Vladimir was one of us!

[Leading Observer]

http://youtu.be/8Wzos0F8nNY

[andrewj]

Certainly plenty of Whiff ideas there , interesting how many designs seem to have been copied by western designers.

Andrew

[PR19_Kit]

Depends who was first with the idea of course.

Plus in many fields of engineering there is an obvious way of doing things, even an elegant way of doing it, and that will tend to be almost self evident.

[rickshaw]

Depends who was first with the idea of course.

Plus in many fields of engineering there is an obvious way of doing things, even an elegant way of doing it, and that will tend to be almost self evident.

God save us from engineers with "elegant" solutions!  I prefer the practical any day!   

[zenrat]

If they're concerned with elegance then they're not engineers they're designers.

[PR19_Kit]

I LIKE elegant solutions, they're usually very efficient and show the science at its best. But not elegance for its own sake, it has to be the best solution possible as well.

[PR19_Kit]

If they're concerned with elegance then they're not engineers they're designers.

Nonononono, I don't mean something that just looks right, I mean something that shows an innovative solution to a particular problem that saves material, space, weight or just complexity. I'll quote such a situation from my own somewhat specialsed field.

When we were developing the Advanced Passenger Train Experimental tilt system the mechanical geometry meant the point about which the body tilted needed be at hip height when the passengers were seated and so there were swing links connecting the body to the bogie which translated the position of the tilt pivot upwards from the point that it actually pivoted. This translated Tilt Centre, in red on the diagram, meant that the lateral accelerometers used to measure the lateral forces also needed to be at hip height. This was obviously impractical, you could hardly expect the passengers to step over the damn thing as they walked down the train! Therefore we put one accelerometer in the roof and one under the floor, in blue on the diagram, and mixed their signals proportionally to produce the desired output.

The elegant bit was that we used the SAME acclerometer signals, but mixed in the opposite phase, to produce a rate signal which we used as a damping term in the control loop.

[jcf]

^^^^^ Need a big LIKE button. 

[PR19_Kit]

A picture's worth a thousand words Jon.  Thanks.