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Science and the City: The Mechanics Behind the Metropolis - download pdf or read online

By Laurie Winkless

ISBN-10: 1472913213

ISBN-13: 9781472913210

Science is secretly at paintings behind the curtain of significant towns of the area and should remain so. Technological advances in fields as varied as quantum mechanics, electronics, and nanotechnology are proving more and more vital to urban existence, and the city global will flip to technology to bring suggestions to the issues of the longer term; greater than 50 percentage of the world's inhabitants now lives in towns, and that share is becoming quick. Can engineering give you the resolution to a manageable megacity future?

Science and the City begins at your entrance door and courses you thru the expertise of daily urban lifestyles: how new techniques to construction fabrics aid to build the tallest skyscrapers in Dubai, how New Yorkers use gentle to regard their consuming water, how Tokyo commuters' footsteps strength gates in teach stations. Uncovering the technology and engineering that shapes our towns, Laurie Winkless finds how expertise may also help us meet the demanding situations of a hovering international population--from an ever-increasing call for for strength, water, and net entry, to easily tips to get approximately in a megacity of millions of people.

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Extra resources for Science and the City: The Mechanics Behind the Metropolis

Example text

We’d entered the modern steel age, and we haven’t left it yet. Concrete So now, back to our skyscraper. With steel, we have a material that is cheap and reliable, and can be used to build a tall frame. But what about the rest of the building? You may not think of it as such, but concrete is a high-tech material, and it has been around a lot longer than cheap steel. In its simplest form, concrete consists of small particles of a hard material (known as aggregate) bonded together by a cement and water, and these days we can even reinforce it using steel bars.

Of course, all of this extra stuff requires power, and so this Sydney development has its own tri-generation energy plant, run on natural gas. Tri-generation is often called combined heat, power and cooling (CHPC). In this system, electricity and heat are simultaneously produced. The third bit of the tri-generation triangle (the cooling) involves redirecting some of the hot water to an absorption chiller. These have no moving parts (unlike the pump used in your fridge) – instead they utilise the fact that every liquid evaporates at a different temperature.

When you add water to your fine powder of calcium silicate (which is calcium, silicon and oxygen bonded together), you produce a series of very sticky compounds that cling on to the aggregate, forming concrete. While hydration is clearly important, you still have to be careful – too little water and the reaction doesn’t complete; too much and unused water can sit inside the material, weakening it. So rain on a day of concrete-laying can be a problem. Generally on building sites, newly poured concrete is either sprayed with a water mist, or covered in moisture-retaining fabric (such as burlap) while it cures.

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Science and the City: The Mechanics Behind the Metropolis by Laurie Winkless


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