Engineering Institute » Energy Works

Home, passive home

admin — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 06:00:52 +0000

It’s a cliché that less is more, but engineers are making it work when they apply it to houses. Passive Houses. Today, on Engineering Works.

Passive buildings, especially passive houses, are built to use as close to no energy as possible for heating and cooling. It’s a nifty idea if you can make it work and some people are.

Careful design and construction are what make passive houses work. Careful siting in relation to the sun. Super-thick and super-efficient insulation. Tight-fitting, energy-efficient windows. Construction that essentially eliminates air moving into or out of the structure. When it’s done right, passive houses use essentially no energy to stay comfortable in winter, as much as 90 percent less than houses built to conventional code standards. Many passive houses are built with no central heating at all.

There’s one big drawback to passive houses. They’re expensive to build, mostly because of specialized construction materials and additional work during construction. Passive houses also need special household appliances, like clothes dryers that don’t vent to the outside. You’d begin getting the payback from lower energy bills right away, but it’s still a lot of money.

If passive buildings are a good idea, we’re running behind. About 25,000 certified passive buildings have been built in Europe. We’ve built about a dozen with more on the way.

Our house isn’t passive, but it’s still time to finish up here and go home. 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. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion:

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/26/business/energy-environment/26smart.html

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

http://www.passivehouse.us/passiveHouse/PassiveHouseInfo.html

The water that was Rome

admin — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 06:00:13 +0000

We’re going to go wading in the water, the stuff the ancient Romans drank. Today, on Engineering Works!

When someone mentions ancient Rome, what comes into your mind? Gladiators in the Coliseum, maybe. Engineers are likely to think about water. Roman engineers did amazing things with water.

Let’s start with simply getting water to the city. They built aqueducts, elevated stone-and-concrete troughs that carried water into the city. Eleven of them over about 500 years. The longest carried water almost 60 miles. Then they passed the water through a system of purification and settling tanks.

From there, the water went to 1,300 public fountains and basins where residents could get water for free. There were 11 huge imperial baths, plus more than 850 free or inexpensive public baths. Then the water went into a network of underground sewers that carried the wastewater to the Tiber River.

This probably seemed pretty simple, and for the 21st century, it is. But 2,000 years ago, it was far ahead of any city in the world. In fact, historians say this water is probably what allowed Rome to grow to a metropolis of at least a million people. At that time, this made Rome the biggest city in the world. It was still dirty and unsanitary by modern standards, but it was far ahead of anyplace else at the time.

Our water comes out of a tap instead of an aqueduct, but we’re still glad to have 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.

http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: With all the marvelous stuff engineers are turning out today, it’s sometimes hard to remember that engineers have been around a long time and they’ve been doing neat stuff all that time. What do you think are the coolest thing ancient engineers did?

For more:

http://tinyurl.com/2aeof6z

http://www3.iath.virginia.edu/waters/

http://www.waterhistory.org/histories/rome/

Under the Alps

admin — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 06:00:31 +0000

While most of us have been keeping track of what’s happening with new computers or airplanes, Swiss engineers have been hard at work on the biggest construction project in decades. Under the Alps. Today, on Engineering Works!

The Gotthard Base Tunnel is actually two tunnels, each more than 30 feet in diameter and more than 35 miles long. It’s the longest tunnel ever built. Drilling began in 1996 and when it opens, probably in 2016 or 2017, it will carry part of a high-speed rail link between Zurich, Switzerland, and Milan, Italy. Engineering experts say it’s the biggest and most complicated construction project since the Panama Canal.

Here are some of the details.

To get to this point, eight huge drilling machines chewed out 23 million tons of rock. On a good day each of them got through about 130 feet. To help work move faster, a half-mile-deep shaft was sunk from the surface at the tunnel’s half-way point. From there, engineers drilled toward each end.

It wasn’t always easy. Unstable rock forced them to relocate an emergency shelter. And at one point, one of the drilling machines was buried by rock falling from the tunnel roof and stalled for six months.

Trains using the two tunnels will travel at almost 150 miles per hour. It will cut travel time from Zurich to Milan almost in half, to two and a half hours. That’s faster than flying.

Our way home is on the surface, and that’s fine with us. See you next time.

Engineering Works! 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. http://engineeringworks.tamu.edu

Start the discussion: Construction projects like these tunnels under the Alps are always impressive. It’s interesting that once the train service gets under way, it’ll be faster to travel from Zurich to Milan by train than to fly.

For more:

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,723202,00.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6471241.stm

Water, water … anywhere?

admin — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 13:20:06 +0000

When we talk about scarce natural resources, we usually think oil. But there’s another one. Water. Today. On Engineering Works!

If you live in the United States, as most of us do, water’s not a big deal. Turn on the tap and there it is. Sometimes, like the last couple of years in Texas, watering the lawn in the summer got a little expensive, but the water was there.

If you look at the Earth from space, it looks like we have plenty of water. And we do. The problem is that most of it doesn’t do us any good. Here are some facts and numbers to think about.

Only about two-and-a-half-percent of all the water on earth is fresh, the kind we can drink. The rest is salty. And two-thirds of that is frozen in arctic and Antarctic ice caps and glaciers. Almost all of what’s left is buried in deep underground aquifers, rock formations – some a half-mile down – that hold water like other formations hold oil. Here’s a kind of scary number: only about three-gallons of every thousand-gallons of fresh water is on the surface, where we can get at it easily.

Many civil engineers spend their careers designing effective ways to store and purify water and move it from where it is to where it’s needed. It’s an occupation that’s only going to get more important as the earth’s population grows.

Our water’s dried up for today. See you next time.

Start the discussion: Water is one of the most valuable natural resources we have, but nobody seems to notice. We can live without oil, but we can’t live without water. How will we get enough?

For more:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/earthwherewater.html

http://water.org/learn-about-the-water-crisis/facts/#water

Solomon, Steven. Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization. New York: Harper-Collins, 2010.

Computers in the driver’s seat

admin — Wed, 10 Nov 2010 06:00:29 +0000

Search engine giant Google has been spending lots of money to come up with a car that drives itself. We’ll look at what it means. Today, on Engineering Works!

If you’ve been following high-tech news lately, you know that the folks that run Google are spending a ton of money to design software and sensor systems that aim to let you leave the driving to your car. Some of their cars have driven as far as a thousand miles on real highways and city streets without a driver’s help.

The take-home part may be what this kind of research is going to mean for drivers like us, next year or five years from now. It’s likely to be pretty cool.

Let’s start with new gear that will help us merge into freeway traffic. Other sensors will warn us if we’re running too close to the car ahead or nodding off at the wheel. Or how about cruise control that thinks for itself. It’ll slow down automatically if traffic slows. Or radar that looks ahead on foggy days to warn us of what’s ahead before we get close enough to see it.

All this stuff is coming. And we’re probably going to see some of this stuff, or all of it, in pieces long before the whole thing comes together in a car that drives itself.

However it happens, it’s going to be fun to see. And drive. 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

Start the discussion: Some of this technology sounds a lot like what we called science fiction only a while ago. The big question: but can we trust it?

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=2&ref=science

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-10-11/google-robot-car-the-future-of-cruise-control-convoys-car-sharing/?om_rid=NrbmWv&om_mid=_BMtLxVB8VLz$Zb

Blowin’ in the Italian wind

admin — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 06:00:48 +0000

Sometimes you find leading-edge energy technology in unexpected places. We’ll show you where. Today, on Engineering Works!

When someone mentions green energy, stuff like wind turbines and solar panels, one place you’re not likely to think of is Italy. Think again. Small towns in Italy are showing the rest of us what can be done to use green technology to cut our energy bills. They’ve got motivation. Their electric rates are about three times what we pay in the United States.

More than 800 small towns and villages in Italy are investing in green energy and making it work. Consider the mountain village of Tocco, population 2,700. Tocco gets electricity from four wind turbines and an array of solar panels. The village doesn’t get its electricity directly from the turbines. The company that owns the turbines sells the electricity they produce to the national electric grid and Tocco gets a share of that price. Last year that paid for the village’s electric bill and produced a profit. About $200,000 worth.

The solar panels provide electricity to light the village cemetery and buildings. They produce a small profit, too.

Residents of the village are getting into it. Some of them are installing their own solar panels. It works for them, too. One new solar panel owner saw monthly electric bills drop from as much as $700 to zero.

Our electric bill is paid up, but it’s still time to wrap this up 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

Start the discussion: This kind of stuff is pretty small stuff in the big picture, but it shows that wind and solar can work in the real world. Pretty cool.

For more:

http://www.greenoptimistic.com/2010/10/07/tocco-italia-renewable-energy/

http://inhabitat.com/2010/09/30/ancient-italian-town-completely-powered-by-renewable-energy/

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/science/earth/29fossil.html?_r=1

Hydraulic hybrids

admin — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 06:00:03 +0000

Everybody knows about hybrids. Here’s a hybrid you probably don’t know about. A hydraulic hybrid. Today. On Engineering Works!

Hybrid cars are no big deal these days. You see them just about everywhere. Even the technology is getting familiar. A gasoline engine paired with an electric motor and a big battery. The important point is that they give you great gas mileage.

There’s another hybrid out there, and it gets better gas mileage than the gasoline-electric hybrids we see every day. A lot better. It’s a diesel–hydraulic hybrid. And diesel-hydraulic hybrids can cut the amount of fuel you use – in half.

In case you’re as technologically challenged as we are, hydraulic devices use fluids under pressure to multiply force. The hydraulic master cylinder in your car’s brake system multiplies the force of your foot on the brake pedal. In hydraulic hybrids, a small pump compresses hydraulic fluid in what’s called an accumulator to a pressure of 5,000 pounds per square inch. When you step on the accelerator, the pressurized fluid is released and turns a hydraulic motor. The closest thing to a gasoline-electric hybrid’s battery is one that stores electricity for things like the lights and radio.

So far, most of the research on hydraulic hybrids uses the system to drive big vehicles. Garbage trucks and UPS trucks and such. But it should work at least as well in passenger cars.

Our garbage truck is at the door and we’re going home. See you next time.

Start the discussion: Hydraulic hybrids sound like a great idea and an intriguing alternative to gasoline-electric hybrids. But there must be some downside to it. What am I not seeing?

For more:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=hydraulic-hybrid-vehicle

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

http://www.hydraulicspneumatics.com/200/Issue/Article/False/38545/Issue

The reactor down the street

admin — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 06:00:41 +0000

Powering your town with nuclear energy. Small reactors for small towns. Today. On Engineering Works!

Usually, when we build nuclear power plants, we build them big. The largest nuclear plants produce more than 1,400 megawatts of electricity, enough power for about 1.5 million households. That could be changing. The Department of Energy is studying smaller power plants that would produce about 300 megawatts. Enough to power, say, Jackson, Mississippi. Other researchers are looking into power plants that could serve even smaller communities.

Experts estimate that a 50 megawatt reactor about the size of a garden shed could provide electricity for small towns or even individual work sites away from the power grid. Even better, these small reactors could be linked together as the town grows and electricity demand increases. There could be another benefit to these small power plants, too.

Since the generators would be located close to where the electricity is used, there would be less loss as it moves along transmission lines. Now, with large regional power plants, between four percent and 10 percent of electricity is lost before it gets to where it is used.

And there’s more. Odd as it sounds, people who live near a nuclear power plant are exposed to less radiation than if they live near a coal-fired plant. In either place, the amount of radiation is so small that there’s no real danger.

In any case, it’s going to be a few years before the first of these mini-reactors is built. 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

Start the discussion: nuclear energy is still a controversial idea, although it shouldn’t be. What do you think of spreading out nuclear generator plants like this? Let us know.

For more:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/09/13/AR2010091304026.html

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/10_22/b4180020375312.htm

http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2009/06/10/10greenwire-company-calls-new-small-nuclear-reactor-a-game-45123.html

Cahokia

admin — Wed, 13 Oct 2010 06:00:25 +0000

Thousands of years ago, people we’d call engineers today built some impressive structures. We’ll look at one. Cahokia. Today, on Engineering Works!

Today, Cahokia is nothing but a collection of big grass-covered mounds alongside the Mississippi River not far from Saint Louis.

A thousand years ago, it was the largest city in North America north of Mexico. The centerpiece of Cahokia is a huge mound that once had a temple on top of it. It’s the largest prehistoric construction project in North or South America.

The clay slab it’s built on is 954 feet long and 774 feet wide. The mound itself is 100 feet tall, and covers 14 cres. That’s larger than the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt.

Here’s another way to understand how big this mound is. It contains about 22 million cubic feet of earth. If 30 people started carrying dirt for it in baskets weighing 55 pounds each — that’s about one-and-a-half cubic feet — and they each carried eight baskets a day, it would take 167 years. More than 14,600,000 basketfuls. If they used pickup trucks, it would have taken almost 230,000 loads.

Two things make this construction project special. First, the dirt the mound is made of is pretty unstable stuff. And it’s built on a flood plain, where it’s lasted through a thousand years of Mississippi River floods. Both of these things suggest people with specialized skills – engineers – were involved. A thousand years ago.

We’ve hauled all the words we can 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

Start the discussion: Just because something like Cahokia is really old doesn’t mean that the people who built it didn’t know what they were doing. We’re always looking for nifty old construction projects: if you think of one, let us know.

For more:

http://bit.ly/asTghd

http://cahokiamounds.org/

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

Drilling into the deep

admin — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 12:20:03 +0000

Let’s talk about oil and some of what it takes to get it. Drilling deep. Today, on Engineering Works!

It takes a lot of information to drill an oil well. And some of it’s pretty hard to come by. Starting is easy. GPS tells you where you are. Once you get underground, it gets complicated quickly. Oil and natural gas are a long way underground. Sometimes three-miles or so. And GPS doesn’t work underground.

In the early oil wells, sometimes drillers would lower a compass on a cord down the well pipe and take a picture of it with a camera to figure out what direction the drill was going. Things are better now. Now, sophisticated sensing tools often ride the drill pipe right behind the churning bit and pass information back up the pipe in real time.

Some sensors measure natural radiation emitted by the rock. Others tap into the electrical resistance of fluids in the rock. Another that’s sort of like MRI machines in hospitals detects the nuclei of hydrogen atoms. Together, they can tell drillers whether they’re drilling through sand or rock, whether the formation contains oil, gas or water, and how easily the oil will flow out of the rock.

All this high-tech equipment is expensive. And knowing about it helps to explain why oil is so expensive these days.

We’ve done the drilling we can handle and we’re calling it quits 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

Start the discussion: Oil may not be the ultimate fuel to run our technological world, but for right now it’s what there is. The difficulty of getting to it helps explain its high cost.

For more:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/science/06drill.html

http://www.elsandcompany.com/howdrillingworks.htm

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/oil-drilling4.htm

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