From protecting our military service personnel to locating victims of natural disasters, drones make our most dangerous jobs safer. They’re endlessly versatile, and people are finding new ways to use drones all the time. That’s why the use of drones continues to expand to many new sectors of society, and their popularity is only expected…
In refrigeration, you don’t actually cool a room, refrigerator, or freezer. Instead, you pump the heat out, and doing so requires an arrangement of tubing, blowers, compressors, and evaporators all connected with fittings. If a fitting is left loose, a service valve cap might leak, releasing its refrigerant. If you tighten it too much, you…
The fastener that holds the main rotor to the mast in the Bell Iroquois UH-1 “Huey” helicopter was called the Jesus Nut by helicopter pilots and their passengers in Vietnam. Given that if anything went wrong with this nut in flight, the rotor would go spinning off to an unknown destination and the helicopter left…
Overhead cranes are critical infrastructure for the industries which use them, including shipping, rail, freight, warehousing, metallurgy, paper production, heavy manufacturing, and any industry where heavy weights must be continually lifted in the same area. When an overhead crane goes out of service, it can bottleneck significant portions, or the entirety, of a company’s daily…
As tunnel workers know, boring machines are anything but. Ranging from merely large to staggeringly huge, these complicated devices chew through loam, clay, and solid rock to excavate large and small tunnels across the world. What’s also enormous is the degree to which the success of a tunneling project rests on the proper maintenance of…
Scuba diving can be a wonderful experience. Whether witnessing the multiplicity of ocean life in the reefs and kelp forests or mapping hidden caves in mountain lakes, scuba divers experience an element unknown to those of us who walk above. But with that comes an element of danger. Scuba divers—from coastal tourists to scientists to…
Modern farming is a capital-intensive industry. The large machines that family farms and corporate farming operations employ to seed, weed, tend, and harvest can represent sizeable portions of multiple years worth of revenue. In order for the farm to succeed, these tractors, combines, harvesters, and other large pieces of equipment must do enough work to…
The centrality of quality management in medical device production cannot be overstated. For that reason, the production of medical devices is heavily regulated across the world, falling under the jurisdiction of various national and international bodies, such as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and the European Commission. To help companies comply with this international…
Little problems on a large scale become big problems. Let’s do some math: You figured it out! Or cheated….it doesn’t really matter. Because the next problem is the most important one: Congratulations! You figured this one out, too. Now the only thing you have to figure out is what you’re going to tell Congress when…
This article is about using rotary torque sensors to measure torque during the torque verification and auditing process. But first, let’s talk football. Recently, a professional field goal kicker blew an easy shot. It was his second in the game and his fifth in two weeks. You can call it coincidence or cause-and-effect, but his…