Showing posts with label buildings. Show all posts
Showing posts with label buildings. Show all posts
Thursday, May 6, 2010
Saturday, July 5, 2008
Tuesday, July 1, 2008
World’s Highest Escalator
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The Umeda Sky Building is the seventh-tallest building in Osaka City, Japan, and one of the city’s most recognizable landmarks. It consists of two 40-story towers that connect at their two uppermost stories, with bridges and an escalator crossing the wide atrium-like space in the center. The escalater ride is an event in itself as it feels like you are floating up into the sky. This is a cheap way to see the city, less than 10 USD to go up to the observation area.
Located in the Umeda district of Kita-ku, the building was originally conceived in 1988 as the “City of Air” project, which planned to create four interconnected towers in northern Osaka. Eventually, practical considerations brought the number of towers down to two.
AquaDom
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Placed at the lobby of the Radisson SAS Hotel in Berlin the 25 meters high AquaDom is the largest cylindrical aquarium ever built.
Filled with about 900,000 liters of seawater it contains some 2600 fish of 56 species.
Combined with a vast amount of sandblasted glass, the giant AquaDom gives a transparent-like feeling to the lobby Guests and visitors are able to travel through the aquarium in a glass-enclosed elevator to reach a sightseeing point and restaurant under the glass roof.
Two full-time divers are responsible for the care and feeding of the fish and maintenance of the aquarium.
Some of the interior rooms and suites look out over the atrium, offering “ocean views” of the AquaDom.
Construction : The AquaDom was opened in December 2003. It cost about 12.8 million euros.
The acrylic glass cylinder was constructed by the U.S. company Reynolds Polymer Technology.
The outside cylinder was manufactured on-site from four pieces; the inside cylinder for the elevator was delivered in one piece The Aquadom is the largest acrylic glass cylinder in the world, with a diameter of over 11 meters built on a 9 meters tall concrete foundation.
World’s Largest Wind Turbine
ShareNew Record: World’s Largest Wind Turbine (7+ Megawatts)
The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor blade length of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts. This new turbine is officially rated at 6 megawatts too, but will most likely produce 7+ megawatts (or 20 million kilowatt hours per year). That’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. A quick US calculation would be 938 kwh per home per month, 12 months, that’s 11,256 kwh per year per house. That’s 1776 American homes on one wind turbine.
The turbine being installed in Emden, Germany by Enercon . They will be testing several types of storage systems in combination with the multi-megawatt wind turbines.
These turbines are equipped with a number of new features: an optimized blade design with a spoiler extending down to the hub, and a pre-cast concrete base. Due to the elevated hub height and the new blade profile, the performance of the E-126 is expected to by far surpass that of the E-112.
WiredForStereo of The Way explains the operation of these new turbines:
[The E-126]… has no gearbox attaching the turbine blades to the generator, in fact, the generator is housed just at the widest part of the nose cone, it takes up the entire width of the nacelle to generate power more efficiently, and provide longer service life with less wear.
Also like small turbines, these have inverters instead of synchronous generators, that is to say, a separate controller that converts the wild AC generated into something the grid can use. This means the rotor can run at more optimum and varied speeds.
Again like small turbines, this one does not shut right off at a predetermined speed due to gusts or just very high wind speeds. It simply throttles down by turning the blades slightly away from the wind so as to continue to generate power though at a lower production rate. Then the instant the wind is more favorable, it starts back up again. Many smaller wind turbines do something similar except have no blade pitch control, they use a technique called something like “side furling” where the whole machine, excepting the tail, turns “sideways” to catch less wind but continue operating.
Money, why else? Big things are cheaper per unit production. If you have 3 2 MW generators, you have to have three (at least) cranes to put them up, build three foundations, have to maintain three machines, and have three times the parts to fail. If you have one, it is larger and more expensive in itself to move, but not as expensive as having to move three smaller ones.
I don’t understand how people can be so concerned about birds becoming mush with modern wind turbines, especially ones this big. It only turns at 12 rpms. That means it takes five seconds to complete one revolution. That is slow but this is much bigger and easy to see compared to the whirring blades of old. The Altamont Pass turbines gave wind turbines such a bad name because they were built in the middle of the natural habitat of rare birds, the turbines were the small fast spinning type, and they were built using lattice towers, the kind birds love to nest in. These are slowly being replaced and all of the new ones are of the slower rotating kind. In the end, it comes down to this. Stationary buildings and moving cars kill literally millions of times more birds than wind turbines. And things like the Exxon Valdez spill kill millions of everything. So let’s go with the best option.
READ MORE - World’s Largest Wind Turbine
The world’s largest wind turbine is now the Enercon E-126. This turbine has a rotor blade length of 126 meters (413 feet). The E-126 is a more sophisticated version of the E-112, formerly the world’s largest wind turbine and rated at 6 megawatts. This new turbine is officially rated at 6 megawatts too, but will most likely produce 7+ megawatts (or 20 million kilowatt hours per year). That’s enough to power about 5,000 households of four in Europe. A quick US calculation would be 938 kwh per home per month, 12 months, that’s 11,256 kwh per year per house. That’s 1776 American homes on one wind turbine.
The turbine being installed in Emden, Germany by Enercon . They will be testing several types of storage systems in combination with the multi-megawatt wind turbines.
These turbines are equipped with a number of new features: an optimized blade design with a spoiler extending down to the hub, and a pre-cast concrete base. Due to the elevated hub height and the new blade profile, the performance of the E-126 is expected to by far surpass that of the E-112.
WiredForStereo of The Way explains the operation of these new turbines:
[The E-126]… has no gearbox attaching the turbine blades to the generator, in fact, the generator is housed just at the widest part of the nose cone, it takes up the entire width of the nacelle to generate power more efficiently, and provide longer service life with less wear.
Also like small turbines, these have inverters instead of synchronous generators, that is to say, a separate controller that converts the wild AC generated into something the grid can use. This means the rotor can run at more optimum and varied speeds.
Again like small turbines, this one does not shut right off at a predetermined speed due to gusts or just very high wind speeds. It simply throttles down by turning the blades slightly away from the wind so as to continue to generate power though at a lower production rate. Then the instant the wind is more favorable, it starts back up again. Many smaller wind turbines do something similar except have no blade pitch control, they use a technique called something like “side furling” where the whole machine, excepting the tail, turns “sideways” to catch less wind but continue operating.
Money, why else? Big things are cheaper per unit production. If you have 3 2 MW generators, you have to have three (at least) cranes to put them up, build three foundations, have to maintain three machines, and have three times the parts to fail. If you have one, it is larger and more expensive in itself to move, but not as expensive as having to move three smaller ones.
I don’t understand how people can be so concerned about birds becoming mush with modern wind turbines, especially ones this big. It only turns at 12 rpms. That means it takes five seconds to complete one revolution. That is slow but this is much bigger and easy to see compared to the whirring blades of old. The Altamont Pass turbines gave wind turbines such a bad name because they were built in the middle of the natural habitat of rare birds, the turbines were the small fast spinning type, and they were built using lattice towers, the kind birds love to nest in. These are slowly being replaced and all of the new ones are of the slower rotating kind. In the end, it comes down to this. Stationary buildings and moving cars kill literally millions of times more birds than wind turbines. And things like the Exxon Valdez spill kill millions of everything. So let’s go with the best option.
Shell-shaped Nautilus House is gorgeous inside and out
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Shell-shaped Nautilus House is gorgeous inside and out
Who cares what the neighbors think? Let’s build a house that looks like a snail shell! That’s just what a Mexico City couple did, with the help of the astonishing imagination of those wild and wooly architects at Senosiain Arquitectos.
It’s more of a sculpture than a dwelling. Taking cues from a Nautilus shell, the house is put together using ferrocement construction, a technique involving a frame of steel-reinforced chicken wire with a special two-inch-thick composite of concrete spread over it, resulting in a structure that’s earthquake-proof and maintenance-free.
The open concept inside the house is dominated by smooth surfaces, spiral stairs and natural plantings that makes the inhabitants feel like they’re living inside a snail who swallowed the entire contents of somebody’s back yard. While the house is surrounded on three sides by the bustling Mexico City, its West side (where most of its portal-style windows are located) has a breathtaking view of the mountains. Wow. Maybe someday all houses will be made this way.
