Practical Engineering

Without listing every bridge, there’s no true way to list every type of bridge. There’s too much nuance, creativity, and mixing and matching designs. But that’s part of the joy of paying attention to bridges. Once you understand the basics, you can start to puzzle out the more interesting details.

Without listing every bridge, there’s no true way to list every type of bridge. There’s too much nuance, creativity, and mixing and matching designs. But that’s part of the joy of paying attention to bridges. Once you understand the basics, you can start to puzzle out the more interesting details.

We’re in the growing pains stage right now, working out the bugs that these new types of energy generation create, but if you pay attention to what’s happening in the industry, it’s mostly good news. A lot of people from all sides of the industry are working really hard on these engineering challenges so that we’ll soon come out with a more reliable, sustainable, and resilient grid on the other end.

Drawing the line between what’s worth the investment and what’s just gilding the electric lily is tough on such a small scale, multiplied by several islands, and with such a quickly growing portfolio of renewable energy sources.

If all the earth was solid rock, life would be a lot simpler, but maybe a lot less interesting too. It is both a gravitational necessity and a source of job stability to structural and geotechnical engineers that all construction - great and small - sits upon the ground. And the ways in which we accomplish such a seemingly unexceptional feat are full of fascinating and unexpected details. Practical Engineering is a YouTube channel about infrastructure and the human-made world around us. It is hosted, written, and produced by Grady Hillhouse. We have new videos posted regularly, so please subscribe for updates. If you enjoyed the video, hit that ‘like’ button, give us a comment, or watch another of our videos!

I'm on location to document the installation of a water transmission line below two railroad tracks.

How do they know when a train is on the way?

Gearless Transmission using Elbow mechanism 📌 #mechanical #engineering #cad #project #prototype #3d

I turned a birthday gift for my brother this week, and decided to make a video about a relatively recent change in the MLB's rules governing wooden baseball bats. In 2009, the MLB health and safety advisory committee determined that the increase in the use of Maple baseball bats (over the traditional ash bats) was a primary reason for the similar rise in bats breaking during games. This had to do with the engineering properties of the two different woods, and how manufacturers were grading bat blanks. The committee issued a series of recommendations to reduce the occurrence of breaking baseball bats, including improvements to how maple blanks are graded. The recommendations have reduced the rate of bat breaks by about half.

A summary of the challenges with starting a grid back up from total collapse. The grid is a little bit of a house of cards. It’s not necessarily flimsy, but if the whole thing gets knocked down, you have to rebuild it one card at a time and from the ground up. Restoring power after a major blackout is one of the most high stakes operations you can imagine. The consequences of messing it up are enormous, but there’s no way to practice a real-life scenario. It seems as simple as flipping a switch, but restoring power is more complicated than you might think.

Not just megaprojects suffer from our inability to accurately anticipate the expense and complexity of construction... From preconstruction costs to inflation to unexpected site conditions, there are a lot of reasons construction budgets rarely align with construction costs. Let's talk about it!

Many cities across the world maximize the use of valuable land on earth’s surface by taking advantage of the space underneath for bypassing floods. This video discusses some of the challenges and solutions to these massive projects.

Friction is the final frontier of vehicle/rail interaction!