rockets, missiles, and bombs

http://www.aerospaceweb.org/question/weapons/q0211.shtml

This is a little more interesting. Missiles are advanced rockets, or they have guiding systems, there are also limiting factors on the diameter of a missile. Bombs don’t have propulsion systems, rockets and missiles do.

http://www.missilethreat.com/overview/pageID.154/default.asp

When we were talking about ICBM’s, this just kind of came up when I was thinking about it and searching for missiles. They are almost the same thing as normal missiles, except for the payload.

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

this thing has an impact speed of four km per second. which turns into 240 km per minute, or 14400 km per hour. about 9000 mph. what was the speed of sound again?

http://www.globalaircraft.org/top50.htm

the american military makes the fastest machine on the planet, that money has to go somewhere. Mach 9.8 though, pretty crazy, wait 9000 mph, mach 25ish? oh right.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/958730.stm

and just in case all you guys reading this thought that airplanes and stuff are only if you want to travel to the bahamas, remember, those missiles we learned about are in the news right now. We use them all the time, and it looks like we will continue needing them, if we ever find another fuel source instead of oil.

the largest plane ever

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbus_A380

So I was looking around for something interesting to write about and I remembered that question about the largest plane in the world. Well, in case any of you actually read this and are still wondering, it’s the airbus A380 and it’s a freakin beast. It flies by the same principle as everything else though, which is pretty impressive because it’s so massive that the amount of lift to keep it in the air must be insane. That’s probably why there are four turbines. Using that segue, this link explains how even the largest bodies can fly with the right physics:

http://www.howstuffworks.com/airplane.htm

basically, when the wing moves foward at a certain velocity, it splits the air to make it either go over or under the wing. The top of the wing has more area than the bottom of the wing. So, according to the equation AV=av, since the area is larger, the velocity is lower. If the velocity is lower, there is less pressure according to a second equation involving pressure, lower velocity means lower pressure, so this means the pressure on the bottom is greater than the pressure on the top, and since pressure is equal to force per area, it forces the plane up.

i have nothing to say

So today we learned about a subject i thought would be interesting, that being the world of programming. After seeing Iron man and how he programmed a robot to do all that crazy stuff, even though it is years and millions of dollars away, it’s something cool to aspire to accomplish. Unfortunately, my questions were all shot down as stupid and my ignorance was mocked. I still think it is a cool subject to know and would love to learn moe about it, and i have even started reading about how to program c online. maybe at some point i’ll try to write my own program. It has also made me start realizing how almost everything has some degree of programming, every machine I use in my to test my materials was all programmed first. It appears that scientific progress would halt without it and it definitely makes me have more respect for the people i though of as computer nerds.

trois

http://www.csa.com/discoveryguides/fuecel/overview.php

We were talking about ceramics and materials that produce final products last time, and that’s kind of like what I’m doing in lab. One of the grad students is/was working on creating better ceramic compounds for use in solid oxide fuel cells, which scientists have recently begun investigating as another form of reusable energy. This site basically explains how they work and some possible applications. There is an anode, cathode, and electrolyte. An oxidizing agent is fed into one end, a fuel is fed into the other, and the electrolyte (which has a high ionic conductivity) moves the oxidized agent from one side to the other to produce the waste (usually water or CO2). The extra electrons go to the connector and can be used to do work.

 

http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/06/16/fuel.cells.enn/index.html

This link is a little older, but it talks about the possible applications and how research is being done to find efficient fuel cells. Pretty cool.

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6528190.html

we were talking about how to effieciently make turbine blades and how they were being made out of composite metal and ceramic materials so they could endure high temperatures. This is interesting just because this guy actually thinks he invented the right compound. He didn’t clearly, maybe it needed a few tweaks, but from what I got out of it, he seemed to have the right idea from what Robert was saying in class.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4825388.stm

When we learned about polymers in class, I figured that they were kind of tapped out as an area of research and innovation. Except in 2006, which is quite recently, they found a new type of polymer to replace silicon in computers and advanced technology. It is still early to know if the research will be used in actual applications, but it’s a cool new innovation in science that relates to what we learned.

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass#The_physics_of_glass

As to the other question I brought up in class, I found my answer. It can be either one according to this wikipedia site, but it doesn’t flow to any appreciable extent over time, so I think I’ll just call it a solid. It is weird that we have such a complicated material that we use as an everyday material though. Interesting what we take for granted these days

numero dos

So i thought that the class today was actually pretty cool. I never realized there were so many types of CAD design, but I can see how they are really useful in the world of engineering and entrepreneurship. A CAD design is the first stage of the design process, where the product to be made is theoretical. From an enterpeneur’s point of view, CAD design is really cost effective because numerous designs of any size and material can be made without any cost of building the real product. From an engineer’s view, time and materials are not wasted building a product that hasn’t even been shown to work yet. At the same time though, it takes a while to learn a specific CAD system, and then, if a newer or different CAD system is set in place, the whole program has to be re-learned. Obviously, in the long run, it is much more economical to take the time to learn the system rather than waste money on parts and materials, especially if it is a large product, but for an engineer, it seems like the most boring thing to do, ever.

first post!

Oscillatory correlates of intentional updating in episodic memory

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6WNP-4S19RH8-3&_user=2139813&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000054276&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=2139813&md5=5f5580dc69959299fec8b8980b5a7786

Karl-Heinz Bäuml, Simon Hanslmayr, Bernhard Pastötter, Wolfgang Klimesch

The main idea behind this article is how the human brain remembers things, which is like how we learn and how we can remember and apply the new material. If we learn something and then forget it, it’s not really helpful to have learned at all. And while this article doesn’t talk about specific types of learning, it does talk about the general idea of learning and forgetting something. The experimenter in the article had people memorize one list, then forget that list and memorize a second list. They did a lot of complex studies and scans on the people to test brain activity and found that in order to really learn something and retain it, something else has to be forgotten in the process. How we learn doesn’t really matter in the long run if our brains are too full of previous information to actually store it. It is an interesting commentary when we spend our whole lives learning, since that also means we spend our whole lives forgetting.

Intro

Que tal chicos? Yea so this is the first time I’ve used one of these, new experience and all that… sweet right? Anyway, in case anyone not in the program somehow manages to find this page, it’s for a UF summer program and is going to be pretty science oriented, more specifically aerospace, mechanical, and materials engineering. If that’s not your brand of tea, peace. Otherwise, yea technical forum fun right? OK, I’m gonna go out into the sunshine of Florida but all you faithful readers can definitely expect updates. Haha, faithful readers. Peace.

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