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The Engineer’s Guide to Volcano-Proofing

Thousands of earthquakes and tens of thousands of tremors have been shaking Iceland in recent weeks, suggesting a volcanic eruption is likely in the coming days. Home to 32 volcanic systems, the country has seen its share of seismic events over the past few decades. 

Remember when the Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted in 2010 and caused the largest air traffic shut down since World War II? The Icelandic government has stated that a similar air traffic disruption is unlikely this time around, but that’s a small comfort at ground level.

Thousands of people have been evacuated, with sinkholes appearing and houses splitting apart in the small fishing town of Grindavik on the island’s southern peninsula. (See current conditions on this live webcam.) Icelandic authorities are scrambling to build defensive walls around the nearby Svartsengi geothermal power plant; a permanent protective dyke was planned but is still awaiting government approval.

Iceland’s response to this threat raises the question of what other engineering solutions could be used in active volcano regions. It’s a dense topic, encompassing everything from harnessing geothermal energy to using drones for surveying and monitoring. When it comes to designing buildings to withstand volcanic eruptions, some hazards–such as the weight of falling ash–are easy enough to account for while others, like pyroclastic flows, can only be dealt with by building in safe locations. 

One of the most intriguing engineering solutions to volcanic eruptions comes from a Welsh designer who proposed using lava flows to cast building components. The basic idea is simple: rather than erecting concrete barriers, dig casting beds in the lava’s path to create blocks for rebuilding in the aftermath of an eruption. The hitch is that we’d need to be better at predicting lava flows, which is still challenging even with the latest simulations. The alternative is redirecting the lava, which has been tried in the past with a combination of bulldozers and explosives. However, the results have been mixed.

In the News

Ahh, the Gentle Caress of a Robot’s Hand

The human hand is a wonder of evolution–which speaks to the difficulty of engineering artificial hands that can perform the same tasks to the same effect. Rather than building their robotic hand out of the usual metals and plastics, engineers at ETH Zurich university and Inkbit, a producer of additive-manufacturing technology, developed new designs for a 3D-printed soft robotic hand that includes ligaments and tendons made of soft-curing polymers. This video reveals the secret of their success: integrating laser scanning with the 3D-printing process to ensure consistency between layers.

“Catastrophic Risks” of A.I.

Artificial intelligence (A.I.) seems to be having an iPhone moment, with the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies investing heavily in the technology. Fei-Fei Li, a co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered A.I. Institute, calls this an inflection point. Going from being an immigrant living in poverty to an A.I. heavyweight has given Li a unique perspective: the technology poses catastrophic risks other than those identified by Geoffrey Hinton and other A.I. “godfathers.” Misinformation, workforce disruptions, privacy infringements–all of these are more likely, and hence more pressing, than the killer-robots-run-amok scenarios that tend to grab headlines.

Start-Ups with Laser Beams

Nuclear fusion has been sought as a solution to the world’s energy problems for decades, and a breakthrough at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory last year, in which a laser-induced fusion reaction achieved net-positive energy generation, spurred the creation of multiple laser-fusion start-ups. We’re still a long way from fusion’s Holy Grail, but the way forward seems clear for the first time in history. Fundamentally, all that remains to be determined is the right combination of lasers and fuel pellets. Whether it’s argon-fluoride or krypton-fluoride lasers, direct or indirect drive, the future of fusion-derived energy is looking bright.

Recommendations

DeLorean Designer Lauds Cybertruck

Giorgetto Giugiaro, designer of the Lotus Esprit, BMW M1 and the legendary DeLorean DMC-12 has some thoughts about Tesla’s Cybertruck. (Spoiler alert: He loves it.) In a recent interview, Giugiaro reflected on his own design process and the criticisms he faced in response to the now iconic DMC-12. Many of those criticisms have been echoed for the Cybertruck, though whether that’s a good or bad sign remains uncertain.

How Do You Date a Da Vinci?

What engineer could deny the genius of Leonardo da Vinci, given the 7,000-plus pages of drawings, scientific observations and personal journals he left for posterity. However, the maestro of art and science made one sizable mistake in his work: he never recorded dates on those pages, leaving art historians to puzzle over their chronology. But engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may have a solution that marries photography and algorithms to analyze the paper’s internal structure, which yields clues to its date of origin.

Think Inside-Out of the Box

Thanks to their power-to-weight ratio and cooling efficiency, rotary engines were the popular choice for powering the warplanes of the First World War. But thanks to their inefficient oiling systems, they’re rarely used today outside of certain specialized applications. That could change with the development of a design that turns the engine inside out and has proven robust in bench tests, go-karts and military drones.

From engineering. com

Autodesk A.I. Sets Sights on Automotive

Autodesk University 2023 kicked off with the announcement of Autodesk’s acquisition of BlankAI and the promise that automotive engineers could soon be designing car bodies with just a few parameters. Like most major engineering software players, the company is betting big on artificial intelligence – but is AI-powered car design what engineers really want?

Master Dimensioning in AutoCAD

AutoCAD power user Mike Thomas is back with another article to help you get the most out of your design software. Dimensioning in AutoCAD is supposed to be easy, but there are plenty of tricks to make this semi-automatic process even easier.

Sim Battle: Apps vs. Experts

Building-materials manufacturer Heidelberg Materials recently launched a simulation tool to help its customers predict concrete curing times, results and strengths by automating relevant calculations. It’s already a hit with more than 1,100 downloads, but do specialized simulation apps like this one undermine simulation experts?