omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Bubble curtain. A bubble curtain is a system that produces bubbles in a deliberate arrangement in water. It is also called pneumatic barrier. The technique is based on bubbles of air (gas) being let out under the water surface, commonly on the bottom. When the bubbles rise they act as a barrier, a curtain, breaking the propagation of waves or the spreading of particles and other contaminants.

Uses
It can be used for the following purposes:
 to reduce propagation of shock waves (e.g. acoustic waves from engines or pile driving, explosions etcetera),
 to reduce liquid or debris floating on the surface from spreading 
 to prevent salt intrusion
 to control the movements of fish
 for decoration and airing in aquariums

In June 2010, Okaloosa County, Florida used air bubble curtains to help protect their Destin Pass coastline from oil produced in the Gulf of Mexico by the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. They hoped to push oil up to the surface for booms and skimming boats to collect the oil. British multinational oil company BP, who the U.S. government named as the responsible party for the oil spill, was billed for the cost of the project.

Equipment
The technical system basically consists of a compressor and pipe or hose with nozzles. When used to reduce acoustic waves from pile driving, a distribution manifold made of plastic or rubber is commonly used.

Offshore pile driving
Pile driving in connection to offshore construction, most importantly monopile foundations for offshore wind turbines, produces very high levels of underwater noise, capable of inflicting damage to the hearing of marine organisms and deter animals at tens of km from the construction site. Large-scale bubble curtains are now routinely used to mitigate these impacts as they can attenuate the noise significantly, in particular the higher frequencies, above 1 kHz.

See also
 Prairie-Masker
 Sonar decoy

References

Water technology
Joe Becker (Unicode). Joseph D. Becker is an American computer scientist and one of the co-founders of the Unicode project, and a Technical Vice President Emeritus of the Unicode Consortium. He has worked on artificial intelligence at BBN and multilingual workstation software at Xerox.

Becker has long been involved in the issues of multilingual computing in general and Unicode in particular.  His 1984 paper in Scientific American, "Multilingual Word Processing", was a seminal work on some of the problems involved, including the need to distinguish characters and glyphs. Following the release of the paper in 1987, he and two others began investigations into the practicality of creating a universal character set. Becker teamed up with his colleague Lee Collins who worked alongside him at Xerox and Mark Davis of Apple.  It was Becker who coined the word "Unicode" to cover the project. His article Unicode 88, contained the first public summary of the principles originally underlying the Unicode standard.

References

Living people
Year of birth missing (living people)
People involved with Unicode
American computer scientists
Alton G. Keel Jr.. Alton Gold Keel Jr. (born September 15, 1943) is an American engineer, government official, diplomat, and businessman.

Keel attended the University of Virginia, where he earned a bachelor of science in aerospace engineering in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1970.  He performed weapons research at the Naval Surface Weapons Center, and then joined the staff of the United States Senate, where he was a Congressional science fellow (1976–78) and a staff member of the Senate Armed Services Committee (1978–81).  He then served as Assistant Secretary of the Air Force (Acquisition) (1981–82) and Associate Director of the Office of Management and Budget (1982–86).  In 1986, he was appointed Executive Director of the Rogers Commission that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster.

In July 1986, President Ronald Reagan appointed Keel as the acting principal deputy to the National Security Advisor.  From 1987-89, Keel was the United States Permanent Representative to NATO.

Keel has held various positions in corporate governance, and as of 2007 was president and managing director of Atlantic Partners LLC, a private investment-banking group.

References
 White House announcement of Keel's appointment as deputy National Security Adviser, July 15, 1986 
 Josie Loyd, "Ambassador Alton G. Keel Jr. Speaks to the Newest Jeffersonian Engineers", U.Va. Engineer, spring 2007.
 U.S. NATO Mission website

 Richard P Feynman ‘What do you care what other people think’ 1988 Published by Penguin Books
ISBN 978-0-141-03088-3

1943 births
Living people
University of Virginia School of Engineering and Applied Science alumni
United States Air Force civilians
Permanent Representatives of the United States to NATO
Reagan administration personnel
George H. W. Bush administration personnel
American aerospace engineers
PCH International. PCH is a global custom design manufacturing company that works with companies to design, engineer, develop, manufacture, pack out, fulfill and distribute products as well as manage supply chains. The company was founded in Ireland in 1996 by entrepreneur Liam Casey.

PCH's corporate headquarters are located in Cork, Ireland with operational headquarters in Shenzhen, China, and U.S. headquarters in San Francisco, California.

Services

PCH offers product design engineering and development services as well as manufacturing, pack out and fulfillment, and distribution services. For startups, PCH has one division – Highway1 – that works with entrepreneurs to minimize the risk of market entrance and help them scale production.

PCH China Direct assists companies looking to export to China or expand existing operations. In late 2015, PCH International laid off 1,500 workers in China, nearly its entire workforce, as it moved away from mass production of products into more niche markets.

Highway1

In June 2013, PCH launched Highway1, a four-month accelerator program.

Funding and expansion

On 7 June 2011, the company announced that it had raised a new round of funding of $30 million. Two new investors, Northbrooks Investments and J. Christopher Burch, and existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Triangle Peak Partners, Cross Creek Capital, and Fung Capital participated in the round.

In 2011, the company acquired TNS Distribution, a European distributor of consumer electronics products and accessories for an immediate payment of €6m (US$8.67m) and an earnings-based payment of €5m (US$7.22m) over three years, based on the performance of TNS Distribution.

On 15 June 2012, the company announced an agreement to acquire Lime Lab Inc., a Silicon Valley–based product development consultancy.

On 3 March 2015, PCH announced that they had acquired Fab (website), a design e-commerce platform, for an undisclosed sum. The purchase price was later revealed to be $15 million, a huge drop in valuation for the distressed internet company.

References

Manufacturing companies of Ireland
Filament tape. Filament tape or strapping tape is a pressure-sensitive tape consisting of a pressure-sensitive adhesive coated onto a backing material which is usually a polypropylene or polyester film and fiberglass filaments embedded to add high tensile strength.

It is used for several packaging functions such as closing corrugated fiberboard boxes, reinforcing packages, bundling items, pallet unitizing, etc.

The first filament tape was invented in 1956 by Cyrus W. Bemmels, a scientist working for Johnson and Johnson. Several other varieties have since been developed.

A variety of grades of filament tape are available. Some have as much as 600 pounds of tensile strength per inch of width (100 N/mm).  Different types and grades of adhesive are also available.

Most often, the tape is 12 mm (approx. 1/2 inch) to 24 mm (approx. 1 inch) wide, but it is also used in other widths.

A variety of strengths, calipers, and adhesive formulations are available.

Uses
The tape is most often used as a closure for corrugated boxes such as a full overlap box, five-panel folder, full telescope box. L-shaped clips or strips are applied over the overlapping flap, extending  onto the box panels.

Heavy loads or weak box construction may also be aided by the application of strips or bands of filament tape to the box.

Application
The tape can be applied manually with a stationary dispenser but is more often applied with a hand held tape dispenser: this allows the user to more efficiently place the tape on the box, cut it off, and rub it down.

Automated machinery for application of tape to high speed lines is also common.

Related products
Some PSA tapes are available which have a highly oriented polypropylene backing with high strength in the long (machine) direction.  Some of these have shaped filaments which help resist tearing across the tape.  These tapes are sometimes used in a similar manner as filament reinforced tapes.

Some filament tapes (or strapping tapes) are sometimes used similarly to strapping.

See also
 List of adhesive tapes

References

ASTM D5330 Standard Specification for Pressure Sensitive Tape for Packaging, Filament Reinforced
ASTM D1974 Standard Practice for Methods of Closing, Sealing and Reinforcing Fiberboard Boxes.
ASTM D5168 Standard Practice for Fabrication and Closure of Tripplewall Corrugated Containers
 Yam, K. L., "Encyclopedia of Packaging Technology", John Wiley & Sons, 2009, 

Packaging materials
Adhesive tape
Robert Stephenson (disambiguation). Robert Stephenson (1803–1859) was an English civil engineer and designer of locomotives.

Robert or Bob Stephenson may also refer to:
 Robert Stephenson and Company, railway locomotive building company, founded by Robert Stephenson
 Len Stephenson (Robert Leonard Stephenson, 1930–2014), English footballer
 Bob Stephenson (sportsman) (born 1942), English cricketer and footballer
 Bob Stephenson (ice hockey) (born 1954), retired Canadian ice hockey right winger
 Bob Stephenson (baseball) (1928–2020), American baseball player
 Robert Stephenson (baseball) (born 1993), American baseball player
 Bob Stephenson (actor) (born 1967), American actor, film producer and screenwriter
 Robert Donston Stephenson (1841–1916), writer and journalist
 Bob Stephenson (American football) (born 1959), American football player
 Robert Stephenson (footballer) (1875–?), British footballer
 Robert Stephenson (cricketer) (1906–1942), English cricketer and Royal Navy officer
 Robert Storer Stephenson (1858–1929), American architect

See also
 Robert Stevenson (disambiguation)
 Robert Stevenson (civil engineer) (1772–1850), Scottish civil engineer
 Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894), Scottish author
 Robert Stephens (disambiguation)
Saxon VIa. The Saxon Class VIa were early Germany steam engines operated by the Royal Saxon State Railways (Königlich Sächsische Staatseisenbahn or K. Sächs. Sts. E. B.). The class included various types of fast-stopping train (Eilzug) locomotive, which had originally come from the Leipzig–Dresden Railway Company and the Eastern State Railway.

History 
Forty locomotives were built between 1848 and 1868 for the Leipzig-Dresden Railway (Leipzig-Dresdner Eisenbahn or LDE) for fast passenger services on the route between Leipzig and Dresden; three more were made for the Eastern State Railway (Östliche Staatsbahn) in 1861/62 for employment on the Dresden–Bodenbach railway. The Royal Saxon State Railways grouped all uncoupled locomotives into its Class _ VIa, whereby the prefix _ represented the short form of the manufacturer's name until 1896 (after which it was dropped entirely). Class VI was for the so-called Eilzuglokomotiven ("fast-stopping train locomotives") and a stood for older (ältere) designs; in this case for the uncoupled engines with a 2-2-2 wheel arrangement.

When the K. Sächs. Sts. E. B. was founded in 1869 it initially only had the three Hartmann locomotives from the Östlichen Staatsbahn in its fleet. From 1871 they were classified as Class H VI a.

The Leipzig-Dresden Railway had retired the first eight of its locomotives (the Borsig and Hartmann deliveries of 1848/49) by 1868 and converted the next four Borsig engines from 1854 to 0-4-2 tender or tank locomotives in 1873/76. These early machines had significantly different dimensions from the later ones. Following the nationalisation of the LDE in 1876, the 28 remaining engines which had been built by Hartmann in 1856 and Borsig in 1868 were given the class designations H VIa and B VIa respectively, the conversions being classed as B II and B IIa T.

The so-called Spinnräder ("spinning wheels") lasted a surprisingly long time. In 1890 21 engines were still in service, almost half the original fleet. In its last years they were used mainly on local passenger train duties. The last one was retired in 1902, number 6, formerly GUSTAV HARKORT. 

Railway number 2, formerly BOEHLEN (previously ZÜRICH in the LDE) was the penultimate engine to be withdrawn, in 1900. In 1901 it was taken back by the state railway and was intended to be given to the Saxon Railway Museum. However it was scrapped around 1925.

Technical features 

The engines had an inside plate frame and, apart from the three engines with the Eastern State Railway, a Kirchweger  condenser. The valve gear was either a Borsig or Stephenson type. In addition the locos had various types of boiler. Most of the locomotives were still being delivered without driver's cabs.

See also 
 Royal Saxon State Railways
 List of Saxon locomotives and railbuses
 Leipzig–Dresden Railway Company

References 

 
 

2-2-2 locomotives
0-4-2 locomotives
06a
Borsig locomotives
Sächsische Maschinenfabrik locomotives
1A1 n2 locomotives
Passenger locomotives
Heinrich Kirchweger. Johann Gottfried Heinrich Kirchweger (12 June 1809 – 18 January 1899) was a German railway engineer. Heinrich Kirchweger was born on 12 June 1809 in Stettin, then part of the Kingdom of Prussia, now Szczecin in Poland. After attending the trade school in Berlin, Kirchweger worked with the industrialist Georg Henschel in Kassel.

Career
In 1838 he became the technical operations manager of the Leipzig–Dresden Railway Company and, later, the Saxon-Bavarian Railway Company. In 1843 he took up a post with the newly founded Royal Hanoverian State Railways. Here he was responsible for the mechanical engineering, operations, maintenance and the procurement of running and rolling stock. Thanks to him, an organised maintenance system and standardised railway operations emerged.

He introduced feedwater preheating on locomotives using the Kirchweger condenser and introduced "Hanoverian standard locomotives" based on those built by Thomas Russell Crampton and Johann Friedrich Ludwig Wöhlert. In addition he produced plans for engines built by Georg Egestorff and pumps for Hanover's river water systems.

After the Kingdom of Hanover was annexed by Prussia and the Hanoverian State Railways disbanded, Kirchweger was transferred against his will to Saarbrücken. As a result, he resigned from state service, worked for a short while in a coach factory and finally returned to Hanover as a civil engineer.

Honours
For his services to the railways he was given numerous honours. He became inter alia a  freeman of the city of Hanover, a Knight of the Royal Guelphic Order, the Saxon Albert Order and the Swedish Order of Vasa.

Death
Kirchweger died at the age of 89 in Hanover, Germany. His grave is located in the Engesohde town cemetery.

See also
 List of railway pioneers

References 

 Waldemar R. Röhrbein in Hannoversches biographisches Lexikon. Von den Anfängen bis in die Gegenwart. Hannover: Schlüter 2002, . 

Engineers from Szczecin
1809 births
1899 deaths
Knights of the Order of Vasa
German railway mechanical engineers
Engineers from the Kingdom of Prussia
Laves phase. Laves phases are intermetallic phases that have composition AB2 and are named for Fritz Laves who first described them.  The phases are classified on the basis of geometry alone. While the problem of packing spheres of equal size has been well-studied since Gauss, Laves phases are the result of his investigations into packing spheres of two sizes. Laves phases fall into three Strukturbericht types: cubic MgCu2 (C15), hexagonal MgZn2 (C14), and hexagonal MgNi2 (C36). The latter two classes are unique forms of the hexagonal arrangement, but share the same basic structure. In general, the A atoms are ordered as in diamond, hexagonal diamond, or a related structure, and the B atoms form tetrahedra around the A atoms for the AB2 structure. 

Laves phases are of particular interest in modern metallurgy research because of their abnormal physical and chemical properties. Many hypothetical or primitive applications have been developed. However, little practical knowledge has been elucidated from Laves phase study so far.
A characteristic feature is the almost perfect electrical conductivity, but they are not plastically deformable at room temperature.

In each of the three classes of Laves phase, if the two types of atoms were perfect spheres with a size ratio of , the structure would be topologically tetrahedrally close-packed. At this size ratio, the structure has an overall packing volume density of 0.710.  Compounds found in Laves phases typically have an atomic size ratio between 1.05 and 1.67.  Analogues of Laves phases can be formed by the self-assembly of a colloidal dispersion of two sizes of sphere.

Laves phases are instances of the more general Frank-Kasper phases.

References

Intermetallics
Crystal structure types
TeLQAS. TeLQAS (Telecommunication Literature Question Answering System) is an experimental question answering system developed for answering English questions in the telecommunications domain.

Architecture
TeLQAS includes three main subsystems: an online subsystem, an offline subsystem, and an ontology. The online subsystem answers questions submitted by users in real time. During the online process, TeLQAS processes the question using a natural language processing component that implements part-of-speech tagging and simple syntactic parsing. The online subsystem also utilizes an inference engine in order to carry out necessary inference on small elements of knowledge. The offline subsystem automatically indexes documents collected by a focused web crawler from the web. An ontology server along with its API is used for knowledge representation. The main concepts and classes of the ontology are created by domain experts. Some of these classes, however, can be instantiated automatically by the offline components.

References

Computational linguistics
Information retrieval systems
Natural language processing software
Flexoelectricity. Flexoelectricity is a property of a dielectric material where there is coupling between electrical polarization and a strain gradient. This phenomenon is closely related to piezoelectricity, but while piezoelectricity refers to polarization due to uniform strain, flexoelectricity specifically involves polarization due to strain that varies from point to point in the material. This nonuniform strain breaks centrosymmetry, meaning that unlike in piezoelectricity, flexoelectric effects occur in both centrosymmetric and asymmetric crystal structures. This property is not the same as Ferroelasticity. It plays a critical role in explaining many interesting electromechanical behaviors in hard crystalline materials and core mechanoelectric transduction phenomena in soft biomaterials. Additionally, it is a size-dependent effect that becomes more significant in nanoscale systems, such as crack tips.

In common usage, flexoelectricity is the generation of polarization due to a strain gradient; inverse flexoelectricity is when polarization, often due to an applied electric field, generates a strain gradient. Converse flexoelectricity is where a polarization gradient induces strain in a material.

The electric polarization  due to mechanical strain of  in a dielectric is given by:

where the first term corresponds to the direct piezoelectric effect and the second term corresponds to the flexoelectric polarization induced by the strain gradient.

Here, the flexoelectric coefficient, , is a fourth-rank polar tensor and  is the coefficient corresponding to the direct piezoelectric effect.

See also 
 Piezoelectricity
 Ferroelectricity
 Ferroelasticity
 Triboelectric effect

References

External links 
 Introduction to Flexoelectricity  

Electric and magnetic fields in matter
Condensed matter physics
Jones reductor. A Jones reductor is a device used to reduce aqueous solutions of metal ions. The active component is a zinc amalgam. Jones reductors have been used for preparing solutions of titanium(III), vanadium(II), chromium(II), molybdenum(III), niobium(III), europium(II), and uranium(III).

Preparation and use
Amalgamated zinc is prepared by treating zinc metal with a 2% solution of mercury(II) chloride. The metal may be in the granulated form or as shavings, wool, or powder. The  amalgam forms on the surface of the zinc. After washing to remove salts, the amalgam is placed in a long glass tube, similar to a chromatography column, equipped with a stopcock. The amalgam is a more effective reducing agent than zinc metal. The effluent is often air-sensitive, requiring the use of air-free techniques.

To use the reductor, the solution to be reduced is drawn through the tube. If the column is loosely packed, the solution may pass through without assistance.  The length of the column or the flow rate are adjusted to effect full reduction of the soluble reagent.  The effluent is also contaminated with zinc(II) salts, but they do not affect subsequent operations.  These operations might include iodometric titration to determine the reducible content of the effluent.  In some cases, the effluent is treated with other reagents to precipitate a compound of the reduced ions.

See also
 Walden reductor

References 

Inorganic chemistry
Reducing agents
Zinc compounds