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1500 questions
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Why home Air Conditioning AC compressor insulated

Compressor is hot due to gas compression, and the gas then cooled in condenser. AC installed in tropical climate. Why compressor have insulation barrier?
RainerJ
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Can polycarbonate dance pole support the torque of a dancer?

I'm creating a light up dancing pole. This requires a translucent material that is strong enough to support the weight and force of a human being, even when it's hollowed out to so LEDs can go inside. The material must also be reasonably affordable,…
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Are jeweled bearings commonly used for applications other than mechanical timepieces?

Jeweled bearings use a metal spindle with a jewel lined pivot hole (pictured below). They have been important in the manufacture of mechanical timepieces since the early 1700's. Their importance lies in the fact that they can be machined to very…
Chris Mueller
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What drives the honey dipper design?

Honey dippers are often made of wood. Is there a property of honey that drives this? Honey dippers are shaped like ovoids with lateral grooves. Is there something about the viscosity of honey that caused this decision? Is this design somehow…
Jellicle
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6
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Why do modern MRI scanners use an axial static field?

Last night I was reading some fascinating history of the first full-body MRI scanner and noticed that it's fundamentally different from modern scanners in one particular way: the static B field is vertical, while all the modern machines I've seen…
6
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How are the structural properties of intentionally frozen soil determined?

Soil freezes naturally all of the time. It is at this point that dirt work usually stops. Occasionally soil is intentionally frozen to improve its structural properties. This process has been used notably in Boston's Big Dig and the Fukushima…
hazzey
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Does every engineering design needs to have a complete theoretical backing or may experimental data suffice?

This may sound rather vague on its own so I will explain with examples. The solid booster rockets used by NASA space shuttle used a central bore design because it had a certain characteristic on burn rate and thrust. If this data was to be…
Allahjane
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Does passenger car traffic actually damage roads?

Pavement Design In roadway pavement design, the (US) controlling design load is usually the Equivalent Single Axle Load (ESAL). This number attempts to quantify how much bending stress a given vehicle causes in the pavement. Trucks have a much…
hazzey
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4 answers

Is it useful to stuff my glasses with newspaper to protect them?

(I'm not sure if this question belongs to this stack exchange, but it seems appropriate to me) I have a very practical situation and our knowledge is lacking to be able to solve our debate. The situation In our country, and I'm guessing everywhere…
Gil Sand
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6
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Hanging a steel mesh without significant deformation

I have an welded steel mesh, like in the following image. . Material: steel Diameter of the wires: 4mm Mesh: 15x15cm I found the following information about the welds: the minimal relative strength of welds in shear: Fms = 4.4kN I want cut out…
clt60
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What is the purpose of grid-like details on engine blocks?

It is common to find this kind of detailing and patterning on engine blocks and related parts. Older engine blocks display much more flatter and simple geometry and this kind of mold work must come with a considerable production cost. What is it's…
user15340
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What is this kind of bearing called

I came up with this concept for a partial rotation, lubricant free, low friction bearing for a robotics application. Two complementary sets of tensioned tendon-like cables (or tapes) serve both to constrain the degrees of freedom of the joint as…
jms
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Could a vacuum tank ever be light enough to be boyant in air?

Given futuristic materials, could a structure ever be strong enough to contain a vacuum, yet light enough to provide buoyancy under standard atmospheric pressure? Obviously "futuristic materials" is highly ambiguous because we don't know what exists…
6
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Elastic (Young's) Modulus relation to the Eigenfrequency

I would like to compare the shape of the frequency spectrum of a plastic and aluminium component. Now if we assume that the plastic and aluminium component only differ in the material, while the mass and stiffness stay the same (I know, large…
mcluka
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Need some advice, control system animation. Appreciate some help!

I would like to have a 3d simulation of a helicopter landing on a ship. I thought about using matlab for this, as a far as I know you can connect models from Simulink to virtual worlds using blocks, which is the main feature of the Simulink 3D…
Alex
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