Category: Possible inventions

It’s still surprising to me that bubbles can actually do damage to hardened surfaces, by their sudden collapse: a process known as cavitation. I’ve been thinking about ways to use bubbles as an indicator of surface characteristics.

When an object is submerged in liquid and is heated, bubbles will form and grow at microscopic nucleation sites on its surface. In general, the more sites there are, the more bubbles form. Today’s invention exploits this to provide a measure of surface damage.

As a component undergoes wear, the number of nucleation sites will increase. Smallish engineered items, from a doorkey to a drillbit, would be gripped by a pair of copper jaws at a precisely determined location and submerged in a small bath of low boiling-point liquid (eg a domestic refrigerant).

The jaws would then be heated in a controlled way, so the volume of vapour formed from the bubble generation, over a fixed period, can be measured (before condensing the vapour for the next session). This process causes no additional damage, of course, to the material (and might even clean it).

Everyone is by now familiar with the idea of using computers’ spare processing capacity to solve the problems associated with folding proteins or detection of extra-terrestrial intelligences.

Today’s invention attempts to make use of a different distributed resource: energy.

Ethernet cable can deliver power to a computer at a rate of about 30 Watts. The lithium-ion battery in a laptop can deliver power to its machine at about half that rate. How about making use of some of the energy stored in the batteries of (wired) networked computers, when not actively being used and reverse the flow of energy?

Each inactive laptop could (just about) power an energy efficient lightbulb, although they would be better used en masse, with the agreement of users, to smooth out sudden, local energy demands. This could lead to more efficient operation of the hard-pressed electrical networks by using that other electrical grid, the internet.

When moving the sliders on a graphic equaliser, I never really have a clue about how to optimise the settings -even in general, let alone for each piece of music. This is partly because my ears aren’t particularly musically attuned but also because the variables seem to have effects which aren’t independent of each other. It would be tough enough to optimise the sound created even if they were.

Today’s invention is a way to achieve ‘optimal’ settings by relying on the opinions of many listeners ie crowd sourcing the equaliser sliders’ positions.

Every time someone felt they could tune their sound card to perform better, their settings for that card and the music they were listening to would be recorded by their browser and relayed to a central server. Here, the data from many expert listeners could be amassed and statistically analysed for the benefit of the less musically gifted.

When a piece was later being played on a networked system, the option would be provided to use one of a small range of the equaliser settings eg a) those of various celebrities, b) the average of all listeners, c) the choice of the recording artists themselves or even d) the settings adopted by the most discriminating of audiophiles.

Chemical de-icing of planes is known to be very bad for poisoning the local groundwater at airports, so I started to think about mechano-thermal solutions.

There are lots of patents awarded for aircraft de-icing systems -all written in that unintentionally laughable form of English which can only be intended to appeal to some judge (I haven’t been able to find the following in a brief search of various online patent databases).

Today’s invention is for de-icing jet aircraft on a runway. Since, even at idle, the outflow from a jet engine is much hotter than 0 degrees C, the idea is to create a duct mounted on a trolley. One end of this would catch some of the idling aircraft engine’s outflow and redirect it onto the icy wings’ surfaces via a coarse particle filter and some kind of flexible nozzle.

I’m always a little disturbed when cooking things in an oven that the space heated is usually vastly bigger than the food itself and opening the oven door causes the whole waiting-for-dinner thing to take even longer (by evacuating all the heat and moisture).

Today’s invention is a range of nested, pyrex chicken bricks….a little like a set of Russian dolls or the layers of an onion.

To cook something, choose two adjacent bricks in the nesting sequence, just big enough so that the inner one will accommodate the food in question. All of the bricks’ top halves have two small ports. The brick in contact with the food will always have its ports plugged. The outer brick will have its ports connected, via an insulated chimney, to the oven’s heating element duct.

Hot air can thus pass through the space between inner and outer bricks, rapidly cooking the food inside the inner one and maintaining its succulence whilst heating only a small volume of cycling air. The food remains visible throughout.

I invested in a woodburning stove recently. One difficulty in using it is that it’s easy to forget to throw another log in until the decrease in room temperature alerts me to the need for one…there is then a delay whilst the stove (and room) gets back up to working temperature.

Logs last for a time which, roughly, depends on both their size and the current temperature of the stove. Today’s invention is a simple electronic device which would monitor both the decrease in weight of the logbasket and the stove temperature.

It would thus be able to calculate the stove-life of a given input of wood and issue an alert (preferably direct to my desktop) when that period was about to end.

Today’s invention is a chain-like structural component. Two of these are indicated in the diagram. As shown, the two parts are free to rotate, relative to each other, in any direction. When these are pressed together, so that the two pairs of cylinders bear on each other, the links together act as a single rod.

Using many such chain links would allow rigid structures to be quickly extended and collapsed -for ease eg of transport (imagine a bicycle frame made of these and collapsible into a carrier bag).

Corner units, consisting of multi-ended links, could also be created to provide 3-D arrangements as well as purely linear ones. The links might be connected by springs, in order to add tensile strength to the rods which they form.

I was told, when young, that a sharp blade was usually less dangerous in use than a blunt one. Higher, and potentially less controllable, force needs to be exerted if the blade is insufficiently ‘edgy’ -ie if the front edge is less tapered than it should be.

Many materials (eg crystalline ones), will have properties such that the cut faces spring apart from each other, and the blade surface, thus contributing no ongoing resistance to the passage of the blade. For other substances (eg viscous, rubbery or gelatinous types) the blade movement is further impeded by continuing contact with the just-cut surfaces.

To minimise the total resistance in these cases requires not just a sharp front edge, but minimal surface area of contact between blade and material.

Today’s invention is therefore a low resistance blade which is as slim as a razor blade but which is braced, by a rear-edge ‘spine’, in the direction of blade movement, to allow a comfortable level of cutting pressure.

As the manufacturers of motorcycles know, having cold hands leads to a lack of concentration and often results in accidents. I was watching some people playing hockey in very cold weather when the following, related, idea occurred to me.

The shaft of each winter sports stick (including icehockey, hiking, skiing, shinty etc) could be filled with a long, thin tube full of heat pad crystals. This tube would be extracted, pre-game, boiled and reinserted, providing at least one half’s worth of handwarming (reheatable at half time if necessary).

The volume and placement of the tube could be tuned, for a given size of stick, to maintain the normal sweet spot (centre of percussion) in ballgames, without affecting the held surfaces or the freedom to change grip.