“There’s been a lot of good press from the science community on self-assembly of atoms. Well, I guess what I’m looking for is self-assembly and disassembly of large-scale structures…There is all sorts of exciting things we can do when [engineering] structures re-configure themselves.” — Prof. Paul Weaver
The technological jump from no functional aeroplane to the first serious military fighter occurred in a mere 10 years. The Wright brothers conducted their first flight in late 1903 and by 1914 WWI broke out with an associated expansion in military flying. This expansion occurred almost entirely without the benefits of organised science in formal […]
This post is a first. Up to now, all content on this blog has been exclusively written by myself. But recently Nick Mehlig and Ben Names from Structural Design and Analysis, Inc. (SDA), a team of stress engineers that design lightweight and load efficient structures, contacted me with a proposal for a guest […]
J.E. Gordon, a leading engineer at the Royal Aircraft Establishment at Farnborough and holder of the British Silver Medal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, wrote two brilliant books on engineering: “The New Science of Strong Materials” and “Structures – Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down”. Elon Musk
From Wright Flyer to Space Shuttle
On December 17 1903, the bicycle mechanic Orville Wright completed the first successful flight in a heavier-than-air machine. A flight that lasted a mere 12 seconds, reaching an altitude of 10 feet and landing 120 feet from the starting point. The Wright Flyer was made of wood and canvas, powered by a 12 horsepower internal […]
At the start of the 19th century, after studying the highly cambered thin wings of many different birds, Sir George Cayley designed and built the first modern aerofoil, later used on a hand-launched glider. This biomimetic, highly cambered and thin-walled design remained the predominant aerofoil shape for almost 100 years, mainly due to the fact that […]
In the early 20th century, a group of German scientists led by Ludwig Prandtl at the University of Göttingen began studying the fundamental nature of fluid flow and subsequently laid the foundations for modern aerodynamics. In 1904, just a year after the first flight by the Wright brothers, Prandtl published the first paper on a […]
Despite the growing computer power and increasing sophistication of computational models, any design meant operate in the real world requires some form of experimental validation. The idealist modeller, me included, wants to believe that computer simulation will replace all forms of experimental testing and thereby allow for much faster design cycles. The issue with this […]
This is the fourth and final part of a series of posts on rocket science. Part I covered the history of rocketry, Part II dealt with the operating principles of rockets and Part III looked at the components that go into the propulsive system.
One of […]
This is the third in a series of posts on rocket science. Part I covered the history of rocketry and Part II dealt with the operating principles of rockets. If you have not checked out the latter post, I highly recommend you read this first before diving into what […]
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