Category Archives: Science & Engineering

You gotta know some heavy stuff in order to build cool cars. Get your learn on.

Dragonfly Wings – Smarter Everyday

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Dragonfly wing muscles via Ryan Lee Photography on Flickr

Dragonfly wing muscles via Ryan Lee Photography on Flickr

Unless you’re already an expert in entomology and mechanical engineering, this high speed footage will forever change how you view dragonflies. As a primer, lets first take a look at the dragonfly in action:


Dragonflies are unmatched in the insect kingdom for precision flight control and efficiency thanks to their two pairs of wings. Managing the flexibility and complexity of the wing system takes some effective engineering. Destin from Smarter Everyday was able to capture some awesome footage of the muscle system on a dragonfly while he was in Peru. He then goes on to explain how the muscle linkage system gives the dragonfly direct control of each wing in both directions. He also shows some flow footage to prove that flapping the two pairs of wings out of phase by 25% nets a 20% flight efficiency for the dragonfly. The Mechanical Engineering doesn’t stop there as Destin examines the heavy spots built into each wing to control its natural frequency of vibration.


Sources: Ryan Lee Photography on Flickr and ultraslo and Smarter Everyday on YouTube

NASA Dryden Flight Research Center

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This is a little promo video for NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center in Southern California. Their slogan is “We turn ideas into reality.” The video shows a highlight reel of some of the research projects that their scientists and engineers have given the gift of flight. These are the things that human ingenuity has brought the world.


Source: NASA Dryden on YouTube

Yves Rossy – The Jetman

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It’s generally a safe assumption that when a person chooses a career as a pilot that he or she loves to fly. Yves Rossy is a pilot for a Swiss airline and he loves to fly. The thing that makes Yves special is that one day he decided that flying planes was not enough. He wanted to fly like a bird. That’s when the Jetman project was born. The idea was to build a rigid carbon fiber wing that Rossy could wear on his back. It would also house four high-end remote control airplane turbines that burned kerosene to produce 22 pounds of thrust each. The fuel tank inside the wing holds enough fuel for 8 minutes of flight time. Yves purposely left control surfaces out of his design. His body would act like the wing’s fuselage so that he could use his head, arms and legs to control his flight. Jetman is very literal name for his project. So far Rossy has flown across the English Channel, raced a rally car on Top Gear and flown in the Grand Canyon among many other successful flights. His future ambitions for the Jetman project are to train another pilot for some formation flying and to be able to take off from the ground.


Source: TED Talks on YouTube

Building an AMG Engine

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Motor Trend’s Johnny Lieberman gets an opportunity to tour AMG’s engine factory in Affalterbach, Germany and we get the pleasure of tagging along. He works with one of the AMG technicians to build one of the 5.5 liter twin turbo V8’s that powers the entire AMG line with the exception of the C63 AMG (the engineers thought the C63 was too light for the turbo engine’s torque so they stayed with the 6.2 liter naturally aspirated V8). The part that I found particularly interesting was the assembly and testing of the 2,000 psi direct injection fuel system. After everything is installed, they pressure test it for leaks with helium since it’s the smallest practical atom (hydrogen is smaller but more ridiculous to work with). The last thing they want is a bunch of high pressure fuel spraying all over the engine. This was a special opportunity for the Johnny unlike GM’s program where anybody can pay to assemble their own LS7 or LS9 for their Corvette or crate engine purposes. AMG actually decided not to put the engine Lieberman worked on into use. Right now it’s on a display stand where it can’t hurt anybody.


Source: Motor Trend on YouTube

Mach 3 Shockwave Model

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Here is more evidence that science and art are not mutually exclusive. It’s a supercomputer model of the shockwave formed when an aircraft hits Mach 3 which is three times the speed of sound. Aerodynamics is still one of the most complicated things that we try to model. Air is a compressible fluid with many codependent variables. Its temperature and pressure can affect that amount of water vapor it can hold which in turn effect its density. Combinations of these variables can actually change how fast sound can travel through air. Unlike the speed of light, the speed of sound (Mach number) is something that has to be calculated based on air conditions. All of these things get even more complicated when we study how air moves. That’s what makes this model of a Mach 3 shockwave made by Swiss scientists using the latest in computer technology so remarkable. The model has two layers: density changes followed by the vorticity magnitude. I’m making an educated guess here, but I think vorticity magnitude is how chaotic the turbulence in the shockwave is. The two models are then broken down in more detail and overlaid on each other. Most of the science is way over my head, but I think the remarkable thing to pay attention to is the formation of the vortex ring.


Source: Physics Central APS on YouTube