Practical Engineering

I got a new toy in the shop and thought I'd take the chance to try it out on video. Expect more metal fabrication in future videos!

This is a demo of a bell siphon I built in collaboration with a couple of engineering professors. There are certain cases where it would be nice to be able to create a siphon without any intervention, a self-priming or automatic siphon: the next level of siphonry. It's built out of an acrylic sheet and a piece of clear pipe. Thanks to Rolf Hut and Pete Marchetto for inviting me to collaborate on their project.

The airwaves are awash with invisible communications keeping us connected and facilitating our information society. All that telecommunication requires a lot of infrastructure! Today's episode of WTI shows some wireless telecommunications.

Engineering statics (or the study of objects at rest) is a fundamental part of most engineering curricula. It's broadly applicable not only to engineers, but anyone who has anything that needs to stay put. Thank you for watching, and let me know what you think.

Sinkholes form through both natural and human-made processes.

A primer on one of the most important companions to civil engineering: land surveyors.

If you've got a telescope, give the crowd a show next week. Make the eclipse bigger! Eclipse glasses are okay, but the sun is only as big as your thumbnail at arms length. That's not very big. I need something to impress some kindergartners! Hopefully the sun funnel can do it.

In civil engineering, quicksand is more than just a puddle of mud! The "quick condition" occurs when seepage reduces the effective stress of a soil. This can lead to some dangerous conditions, especially if the seepage causes piping erosion to occur at a dam. Thanks for watching!

Okay this is the last video on the hazards of soil mechanics for a while :)

Hydraulic transients (also known as water hammer) can seem innocuous in a residential setting, but these spikes in pressure can cause major damage to large pipelines and industrial pipe networks. In this video, we briefly discuss how water hammer occurs and how engineers mitigate the effect.

A few things that can go very wrong when you put steam in a pipe...