By FrauTech on December 9, 2011
I talked last week about increasing fuel economy standards in the US and how our engine designs have been improving incrementally to meet this new demand. It was almost a year ago that I talked about the military’s affection for diesel in a wide variety of platforms. Well now it seems like the flexibility of diesel and the American consumer’s desire for better fuel efficiency is meeting somewhere in the middle. When Americans think about diesel they might have an image in their heads of 1970s diesel cars puffing black smoke everywhere or a smelly large truck. Diesel is extremely popular in Europe but their environmental and safety standards are different which prevented direct injection (ha!) of European diesel cars in to the US (like the direct injection of the Bosch common rail injector in the photo). Still the advantages in fuel economy with the models we’ve been seeing so […]
Posted in Mechanical Engineering | Tagged autos, design, diesel, engines, fuel, fuel efficiency, manufacturing, power, turbocharger |
By Chris Gammell on February 2, 2011
All across the midwest this evening, they’ve been calling the most recent stormfront the Blizzard of 2011. Whether or not it will develop into a truly nasty storm remains to be seen. But it did get me thinking (and yes, a little bit scared): If you had to generate all you own power starting tomorrow, do you think you could do it? Posing this question to a few co-workers and myself gave me pause. I understand the scope and magnitude of power generation. It’s no small feat! Aside from the fact that we just expect power to be there these days, we don’t usually have a real feel for how much total power we use and how hard it is it actually generate that power. But we’re all engineers around here, right? (or at least masochists who enjoy reading about engineering) So let’s figure out what it would take and […]
Posted in Education | Tagged furnace, generation, power, refrigerator, winter |
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