End of the Line

The recent failure of a plug door in an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 generated lots of speculation about the cause of this unusual failure. As is frequently the case when components fall off aircraft, fasteners were immediately brought into question. Whether or not the plugs were positively fastened to the airframe is still in question, but the mainstream media refers to all aviation fasters as “bol...

The Robinson R22 and its larger sibling the R44, are two of the most widely produced light helicopters in the world. They are relatively cheap to buy, and have low operating costs, making them popular with flight schools, private pilots and law enforcement agencies. They also have a reputation for crashes. * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? End of the Line  is available on engineeri...

EV’s are the future of motoring. Quiet, smooth, no pollution and no gas. Performance? With both high horsepower and very high torque off idle, we know that electric vehicles are fast and quick. So what’s not to like? * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? End of the Line  is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as This Week in Engineering, Designing the...

*This is our last episode of 2023! We'll be back again the week of January 8th.* Golf equipment, particularly golf balls, have seen significant impact of technological advancements, leading to longer driving distances. This trend poses challenges for golf course design as courses struggle to accommodate the increased length. To address this, the PGA, in collaboration with the Royal and Ancient, pl...

The Saturn 1 project originated with a U.S. Army requirement for a heavy lift launch vehicle in the late 1950s and was ready for initial test flights shortly after President Kennedy announced the Apollo moon landing program. The timing was perfect, since the program needed launch vehicles to test Apollo flight hardware a fast as possible. Reliability of launch vehicle systems early 1960s was not g...

If you live in Southeast Asia, you have multiple options for low-cost motor vehicles that are unavailable in North America.  An example is the very utilitarian Toyota pickup, the IMV 0, which has a base price as low as as US$10,000.  High style it isn’t, but as a utility vehicle, it combines a very practical form factor with economy and solid engineering.  A typical entry level half...

While the second test flight of the SpaceX Starship space launch system ended with the explosion of both booster and spacecraft, perhaps the most technically challenging aspect of the mission, hot staging, operated perfectly. Hot staging simplifies rocket design by eliminating ullage rockets and associated sequencers, but it’s hard on the booster stage, which at SpaceX, is expected to not only sur...

Fear that artificial intelligence will replace humans and create a miserable and dystopian world has been a staple of science fiction like the Terminator's Skynet. But will it actually happen? Faith in technology is the cornerstone of modern society and from the perspective of the average user, including engineers, computer software already operates as a kind of artificial intelligence. What matte...

Heat pumps have been around for residential heating and cooling for decades, but the movement toward carbon-free energy has made them more relevant than ever. Compared to purely electric heat, heat pumps are four to five times more efficient. But can they actually replace the combustion of fossil fuels like natural gas, propane or kerosene? That depends on multiple factors, including the sophistic...

On March 31, 2022, the Biden Administration announced several measures to address the spike in oil prices caused by the Ukraine war, and slipped in an unusual measure: the Defence Production Act. The DPA is normally used in times of war to authoritatively allocate raw materials and finished goods according to a priority system to ensure that the military has what it needs. But it’s unusual to impl...

In the future, all consumer goods in everyday use will gather performance data, aggregated and transmitted through the cloud back to the products’ manufacturers. For the engineers that design those products, the result is a data set to determine the upper and lower limits of performance for critical components, allowing an iterative design process that lets each generation of component and assembl...

Is latency a new issue? No, in fact, in the days before transistors, television sets operated with vacuum tubes, which required a warming up period before they worked. It could be five or 10 seconds before the picture tube lit up after turning the set on, something which was sufficiently annoying that many manufacturers built a system called “instant on”, which was a major selling feature.  T...

Driverless taxi services have been under test in America and China for some time now, with perhaps the most famous being the Cruise autonomous vehicle ride hailing system on widespread test in San Francisco right now. In every case, the systems are based on conventional passenger cars, but truly autonomous ride hailing will use dedicated vehicles built as a passenger cabin without conventional con...

Measuring things is essential to both economics and engineering, and while engineers strive for both accuracy and repeatability, economists play by a different set of rules. Consider civil engineering. When Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast in August 2005, it surpassed Hurricane Andrew in 1992 as the costliest hurricane ever hit the United States. When a civil engineer designs a structur...

In his annual letter to CEOs, investment heavyweight BlackRock’s CEO, Larry Fink, addressed decarbonization as a major driving force in investment strategy going forward. But notably, he identified the problem of cost. Alternate energy is too expensive, and as long as it remains that way, the transition to green energy will be glacially slow. The solution, according to Fink, is investment in a new...

Sometimes, the most brilliant engineering manifests itself in simple mechanisms. The dual, single acting solenoid valves that control hot and cold water flow in consumer washing machines as an example. Small and lightweight, the unit uses commodity grade polypropylene, handle water flow of widely varying pressure and temperature, and cycle repeatedly to regulate wash temperature. It’s one of the s...

Internal combustion engine valves, or poppet valves, are conceptually simple components that have been around for well over a century. Producing them in mass quantities is done with special-purpose machine tools and interesting friction welding technology to meet stem with head. But as internal combustion engine demand is predicted to flat-line and eventually fall with the advance of electric vehi...

Devices are useless if the instructions can’t teach users how to operate them.  * * * Want to watch this podcast as a video? End of the Line  is available on engineering.com TV along with all of our other shows such as This Week in Engineering, Designing the Future, and, Manufacturing the Future.

Millions of people use this technology to light the barbecue grills: a butane lighter. It works by the piezoelectric effect, applying pressure to a crystal of lead zirconium titanate to create a potential of several thousand volts, creating a spark. It’s low in cost, but spark ignition is a very poor way to ignite fuel air mixtures, especially when the mixture stoichiometry is uncontrolled, as in...

Keeping equipment running in the field has always required a sensible service parts organization. A century ago, automobiles would frequently be laid up for weeks waiting for replacement parts—sometimes for something as common as tires. Today, consumers expect rapid access to maintenance and repair components, and supply chains have evolved to reflect this. Pricing of those replacement parts, howe...

In the early 1950s, Convair—now General Dynamics—built a prototype of a very high-performance jet fighter for the U.S. Air Force. It promised to bring supersonic speed, but the prototype XF-102 had one problem: it couldn’t break the sound barrier. The reason was because of the shape of the airframe, and the solution involved the application of the theory that seems counter intuitive by the standar...

In the 1950s, brands like Nash, Packard, Studebaker, Hudson and Kaiser were significant players in the automotive industry. All eventually disappeared, as scale economies forced automakers to get bigger to stay price competitive. In those days, automakers used proprietary bodies, engines and transmissions to differentiate the product, but the modern electric vehicle market is going in a different...

Space is intrinsically dramatic, but there’s a little secret to human spaceflight that few understand: machines went there first. By the time humans orbited the Earth in the early 60s, satellites had already measured a great deal about the near-Earth environment. Even 50 years ago, machines did the trailblazing for the people. And If AI continues to develop as fast as it is right now, we will rapi...

Cargo airplanes are traditionally derived from two sources: passenger aircraft designs and military airlifters. The advances in drone flying, however, suggest an interesting possibility: simplified fixed-wing cargo airplanes without pressurization. Operating from secondary airports, these specialized cargo airframes could lower the cost of air freight and create a new class of large airplane.&nbsp...

The recent tragic loss of all hands aboard the OceanGate Titan submersible has generated a great deal of criticism over the choice of carbon fibre as a structural material for the vehicle. Carbon fiber has a long history in aerospace and high-performance automotive applications, and it is a proven, durable and safe material in everything from racing cars to space satellites. It can be used for sub...