831–840 of 1001 posts
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> hand-crank a tiny air compressor Is that what Dr. Sattler is doing in this scene from Jurassic Park ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoW4vXnkhJw
How did you remember this scene?!
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I can’t see an answer here: how does an air compressor start an engine?
The compressor pressurizes an air tank. When the pressure in the tank is nice and high, use the compressed air to turn a turbine connected to the crankshaft of the engine.
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> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
In a multi-day event like we are talking about here, couldn't a shop owner revert to a paper ledger? I mean, it would suck and transactions would take much longer but if the alternative is people starving or having your inventory looted by a desperate mob, a nineteenth century solution seems preferable.
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I seem to recall a tree falling in Ohio knocked out the power to NYC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
A monkey took out the whole grid in Sri Lanka this year https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/13/asia/sri-lanka-power-outa...
Remember folks, there's about 1% chance of a Carrington event occurrence every year. We're simply not ready.
Last big outage here in Spain, we got a generator, wind turbine, solar and battery. All cheap Chinese stuff as it doesn't happen often, as a result, this event was barely noticeable to us. Especially the wind turbine did well the entire day and night until the power came back a few hours ago.
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In another life I worked as an engineer commissioning oil rigs and I’ve seen how tricky even a small-scale black start can be. On a rig, we simulate total power loss and have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator, which then powers the compressors needed to fire up the big ~7MW main generators. It's a delicate chain reaction — and that's just for one isolated platform. A full g…
I love the "analog" handcranked air compressor to 7MW generator escalation, it really captures human ingenuity. I wonder however how being part of the "continental Europe synchronous grid" affects this, and how it isolates to Portugal and Spain like this. But yeah there are a lot of capacitors that want juice on startup that happily kills any attempt to restore power. My father had "a lot" of PA speakers at home and…
I realized the tech must have been winding up a flywheel, and then the pilot engaged a clutch to dump the flywheel's inertia into the engine.
The engineer in me loves the simplicity and low tech approach - a ground cart isn't needed nor is a battery charger (and batteries don't work in the cold). Perfect for a battlefield airplane.
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I saw an exhibit of an Me-262 jet fighter engine. Looking closely at the nacelle, which was cut away a bit, I noticed it enclosed a tiny piston engine. I inferred that engine was used to start the jet engine turning. It even had a pull-start handle on it! Again, no ground cart needed.
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I was reading about the MiG-15. American fighters used a pump to supply pressurized oxygen to the pilot. The MiG-15 just used a pressurized tank of air. It provided only for a limited time at altitude, but since the MiG-15 drank fuel like a drunkard, that was enough time anyway. Of course, if the ground crew forgot to pressurize it, the pilot was in trouble.
Again, simple and effective.
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> have to hand-crank a tiny air compressor just to start a small emergency generator Similarly, the US Navy maintains banks of pressurized air flasks to air-start emergency diesels. Total Capacity being some multiple of the required single-start capacity
I understand some old radial airplane engines were started with what were essentially shotgun cartridges
Random fact: Those starters are a plot point in the 1965 film The Flight of the Phoenix, where the protagonists are trying to start a plane that’s stranded in the Sahara, but only have a small supply of starter cartridges left.
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I understand some old radial airplane engines were started with what were essentially shotgun cartridges
They’re called Coffman engine starters [1]. Random fact: Those starters are a plot point in the 1965 film The Flight of the Phoenix, where the protagonists are trying to start a plane that’s stranded in the Sahara, but only have a small supply of starter cartridges left. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffman_engine_starter
Green energy! Maybe nuclear and fossil fuels would help?