From modern leaning tower to robo-butterfly
In "MT" we have repeatedly described the most famous wonders of modern technology. We know a lot about the CERN Large Hadron Collider, the International Space Station, the Channel Tunnel, the Three Gorges Dam in China, bridges like the Golden Gate in San Francisco, Akashi Kaikyo in Tokyo, the Millau Viaduct in France, and many others. known, described in numerous combinations of designs. It's time to pay attention to lesser known objects, but distinguished by original engineering and design solutions.
Let's start with the modern Leaning Tower or Capital Gate tower in Abu Dhabi (1), United Arab Emirates, completed in 2011. This is the most inclined building in the world. It is tilted as much as 18 degrees - four times the size of the famous Leaning Tower of Pisa - and has 35 floors and is 160 meters high. The engineers had to drill 490 piles almost 30 meters into the ground to keep the slope. Inside the building there are offices, retail space and fully functional retail space. The tower also houses the Hyatt Capital Gate Hotel and a helipad.
Norway's longest road tunnel, Laerdal is a road tunnel in the Hornsnipa and Jeronnosi mountains. The tunnel passes through solid gneiss for 24 m. It was built by removing 510 million cubic meters of rock. It is equipped with huge fans that purify and ventilate the air. Laerdal Tunnel is the world's first tunnel equipped with an air purification system.
The record tunnel is just a prelude to another exciting Norwegian infrastructure project. There are plans to upgrade the E39 motorway connecting Kristiansand in the south of the country with Trondheim, which is about a thousand kilometers to the north. It will be a whole system of record-breaking tunnels, bridges across fjords and… it’s hard to find the right term for tunnels floating in the water, or maybe bridges with roads not above but under water. It must pass under the surface of the famous Sognefjord, which is 3,7 km wide and 1,3 km deep, so it will be very difficult to build both a bridge and a traditional tunnel here.
In the case of a submerged tunnel, two variants are considered - large floating pipes with lanes attached to large floats (2) and the option of fastening the pipes to the bottom with ropes. As part of the E39 project, among others, tunnel underneath the Rogfast fjord. It will be 27 km long and run 390 meters above sea level - so it will be the deepest and longest underwater tunnel built so far in the world. The new E39 is to be built within 30 years. If it succeeds, it will surely be one of the greatest engineering marvels of the XNUMXst century.
2. Visualization of the floating tunnel under the Sognefjord
An underestimated marvel of engineering is the Falkirk Wheel in Scotland (3), a unique 115m swivel structure that raises and lowers boats between waterways at different levels (35m difference), built from over 1200 tons of steel, propelled by ten hydraulic motors and are capable of simultaneously lifting eight boats. The wheel is capable of lifting the equivalent of a hundred African elephants.
An almost completely unknown technological marvel in the world is the rooftop of Melbourne's Rectangular Stadium, AAMI Park, in Australia (4). It was designed by combining interlocking triangular petals into dome shapes. 50 percent has been used. less steel than in a typical cantilever design. In addition, recycled building material was used. The design collects rainwater from the roof and minimizes energy consumption through an advanced building automation system.
4 Melbourne Rectangular Stadium
Built on the side of a huge cliff in China's Zhangjiajie National Forest Park, the Bailong Elevator (5) is the tallest and heaviest outdoor elevator in the world. Its height is 326 meters, and it can carry 50 people and 18 thousand at the same time. daily. Opened to the public in 2002, the elevator was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the tallest and heaviest outdoor elevator in the world.
China's record-breaking mountain lift may not be as famous anymore, but not far away in Vietnam, something has recently been created that can compete with it for the title of phenomenal engineering structure. We are talking about Cau Vang (golden bridge), a 150-meter observation deck from which you can admire the beautiful panorama of the surroundings of Da Nang. Cau Wang Bridge, opened in June, hangs 1400 meters above the surface of the South China Sea, the coast of which is within sight of those passing over the bridge. In the immediate vicinity of the footbridge are the UNESCO World Heritage Sites - Cham Sanctuary in Mu Son and Hoi An - an ancient port with unique Chinese, Vietnamese and Japanese buildings from the 6th-XNUMXth centuries. The artificially aged arms supporting the bridge (XNUMX) refer to the ancient architectural heritage of Vietnam.
Write structures differently
It is worth noting that in this day and age, works of engineering do not have to be huge, the biggest, overwhelming in size, weight, and momentum to impress. On the contrary, very small things, fast and miniature works, are just as big or even more impressive.
Last year, an international team of physicists created an ion system called "the smallest motor in the world." It is actually a single calcium ion, 10 billion times smaller than a car engine, which was developed by a team of scientists led by Prof. Ferdinand Schmidt-Kahler and Ulrich Poschinger at the Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany.
The “working body” in an ion engine is spin, that is, a unit of torque at the atomic level. It is used to convert the thermal energy of laser beams into vibrations or vibrations of a trapped ion. These vibrations act like a flywheel and their energy is transferred in quanta. “Our flywheel measures the power of an engine on an atomic scale,” explains study co-author Mark Mitchison of QuSys at Trinity College Dublin in a press release. When the engine is at rest, it is called the "ground" state with the lowest energy and the most stability, as quantum physics predicts. Then, after being stimulated by a laser beam, as the research team reports in their research report, the ion thruster "pushes" the flywheel, causing it to run faster and faster.
In May of this year at the Chemnitz Technical University. Scientists from the team built the smallest robot in the world, and even with "jet engines" (7). The device, 0,8 mm long, 0,8 mm wide and 0,14 mm high, moves to release a double stream of bubbles through the water.
7. Nanobots with "jet engines"
Robo-fly (8) is a miniature insect-sized flying robot developed by scientists at Harvard. It weighs less than a gram and has super-fast electrical muscles that allow it to beat its wings 120 times per second and fly (on a tether). It is made of carbon fiber, giving it a weight of 106mg. Wingspan 3 cm.
The impressive achievements of modern times are not only large above-ground structures or amazingly small machines that can penetrate where no car has yet squeezed through. Undoubtedly, the remarkable modern technology is the SpaceX Starlink satellite constellation (see also: ), advanced, advances in artificial intelligence, generative adversarial networks (GANs), increasingly sophisticated real-time language translation algorithms, brain-computer interfaces, etc. They are hidden gems in the sense that they are treated as technological the wonders of the XNUMXth century are not obvious to everyone, at least at first glance.
