Design Engineer’s Weekly

Broaden your perspective. Expand your knowledge. Love your work.

In this Issue

• Revealed: Amazon’s MK30 delivery drone

• Concept vehicles dazzle at Tokyo’s auto show

• The one car you’ll want to bump into

• F1 champions succeed with simulation

• Tesla wins the [hypothetical] Nobel Prize

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Cover Story

Amazon Drones On

Despite a wave of layoffs and the loss of some key executives earlier this year, Amazon’s Prime Air drone delivery service might be nearing mass availability after a decade in development. The company’s most recent announcements about the project include the planned 2024 launch of drone delivery in a third U.S. state and several cities in Italy and the U.K., none of which Amazon has named. It also released the first photos of its latest drone model, the MK30: a hexacopter about 5.5 feet in diameter with a top speed of 50 mph and a payload capacity of 5 lbs.

Amazon’s unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) designs have come a long way since the company started gobbling up patents for delivery drones and unveiled its MK4 prototype in 2013. Back then, the design was little more than a proof of concept, with eight exposed rotors that made for loud and potentially hazardous flights.

The MK23 represented a more radical design. Introduced at the end of 2015 in a commercial with Top Gear host Jeremy Clarkson, this UAV incorporated fixed wings as well as a rear propeller to improve its flight efficiency, though at the cost of flight time and range. The MK23 was retired to the National Air and Space Museum in 2018.

The MK30 closely resembles its predecessor, the MK27-2, although it’s smaller and lighter. With vertical take-off and wing-borne flight, both fall into the same hybrid category as the MK23, though the two later models are much closer to more conventional drone designs. The differences between the MK27-2 and the MK30 make it clear that Amazon has reached a point of more incremental refinements rather than the broad, sweeping changes seen between earlier generations.

Improvements in cost, range and noise appear to have been Amazon’s primary ambitions for the MK30. The company initially claimed a 25% reduction in perceived noise, but now says it’s achieved a drop of nearly half. According to one source, the MK30 was expected to cost $60,000 per unit – way less than the MK27-2’s $146,000 price tag – and have a 15 km flight range, triple that of the MK27-2. Neither improvement has been confirmed by Amazon.

Whether Bezos’ brainchild will prove profitable remains to be seen, with many more technical and regulatory hurdles still to come. The drones’ design will no doubt continue to evolve, and we trust they will be smart enough to avoid belligerent eagles on their delivery routes.

The Poll

In the News

Concept Cars Dazzle in Tokyo

After a three-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Japan’s biggest automotive trade show has returned, albeit with new branding. What used to be called the Tokyo Motor Show is now the Japan Mobility Show, a change that’s supposed to take the show beyond the auto industry. You can already browse through all the cars that have been unveiled, including the reborn Honda Prelude – or just skip right to the giant, pilotable robot that’s already available for sale.

Biden Bets on Tech Hubs

As part of a Commerce Department initiative to distribute $500 million in grants to cities across the U.S., President Joe Biden just announced the winning regions for the first phase of the Tech Hubs competition. The designation of 31 Tech Hubs is intended to encourage investment and innovation away in places not called Seattle or Silicon Valley. Concentrating talent and resources in such “superstar” regions is expensive, though at least one study suggests they’re (mostly) worth the cost.

10” of Rain in 6 Hrs. Three Days to Fix the Dam

The news is about more than federal policies and international events. It’s also about what’s happening on the ground, and this story about engineers scrambling to repair a dam in a small town in Massachusetts is a perfect example. With dam infrastructure unprepared for climate change and at least one catastrophe partly attributable to it, civil engineers need to be thinking in the longer term while also preparing for more immediate crises to come.

Exposure

Black Hawk Up

After 40 years of service, General Electric’s T700 engine for Apache and Black Hawk helicopters finally has a worthy successor. The U.S. Army recently accepted the first two T901-GE-900 flight test engines for the Black Hawk, Apache and Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA). According to GE, the new engine design boasts 50% more power using few parts, including some made from ceramic matrix composites or with additive manufacturing to reduce weight. In addition, the T901 has the same aircraft mounting and installation envelope as the T700, which makes for easier retrofitting on the existing fleet.

Recommendations

An Unreasonable Facsimile

For those who wasted the first few months of COVID lockdown, bottle this bolt of inspiration for the next big one that hits: retired mechanical engineer Dan Hryhorcoff used his unexpected free time to build a gigantic, street-legal bumper car. Modeled on the 1953 Lusse Auto Skooters in operation at a local amusement park, Hryhorcoff’s amazing 13-footer contains a power plant pulled from a Chevrolet Aveo. Despite the pedigree of his vehicle, we suspect Hryhorcoff takes care to avoid collisions when he takes it out for a spin.

Who Wrote the Book on Electric Lighting?

Here’s a hint: it wasn’t Edison. The fourth son of escaped slaves, Lewis H. Latimer served on a gunboat in the Civil War, worked as a draftsman in a patent office and helped make the electric lightbulb affordable for the average person. But that’s not all. At Edison’s behest, Latimer eventually wrote Incandescent Electric Lighting: A Practical Description of the Edison System, which features dozens of his truly beautiful mechanical drawings.

How to Make a Modern PLATO Terminal

If you’ve never heard of Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations (PLATO), there’s a lot to learn about the world’s first generalized computer-assisted instruction system. Designed and built by the University of Illinois in 1960, it ran for the next four decades and was the origin of many concepts we take for granted today: forums, message boards, online tests, even remote screen sharing. Want to try it for yourself? Here’s how you can create your own modern-day PLATO terminal.

From engineering.com

A.I. Will Power Next-Gen Wireless

We hear a lot about how artificial intelligence is transforming everything from marketing to healthcare, but its impact on wireless communications has generally been undersold. Engineering.com spoke with the principal product manager at MathWorks to understand how A.I. algorithms are transforming the wireless domain.

An Inside View of Red Bull Racing’s F1 Success

The Oracle Red Bull Racing Team has clinched the 2023 Formula 1 World Constructors’ and World Drivers’ Championships, thanks in no small part to simulation. Ansys recently released a new video series about what that means and how the company’s multiphysics solutions shaped the F1 car into a champion.

Dell’s 96-Core Tower Takes Aim at Generative A.I.

If you’re looking for a powerful new workstation, Dell’s massive Precision 7875 Tower is hard to beat. With the option to include AMD’s more performant new processor–the 96-core Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7995WX–the new workstation also supports dual graphics cards and a maximum 2TB of memory and 56TB of storage. Dell designed the Precision 7874 with A.I. in mind, claiming that it can support model training, generative A.I., machine learning and more.

Poll Results

In our last issue, we asked readers to choose the most deserving of six nominees for the inaugural Nobel Prize for Engineering – assuming one existed and could be received posthumously. Nikola Tesla was the runaway choice with 68% of the votes, followed by James Watt (25%) and Charles Babbage (7%).