Ideas_of

Some Ideas About our Technology World

Equally as for many other engineers, my preoccupation with technology started with my first motorbike. I'm still enthusiastic about them, and so I spent many of my thoughts on the improvement of those splendid machines.

If you ride a motorcycle without a fairing, you experience a force acting on your body that is due to the air flow around it, and which increases with the speed you drive. Why not use the static air pressure to charge the intake system of the motor I wondered in 1988? I had then just started my studies in mechanical engineering and was therefore laughed at by my senior student colleagues to whom I related my idea. Today, of course, every sports motorcycle is supercharged in just that way. Even the BMW K series models have their air intake in a position where a velocity charging effect is achieved.

Triumph TT 600 (2000)

After I had finished my examination in aerodynamics in 1993, I wondered about the shape of cars. There are so very few cars that have the ideal shape which allows the boundary layer not to stall too early and the static pressure to reincrease at the rear end of the car shape. Most cars are slim at their front and have huge and bulky rear ends although the shape should be just vice versa. It was Alfa Romeo and Mercedes Benz who started this wrong design trend in the mid-eighties. The first example though of this so-called wedge design was the NSU RO 80 in the early seventies. Only recently the car manufacturers have started to cautiously alter their design in the right direction. The new Mercedes class S limousine, for example, has a back that converges and thus improves the overall coefficient c_w of air resistance.

Citroen DS (1956, c_w = 0.38)

It must have been in autumn of 1994, when I went for a hike through the woods, that I found a small trunk of a fast-growing annual bush and took a section of it back home. As a kid I had done much scrambling through thickets when playing hide and seek or to get a lost frisbee. I appreciated cut sticks from these kind of bushes because they were light-weight but comparatively strong. This is due to their hard shell and their soft reinforcing foam-core. As an engineer of course the idea struck my mind to use this example of nature's ingenuity to built ultra light-weighted timber-framing structures. It was only recently that I read a scientific article about carbon fibre struts that are built in just that way. They are indeed reinforced through a foam core and are used in the space- and aircraft industy.

Carbon fibre strut with foam core

I happen to be slightly short-sighted and therefore need to wear glasses although I tried for a long time to live without. Since 1994 I wear glasses that are sensitive to ultaviolet light and that turn dark when exposed to sunlight. I think it was in the year 2000 when the idea occured to me that such a self-toning glass would be ideal for the windows of a car compartment, since you don't wear sun-glasses during the night, which is when a windscreen with ordinary hue remains toned and thus diminishes your view. Everybody to whom I related this idea instantly demurred saying that it couldn't be done because the toning would not subside quickly enough when you drive from bright daylight into a tunnel. Last year, in 2004, I read that such a kind of windscreen glass was under development in the German automotive component supplier industry.

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