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A 15-storey building—in six days
Amazing advances in building technologies in China were evident in the construction of sports stadiums and lodging facilities at the Shanghai World Expo and the Beijing Olympic Games. Chinese construction engineers have now achieved an even more spectacular feat—constructed a 15-storey building in only six days after the foundations and underground works had been completed.
The building is that of Ark Hotel in the city of Changsha, located in the Hunan province. The frame of the building was erected in 46.5 hours while the external surfaces and other features of the building were completed in 90 hours. Only 200 workers were involved in the construction work. The building is strong enough to withstand an earthquake of magnitude 9.0. The building is five times more efficient than conventional buildings, having triple pane windows, heat recovery systems, six inches of thermal insulation, LED lighting systems and external solar shades. The building utilised only one-sixth of the materials used in similar sized conventional buildings and was built at a much lower cost.
There are 15 similar buildings planned to be built in China and 30 such buildings in other countries.
Air hybrid cars
When the car engine is idling or when you are driving down a slope with no power needed from the engine, the energy of the engine is wasted. This energy can be used to fill an air cylinder and then supplement the power of the engine, leading to saving in fuel consumption.
Such pneumatic systems can be built into vehicles and the engines serve to compress air during vehicle deceleration when engine power is no longer needed to propel the vehicles forward. Similarly, the energy in the braking process can be stored in an air compressor and used later. Such air-hybrid systems can work with gasoline, diesel or natural gas engines and would be much cheaper to manufacture than the electric hybrid systems requiring expensive battery packs.
Researchers at the Lund University in Sweden have now successfully tested a prototype of such a system. This was the subject of a PhD thesis of Sasa Trajkovic at Lund University, who showed that buses running in cities could save up to 60 per cent fuel consumption if they used their engines simultaneously as air compressors. The technology is particularly beneficial during slow and jerky driving.
New exo-planets discovered
The Kepler space telescope of Nasa, launched in March 2009, has been searching for earth-like exo-planets where life may exist. It has so far looked at 156,000 stars and found 1,235 planets that have the potential to harbour life as they are in the habitable zone (near enough to their respective suns for light and warmth to reach them, but not too close where it would be too hot for life to exist).
An exciting recent discovery is the Kepler 11 planetary system which has at least six planets around its star. It is the most compact and largest planetary system discovered till now, since very few stars have been found that have more than one planet revolving around them, and none was known previously (besides our own) which had more than three planets.
The Kepler telescope has identified 54 planets so far which are in the habitable zone since its launch. As the telescope has been aimed at only a very tiny section of the sky, it is apparent that there must be hundreds of thousands of planets, if not millions, that exist in the universe and on some life may have evolved.
The problem with the Kepler 11 planetary system is that it is about 2,000 light years away from us. So if you ever want to go there, it would take 2,000 years even if you could travel at the speed of light, which you cannot.
Nature, the best teacher
Engineers of today continue to learn from nature in many ways. A field has involved known as ‘biomimicry’ –copying nature. Biomimicry provides novel engineering concepts and designs that lead to new products and processes. For example, termites can maintain constant temperature and humidity in termite mounds in Africa in spite of variations of outside temperatures from 1.5ºC to 40ºC.
Engineers learning from the termites constructed the Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, which remains cool without air conditioning and uses only 10 per cent of the power used by other conventional buildings of comparable size. A cane has been developed for the blind, based on the echo-location technique used by bats. Velcro was developed on the basis of hook-like structures present on the surface of burs. Hundreds of other products have been designed, learning from the way nature has solved various problems in the course of evolution.
Nature is the greatest master!
