Tuesday 28 January 2014

Energy sources, Power and transmission.

I learnt about different types of energy from the facilitator. Energy is described as the ability of  any given body to do work, either by moving from one point to the other.

Some more examples of energy sources are solar, which comes from the rays of the sun, Geothermal which comes from the earth's crust, We mainly concentrated on Kinetic and Potential energy.
I was clear that energy is never destroyed nor created but only changed from one form to the other and during this process usually heat is generated.

Potential energy is the energy possessed by a body because of its position relative to the ground, the more distance its lifted off the ground the more it gains potential energy. A question was asked whether electricity is energy or source of energy but the answer is electricity is non of both but only a catalyst which drives the energy {Electrons} to do or be used to do work like driving motors.

The facilitator cleared the fact that from power generation plants, a small current is driven by bigger potentials in Voltages to avoid trunks from overheating as there will be losses along the way due to factors like resistances of the cables due to length, but in domestic use, the voltages are lowered and the current used goes up a bit because here we need to heat up things like water quickly.

Electricity is generated from a number of sources including wind, solar, fossil fuels like coal and even hydro stations driven by water flow or steam as illustrated by the diagrams below.

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Hydro power station.





Wind mills to generate electricity.




All types of electricity generations have their disadvantages of being expensive  build and run  and this makes coal to be the most common and cost effective way of producing electricity worldwide as per the pie chart below.





Thursday 23 January 2014

Orthographic projections.

On Monday 20th I learnt about the differences between first and third angle projections in engineering drawing. This really deals with the positioning of different views of the object drawn.
In the third angle the view is drawn on the side the object is viewed from while with first angle the view is drawn on the other side of the object viewed.

I then drew the view of the bracket below in third angle. The main problem I had was that I did not allocate proportional spaces for different views. This is why the bottom view is next to the plan view.


Tuesday 14 January 2014

My knowledge.

Deconstruction / systems analysis.

Partially done this at my workplace in disassembling vehicle components and assembling them together after some repairs are done or replacing other components.

Pneumatics

Experienced this on truck brakes which only uses air without brake fluid. I was repairing leaks of air pipes.

Hydraulics.

This is a common system on all small and pick up vehicle brakes where I had to replace components and bleed the system to remove excess air for efficient operation during braking.

Basic accurate measuring techniques and methods used in engineering.

measured a crankshaft, brake drum diameter in a repair workshop but I am not confident with it.

Transducers and sensors

I know different sensors on a vehicle like the air temperature sensor, coolant temperature sensor, wheel speed sensor and a few more but not exact with transducers which I believe to be actuators.

Motors

These are common in the automotive industry, these include starter, alternators and wiper motors which I have been working on for a long time.

Levers and gears

Levers help individuals to apply less effort to move heavy loads or even engage gears in a manual gearbox of a vehicle. Gears transmit drive from one point to the other through shafts.

Energy, energy storage, energy conversion

Energy is in different forms like electrical in batteries, chemical in the fuel and mechanical which involves manual movements and kinetic which is motion too.

Static and dynamic structures in engineering

Static means things which are stationary while dynamic means things which move to do work.

The use of breadboards in electronics.

This is  not really complicated I used them in some of the experiments in the lab.