Some thoughts for 2012

Haven't posted for a while so better put something up! Wishing everyone clear skies and smooth waters for the year. What is the difference between Mathematics and Physics? Picked up this interesting quote which is food for thought:

"We are able to demonstrate geometrical matters because we make them; if we could prove physical matters we would be able to make them".  

Giovanni Vico (1668-1744).

What's happening with Propulsion Physics and where are we going? Is Interstellar Travel going to happen sometime soon? Several interesting papers were published in 2011 and the 100 year Starship conference went ahead however don't see them leading to a breakthrough anytime soon. Several key technologies such as fusion reactors need to be in place before the propositions in the papers can be turned into a Starship so one might have to wait at least 50 years, Marc has his wonderings on a possible future timelime here. It appears that the Universe as we understand it with our current models is not human friendly as far as practical interstellar flight is concerned although the Physics doesn't deny us Interstellar Travel, it appears that one needs to be prepared for the extreme challenges of distances and time required to travel to possible nearby Earth-like planets in our Galaxy.

If Schiller's Strand model for eg turns out correct, then it looks like Physics is close to being complete which would make it even more difficult for Breakthrough Propulsion Physics. Between work, I am pursuing my studies for 2012 in Quantum Vacuum Physics & Engineering and see where it leads. The other big problem is getting large amounts of hardware into orbit without using chemical rockets. Is there a viable solution without using space elevators?

Some recents photos taken when I was recently in Exmouth, Western Australia. Most interesting sites are the US Navy VLF transmitter for submarines and the Learmonth Solar Observatory. Didn't see any turtles laying eggs on the beach, they turn up at night.     

CI.

Local Exmouth resident.

Vlamming Head Lighthouse.

Navy VLF station in the distance.

Closer view.

Checkout the Sydney outline diagram!

An interstellar position fixing method

Paper is now available for download at:

http://vixra.org/abs/1106.0053

CI.

Here goes Captain PlakaDuck

Any day on the water is better than a good day at the office!

Introduction to Wärtsilä marine diesel engines

Been reading up quite a bit on these engines as recently I've been working on a OSV (Offshore Supply Vessel) as 1st Engineer and this boat was particularly interesting since it's the first time I've worked on one which has Z-pellers and introduced me to Wärtsilä marine diesel engines which are famous for their slow to medium speed engines used in big ships. This one had two Wärtsilä 6R25, 4-stroke 6 cylinder inline turbocharged air start main engines rated at 1493KW each, these are classed as medium speed diesel engines which means they don't go over 1000RPM. There's another engine just to run the fire pump and also has three 471 Detroits for the generators, quite a busy engine room as far as maintenance goes as there are lots of other machinery to look after in and out of the engine room which includes a fuel clarifier, oily water separator, compressed air system, sewage treatment plant, hydraulic system, air conditioning plant etc.

The engine room, port main engine in the background

Big engine

From the outside the engine looks fairly simple design compared to Caterpillar and Cummins engines I'm used to work with, these have much less pipework running around the engine and each cyclinder has a pyrometer to check exhaust temperatures. As is common practice with large engines, the indicator cocks are opened for each cylinder and compressed air run through them at first to blow out any water or fuel. This is to make sure there's nothing blocking the pistons upon startup which could cause damage. The other thing that striked me is that there are no batteries used in the engine room as everything including the generators are started with compressed air (couple of new batteries which haven't been commissioned yet have been introduced purely for a new upcoming electronic Z-peller control system). 

Front of the main engine

If for some reason one has to leave a dead ship on a cyclone mooring for eg, one makes sure that the two compressed air bottles are pressed up before shutting down and failing that there is a manual air pump with a large handle to get compressed air in an emergency for startup which will need at least 800 pumps, good workout!

Being a manned engine room, this one has an airconditioned Engineer's control room which is really cool :-) The shafting behind the main engines leading to the aft compartment which has the machinery for the Z-pellers is quite extensive with 7 shaft bearings on each side and mechanical joints throughout the system. As this system allows the propellers to be rotated 360° in azimuth, this makes the vessel highly manoeuvrable and is used quite often in tugboats and other vessels.

Many large ships these days use Azipods which are similar in principle except they use a large electric motor underneath the ship to drive a propeller in direct drive. This is a more efficient system as the electric motors generate 100% torque at 0 RPM (unlike conventional diesel engines) and the diesel generators producing the electrical power to drive these Azipods can now be placed anywhere in the ship thus giving the ship designer more flexibility because the engine room doesn't have to be aft of the ship anymore with long shafts saving space for more cargo. Since the motors are electric, this also opens up the doors to using future technologies such as Hydrogen fuel cells, nuclear power plants etc which also produce electrical power without burning fossil fuels (was watching a doco the other day which indicated we reached peak oil production in 2006!).

Very cool Engineer's control room

Starboard Z-peller control system

It's coming up to 3am here, better start doing my rounds so till next time.

BTW for those who didn't know LyX 2.0 has just been released! Looks like they've made major upgrades, check it out. Writing a paper called "A position fixing method in Interstellar Space" using Lyx, keep you people posted.

CI.

iPhone application development adventures

Just a few months ago after walking past an Apple store (the flashy new one in Sydney CBD) I decided to go in and have a wonder around and play with the toys they had displayed. Since I was a kid, I've always been a PC person myself and the thought of using an Apple computer would send shivers down my spine... I always liked the idea I could goto the monthly computer market and get bits and pieces of computer hardware, memory etc and build my own computer and tinker around with it. My first one (8088) didn't even have  a case, the computer power supply, motherboard, 5 1/2 inch floppy drive (remember them?) all were sitting on the table next to the black&green monitor and clunky keyboard typing away programs in BASIC and playing flight simulator in MSDOS! Anyway had a look at Apple's hardware and played around with the iPhone 4.

I was thinking getting a new phone because the one I had was cleary outdated and the battery in my one was starting to get old. Well I was sold! Well sort off. Although the phone looked great, I was more interested in the iPhone applications that run on it and was pretty impressed especially since the phone packs a dummy GPS, motion sensors, camera etc. I didn't want to fork out the $800 or so they wanted so decided to get an iPhone 3GS from ebay at a more reasonable price to experiment. I was hooked! How do these people write all these great games and applications? Although I have experience writting in Java, one needs to learn Objective C for iPhone stuff so got myself copies of Objective-C for Dummies and iPhone Application Development for Dummies. All good so far except to develop iPhone Apps, one needs the Apple Software Development Kit which apparently only runs on Mac computers!

Mmmmm I had no choice then and saw the sleek looking MacBook Pro and grabbed one from the Apple store! To be able to test and download my Apps on a real iPhone and download the Software Development Kit, one must sign up to become a registered Apple Developer and pay the fee. While looking at the other Apps in the iTunes store one will notice that many developers will write a "HD" ie High Definition version of their game for the iPad. Well after playing around with it and realised I wouldn't have to printout all these Physics PDFs so I can read them on the run, got an iPad as well! I was pretty impressed with the iBooks application apart from the quality games and Apps people have written for it. One can also get whole physics lectures in iTunes U.

Well after getting all this Apple hardware, am I a convert? Definately not, however for reading I will definately be using my IPad from now on as the screen is large enough to make reading PDFs easy on the go and the MacBook for App development.

So what's coming up? Well, I'm working on my first iPhone/iPad game which shall be called Deckhand Pro: Sydney. This will have lots of maritime action and test your rope throwing skills onto the wharf, battling through misbehaving passengers, rescuing Man Overboards, rescuing boats stuck on reefs, stopping dissembarking passengers from taking beer bottles and drinks with them etc should be great fun. Other apps I have in mind include an iPhone Maritime Tutor for Master 5 and MED 3 students getting ready for their orals and a compass error calculator. So is writting all this fun? U betya! :-)

CI.

Some more photos from Western Australia where I was working as Engineer on a cargo boat.

This is home for 5 weeks, on a cyclone mooring here near Dampier.

It's pretty hot in here, not too bad once you get used to it.

Nuts and bolts

It has been an interesting start of the year for 2011 with some recent items worth mentioning:

Marc Millis of the Tau Zero Foundation posted two papers related to interstellar flight:

Progress in revolutionary Propulsion Physics: summarises the current state of where we stand towards a solution? for "timely interstellar flight - to reach other habitable worlds within a human lifespan". There are currently many options available to reach other stars using known physics. Most would take many decades just to reach our neighbour stars and none of them can get us to destinations beyond many light-years away in a timely, human lifespan timeframe. The paper uses many references from the first recent textbook devoted to this area of research and is worth every dollar: Frontiers of Propulsion Science. I like Figure 1 in the paper which graphically shows the many areas of Physics and concepts that need further research grouped by the key barriers to practical interstellar flight as stated in the paper: Non-propellant propulsion, faster than light travel and energy breakthroughs.

Second paper by Marc: Energy, incessant obsolescence, and the first interstellar missions: there's a review here. Regarding the "incessant obsolescence postulate: No matter when an interstellar probe is launched, a subsequent probe will reach the destination sooner and with more modern equipment": better launch as soon as one has the capabilities to do so because the opportunity may not present itself again due to unforseen circumstances in the future or "societal retardation" ie unforseen catastrophies or less energy production. The implicit motivations for interstellar flight, Table 6 in the paper is interesting, apart from the obvious scientific benefits from the mission and safeguarding humanity's long term survival, I liked another reason that Marc mentions in his talk to pursue interstellar flight: it gives nations something to conquer peacefully and together rather than concentrating on conquering each other on Earth.

Significant results released by the Kepler space telescope shows possible candidates for other Earth like planets. From the NASA press release:

"The fact that we’ve found so many planet candidates in such a tiny fraction of the sky suggests there are countless planets orbiting stars like our sun in our galaxy," said Borucki. "Kepler can find only a small fraction of the planets around the stars it looks at because the orbits aren’t aligned properly. If you account for those two factors, our results indicate there must be millions of planets orbiting the stars that surround our sun."

Also checkout APOD, Centauri Dreams, this and this.

Got in the mail a few days ago: Advanced Propulsion Systems and Technologies, Today to 2020. Another major problem to practical interstellar flight is getting the expected large amounts of hardware out of Earth's gravity well into orbit without using chemical rockets. Space elevators have been proposed (which seems only viable if ultra high strength carbon nanotube cables can be commercially fabricated in the required lengths). A more elegant solution? from Space Drive Physics is worth looking into (see Marc's first paper for an introduction, Chapter 3 Prerequisites for Space Drive Science and Chapter 12 Thrusting against the Quantum Vacuum in Frontiers of Propulsion Science). Anyway should be an interesting read.

CI.

Fremantle Harbour, Western Australia.

Dampier Harbour, Western Australia.

Book Review: And Yet It Moves

Today I finished reading And Yet It Moves: strange systems and subtle questions in Physics by Mark P. Silverman. I found this book particularly interesting as it introduced me to quantum phenomenon which previously weren't very familiar to me. The author being a research physicist has first hand experience with the topics he discusses. Several experiments are descibed including the wave like propagation of electrons in the two-slit experiment describing the familiar wave interference effect and the Aharonov-Bohm effect and other subtle behaviour of electrons. To me the nature of this particle is somewhat still not understood. Some texts for example will describe the electron as point-like as today's experiments give no measurable size of this particle (the classical electron radius is given as 10^-13 cm), however there is no such thing as a point-like entity (and no such as thing as a mathematical singularity in nature for that matter which rules out infinities as well, the Universe is not infinite) so suffice to say the electron must have a size albeit very small and unmeasurable with current technology.

The author goes on to describe some exotic atoms describing some which can be nearly the size of bacteria!, the physics of light reflections, light polarisation, the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, the amazing (check this out!)  Vortex Tube and other interesting subtle effects. The author asks on p204:

"Can the rotation of the Earth influence the structure of an atom?"

And goes on to discuss biomolecular chirality ie why living things make and use specific types of molecules such as right-handed sugar molecules or left-handed amino acids (this isn't understood, Earth evolutionary reasons?). The last chapter "Science and wonder" gives a personal account on various issues with science education, from the last page:

"To teach science well, one must have the philosophical attitudes of a scientist: to see science as culturally important, technically useful and aesthetically moving; to understand that the pursuit and acquisition of scientific knowledge helps free the mind from the bondage of ignorance, superstition and prejudice; to have a driving curiosity to comprehend the reason that manifests itself in nature and to enjoy sharing this curiosity with others.

  Einstein's eloquent words say it all:

The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle."

Great book, definately recommend reading it, got me chasing up some of the references at the back as well.

Red Bull Flugtag 2010 photos

     

A few weeks ago we had the judges onboard for the Red Bull Flugtag event in Farm Cove near the Sydney Opera House. Those crazzy people with their flying machines were at it again! It was a nice sunny day and there was a good turnup with the crowds and boats.

One of the teams made quite a long flight (it was pretty much a standard flying kite though, no exotic design). Most just fell straight down off the ramp to see their flying machine broken into bits and pieces. The judges gave scores to each team for design, asthetics etc.

After the crew are rescued by Surf Rescue, what happens to these flying machines?

Although few teams have demonstrated their mastery of flight, it was a fun day out on the water.

CI.