let's blast concrete?

Hey folks,

Max here from The Engineer's Espresso, and welcome to this not-so-nerdy (but nerdy) newsletter.

I have to say, what the University of Hong Kong team has achieved here is pretty remarkable.

While everyone has been striving to develop flying robots capable of soaring like birds, the University of Hong Kong team appears to have made significant progress with their SUPER quadcopter.


What really stands out to me is their clever pivot away from traditional cameras and sensors. Instead, they went with 3D LiDAR, which gives the drone real-time awareness of everything within a 70-meter radius.

That's honestly a huge deal – most other attempts have gotten bogged down processing massive amounts of video data, which really kills their speed.

The dual-trajectory system they've developed is particularly ingenious.

Rather than forcing the drone to always take either the safest or most exploratory path, it can actually weigh its options in real-time and choose the optimal route.

We're talking about a machine that can blast through obstacle courses at 20 meters per second – that's seriously impressive.


What I find most exciting is how versatile this thing is. The team demonstrated it could track humans through a forest, dodging trees and branches on the fly. And since it's using LiDAR instead of cameras, it works just as well in poor lighting conditions.


It even managed to detect and avoid obstacles as thin as power lines, which has been a major stumbling block for previous designs.


In my opinion, this represents a significant leap forward in the field.

It'll be fascinating to see how this technology develops and where it ends up being deployed first.

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This team from the University of Tokyo has been researching the durability of concrete in nuclear power plants.


They've been at it since 2008, and what they found is pretty mind-blowing.

Turns out, when radiation hits concrete slowly enough, it doesn't just fall apart like we thought - it actually has time to fix itself!

How It Actually Works

Let me break this down in a way that makes sense:


⦁ Inside concrete, there are these tiny quartz crystals
⦁ When radiation hits them, yeah, they do expand (which sounds bad)
⦁ If the radiation comes in slowly enough, these crystals actually recover
⦁ The bigger crystals handle it better than the smaller ones

Professor Maruyama (the lead scientist) puts it this way: it's kind of like giving the concrete time to catch its breath.

The Tokyo team isn't done yet.

They're looking at other stuff in concrete to see how it handles radiation. But honestly, the biggest impact here is that it might help us build better nuclear plants in the future.

What's really getting me excited is thinking about what this means for clean energy. Nuclear power's been this controversial topic forever, but findings like this could really change how we think about it.

• Electrical Engineer III - Honeywell
  Build circuits. Break limits. Burn out? Not on our watch.
  

• Aerospace Systems Engineer - The Structures Company
  Take off with this role—because gravity is overrated anyway.
  

• Electrical Engineer - Siemens Energy
  Keep the world running. One high-voltage decision at a time.

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