Mixing fluids is important and difficult.

Today’s invention is a way to determine optically just how mixed eg a can of paint is (and might be applied to many other industrial processes).

Paint is mixed using a robotically-driven stirrer with an endoscope (or two) within it.
The stirrer can send information to a computer, with image processing capability, which can tell by colour contrast, what the state of mixing is locally.

If it’s well mixed then the endoscope would be automatically moved to a new location within the container.

This process would continue until the degree of local mixing at each 3D location, assessed by contrast, was within an acceptable tolerance. Multispectral contrast would allow machines to spot unmixed regions with greater precision than human eyes.

Doing CPR on someone is often not that effective. One reason is that it’s quite hard to know how hard to pump the chest.

Today’s invention is a simple clip-on device to be worn on the outside of clothing and with a pad set to click when squeezed with the correct force (set for an individual -depending on chest size and clothing density). This would be attached on the best spot for CPR and with an instruction to press hard enough to hear clicks, and to the beat of the Bee Gee’s “Stayin’ Alive”).

If the wearer is found lying unconscious, anyone could press on their chest with the correct force to hear the clicks.

People buy cocktails, even at stupid prices. Today’s invention is a beer cocktail.

Consumers should be able to ask for a combination of several beers, so that each pub visit has an element of discovery about it. Popular hybrids could be given common names to make ordering easier.

This would be pretty easy to achieve, using bar taps and a metering unit into which a bartender could enter how much of what beers were required using a keypad.

This would also allow a pub-goer to order his or her favourite beer diluted with zero alcohol beer, in order to limit their intake of alcohol.

The bar would then issue you with a receipt for each drink, stating the amount of alcohol included (with a warning on your phone, as you approach the legal driving limit).

Some of the most popular combinations might be made available in bottled form.

Today’s invention is inspired by the idea of vortex flipping which is beautifully described here.

A fish, moving through water at medium speeds, sheds a vortex from one side of its body and then flips it to the other side of its body, using its tail. This shedding happens from right and left sides in sequence. The effect of this is to significantly lessen the drag force on the fish.

So, imagine say a streamlined vehicle, fitted with a tail device.

This tail can sense the motion of a vortex down its surface (perhaps by using whiskers protruding through the boundary layer) and, just as it is about to be shed, the tail moves to flick it to the opposite side of the vehicle.

This would have a measurable effect on fuel economy, as long as the roadspeed was not so high that the vortices became too small/fast to sense.

A back of the envelope calculation suggests that this drag reduction would only be significant at speeds less than about 10 MPH, so this is really only relevant to cyclists and mobility scooters.

Tracks on armoured vehicles are something I can’t stop thinking about.

Today’s invention consists of tracks which run around subsets of roadwheels, rather than all the wheels on one side of a tank.

For example, in the image we have two (green) wheels, linked by a track. The suspension of the vehicle could have several units. At a minimum, each such unit on each side would need to include one drive sprocket, although ideally I’d like to see every unit with its own separate electric motor.

The track around each unit, being much shorter than normal, could be made of something like kevlar reinforced rubber, or chain, rather than requiring to be solid steel.

This would allow each wheel to be made with hollow internals so that extra coiled lengths of track could be stored inside, as shown. (I will come up with a way to have these coils link automatically, in a future post).

This design still spreads the load of a heavy vehicle quite well (especially with interleaved wheels) and massively improves redundancy when under attack, whilst also allowing for faster repairs.

Military jets can find themselves being targetted by smart missiles that are hard to evade.

Today’s invention is to use the missiles being carried by a target plane to save it from attack.

Missiles and rockets are still commonly carried on pylons under-wing. If a missile approaches, the plane can rotate the pylons and fire its missiles in situ, so as to make the whole target plane sidestep out of the way.

Timing would be critical and the g forces for the crew might be rough, but the same could be said of ejection systems. An upgraded version could have variable firing rate characteristics, to make the attacker’s job even more difficult.