Material science 101

Being my inquisitive self, I have decided I would like to learn how the Finite Element analysis actually works. However having studied biomedical engineering this was not an obvious subject and I do not have the necessary background information to grasp it. So what do you do? 

I just finished the first lecture and what stuck was the following. I liked the part of putting energy usage in perspective. That we as dutch citizens have on average about 6 kW/s working for us compared to ~2 kW/s for the average world dweller is quite a difference.

Everyday energy costs, note the amount of energy it takes to power a house/car 

Moving on to the actual material science part of the lecture. I learned the basic properties of materials. Which you know by experience but I need to find how to get an intuitive grasp of these concepts. Take Elastic modulus for example... what does that mean, which materials have a high/ low Emod? high would be steel and low would be plastics... meaning... meaning... meaning... meaning that steel is harder to bend than plastics, right? correct me if I am wrong. 

The picture below helps kind off to make sense of these properties: 

All in all an interesting lecture and I am determined to follow at least 3 more lectures. The key to happiness is to set low expectations  :P 

Silencing the Smoby “Be Fun” push trike

In my first post on the Smoby Be Fun Trike I wrote that it is generally a good bargain priced tricycle with a handy push rod. The drawback however was that it was seriously noisy. In my second post I did some good ol’ problem analysis and thought of some ways to solve it. So in this final installment, my solution.

First on what do you need:

• Smoby Be Fun Trike
• An (old) inner tube of a bicycle tyre.
• Scissors
• Ducktape

Seriously that’s all

So what we are going to do is tape the bicycle tire tube to the wheels of the trike.  You start with measuring the circumference of the 3 wheels and cut the old bicycle tyre in according length. Then tape the pieces of tire tube to wheels using your trusty duck tape and there you have it a whopping 15 db noise reduction (remember that every 3 db the sound level is doubled).

There you have it, a simple solution to an annoying problem and one that can be done in 30 minutes with your basic household inventory. Enjoy!

Note: The picture shows my first solution using only ducktape. This worked for a while but after a few weeks of driving, the tape lost its dampening power. So I decided to add the tube for higher durability and increased noise reduction