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- Category: Environmental
by Elizabeth Rusch
She was in the water when the epiphany struck. Of course, Annette von Jouanne was always in the water, swimming in lakes and pools as she was growing up around Seattle, and swimming distance freestyle competitively in high-school and college meets. There's even an exercise pool in her basement, where she and her husband (a former Olympic swimmer for Portugal) and their three kids have spent a great deal of time...swimming.
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- Category: Civil
Borrowing from Mother Nature, a team of MIT researchers has built a school of swimming robo-fish that slip through the water just as gracefully as the real thing, if not quite as fast.
Mechanical engineers Kamal Youcef-Toumi and Pablo Valdivia Y Alvarado have designed the sleek robotic fish to more easily maneuver into areas where traditional underwater autonomous vehicles can't go. Fleets of the new robots could be used to inspect submerged structures such as boats and oil and gas pipes; patrol ports, lakes and rivers; and help detect environmental pollutants.
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- Category: Environmental
by Dave Alexander
The National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration operation in Muskegon and a Houston-based energy company are partnering to explore alternative energy.
Mobile Gen LLC has been at the NOAA Great Lakes Environmental Research Laboratory in Muskegon for the past week testing the performance of its new mobile power generation trailer.
Read more: NOAA Tests Power-Generating Trailer at Muskegon Facility
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- Parent Category: Engineering
- Category: Civil
Why Reinforcing Concrete Columns with Internal Bars Made of Glass Fibers Can Make a Building More Sturdy
Conventional means of internal reinforcement for concrete member in buildings involve steel bars. Yet for structures that function in harsh environments like coastal regions, or for structures that support sensitive equipment, such as magnetic resonance imaging units; the use of fiber reinforced polymer (FRP) is emerging as a valuable option, due to its natural resistance to corrosion, its high strength, light weight, transparency to electrical and magnetic fields and ease of manufacturing and installment.
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- Category: Environmental
Mine shafts on the point of being closed down could be used to provide geothermal energy to local towns. This is the conclusion of two engineers from the University of Oviedo, whose research is being published in the journal Renewable Energy. The method they have developed makes it possible to estimate the amount of heat that a tunnel could potentially provide.
"One way of making use of low-intensity geothermal energy is to convert mine shafts into geothermal boilers, which could provide heating and hot water for people living nearby", Rafael Rodríguez, from the Oviedo Higher Technical School of Mining Engineering, tells SINC. This type of energy, which is hardly used in Spain, is obtained from the internal heat of the Earth.
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- Category: News
An assistive technology that enables individuals to maneuver a powered wheelchair or control a mouse cursor using simple tongue movements can be operated by individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries, according to the results of a recently completed clinical trial.
"This clinical trial has validated that the Tongue Drive system is intuitive and quite simple for individuals with high-level spinal cord injuries to use,” said Maysam Ghovanloo, an assistant professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Trial participants were able to easily remember and correctly issue tongue commands to play computer games and drive a powered wheelchair around an obstacle course with very little prior training.”
Read more: Clinical Trial Shows That Quadriplegics Can Use Tongue Drive System