Why Gas Turbines Rule the World
It is an interesting fact that the most efficient way to generate electricity — at least so far — is to spin the shaft of a generator. The only real …read more Continue reading Why Gas Turbines Rule the World
Category Archives: Gas turbine
Your Drone Is Cool, But It’s No Jet Fighter
There are some communities with whom our happy band of hardware hackers share a lot in common, but with whom we don’t often associate. The more workshop-orientated end of the car modification or railway modeler scenes, for instance, or the model aircraft fraternity. Many of these communities exist more for the activity than for the making, some of them dabble with building kits, but among them are a hard core of people who create amazing projects from scratch.
Take [Igor Negoda], for example. Not content with building just any model aircraft, he’s built his own from scratch, to his own …read more
Continue reading Your Drone Is Cool, But It’s No Jet Fighter
The Last Interesting Chrysler Had a Gas Turbine Engine
The piston engine has been the king of the transportation industry for well over a century now. It has been manufactured so much that it has become a sort of general-purpose machine that can be used to do quite a bit more than merely move people and cargo from one point to another. Running generators, hydraulic systems, pumps, and heavy machinery are but a few examples of that.
Scale production of this technology also had the effect of driving prices for these engines down, and now virtually everyone in the developed world has cheap and easy access to them. In …read more
Continue reading The Last Interesting Chrysler Had a Gas Turbine Engine
Daedalus Jet Suit Takes to the Skies
[Richard Browning] wants to fly like Daedalus. To us, it looks a bit more like Iron Man. [Browning] is working on project Daedalus, a flight suit powered by six jet engines. These turbines are exactly the type one would find on large, fast, and expensive R/C planes. Some of this is documented on his YouTube channel, Gravity Industries, though RedBull has also gotten involved and have a video of their own that you can check out after the break.
The project started last year in [Browning’s] garage. He strapped a jet to an old washing machine to test its thrust. …read more
Retrotechtacular: Railroads In The Jet Age
It started with one of those odd links that pop up from time to time on Hacker News: “The strange and now sadly abandoned Soviet Jet Train from the 1970s“. Pictures of a dilapidated railcar with a pair of jet engines in nacelles above its cab, forlorn in a rusty siding in the Russian winter. Reading a little further on the subject revealed a forgotten facet of the rivalry between Russians and Americans at the height of the Cold War, and became an engrossing trawl through Wikipedia entries, rail enthusiast websites, and YouTube videos.
Railroad speeds have been a subject …read more
