The Birth of the Jet: The Engine that Shrunk the World
In today’s time it is easy to take for granted the complex inventions that alleviate our everyday life. The modern jet propelled airplanes for example, are one of the biggest…
Breaking the Sound Barrier
The Battle of Hastings in 1066 marked the last successful conquer of the British Isles. In the summer of 1940 the Spitfire prevented the most recent attempt of invasion and marked one…
Composites Manufacturing
Throughout the last four decades the exploitation of fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP) in engineering structures has been steadily diversifying from sports equipment and high performance racing cars, to helicopters and most…
Composite Manufacturing – Autoclave Variability
Throughout the last four decades the exploitation of fibre-reinforced plastics (FRP) in engineering structures has been steadily diversifying from sports equipment and high performance racing cars, to helicopters and most…
Milestones in Aircraft Structural Design
Although the exploitation of advanced composite materials in the aerospace industry is steadily increasing, high strength metallic materials, particularly aluminium alloys, are still the first choice for large-scale fleets such…
The Dangers of Outsourcing
“Outsourcing” is a loaded term. In today’s globalised world it has become to mean many things – from using technology to outsource rote work over the internet to sharing capacity…
The Start of a New Era
The April 12 launch of STS-1 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Put frankly, the Space Shuttle is probably the most powerful machine ever constructed. One of the earliest astronauts aptly described the…
Smart Materials Application: Variable Geometry Chevron for Noise Reduction
For many years engineers have been trying to harness mechanical work from thermal energy by taking advantage of the crystallographic phase change of shape memory alloys (SMA’s). SMA’s can exhibit strains of…
Fancy a Sandwich?
In this post I want to use the sandwich panel as an example to explain some basic concepts about bending of structures. The explanations in this post are kept very…
FOUR STROKE DIESEL ENGINE
Construction: • A piston reciprocates inside the cylinder • The piston is connected to the crankshaft by means of a connecting rod and crank. • The inlet and exhaust valves are mounted on…
