4.7 Photographs showing the detail: damage to pier 1 The final example of a partly collapsed pier is pier 1, photographed from the base of pier 28 and shown in Figure 32. Fracture damage to the flange at the top of the second tier is visible on the east-most column (top right); a large chunk of metal has broken off. The southern column (right of centre) exhibit
3.5 Sunday 28 December 1879 The morning of Sunday 28 December 1879 was quiet. When Captain Wright took his ferry boat, the Dundee, across the firth at 1.15 pm, he noted that the weather was good and the water was calm. The 4.15 pm crossing was just as uneventful, but the captain noted that the wind had freshened. By 5.15 pm a gale was moving in from the west and the river, in the words of the captain ‘was getting up very fast’. The local shuttle train left Newport at 5.50 pm and arrived at Dundee statio
3.4 Building the bridge The contract for the bridge was won by the firm of Charles de Bergue, and a contract signed on 8 May 1871, whereby the contractor undertook to have the bridge ready for traffic in three years at a price of £217 000. In the event the bridge was opened on 31 May 1878, by which time it had cost £300 000. Work started on the south bank of the Tay, with piers laid on to solid rock foundations. As the piers advanced into the estuary, foundations needed to be sunk onto the river bed, and cai
Introduction This course will introduce the notion of social citizenship in relation to rights and obligations within society, with particular reference to women and disabled people. The material is primarily an audio file, originally 23 minutes in length and recorded in 1998. This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 1 study in Author(s):
3.1 Overview The Tay Bridge disaster came towards the end of a period of intense development of the railway system in the UK. The bridge had materials that were well known. Cast iron was used for the columns and wrought iron for the trussed girders. The construction of the bridge was, at the time, the largest single engineering project in Britain, the Tay estuary being about two miles wide near Dundee, and the bridge was the longest in the world. In the shallower approaches in the estuary, con
2.4 Early disasters Many of the earliest bridges were simply a wooden trestle type of construction, an efficient and easy-to-build structure, yet providing a secure and safe passage for heavy metal trains. Although we tend to associate such structures with the United States, they were in fact widely used in Britain in the early days of steam locomotion. However, they had a limited lifetime owing to rot, so were gradually replaced by wrought iron girder bridges, often laid on brick or masonry piers. Designe
2.3 Railways in Britain The railway age started with attempts to make a steam engine small enough to be fitted to a wagon for hauling coal at collieries, the wheels moving on a wooden or iron rail for guidance. Improvements to the drive mechanism led directly to the Locomotion designed by George Stephenson, and the opening of the first passenger and goods service for the 27 miles between Stockton and Darlington in County Durham. It was opened in 1825 and was quickly followed in 1830 by a line between Manchest
2.2 Transportation disasters Movement of people and goods was one of the main outcomes of the industrial revolution in Britain in the late-eighteenth century, starting with canals, which were displaced gradually by railways. Industrialisation came through innovation in manufacture, especially the development of mass-produced materials such as cast-iron. While the material had been known and used since the Elizabethan period, it could only be made in small quantities by smelting iron ore with charcoal. The Darby fam
2.1 Overview Catastrophes of human origin can be just as traumatic as those of natural origin, and are studied with even greater intensity for their causes. There are several ways disasters of human origin can be classified, depending on cause or size or origin. Another way of looking at them is by the kind of human activity – perhaps mining, fishing or transportation. Equally, disasters could be classified according to the kind of event that occurred during the accident – perhaps collision, sinking,
1.1 Overview Why are disasters important? They attract public attention because there is great loss of life, or because the event happened suddenly and quite unexpectedly, or because the accident occurred to a new project that had been regarded as completely safe. Certainly, the aspect of suddenness is one that features in many catastrophes, and indeed, it is this feature by which a catastrophe is defined. Great disasters are always traumatic, especially for those who endure them and come through al
Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you to Conclusion This free course provided an introduction to studying Engineering. It took you through a series of exercises designed to develop your approach to study and learning at a distance, and helped to improve your confidence as an independent learner. 4 Engineering with proteins What are the prospects for designing and making new proteins for specific purposes? The technology exists to build polypeptide chains unit by unit in a test tube, but this is time-consuming and expensive. Often a more practical approach is to find ways of working with nature to produce useful substances in a form that we can use. This might involve extracting a naturally occurring protein and chemically modifying it in some way, or using genetic engineering to produce a particular protein in 3.3 Spider silk The presence of regions of helical and sheet-like structures within a protein will affect its properties in different ways: a particularly striking example of this is provided by spider silk. Imagine a polymer that forms fibres stronger, by mass, than steel and can be processed from water at ambient temperature and low pressure. As a consequence of its biological origin, it is extremely environmentally friendly and totally recyclable. It may sound like science fiction, but this i 3.2 Protein structure Proteins are one example of a biopolymer. You will already be familiar with synthetic polymers such as polyethylene and nylon: long chains made up of many thousands of repeating units, called monomers, linked together by strong covalent bonds. Polymers are particularly versatile materials because of the very different strengths of the bonds between monomer units in the chain (strong) and between one chain and another (weak). By varying the arrangement of chains within a material a huge 2 Construction with lipids The cell membrane is constructed from lipids. Chemically, lipids are a rather varied group of compounds that include all the substances you might already think of as fats or oils. What they have in common is that they are all insoluble in polar liquids like water, but soluble in organic (carbon-based) solvents: by this I mean the sort of smelly solvents you tend to find in paints, glues and degreasing agents; chloroform is one example. Lipids make up the fatty components of living organisms a References Keep on learning   There are more than 800 courses on OpenLearn for you t 17.1 Part 4: 1 Revising your understanding By now, it is probably apparent that those of us writing this unit are enthusiastic about the possibilities for systems thinking and complexity thinking. Our enthusiasm extends beyond just thinking, to applying systems thinking to a situation in the world that we experience as complex for the purpose of doing something about it. Our focus is on improving a situation experienced as problematical or on grasping some opportunity. It is the act of relating systems thinking to action in a given co 6.6 Reviewing the juggler through the understandascope At the beginning of Part 3 I invited you to consider through the lens of the understandascope (Figure 19) an ideal model of a systems practitioner juggling the four balls of being, engaging, contextualising and managing. By introducing material based on the biology of cognition when
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