Blog Marco - Electrical Engineering

Straight Out of Sci-Fi: Rail Guns on a Navy Ship

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 22:40:55 -0700

Holy crap. Rail guns exist? It looks like the US Navy will soon have the technology to shoot anything in North Korea from a ship with a rail gun. A rail gun basically shoots a bullet or some projectile with EM energy (Electro-Magnetic) instead of the usual gun powder. Here's more information: PopSci. I thought this type of technology was just Science Fiction. (They have these rail guns on ships in the TV series Stargate)

Shortage of Engineers in Australia

Fri, 23 Jun 2006 03:52:20 -0700

Its been known for a while that Australia is undergoing a shortage in engineers across all fields. Companies are resorting to importing skills into Australia. Perhaps this would raise engineering incomes in future?

Skills shortage threatens Queensland projects

"Engineers Australia has warned that despite commitments of huge funding for Queensland infrastructure projects, the delivery of many projects will be jeopardised without access to enough professional engineers.

"Speaking ahead of a presentation to the Queensland Infrastructure Summit in Brisbane last week, Engineers Australia chief executive Peter Taylor said: "the limited availability of professional engineering skills will be a major factor in determining whether or not the huge infrastructure programs for Queensland can be implemented.

""The number of engineers graduating from our universities across Australia has remained static for a decade and when the massive expansion of infrastructure projects needs the skills base to underpin their delivery, we have been caught short.

""Even though the Australian government's own list of migrant occupations in demand shows that there are significant shortages of civil, mechanical, electrical power and resource engineering, there is no recognition of the connection between that list and the inability of our own education system to produce more engineers," he said."

Automated Student Bedroom

Fri, 12 May 2006 22:30:51 -0700

Check out this Automated Student Bedroom made by Zack Anderson from MIT. Website comes complete with YouTube videos of his gadget in action. Its amazing... And also check out Zack's resume. This guy is really driven... and smart - given his 4.5 GPA. No wonder he's a student in the world's best Engineering faculty. If you want to check out some of MIT's classes (FREE!) check out their opencourseware website.

OneSteel Engineers Australia Site Visit

Sun, 02 Apr 2006 05:40:40 -0700

Teaser:
I went on a site visit to the OneSteel Sydney Steel Mill a few weeks back

Image:

Body:

I went on a site visit to the OneSteel Sydney Steel Mill a few weeks back

I went on a site visit to the OneSteel Sydney Steel Mill a few weeks back with Engineers Australia. The picture shows the RED HOT billets coming out of the plant to be naturally cooled and stacked. I went to their last regional site visit to the RAAF Richmond base to check out their Hercules aircraft. Finding that site visit interesting, (and motivating) I signed up to this site visit. (As long as its free - I'm there!)

Anyway, I was the only student engineer there - perhaps everyone else doesn't care or doesn't have time, or just didn't know about it? The original reason why I chose engineering was that I loved to see how things worked and see and understand how they came to be. I kind of lost that passion I had (Or did I ever really have it?) for engineering... When it came to the the stock markets, trading shares and forex, I just had a knack for it - but thats another story. Getting back to what I was talking about - I think it is worth going to these site visits because you get to talk to the real engineers out there in the field, and a wide variety of engineers go to these site visits - and you can certainly build a network of contacts through going to these site visits.

Signals and Systems is Fun - Playing with Digital Oscilloscopes and Sine Waves

Fri, 31 Mar 2006 02:06:33 -0800

Teaser:
Digital Oscilloscope showing a sine wave and another smaller wave which is a sine wave convolved (convoluted!) with a square wav

Image:

Body:

I took this photo (K750i) in one of our labs for Signals and Sytems. (I took a photo from a lab last semester in Advanced Maths and Physics and another lab with a monochromator)The picture shows a display from a Digital Oscilloscope showing a sine wave and another smaller wave which is a sine wave convolved (convoluted!) with a square wave. Signals and Systems is fun! It's a tough course.

Tough because of the amount of hours you need to put into it in order to understand the underlying concepts, and also it is tough to have the discipline to actually sit and put the hours of grinding through the problems. ARGH! But besides all the math, the concepts and the technology is quite interesting to learn.

A lot of this "basic" theory is put into practise in the real world, wherever there is a signal and a system. For example, take your radio station and your radio receiver. The systems in place is the actual equipment that processes those signals - the sounds - music and voices. The systems operate on the signals in real-time, going through a number of processes - mathematical operations that the electrical components inside the equipment work on. The radio station equipment would modulate the sounds and jack it up in frequency, say up to 96.9 MegaHertz or 96.1 MegaHertz. In your radio, these values would correspond to 96.9fm and 96.1fm, when you tune your radio to these frequencies, the radio is actually demodulating it from the higher frequencies, and retrieve the actual sound from the carrier signal (the higher frequency signal) by operating on the signal again which then outputs audible sound which is in the range of 20kHz to 2Hz?.

Lane Cove Tunnel Helmet

Wed, 23 Nov 2005 05:38:03 -0800

My old Lane Cove Tunnel Helmet. My work experience that is part of my engineering degree.

I've previously covered the lane cove collapse in the following articles:

Mr P.K. 's advice on Op amps

Wed, 09 Nov 2005 01:24:20 -0800

Mr P.K. taught me today that:

If the input source i.e. voltage souce is going into the negative terminal of an op amp it is an inverting op amp. If it is going into the positive terminal, it is a non-inverting terminal.

The non-inverting amp gain is 1+ (R2/R1) and conversely the inverting amp is (-r2/r1).

Thanks PK! (A CASS member)

Quantum Mechanics - Advanced Maths and Physics Lab

Sat, 05 Nov 2005 08:50:03 -0800

Towards the end of a three hour computer lab I tend to get distracted.

This computer labratory was about quantum mechanics and in this particular computer screen there are four quantum wells present. These wells are of depth -380eV. Each quantum well was about 0.75nm (yes nanometres!).

Those squiggly lines you see are the energies for that particular quantum state.

Why are we learning this stuff? I have no clue... I found the lab very tedious and laborious... The only way my partner and I could find out what we were actually doing was by asking multiple questions to the lecturer. And I do mean multiple... like every 3 minutes or so! But really... this subject is a part of the Electrical major of the Bachelor of Engineering. I guess this topic ties in with the fact that everything is linked - from what we see - the macro view of things to the micro - or rather the nano/femtoview of the world. (Yes femto - thats 10^-15. I was actually guessinf what fs meant at the start of the subject. Little did I know that fs stood for femtoseconds - just like ms for milliseconds! Well I didn't really expect to see fs!)

Sunglass Reflection in CA (Circuit Analysis) Tutorial

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 12:44:15 -0800

This photo was taken out of boredom from a CA tutorial a few days ago. Gerard was once again going off topic (not that there is anything wrong with that) but it was getting way off topic that I was starting to daydream...

This photo is of the reflection off Andrew's Sunglasses.

Photo taken with a Sony Ericsson K750i, a 2 megapixel mobile phone camera. Curves in Photoshop to achieve the desired effect.

Physics Lab - Monochromator

Fri, 21 Oct 2005 03:49:48 -0700

This photo was taken during a Physics lab where we were measuring the wavelength of light using a bank of different coloured LEDs and a monochromator.

RAAF Richmond Site Visit 27th September 2005

Thu, 20 Oct 2005 11:14:24 -0700

As a student member (StudIEAust) of IEAust (Institution of Engineers Australia) I was invited to go on a site tour of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) base at Richmond in NSW Australia. I’ve received many invitations in the past, but this time I wanted to give it a go and see what I could get out of the whole visit. (And also it seemed like a little more interesting than the other site visits – like seeing the M7 which is part of Sydney’s orbital road. And having seen and been into a tunnel being built I wanted to see something that wasn’t related to civil engineering)

The RAAF base at Richmond NSW is located about 40 kilometres north west of Sydney and is the base for the 33rd, 36rd and 37th squadron. The 33rd squadron is responsible for the Boeing 707’s, which is an aging fleet of aircraft used for transporting 150 or so troops to where they are needed. The 36th squadron covers the C130-H better known as the ‘Hercules’ which we all hear about so often in the news. The 37th squadron is responsible for the new generation C130-J - a cargo aircraft that the Australian Defense Force (ADF) purchased to replace an obsolete model of C130 (E class?) and compared to the C130-H aircraft, this one is full of the ‘latest’ gear with computers and the like… (I say ‘latest’ with apostrophe marks considering how fast technology moves today, this four year old aircraft should be out dated now)

Circuit Analysis 1800-2100 Wednesday Night

Wed, 24 Aug 2005 06:56:45 -0700

Trying to keep focused on Circuit Analysis for a three hour session is a challenge.

A summary of three hours work:
1. T-parameters, H-parameters, Z-parameters, Y-parameters; (Note to self: How do you do matrices? - I'm supposed to know them from first year)

2. Example with a Capacitor and Inductor. (Hmm... so that's what steady state meant...)

3. Method of Undetermined Coefficients (This was where I started to drift off...)

And, this was what I had to resort to (to keep awake)... taking a picture of my "Spirax" Note Book Spines. I also took a snap of a couple of calculators but thats another story...