Nowadays, the industry is centering their efforts on the development of single aerial robots carrying single objects, such as the widely-known drone of Amazon for delivering packages, which was followed by some national post-office services. However, other approaches go a step further and get to transport bigger objects in a cooperative way, reducing the payload […]
Trains are one of the least consuming means of transport, and it is mainly due to the metallic wheels and rails: there is almost no energy dissipation due to the rolling contact. Of course, not everything is so great with a steel wheel rolling on a steel rail, as the loads transferred between them can […]
In lay people’s minds, railway lines are composed by rails and wooden sleepers on a bed of stones. These medium-sized stones are called ballast, and it is true that they are the most common material to lay the track on; at least when you are not building it in a tunnel or a bridge, where […]
Trains have a huge seasonal problem each autumn: leaves. Yes, leaves from the trees. And now they are testing a solution: laser beams! It sounds absurd, but it will all make sense after we get into its science. Every autumn when leaves fall off the trees and beautifully cover parks and streets, railway infrastructure managers […]
Materials science is becoming more and more an interdisciplinary field in which almost every traditional subject has its say. Disciplines such as biology, medicine, computational design, architecture or even music, painting or sculpture converge on this open-minded host. As a result, new inspiring research is coming from so many different fronts, brought together by their […]
If you have a bike, most surely you will own a helmet too. If you fall off the bike your helmet might avoid some nasty head injuries, right? That looks pretty obvious… except that it isn’t. Lets start with a little bit of skepticism, and as straightforward as it seems, we would like some proof […]
Of all the seven wonders of ancient times, only the pyramids of Egypt remain on their feet. The technical means Egyptians had that many years ago for building these huge structures were extremely limited, and that is the main reason for them being so fascinating: they could build them despite the huge technical difficulties they […]
Bicycles are usually regarded as the most sustainable mean of transport for urban environments. Now, when talking about sustainability, there are usually two different discussions: on the one hand, there is energy sustainability, as the fossil fuels won’t last forever and their secondary products are quite unhealthy. Bikes, being powered by people, fully comply with […]
Classic rail vehicles have rigid wheelsets: both wheels are interlocked and have the same degrees of freedom (DoF), so they share all their displacements. They also have positive conicity, this is, the wheel surface on the contact patch is conical and, if we extend these ideal cones, their base would meet at the centre of […]
The locomotion of every moving system, alive or manufactured, is produced by the interaction between some movable components or appendages and the surrounding environment. This applies for every kind of surroundings: land, water or air. For water and air, Navier-Stokes equations allow predicting the interaction with the fluid with very high precision. In the case […]