Veerle's blog

A while ago I came across an article* about some extreme advanced projects that engineers are working on these days (real or still in concept stage). Here are some of those extraordinary engineering projects:

The longest elevator
This may sound like science fiction but it’s not… Scientists are working on a space elevator. In theory, the space elevator consists of a thin cable placed by the Space Shuttle into low Earth orbit (200 to 300 miles above Earth - 321 to 483 km), and then raised to a stationary, geosynchronous orbit about 22,000 miles (35,405 km) up. The cable is then lowered down to the Earth’s surface and anchored to a mobile ocean-going platform in the Pacific Ocean along the equator, several thousand miles off the coast of Ecuador (an area chosen for its lack of hurricanes and ship traffic). The cable is as thin as paper, but not as fragile. In fact, it has the same strength as diamonds, and consists of the same base element: carbon nanotubes. Such a nanotube is “essentially a perfect tube of carbon, and they are 30 times stronger than Kevlar or steel and very light,” said Brad Edwards, a physicist at Eureka Scientific who conducted a six-month study of the space elevator concept for the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts program. If you want to know more, here is a PDF to download.

The highest building
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill are working on the highest tower of the world, the Burj Dubai, a tower of 700 meters (2,296 ft) high. This tower will resist a wind velocity of 180 km/hour (112 miles/hour).

The longest tunnel
Ernst Frankel and Frank Davidson veterans of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the first Chunnel study-group are working on a vacuum tunnel from New York to London anchored on the bottom of the ocean. The air would be pumped out of the tube, creating a vacuum, allowing alternating magnetic pulses in the wall of the tube to speed a magnetically levitated train across the Atlantic at 6,000 km/hour (3,728 miles/hour) fast enough to make the trip from New York to Brussels in approximately an hour.

The longest suspension bridge
The American company Hardesty & Hannover have been thinking on building a suspension bridge of 3 km long to connect Sicily with Italy since 1969, but technical and economic concerns have delayed a final decision. Silvio Berlusconi promised in 2002 to look into this matter. The current design has a unique deck that is shaped like an aeroplane wing, as well as being constructed of three separate components, allowing wind to funnel through at strategic points. The bridge will carry three lanes of car traffic and one train line each way, with extra lanes for emergencies servicing.

The biggest dump
According to scientists, the Yucca Mountain in the American Nevada dessert, would be the ideal place to build a giant dumping ground where nuclear waste could be kept for 10,000 years. There are a lot of doubts and questions around the security of this project, but the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has given the green light to start at this project in 2010.

*Source Knack magazine