prototypes of wave-power generators have been around for 100 years. But people have only started to get serious about it since the reality of global warming started to sink in.
The idea is simple. Anything that moves can power a generator. Water in the ocean moves, all the time. It’s easy to predict how that water will move, next week or next year. We can predict how tides will move in bays and rivers – several years ahead. And satellite images can tell us several days ahead of time how high the waves will be.

Engineers are already testing wave and tide-powered turbines. A turbine on the bottom of New York City’s East River already provides enough electricity to run a nearby grocery store and parking garage. A generator buoy bouncing in the waves off the Oregon coast is being tested, too. Engineers estimate that eventually, 300 buoys could provide power for almost 40,000 homes. Turbines in the Gulf Stream could provide electricity for more than 100,000 homes.

Our tide has turned and we’re leaving. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Jennifer Trenchard

Venice has a problem. We’ll look into what engineers are doing to help. Today, on Engineering Works!

The beautiful piazzas and famous canals of Venice are in trouble — they’ve got more water than they know what to do with. The thousand-year-old city is sinking into its famous lagoon, a few inches at a time. The water level is nine inches higher than it was a hundred years ago, 40 inches higher than 250 years ago.

The high water damages brick walls never intended to be in the water. There’s a lot of salt from the Adriatic Sea, too. Between the water and the salt, a lot of the city’s beautiful historic buildings are rotting.

A team of Italian engineers is working on a gigantic government-funded construction project they say will save Venice from the rising water. At its heart is a high-tech system of 300-ton concrete barriers that will be raised and lowered to protect the city from damaging tidal surges. Plus thousands of steel poles and other barriers on the floor of the lagoon to slow down the water.

They also plan to re-establish vanished wetlands and reinforce damaged foundations in the city itself. Altogether, the project will cost more than $4 billion and take seven years to complete.
Not everyone thinks it’s a good idea — or that it will help. But the engineers think it will. And it’s better than letting the city sink, they say.

We say, that’s it for this time. See you next week.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Radar tracks everything from aircraft in the sky to you when you’re speeding. Radar also tracks some unusual things. We’ll home in on one of them, today on Engineering Works!

People who study bees argue about the dances bees do. You’ve heard of them. Bees gathering pollen do a little dance when they find the pollen they use to make honey. Some experts say the dances tell other bees where the pollen is. Others say it’s just dancing. Everybody had an opinion, but nobody knew.

Engineers in England got together with bee researchers to figure out a way to use radar to track bees after they flew away from the hive after a bee did the honey dance. The engineers designed and built a tiny radar transponder that helps radar to see the tiny bees. The transponder is a micro antenna with a really small computer chip on it. The whole thing weighs about as much as a large grain of sand. When a radar signal hits the transponder, it sends out its own signal that the radar can pick up, just like an airliner flying from New York to Dallas.

It turns out that the bee dances do tell other bees where they can find the pollen. Dancing in a circle means it’s close – within 100 feet or so. A figure eight means it’s farther away. The bees read direction from angles in the dance.
It’s time for us to buzz out of here.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

What happens when your new computer hits retirement age? Recycling high-tech. Today, on Engineering Works!

We can do so many cool things with our new computers that we never stop to think about what to do with them when they get old. Engineers are thinking about it a lot these days.

From the monitor to the hard, drive, your computer is full of hazardous waste waiting to happen. Listen to this list – antimony, arsenic, cadmium, hexavalent chromium, lead, mercury, polyvinyl chloride. More than eight-and-a-half-million tons of potentially hazardous stuff over the last 20 years or so.

Engineers are working on the problem from both ends. Before computers go into production, and after you get rid of them. Design engineers at one major computer maker now check out how materials in the new machine can be recycled and how long it takes to take one apart for recycling – before it ever goes into production.

They’re also working out how to make it easier to take apart the new computer so it’ll be easier to recycle. Plastic is more difficult to recycle than metal, so some manufacturers are replacing plastic components with metal and cutting down on the different kinds of plastic. Different kinds of plastic need different processes to recycle, you know.

It isn’t just computers. We toss out about 100 million cell phones every year with a lot of the same problems as computers.

It’s time for us to get out of here before somebody recycles us.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Grant Hutchison http://flickr.com/photos/splorp/

Good gas mileage is getting to be almost as sexy as convertibles. A hundred miles a gallon. We’ll look, today on Engineering Works!

Professional and amateur engineers from 60 countries have signed on to an earth-bound competition modeled on the X-prize for commercial space flight. The prize is a big one — $10 million. Instead of space, the goal this time is 100 miles a gallon.

The hopeful automotive engineers are working with all sorts of technology to drive their vehicles. From high-efficiency gasoline engines to hydrogen fuel cells and – ready for this? – compressed air, the stuff that inflates your tires. One team has gotten 92 miles per gallon from gasoline fumes. They’re still working on that extra eight miles a gallon.

And it’s not just the big guys. A team from Cornell University has entered and so has one from an inner city high school in Philadelphia.

So far none of the major American automakers have signed on to the competition. Some foreign companies are interested. Others, like Volkswagen, aren’t. They fielded a 100 miles per gallon car back in 2001 and aren’t interested in doing it again. By the way, that car, the Lupo, is no longer in production.

The only automobile company to enter so far is a Silicon Valley startup, Tesla Motors. Tesla already makes a high-performance electric sports car that gets the equivalent of 135 miles per gallon. Of course, it also costs $98 thousand.

We’re getting a lot less than 100 miles per gallon these days, and we’re about out of gas. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

The TV show CSI and its spinoffs have turned forensic scientists into pop heroes. We’ll look at how engineers turned science into a tool forensic scientists use to catch the bad guys – today on Engineering Works!

CSI fans know that forensic scientists can find out a lot from tiny bits of stuff at crime scenes – who that hair belonged to; what kind of paint is on that car bumper; where that bit of dirt came from – the little things that trip up the bad guys.

When Gil Grissom confronts the murderer with the bit of hair that belongs to her, he knows what he’s talking about because of a nifty analytical tool called neutron activation analysis.

Neutron activation analysis uses neutrons from a nuclear reactor to show researchers exactly what stuff is made of. Hair, for instance – the stuff of TV and real-life murder mysteries.

Hair is mostly protein, but it also has tiny amounts of trace elements, as many as 14 of them. The elements in your hair will be different from those in our hair. When neutrons hit these elements, the combination in your hair gives off a pattern of radiation that’ll be different from mine. So Grissom knows it was you and not me that done it.

Neutron activation analysis is used in a lot of other things, from archaeology to semiconductor manufacturing, to identify traces of different substances.

We’ve identified that our time is up for now. See you next time.

It’s cosmic rays to the rescue – seriously. We’ll find out how. Today, on Engineering Works!

Here’s a question for you. How would you find a nuclear bomb in the millions of trucks and cargo containers that come into the United States every year? The answer worries anti-terrorism experts a lot. Nobody knows.

Cosmic rays may help. Engineers and scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are building a new sensor that uses cosmic rays to detect uranium or lead used to shield it. In case you’ve forgotten, cosmic rays are streams of particles that bombard the earth all the time from space.

These particles – physicists call them muons – zip right through most things, including you and me. Steel plates hardly slow them down. Ditto for aluminum. They cruise right along until they hit something really dense. Like lead or uranium. Then they bounce, or scatter.

The useful thing about all this is that the particles scatter differently depending on what they hit. Steel scatters differently from lead. Lead scatters differently from uranium. And you can program a computer to tell the difference. You don’t even need a person to interpret an x-ray image. The new sensor should be safer and more sensitive than x-rays, big enough to handle big trucks and cargo containers and fast enough that it won’t cause traffic jams at ports and border crossings.

Our cosmic rays are pretty scattered right now, so we’ll see you later.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We’re going to do this one on time. Come along with us as we figure out how. Atomic clocks, today on Engineering Works!

Time never stops. We’ve been keeping track of it for a long time, and we’ve done it a lot of different ways – sundials, dripping water, candles with marks on them, springs and gears and pendulums, quartz crystals and electricity.

All of these timekeepers have one thing in common. They keep track of the interval between one tick and the next. And they all have a problem — the same problem. The intervals they measure aren’t always the same. They’re probably not that different, but they vary — a little or a lot. If you need to measure time exactly — to navigate a space probe or use a global positioning system – they’re not good enough.

This is where special clocks called atomic clocks come in. Instead of pendulums and gears or even quartz crystals, atomic clocks use the vibration between the nucleus and electrons of atoms — usually cesium atoms — to set the interval we use to measure time passing. Even this interval varies a little. But not much. The atomic clock at the Naval Observatory near Washington, D.C., is accurate to within about one second in 20 million years.

If you think this is accurate, clocks based on hydrogen atoms do even better over the short term. But over longer periods of time, cesium is better.

Time’s up. We’ve got to go now.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We’re going to take a shot at understanding how bulletproof vests save lives. Today on Engineering Works!

Everybody knows about armor. You know, the metal suits knights used to thrash around in. You’d expect that kind of armor to stop bullets. Using armor made of cloth to protect yourself from gunshots sounds a little odd. But it works, if it’s the right cloth.

The cloth bulletproof vests are made from is special. It’s woven from plastic fibers called aramids. The best-known is probably Kevlar, made by DuPont. Aramid fibers are hard to break because of the way the molecules they’re made from fit together. And they hardly stretch at all. This is important, because it means that the cloth in bulletproof vests can absorb almost all the energy from that speeding bullet.

Bullets hurt you by transferring the energy they carry to your tissues when they hit. If a bulletproof vest absorbs most of the energy before it gets to you, you don’t get hurt – at least not as badly.
Bulletproof vests work best against pistol-sized bullets. Some vests get help against rifle bullets from ceramic or metal plates. The faster, heavier bullets from rifles break into smaller lighter pieces that the cloth armor can handle.

Engineers also use aramid fibers like Kevlar to design and build other things that have nothing to do with bullets — boat hulls, tires, spacecraft parts, tennis racquets.
Bullets or just a hard serve, aramid fibers are good to have around.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Photo: Curious Expeditions

Everything’s going down the tubes, today on Engineering Works!

Sometimes the niftiest gadgets are nothing new. If you use the drive-up window at your bank, you know about one of them. The contraption that slurps up your check and gives you back money. It’s a pneumatic tube, and it’s been around since the Victorian Age, back in the 1800s.

Pneumatic tubes use compressed air to move things. Sort of like a vacuum cleaner in reverse. A puff of air sends them away. Lower the pressure and they come back. In the beginning, engineers thought big pneumatic tubes might be a good way to move freight, even people.

In 1870, inventor Alfred Beach built New York City’s first subway – a 300-foot pneumatic tube big enough to carry wheeled vehicles. It ran for a block from City Hall. City officials decided to build elevated trains instead.

By the early 1900s, underground tube systems in Philadelphia, Chicago, New York and other cities whisked mail all over town faster than a horse-drawn wagon could. The New York Stock Exchange moved orders with pneumatic tubes faster than messengers on foot. And sales clerks in almost every department store traded payments and receipts with cashiers at the other end of pneumatic tubes.

Today, banks, hospitals and some businesses use pneumatic tubes to send things quickly within their buildings. Paperwork. Machine parts. Try sending a bottle of antibiotics over the Internet.
Well, we’re done here.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by K-A-M-U F-M in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Most of the time when we think about engineers, we think about the nifty things they’re designing and building, now. But a lot of what they do now started a long time ago. We’ll take a look back, today on Engineering Works!

The engineers we know design and build new fuel-efficient cars, ultra-fast computers, tall buildings. Cool stuff. But many of the principles they use are thousands of years old. Consider the lever. You know what a lever is. It’s a bar of something that pivots over something else. It’s a powerful idea. Every geometry student knows what the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes said about levers: give me a fulcrum and a place to stand and I’ll move the world.

If we think about levers at all, we probably picture playground teeter-totters or prybars. But these are only the beginning. Hammers, the oars in a rowboat, wedges used to split wood. They all use the principles of the lever. Then there’s the wheel and the pulley. And the screw. They’re levers, too.
Archimedes gets a lot of credit for understanding the lever. But he wasn’t the first to think about how levers work. The earliest recorded discussion of levers appeared at least a generation before Archimedes and his famous statement.

So the next time you see something really neat that an engineer did, take a minute to wonder a little. It all started a long time ago.

Long time or short, we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

They say that some people run both hot and cold. Here’s an invention engineered to do that – on purpose — the thermos bottle. Today on Engineering Works.

It keeps the milk cold in your kid’s Spiderman lunch box and a construction worker’s coffee hot ’til break time. It’s the thermos bottle – an insulated container with a screw-on cap that’s a cup. Remember yours from grade school?

Maybe you took your thermos apart to find out how did it know when to keep things hot or cold? But there’s nothing magic about a thermos. It works simply by slo-o-w-ing down temperature changes – so hot liquids don’t cool off, and cold liquids don’t warm up.

Let’s take a look inside a thermos. That shiny thing is the liner, where you pour whatever beverage you want to drink later. Don’t drop it – it’s glass. The outer case – the one decorated with your favorite superhero – protects it. The liner looks kind of like a mirror, to keep heat from radiating out.

What you can’t see is that the liner has two walls. The space between them is filled with – nothing, not even air. It’s a vacuum – the best insulator there is. This makes it hard for heat to move in or out of the thermos.

Your coffee won’t stay hot forever in a thermos, but it will be just the temperature you like with your donut at the office.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Most engineering is serious stuff. Some isn’t. We’re going to take a look at some of the not-so-serious stuff, today on Engineering Works! Would you like fries with that?

Think Saturday evenings in the summer. Think burgers on the barbecue pit. Think what hard work it is to grill those burgers. Okay, maybe you don’t think it’s too hard, but some young engineers in Iran did. So they designed a way to use the excess heat that goes out our cars’ tailpipes to cook them. Automatically. Well, almost.

We can hear you thinking: that sounds awful. Who wants to eat a burger after your car has breathed on it for 10 minutes? Not to worry. The burger cooker is actually a burger-shaped container with an exhaust pipe-shaped extension running across the top of it. The burger is closed inside the container so it never comes near the exhaust gases.

Using it is easy. Put your burger into the container. Stick the extension into your car’s tailpipe and head home. By the time you get there, you’ve got a freshly grilled burger.

You can probably see some problems with this idea. We know we can. Like how you know when the burger’s done. And what you do about it. You can’t just stop in traffic and disconnect your cooker from your car. Oh, well. It’s still a pretty neat idea.

Our burgers seem to be done just right, so we’re going to go eat. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Put on your coat and come along. We’re going to watch some football. Today on Engineering Works!

Everybody catches their breath and winces when a linebacker puts a big hit on the ball carrier. Sometimes you can feel it all the way up in the stands.

It’s exciting, but some of those big hits can knock a player silly, especially if he gets hit in the head. During six recent seasons, NFL players suffered almost 900 concussions, some severe enough that players had to stop playing football.

Biomechanical engineers studying the problem for the NFL are finding that concussions are complicated events. They happen very quickly, in about 15 thousandths of a second. They happen most often when one player’s helmet rams into the side of another player’s helmet. The most dangerous place for a player to get hit is just below the ear. And they get hit hard. Sometimes almost a hundred times the force of gravity.

It’s even led to a whole new field of study – concussion physics.

One team of engineers is using computers to build a virtual model of a helmet to help them figure out how to best protect players’ brains against the shock of a hard hit. The model they come up with could be used to design and build better helmets for other sports, like hockey

Time to get back to the game. That looked like a clip!

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Engineers are finding design inspiration in new places. We’ll find some, too. Today on Engineering Works!

When most of us think of engineering design, we picture computers and high-tech laboratories. A lot of engineers do, too. But some are finding inspiration in odd places. Like the Australian outback. A spiky inch-tall lizard called the thorny devil that lives in the dry, 100-degree-plus desert is giving engineers ideas for efficient ways to move traces of water from one place to another.

This lizard doesn’t even have to open its mouth to get a drink. All it has to do is step into water and the water wicks up its legs and disappears. Researchers don’t understand how this works, but it could give important clues to designing emergency gear to help humans collect water in the desert.
Other engineers are studying everything from beetles than can detect forest fires burning 60-miles away to the way flies buzz through the air and how geckoes scamper up and down walls.

They don’t want to build artificial beetles or flies or geckoes. They do want to understand how these creatures do it so they can use the same principles to build things humans can use.
An artificial fly, for instance, could be sent into a collapsed building through passages too small for humans to find and report on survivors buried in the rubble.
We’re not an artificial fly, but it’s time for us to buzz on out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

This is one sound just about guaranteed to get your attention. Today on Engineering Works, we’ll listen to why you hear it, even before the smoke gets in your eyes.

So you settled down on the couch to watch “Friends” last night and forgot all about that pot roast you put in the oven. And the hot pad you left sitting on the hot stove. Have no fear, the smoke detector’s here, right? You may be wrong.

Many people do not realize that their detector is old and needs to be replaced. Engineers study smoke detector failures by staging full-scale fires in residences and have discovered that ionization detectors can take more than twice as long as photoelectric types to detect smoldering fires, often a delay of 15 minutes or more.

About 90 percent of smoke detectors in homes and on the market sense fire and smoke by using an ionization chamber. These detect flaming fires faster than others, but they just aren’t as quick to detect flameless combustion like smoldering fires.

The typical smoke detector in stores is probably the ionization type, although the labeling won’t necessarily tell you that. Photoelectric detectors will often be labeled as such, sometimes with wording about optical sensing.

If you don’t know how old your smoke detector is, or it’s more than eight years old, replace it. Have both photoelectric and ionization detectors installed or purchase a combination model. Place detectors in every bedroom and hallway. Change the batteries at least twice yearly and test detectors regularly. Or forgetting about that hot pad might become a baptism of fire.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU_FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

If you sneer at science fiction, think again. Interchangeable electricity and heat. Today, on Engineering Works!

Science fiction has always been full of nifty gadgets that would – almost – work in real life. Almost, but not quite. Put away your skeptical hat. Engineers are turning some of these far-out gadgets into reality.

How about a jacket that uses your body heat to charge your cell phone? Or a tiny power plant that uses the heat from your apartment to light your living room?

These science fiction-sounding items are theoretically possible. They use something called the – thermoelectric effect – to turn heat into electricity and electricity into heat. In the past these gadgets have been too inefficient and too expensive to be worth developing. That’s changing as the cost of energy gets higher.

Now, engineers are using nanotechnology to pull off this heat-into-electricity-into-heat trick. They start with a high-tech alloy, bismuth antimony telluride, and crush it into really tiny particles. You could line up a-thousand of them across the end of a human hair. Then they press it into a wire or tape.

What’s important here is that these new wires conduct electricity with almost no heat. This is what makes thermoelectric devices practical.

The engineers working on this new generation of thermoelectric devices are looking ahead to a time when thermoelectric coolers will replace refrigerators and thermoelectric power generators will be standard equipment for any – green house.

Thermoelectric or not, our effect is running down. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU_FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Farmers and engineers are getting together to turn corn into fuel you could put into your car’s gas tank. We’ll see how they’re doing, today on Engineering Works!

The idea of using corn as the raw ingredient for alcohol and burning that alcohol in your car or truck is nothing new. Some experts think alcohol – ethanol – could be the future of motor vehicle fuel. Others say it’s not as simple as it sounds.

We grow enough corn to produce lots of alcohol fuel. In fact, we’ll probably distill about five billion gallons this year. That’s about three percent of the gasoline we already use. The problem is that current technology uses lots of fossil fuel – natural gas and coal – to produce the alcohol. Enough that some people say it’s not worth it.

Chemical engineers are working on new ways to distill the alcohol with less fossil fuel, including using parts of the corn plant that’s not used for alcohol to produce a gas kind of like natural gas. We could burn it to provide heat for the distilling process. You can get the same thing by feeding the corn to cows and processing their manure into methane.

So. Will you be going to the – ethanol – station to fill up your car any time soon? We’re getting closer. Lots of cars in Brazil already burn alcohol. And Sweden says they want to replace oil almost entirely with alcohol.

Our gas – alcohol? – tank is full and we’re out of here.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Working in space can be a sweaty business. We’ll see how engineers are helping astronauts keep cool. Today, on Engineering Works!

Here on Earth, we don’t think much about how astronauts keep cool in their space suits. It’s important and harder than you think. It gets hot up there — as hot as 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Hot enough to boil water. Dangerously hot.

Astronauts have this problem because there’s no air in orbit. On earth, the sun’s heat rays never hit us directly. Some of the UV rays do hit us, though. They hit molecules of air and heat them. Those molecules pass on their heat to other molecules that eventually touch us — nowhere near as hot as what the astronauts experience in space.

Engineers are trying to solve the problem by adding another layer to the suit’s cooling system. Astronauts already wear mesh suits that circulate cooling water next to their skin. The new cooling system would add high-tech water-absorbing fabric that removes moisture from the skin and holds it. Then when it gets too hot inside the suit, the fabric releases outside the suit the moisture it absorbed, cooling the fabric just like what happens to our skin when we sweat.

Firefighters, steelworkers and others who work in extremely hot conditions already use a cooling system kind of like this, and engineers think it will work for astronauts, too.

It’s time for us to get off the hot seat and into the cool. We’ll see you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Be honest. Nobody likes to cut the grass. But what if your lawnmower did the lawn by itself? We’ll take a look. Today, on Engineering Works!

Everybody likes their lawn to be green and neat. But if your lawn is a big one, you can spend hours keeping the grass trimmed to the height you like. Not fun.

Engineers don’t like to spend time following a lawnmower around the yard any more than we do. So they figured out a way not to.

Enter the robot lawnmower. We’re not kidding — a lawnmower that starts up by itself, mows the lawn and goes back to where it lives. All by itself, once you’ve set it up. It’s not especially complicated — no electronic maps of your yard, no GPS receivers. Just a grass-level antenna and a receiver that keeps track of where the mower is in relation to that antenna. And the ability to follow a pattern it’s cut before.

Robot lawnmowers are electric, so they’re quiet. And since you’re not watching where the mower is going, you could program one to mow your yard while you sleep, if you wanted to.

They’re not cheap. Robot mowers run about $1,500 each. But some people are willing to pay a lot for the extra time they’ll gain from not having to mow their lawns each weekend.

Our lawn is getting shaggy and the only robot pushing our mower is us. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Modern engineers have almost always built bridges from steel and concrete. A new bridge is going high tech. We’ll check it out. Today, on Engineering Works!

The next time you drive across a big bridge, take a look at what it’s made of. Chances are it’s concrete and steel. Just about all of big bridges are. The Brooklyn Bridge. The San Francisco Bay Bridge. The bridge over the Mackinac Strait in Michigan. It makes sense. Put together, steel and concrete are strong and durable, qualities we want bridges to have.

Some engineering researchers in Missouri are looking beyond steel and concrete to more high-tech materials. A composite of glass and graphite fibers mixed in a polymer matrix. Almost like a tennis racquet or golf club. Or your favorite fishing rod. The new material does just about everything engineers need to build bridges. It’s strong, lightweight and durable.

The first one is a short one, only about 30 feet long and big enough to handle pedestrians and light vehicles. It’s built of layers of composite tubes, assembled into a sandwich of beams and flat decks. The engineers fitted it with an array of fiber-optic sensors that will let them keep track of stresses and check for damage or signs of failure.

If everything works the way the engineers think it will, they plan to build three full-scale bridges soon.
We’ve crossed the bridges we came to today, and we’re on the way home. See you next time.
EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tau.edu.

Traffic cops use it to catch you speeding. It’s a lot of other things, too. You got it — radar. Today, on Engineering Works!

Radar — radio detection and ranging — has been around since the 1930s. Radar helped protect English cities against German bombers during World War II. Now, air traffic controllers use it to keep airliners from colliding. Radar images help predict the weather and find tornadoes.

Radar’s name describes how it works. A radio transmitter sends out a beam of radio waves. When they hit something, some are reflected back to a special receiver. The receiver turns the reflected beam into information about direction and distance.

Early radar images were awful — smears of light on a screen. You had to know what you were looking for to make sense out of them. But during World War II, they seemed almost magical. Radar today is different — a lot better. One kind, synthetic aperture radar, or SAR, produces images that are almost like photos. Even non-experts can tell the difference between SAR images of a car and a truck. And this is only the beginning.

Engineers are working on ways to make radar so small it can fit into unmanned aerial vehicles only a little bigger than model airplanes. And automakers are working on even smaller radars that will warn us if someone is driving in our blind spot on the highway.

Someone must be in our blind spot. We’ll get out of the way.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Get out your magnifiers. We’re going to take a look at the tiny beginnings of the Information Age: transistors. Today, on Engineering Works!

Transistors might be the Rodney Dangerfields of the Information Age. They do the work, but the microchips get the credit. As Rodney might say, microchips wouldn’t be nothin’ without transistors.

Engineers at Bell Laboratories built the first one in 1947. Transistors act as both on-off switches, stopping or starting the flow of electricity, and as modulators or amplifiers, increasing the electrical signal. Think of the dimmer switch in your living room. It turns a light on and off, and dims and brightens it.

In a microchip, engineers put together millions of transistors in a particular pattern that does whatever task the chip is intended to do. Arrange the transistors one way, and you get processors that make calculators calculate and computers compute. A different pattern gives you the chip that keeps time in your digital watch or microwave oven. Maybe you need a sensor to monitor temperatures or detect intruders: design a different pattern and it’s yours.

By themselves, transistors can’t do much. But put together enough of them in the right patterns and you can do big jobs and complex calculations; fast, too. Each transistor switches on and off 100 million times a second.

It’s about time to switch off this week’s Engineering Works! See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s almost like the fairy tale of the genie in the lamp. But you get more than three wishes — personal fabrication, today on Engineering Works!

All of us have wanted things that we couldn’t find. Not big or expensive, but we couldn’t find it anywhere — spent hours Googling. It didn’t exist.

Now information technology experts and engineers are working on an idea that may make our wishes come true. They call it fabrication laboratories, or fab labs. Your own personal genie in the lamp — with unlimited wishes. Almost.

Fab labs put together easy-to-use design software and computer-controlled tools so people can design and make – themselves – things that they want, but nobody makes. It sounds like it ought to be science fiction, but it’s already fact. In a small way.

How about this one? A farmer in far northern Norway kept losing some of his sheep as they grazed in the rugged hills around his farm. He used a fab lab in one of his barns to design and build little devices based on cell phones and GPS locators that the sheep wear on collars. When he couldn’t find one, he’d call its locator and it would tell him where the sheep was. Pretty slick.

This kind of personal fab lab is still mostly experimental, but the engineers working on them say they should be getting more common.

Our time is up for now, so we’re going to fabricate our way out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We’re going to listen to a sound that fascinated an Austrian scientist 150 years ago. Today, on Engineering Works.

We may not remember what it’s called, but we’ve all experienced something called the Doppler effect. It’s the change in the pitch of the sound of a locomotive as it goes by you. Or maybe the sound of an ambulance siren as it comes toward you and then goes away. That’s the Doppler effect, too. Austrian physicist Christian Doppler discovered it 150 years ago.

That change happens because the sound waves you hear as the ambulance comes toward you get squeezed together in the air, just a little. Then as it goes away, the sound gets stretched. The squeezing and stretching changes what it sounds like.

This may sound like just physics trivia, but engineers are putting the idea to work in important ways. Doppler radar, for instance, uses the same idea to watch the winds inside big thunderstorms. If part of the wind is blowing toward the radar and part away from it, that means the wind is spinning. And that means a tornado.

Doctors use Doppler ultrasound to find problems in the way your blood circulates through your heart and arteries. The Doppler effect lets them look at how fast blood flows and in what direction. If there’s a problem, the Doppler effect helps the doctors see it.

Our problem is we’re out of time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We’re going to look into one of the threats that make terrorists terrifying. Dirty bombs. Today, on Engineering Works!

Only a while ago, terrorism was just a word. Now it’s something everybody knows about. Car bombs. Hijacked airliners. Anthrax in the mail. One of the scariest threats is something called a dirty bomb. Dirty bombs are bombs that scatter radioactive material around where they go off. They’re not nuclear bombs. They’re not weapons of mass destruction. They’re weapons of mass disruption.

Unless you’re near the explosion, your chances of getting seriously hurt by one are pretty small. It’s important to understand that. Dirty bombs are not nuclear bombs. Compared to real nuclear bombs, dirty bombs are firecrackers.

But they are easier to build than nuclear bombs. Lots less engineering. That’s what makes them so scary. All you need to make one is some explosives. One stick of dynamite would do for a small one. And radioactive stuff. The most likely stuff is radioactive material hospitals use for nuclear medicine. Or the radiation sources industry uses for all sorts of things. It’s easy enough to get, to be concerned about.

The people in the most danger from a dirty bomb are probably the fire and rescue personnel who treat people injured in the explosion and clean up afterward.

Don’t get us wrong. A dirty bomb is a serious thing. But it’s a long way from a major disaster.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Today, we’re going to meet a rock, a talented rock called a zeolite. On Engineering Works!

To most of us, a rock is a rock. But imagine an odd rock with a network of pores so small they can trap molecules, even atoms. Or trap some things and let others through, like a sieve. You could do a lot with a rock like that. It’s a zeolite.

Zeolites turn up in a lot of everyday products – laundry detergent. Zeolites soften the water so the soap works better and your clothes come out bright and clean. Cat litter – they soak up the smell, so you and Tabby can share the same space. Or water filters – zeolites snag impurities so your drinking water tastes better.

Zeolites are also at the heart of oil refining, where they help transform crude oil into gasoline and other products. They’re a multi-billion-dollar industry around the world.

Zeolites were first found in nature, and each one is good for a particular job. Engineers have created more than a hundred for specialized jobs. Making the right zeolite for the right job is still mostly a mystery, but engineers are working on it.

At Texas A&M, for example, chemical engineers are trying to figure out how to turn silicon, aluminum and oxygen – zeolites’ building blocks – into a zeolite with the exact properties you need.

Talking about zeolites is thirsty work. But at least the water tastes good. Ahh!

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

There’s radiation all around us. And in some strange places. We’ll look, today on Engineering Works!

First, a question: would you rather live next door to a coal-fired power plant or a nuclear-powered one? You’d probably choose the coal plant. All that radiation from the nuclear plant, right?

Well, if you’re worried about radiation, either place is probably okay. Your risk of health problems in any year from nuclear power plant radiation is tiny. About one in a billion, with a B. But here’s the kicker: the radiation health risk from coal-fired plants is actually higher. About one in 10 million. Still really small, but 100 times higher than the nuclear plant.

Here’s why: When coal comes out of the ground, it has traces of radioactive uranium and thorium in it. No problem. They’re tiny. But most of the coal disappears when it’s burned, and the fly ash that comes out of the stack contains more uranium and thorium than the original coal did. Probably 10 times more.

Of course, you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than get sick from radiation from either kind of power plant. But it’s worth thinking about. We’re building a lot of power plants – both kinds. In China alone, a new coal-fired plant opens every week or two. In the United States, we’ll probably build 30 new nuclear plants over the next several decades.

Coal or nuclear, our power is about ready to be switched off. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We like to think that engineers do good things, and usually they do — build roads and bridges, design new cars and airplanes, find new materials. But occasionally, engineers turn up on the other side of the law.

Take the engineers that design elaborate tunnels that smugglers use to move bales of marijuana under the Mexico-California border. On the U.S. side of the border, one of these tunnels opened into a semi-trailer-sized shipping container in a warehouse. From there, it dropped 50 feet underground and ran through solid rock half a mile to an office building on the other side of the border fence.

The tunnel appeared to have been dug with professional mining tools and was carefully lit, ventilated and drained.

It’s not a small problem. Investigators have found almost 70 border-crossing tunnels, most under the border with Mexico. One crossed the border between Washington State and Canada. Most of them were pretty crude, but some – like the one we’ve been talking about – are really slick.

If engineers on the wrong side of the law helped the smugglers build the tunnels, other engineers have figured out a good way to put the tunnels out of action. Pour them full of concrete. Works like a charm.

There’s light at the end of our tunnel, so we’ll shut it down and get out. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Climb in and start ‘er up. We’re going to take a little drive today on Engineering Works!

If you’re going to have wheels, you need roads. If you’re going to have roads, you need engineers.

The old Roman military engineers got a lot of ink in the history books for their roads, but the Egyptians got there first. Ancient Egyptian engineers built the first paved road. more than 2,000 years before the Romans built even a hiking trail. It wasn’t much of a road — seven-and-a-half miles that linked a rock quarry to the Nile River; but it was first.

Today, we take paved roads for granted, from city streets to the interstates that connect cities. It hasn’t always been that way. In fact, it really hasn’t been that way very long. Until the 1920s, most highways in the United States were dirt roads. In fact, in 1919, Dwight Eisenhower, then an Army officer, drove across the country on those dirt roads. It took him two months.

President Eisenhower later signed the law that started construction of our nationwide system of divided interstate highways. Now we have more than four million miles of paved public highways.

And just in case you wondered — the first recorded traffic accident involving a motor vehicle happened in New York City in 1896. A motorist hit a bicycle rider and spent the night in jail.

That’s the end of today’s trip. Drive safely.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

In the world of photography, digital is the magic word these days. But there’s no magic in digital cameras, just good engineering. We’ll focus on digital cameras, today on Engineering Works.

That new digital camera you used to take those snapshots of your kids at the Grand Canyon looks kind of like your old point-and-shoot film camera, but it’s not. It’s the difference between chemistry and physics.

Your old film camera used chemistry to catch Uncle Steve with the lamp on his head at his birthday party. Light coming through the lens changed chemicals on the film to record the scene in your viewfinder. That same light in your digital camera causes tiny sensors on a computer chip to record a series of ones and zeros. Different colors and tones give you different sequences. A tiny computer in the camera converts those numbers into pictures you can see on a screen.

Unlike your old snapshots, you can e-mail your digital photos to the whole family. And you can print them yourself at home instead of sending them off to be developed.

The ideas behind that new camera go all the way back to 1951, when the first video tape recorder captured images from TV. NASA started using digital technology to record signals from space probes in the 1960s. It was even used in spy satellites.

The first electronic camera was patented by Texas Instruments in 1972, and Sony sold the first commercial electronic camera in 1981. But the first real digital camera to work with your home computer didn’t appear until 1994. Thank you, Apple.

Now, digital cameras are as common as, well, ones and zeros. Say cheese!

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

We’re going to take a crow’s-eye look at some nifty technology. Today, on Engineering Works!

Ornithologists have been fascinated for years with New Caledonian crows. These birds live in the remote jungles of New Caledonia in the South Pacific. And they’re smart. Smart enough to figure out how to make and use simple tools. They’re not about to compete with engineers any time soon, but for birds, they’re pretty good.

They use their beaks to whittle twigs and leaves into little bug-grabbers. And they’ve been seen using grass stems to probe into litter on the jungle floor. No other bird comes close to this kind of – technological – savvy. It’s even beyond most apes and monkeys.

What the human engineers have done is design a tiny camera that ornithologists can clip to the crows’ tails. These cameras weigh about half an ounce, the same as something, and they let the scientists see what the crows see. This is pretty important, because until now, we’d only been able to study New Caledonian crows in captivity. And the way they behave around people is a lot different from the way they act in their own territory.

The tiny cameras send what they see to the researchers’ receivers for study later. G-P-S devices also transmit the birds’ location, so the researchers know where they’re doing what they do.

There’s no camera to watch us, so we’ll take our behavior somewhere else. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Engineers are looking into a nasty disease. We’ll look, too. Today, on Engineering Works!

Tuberculosis, or TB, is one of the nastiest diseases there is. If it’s not treated, eventually it destroys the inside of your lungs, and you drown in your own blood.

TB kills between two million and three million people a year, mostly in developing countries. Doctors can treat most TB effectively with antibiotics, but first you and your doctor need to know you have it. In the United States and other industrialized countries, diagnosing TB is no problem. In developing countries, it is.

Many developing countries are short of the kind of medical diagnostic equipment we take for granted.

This is where the engineers come in. Doctors have figured out that a detector originally designed to look for life on Mars works really well at diagnosing TB here on Earth. It’s called a gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer, or GCMS. GCMSes are standard analytical equipment in chemical labs, but they’re big and heavy.

Because this GCMS was designed to ride to Mars in a space vehicle, it’s light and compact — about the size of a shoebox. This means that taking it from place to place in countries without many chemical or diagnostic labs is easy. And it gives doctors there a tool to diagnose TB, quickly and accurately.

A diagnostic tool called a clock is telling us that our time is up. We’ll see you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

It’s Friday Night Lights — a new helmet that may make football safer. Today, on Engineering Works!

Football is supposed to be fun, but sometimes it hurts. One in five high school football players suffer concussions. More than 67,000 every year. Retired NFL players who’d had more than three concussions were 20 percent more likely to develop clinical depression later in their lives. They’re also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

Engineers are using technology to help coaches and doctors fight back — new helmets with sensors that send information about each hit to a PC on the sidelines. Software on the computer analyzes where the helmet got hit, how hard the hit was, what direction it came from and how fast it was. Coaches and doctors can then work out a profile for each player and see each hit his head takes.

Another new helmet shows a red warning light that warns the coach that the player got hit hard enough to be at risk of concussion. Coaches are using the systems to see when players need to work on good tackling techniques as well as monitor potential concussions.

It’s not cheap. One school district in Illinois spent $30,000 on a waterproof computer to monitor the helmet sensors and about $1,000 each for the helmets.

Nobody has thumped us hard enough for a concussion, but it’s still time to get out of the game. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Here’s something the inventors of the internet never thought of – petting your chicken. We’ll take a look, today – on Engineering Works!

Computer scientists and engineers in Singapore have come up with a nifty system that you can use to pet your pet chicken without touching it with your fingers. Pretty neat, huh? Well, maybe.

Here’s how it works. Sensors in a life-sized statue of a chicken are linked with a wireless connection to a nearby PC. The PC uses another wireless connection to send what the sensors feel to a network of tiny vibrating motors in a sort of jacket that the chicken wears. The little motors transfer the pressure of your fingers to the chicken. We’re not sure what the chicken thinks about it, but the researchers are pretty excited. They see it as the first step in a whole new system of long-distance touching.

Before anybody starts snickering, they’re really not that interested in petting chickens – near or at a distance. They are interested in touching by long distance for other more practical reasons. Imagine a security guard silently directing a guard dog by long-distance touch, or a search-and-rescue operator directing a search dog by touch deep inside a wrecked building. Or how about learning how to dance by feeling the same motions in your legs as an expert dancer feels, or – you fill in the blank.

Uh-oh. I can feel it. Somebody’s messing with my chicken. Gotta go.

Engineering Works! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

If you’re going to talk on your cell phone, you’ve got to keep the battery charged. Engineers and bugs? may help. We’ll see how, today on Engineering Works!

Everybody has a cell phone these days. They’re everywhere. Some places, they’re the only phones there are. Consider Uganda. In rural Uganda fewer than one household in 100 is connected to the utility grid. No electricity. No landline telephone. But more and more people have cell phones. In developing countries, it’s cheaper and easier to build a cell network than a conventional landline system.

Of course, this brings another problem. How to recharge cell phone batteries without electricity to power the charger. This is where the engineers and the bugs come in.

Some engineering students have come up with a way to capture the energy that bacteria produce as they chow down on plant wastes to get electricity. It’s called a microbial fuel cell, or MFC. MFCs would be a perfect fit for electricity in rural areas of developing countries.

But don’t look for MFCs at your local big box store any time soon. The inventors are still early in the development process, and their prototype is kind of slow. It would take about six months to recharge a cell phone battery. But you can connect several together to get more power, and the engineers say future versions are likely to be more powerful still.
Our batteries are going flat, so we’re out of here. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Realistic simulators help pilots learn how to fly. How about a simulator to help physicians learn what heart failure feels like? We’ll find out more. Today, on Engineering Works!

Congestive heart failure is one of the most common illnesses we face as we get older. It’s the number one reason people over 65 are admitted to the hospital. The symptoms are pretty scary. Walking even short distances makes you tired. It’s hard to breathe and you have trouble catching your breath. After a while, just getting out of bed takes everything you’ve got.

Engineers and computer programmers are using virtual reality to help physicians understand what congestive heart failure feels like.

The computer-controlled simulator is pretty neat. You sit facing a big video screen. Feet go on a set of pedals in front. And an inflatable band goes around the chest.

The simulation begins with a congestive heart failure patient on the screen taking a walk in the park. The physicians take a virtual walk with the guy on the screen, pedaling in time to the on-screen patient’s walk. As the disease develops, it gets harder to pedal, just as in real life walking gets more tiring. As it gets even worse, the chest band inflates and it’s hard to breathe. Special headphones block outside sound and play the sound of a heartbeat. Physicians who’ve used the simulator say it’s very real.

Our heart is feeling fine. But it’s still time to wrap it up. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web. Engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Old McDonald’s farm was never like this. We’ll spy on how satellites and other new technology are helping farmers keep track of their cows and corn — today on Engineering Works!

McDonald never heard of the global positioning system – GPS. But if he was farming these days, he’d probably be using global positioning system technology to keep track of his cows and all the other animals. GPS satellites, computers, new sensors and other high-tech tools are helping farmers “harvest” information from their fields – information they can use to harvest more crops.

Sensors in this cornfield, for instance, are measuring how fertile the soil is.

GPS satellites overhead read where the sensors are, and the farmer’s computer puts the data together and draws a map to show which areas need more fertilizer, and what kind.

Other sensors “see” where pests are chowing down on tasty crops, and map out where to apply insect killers. It’s all about making farming more efficient, doing the right things at the right time.

If you know exactly how much fertilizer and pesticide you need, and where you need it, you can be sure you’re applying enough without putting down too much. The same technology can also warn you about water pollution and other environmental problems before they get out of hand.

Bet Old McDonald wishes his farm was high-tech.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering. Visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Sometimes, they say, life imitates art. So does engineering — sort of. We’ll see how, today On Engineering Works!

If you’re a fan of campy science fiction movies, you might remember the 1966 flick, Fantastic Voyage. In the movie, a submarine with a crew of medical experts is shrunk and injected into the bloodstream of a guy in a coma. Except for Raquel Welch, the movie is pretty forgettable. Of course, shrinking the submarine is pretty neat, too.

Now, biomedical engineers have pulled off something like the shrinking submarine, except it’s real. This time, it’s a miniature camera in a capsule. No Raquel Welch. Sorry, guys. Doctors use this camera capsule to examine the inside of the small intestine, one part of the body that’s hard to reach with more conventional diagnostic tools. The capsule is bigger than the fictional submarine — about the size of a big vitamin capsule. It carries a camera on a computer chip, light source, radio transmitter and a battery.

Here’s how it works. You swallow the capsule and it passes through your stomach to your small intestine, taking pictures as it goes. The images are transmitted to a receiver on a belt, powered by its own battery pack. In a day or so, the capsule passes on through the rest of your digestive system and your doctor collects the images from the receiver and analyzes them. Pretty cool.

Our capsule has gone where all capsules go, and we’re done. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Hybrid cars get good gas mileage, but you ain’t seen nothing yet. We’ll look, today on Engineering Works!

If high gas prices are squeezing your budget, consider the engineers that design NASA space vehicles. These guys worry about the cost of fuel, but what’s really important is how much that fuel weighs. They’re always looking for ways to go farther on less.

They’ve outdone themselves this time with the Dawn mission that’s headed for the dwarf planet Ceres and the asteroid Vesta. If the engineers are right, the Dawn spacecraft will make the three billion mile trip on less than 72 gallons of fuel. That’s almost 42 million miles to the gallon. Move over, hybrids.

What’s important is that 72 gallons of Xenon weighs about a fifth of the conventional fuel the trip would need.

Of course, the fuel that’s driving Dawn wouldn’t work very well in your earth-bound car. It’s an exotic gas called Xenon. Dawn’s engine uses solar-generated electricity to pop electrons loose from Xenon atoms. An electrically charged screen pulls the electrons out the engine’s nozzle and that thrust pushes the spacecraft along. Gently.

Hold out your hand and lay a piece of paper on it. That’s the amount of force the Dawn’s Xenon-powered engine produces. It would take Dawn four days to accelerate from zero to 60. But by the time it gets to Vesta, it’ll be streaking along at 68 thousand miles an hour.

We’re about out of gas, so we’re shutting it down. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU FM in College Station. We’re on the World Wide Web, too. Visit us at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

When something bad happens, we like to know how bad it is. We’ll look at the numbers, today, on Engineering Works!

No disaster is good, but some are worse than others. For instance, most of us know that Hurricane Katrina started out as a category 5 hurricane, but was only a category 3 when it swamped New Orleans. And when we hear about tornadoes on the weather report, sometimes the meteorologist tells us that it was an F-1 or an F-3. It’s the same with earthquakes. The Richter scale lets us know how badly it shook things up.

Most of us know about the Richter scale, but you might not know that meteorologists measure hurricanes on the Saffir-Simpson scale, and tornadoes on the Fujita scale. Now nuclear engineers have come up with a scale to rate nuclear-related incidents. It’s called the International Nuclear Event Scale, or INES. It runs from zero – a deviation with no safety significance – to seven – a major accident. The 1979 accident at Russia’s Chernobyl reactor would have been a seven.

We started using the INES in 1992, and no sevens – major accidents – have occurred since then. Ten less serious incidents happened at U.S. nuclear plants last year. Two involved reactors. Most of the rest were spills of radioactive materials, some more serious than others. All of the incidents rated twos on the INES seven-point scale.

Our scale is the clock, and it’s ticking down to nothing. See you next time.

EngineeringWorks! is made possible by Texas A&M Engineering and produced by KAMU-FM in College Station. Learn more about engineering — visit us on the World Wide Web at engineeringworks.tamu.edu.

Nobody talks about it, but everybody knows what that is. We’re going to bring you to the edge of your seat, today on Engineering Works.

It’s something everybody grows up with. Your mother probably told you several thousand times — wash your hands after you flush the toilet.

Now, let’s find out how some clever engineering makes it so you don’t have to remember to flush in public restrooms.

It’s all about light. A special kind of light, known as infrared in this case. You can’t see infrared light. Its frequency and wavelength, two things physicists use to describe light, are outside the range of light our eyes can see.

Using infrared light, engineers have developed valves that flush by remote control.