Archive for: February 2011

For arenas which are large and yet must be used flexibly, enter today’s invention.

It’s a wheeled robot which can pick up chairs, even when they are randomly lying about, and place them, nested, within its body.

The robot can then move itself so as to position the chairs very precisely -according to a layout described by a remote technician with a touchpad.

Layouts could even include eg circles for group discussions, rearranged rapidly from the normal rows, during a coffee break.

Today’s invention is another aerial vehicle (plan view on the right).

It consists of two horizontal drive shafts on each of which are placed a set of rotors (red).

At the rotors turn, their blade pitch is altered (perhaps by a cam on the shaft) so that as they descend on the outer side of the craft, they force air down and provide lift.

On the inner, upward part of their rotation, the blades are feathered so as to cause comparatively little vertical drag (their flat, front-facing blades are shielded from axial drag by being hidden within the body of the vehicle).

Each rotor could be made with numerous blades and each could be rotationally offset from its neighbour causing waves of lift.

Today’s invention is a telescopic inner shaft for an umbrella.

When it’s raining and you are stuck outside for a while, watching some match, for example, this extra shaft can be extended downwards from inside the normal umbrella handle and locked at a convenient length.

This acts as a monopod to take the weight of the brolly, so that one’s arm doesn’t get fatigued.

The lower end of the shaft could have a point, a turf screw or even a small fold-out tripod so that it stands securely anchored.

How to get people seated quickly on an airliner? Some passengers are naturally slower-moving than others but some are totally unaware of the fact that they may be obstructing the embarkation process by dallying in a narrow aisle.

Airports already force passengers to walk significant distances between check-in and departure lounge. Today’s invention is to equip both these points with a ticket barrier, like the ones in railway stations.

Passengers would use their flight ticket to gain entry and the system would record transit time between these two locations. Boarding would then occur by displaying ticket numbers in order of passenger speed. The faster movers would board first, allowing staff more time to help the slower ones aboard afterwards.

This also creates lower frustration levels and injects an extra gamification element for highly impatient individuals.

I watched a woman knock over a cup of coffee whilst traveling by train today.

Today’s invention would have helped avoid such a small-scale disaster.

It is a coffee cup lid with a depression in the top. Take off the top and press the cup into the depression until an interference fit is achieved.

This forms a drip tray/saucer as well as a base which maintains stability -even when the level of coffee remaining is low.

Ballooning is not a sport for the impatient.

Today’s invention attempts to reduce both the awful hanging about and the potential damage to the balloon’s surface which conventional approaches entail.

The balloon basket (yellow) has a burner unit attached permanently above (red). Located above that is a telescopic carbon-fibre tower with a ‘mushroom’ on top.

The balloon is transported on top of the mushroom with the tower retracted. On arrival, the tower is lengthened, lifting the balloon upwards and sucking in air via the pipe at the bottom right. The burner is fired and the envelope inflated.

The tower and mushroom fly inside the inflated balloon and support it again on landing.

No more dropping the fragile balloon on the surface of an unfamiliar field, trampling about inside and flapping the edge ineffectually before engaging the burner in the hope that the weather won’t worsen.

Today’s invention is a ski outfit adaptation for novices in the sport.

The surface of the suit would be covered in numerous rubbery prongs (say 20mm long) so that when in collision with someone’s helmet or another skier’s body at speed, the novice would have an extra, lightweight impact barrier.

Falling on hard snow or ice, as happens about every 30 seconds, would also be cushioned.

In addition, the prongs would rapidly slow a skier who was sliding bodily down the slope, before too many subsequent crashes had occurred.

Mountain rescue dogs (and their handlers) do a great job. Today’s invention is aimed at supporting their efforts.

Every time a mountain walker heads off from base they open a packet containing a scented stick. The manufacturer would make these with carefully controlled amounts of a number of scents, so that they are differentiable by dogs.

One half of the stick is attached to a board or a car parked at base. The other is inserted into a spring-loaded slot in the base of one boot.

During walking, the spring forces the stick into contact with the ground so that tiny, smelly crumbs are shed.

If a walker or mountaineer does not return, a tracker dog can be allowed to smell the half left below and then follow the trail of scented crumbs direct to the missing person.

It seems that people who make big steel structures like the ‘jackets’ that support offshore drilling platforms have a number of problems. One of the main ones is how to make many such frameworks quickly, inside buildings of limited size.

Traditional approaches to boosting production involve building one and then repeating the process alongside the first. If you can’t start shipping these to operational locations, due eg to bad weather, you have to put manufacture on pause.

Today’s invention is a system for making several such jackets at once.

First, finish one build completely -standing on one side using support legs (black). Then, use this as the scaffold from which to build the next (green).

Thereafter, if a delivery is required, the black one is ready to have its supports detached and pulled clear. The green acts as scaffold for the red one and so on.

Nesting the structures allows both reduced production time and storage space.

Today’s invention may have only a very minor effect on overall fuel economy but it may help to reduce wear and tear within conventional combustion engines.

Each piston crown would be equipped with a disc of permanent magnetic material (increasing inertia and compression ratio only slightly).

Each cylinder head would have an electromagnet powered by an upgraded spark-plug coil. Its magnetic field would be gradually powered up and reversed in polarity through the combustion cycle, so that the piston would be attracted upwards and then repelled downwards within the cylinder.

The main benefit of this would be to provide a more gradual, controlled piston motion than can be achieved using fuel detonation alone. This in turn would lessen inefficiencies and the damage caused by eg ‘knock’ effects and other sources of irreversibility.