omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Hieu C. Truong. Hieu Cong Truong,  (born September 23, 1941) is a Vietnamese Canadian engineer, responsible for designing minting machines used by the Royal Canadian Mint. His engineering team was responsible for creating the two dollar coin's bi-metallic coin locking mechanism.

Early life and education
Born in Saigon, Vietnam, Truong graduated from New York University in 1963 studying chemical engineering. After earning his master's degree in chemical engineering in 1964, he returned to Vietnam where he was a  lecturer at Phu Tho National Technical Center eventually becoming director of its chemical engineering school. After completing his Ph.D. in engineering in 1971 from New York University, he emigrated to Canada.

Career
Truong joined the Royal Canadian Mint in 1978 until retiring in 2014. He is the namesake of the Mint's Hieu C. Truong Centre of Excellence for Research and Development. His appointment to the Order of Canada was announced in June 2017.

References

1941 births
Canadian engineers
New York University alumni
Officers of the Order of Canada
People from Ho Chi Minh City
Vietnamese emigrants to Canada
Living people
Vietnamese engineers
Airplane Coaster. Airplane Coaster, known previously as the Aero-Coaster and the Aeroplane Dips, was a wooden roller coaster which operated at Playland Amusement Park in Rye, New York, from 1928 until 1957.

History and design
The Airplane Coaster was designed by noted roller coaster engineer Frederick Church. For many years it was believed, based on past collaborations and similar design, that Harry Traver of Traver Engineering had built the coaster, but in the 1980s it was determined that Traver was not the builder. A researcher, digging through a Rye, New York attic, discovered plans that listed the actual builder as Frank W. Darling, the owner of LaMarcus Adna Thompson's construction company.

Originally planned to be named "The Bobs" (like many of Church's other coasters), the coaster was first named "Aeroplane Dips" in honor of Charles Lindbergh's noted flight from New York to Paris. Over the next few years, the name was changed to "Aero-Coaster" and finally "Airplane Coaster" (although Aero-Coaster persisted among many as a nickname). The coaster was the largest built at Playland. It had multiple levels with many spirals, as well as steep drops and curves. Most commented on were the bottleneck curves where multiple tracks seemed to converge. It had many similarities in design elements to The Bobs at Riverview Park in Chicago, Illinois.

Demolition 
Maintenance issues doomed the Airplane Coaster. While it had early operational issues (the coaster took three days to get completely up and running), its late stage lifespan was particularly beset with problems. In 1956, when Playland changed insurance companies, inspectors condemned the coaster, stating it was unsafe. Renovations would have cost $100,000, so it was decided to demolish the coaster for a tenth of the cost instead. The coaster was torn down in November 1957.

Ride experience and reception
The Airplane Coaster was quite popular, with unexpected drops, sharp turns, and sudden speed changes cited as especially thrilling elements. Although some locals at the time expressed wariness with a coaster that seemed too dangerous, many writers have since called it a "masterpiece". A number of other writers called it the greatest roller coaster ever built.

References
Algatron. The Algatron was a proposed and prototyped waste filtration and recycling system to be implemented on NASA missions. Designed and built by a pair of sanitary engineers at the University of California, Berkeley, William J. Oswald and Clarence Golueke, the Algatron relied on algae to provide carbon Dioxide absorption and oxygen generation as well as "microbiological waste conversion" for "humans sealed within an isolated capsule.". A working model was built by Oswald and Golueke in 1965 or 1966 under a contract by from the Air Force Cambridge Research Laboratories. Composed of two stacked cylinders lined with Algae, the cylinders would spin in opposite directions. With ports to allow sunlight in, nutrients (the waste and urine) were introduced via some overflow mechanism. Despite the promise that the Algatron represented, and the ways in which Oswald and Golueke "understood that the closed environment of the space capsule was itself just the a microcosm of the closed system of the earth's biosphere," the technology would never get past the prototype stage. NASA instead decided to go with fecal bags to deal with waste. The Russians developed a similar system, the BIOS-3, which got as far enough as a successful test run with human occupants in 1965.

See also
Assimitron
Biotron (disambiguation)
Eggatron
Phytotron

References

External links
The Algatron at World of Trons
David P.D. Munns, Engineering the Environment: Phytotrons and the Quest to Control Climate in the Cold War (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2017).

Atmospheric chemistry
Environmental science
Pacific Building (Seattle). The Pacific Building is a 22-story building in the Central Business District of Downtown Seattle, Washington. It is located at 720 Third Avenue. It was completed in 1971.

History
The Pacific Building Corporation, ran by prominent developer and engineer Richard H. Hadley (the son of Homer Hadley, pioneer in building floating bridges), oversaw the construction and development of the Pacific Building.

On May 16, 1968 The engineering firm Dames & Moore had completed its "Report of Soils Investigation, Proposed Multi-Story Pacific Building, Third Avenue and Columbia Street, Seattle, Washington" for the Pacific Building Corporation. The work included drilling three exploratory borings at the building site, conducting appropriate laboratory tests, and undertaking engineering analyses and evaluations to determine appropriate means of foundation support and develop foundation design criteria.

By 1995, the building was half empty, with tenants filling several of the lower floors. This was partly the cause of Continental Savings Bank (now HomeStreet Bank) terminating its lease with the Pacific Building in 1992, where it occupied around 45,000 square feet on seven floors. The bank had been headquartered there since the building opened in 1971. By 2001 roughly 90% of floor space was being utilized, during which time it was being managed by Martin Smith Inc.

On December 5, 2007 Meriwether Partners purchased the building from LHT Corporation as Pacific Building Partners LLC for $34 million or $264 per rentable square foot. At the time, the building was 86% leased by 33 tenants. The company implemented a multi-million dollar renovation plan for the interior and exterior of the building, remodeling the main floor lobby and elevator cabs, upgrading multi-tenant lobbies and corridors, improving the parking garage controls, installing a new fire sprinkler system, and installing a new canopy system along Third Avenue.

During May 2014, public records show The Office of Professional Accountability, affiliated with the Seattle Police department, entered a 10-year lease on the 18th floor, accommodating 8,226 rentable square feet. The lease rate began at $29.50 per square foot per year, with a $0.75 per square foot annual increases, ending at $36.25 per square foot per year ($307,138 per year) by 2024.

The building was sold October 2014 to Brickman for $50.35 million.

Gallery

References

Commercial buildings completed in 1971
Office buildings completed in 1971
Skyscraper office buildings in Seattle
Buildings and structures in Downtown Seattle
1971 establishments in Washington (state)
Maduru Oya Dam. The Maduru Oya Dam is an irrigation dam built across the Maduru Oya. The embankment dam measures  in length,  in height, and creates the Maduru Oya Reservoir. The reservoir has a catchment area of  and a storage capacity of  The proposed Maduru Oya Solar Power Station is to be built over the surface of the Maduru Oya reservoir.

See also 
 Maduru Oya National Park

References

External links 
 
 

Dams in Sri Lanka
Embankment dams
Frank J. Canova. Francis James Canova Jr. (born 23 December 1956) is an American electronics designer who originated the idea for the IBM Simon and has thus been described as the inventor of the smartphone.

Early life
Frank Canova was born in Wilmington, Delaware, raised in Green Cove Springs, Florida, and attended Clay High School, graduating in 1974. He received his advanced education at the Florida Institute of Technology, graduating with a BSc in electrical engineering in 1978.

Career

IBM
Canova was working at IBM when he realized that chip-and-wireless technology was small enough to use in a handheld device. His boss, Jerry Merckel, was working on the development of PCMCIA cards that could be used to expand the memory of laptop computers and realized that they could also be used in the sort of device that Canova was thinking of. Both were working in a team that had been put together by Paul C. Mugge to enliven IBM's product range by developing smaller, lighter products.

Merckel pitched the idea to Mugge of "the phone of the future" that would use cards inserted into the phone to run services, and the development of a prototype was approved by Mugge. It was decided by IBM to show the device, code named "Angler", at the November 1992 COMDEX technology trade show in Las Vegas, necessitating a rush to complete the prototype by Canova and his team that saw them working 80-hour weeks in order to have it ready.

The device was an immediate success at the show and Canova found himself on the front of the money section of USA Today, pictured holding the phone. It was released under the name Simon in August 1994 and patented by Canova and other team members in 1995 with a priority date of 13 November 1992. As the originator of the idea for the IBM Simon, Canova has been described as the inventor of the smartphone.

Palm
Canova joined Palm in January 1997 where he was head of engineering for the PalmPilot, Palm III, V, and VII series of PDAs and successor devices.

Other appointments
Canova has also held senior engineering positions at Amazon Web Services, Coherent, Inc., Plastic Logic, Neato Robotics, Livescribe, Reactrix Systems, Wheels of Zeus and Cirrus Logic.

References

External links
Francis J. Canova, Jr. Inventions, Patents and Patent Applications - Justia Patents Search

1956 births
Living people
American electronics engineers
IBM employees
Florida Institute of Technology alumni
People from Wilmington, Delaware
People from Green Cove Springs, Florida
Pentanoyl chloride. Pentanoyl chloride is an acyl chloride derived from pentanoic acid. It is a colorless liquid that is used to attach the valeroyl group.  It is usually produced by chlorination of valeric acid.

Reactions
Like related acyl chlorides, valeryl chloride hydrolyzes readily:
CH3(CH2)3C(O)Cl  +  H2O  →  CH3(CH2)3CO2H  +  HCl
Alcohols react to give esters:
CH3(CH2)3C(O)Cl  +  ROH  →  CH3(CH2)3CO2R  +  HCl
Amines react to give amides:
CH3(CH2)3C(O)Cl  +  R2NH  →  CH3(CH2)3C(O)NR2  +  HCl
Benzene reacts under conditions of the Friedel-Crafts reaction to give valerophenone:
CH3(CH2)3C(O)Cl  +  C6H6  →  CH3(CH2)3C(O)C6H5  +  HCl

References

Acyl chlorides
Reagents for organic chemistry
Weaver Viaduct. The Weaver Viaduct, in the north of Cheshire on the M56, is one of the longest concrete viaducts on the British motorway network.

History
It was built as part of the first section of the M56 North Cheshire Motorway, also initially known as the Cheshire East-West Motorway, five miles from junctions 14 Hapsford Interchange to 12 at the A557.

The contract was given in early March 1968, to be finished by September 1970, to the Christiani-Shand consortium (its headquarters were at Romney House, on Marsham Street in London) for £3,146,387.

Design
It was designed from 1964 to 1967. It was designed by Husband and Company Consulting Engineers of Sheffield.

Construction
Work started on the viaduct on 1 April 1968. Work began on the eight-mile motorway in December 1968. The bridge crosses a flood plain. The foundations had 2,376 reinforced concrete piles. Thirty two 125-foot concrete 100-tonne beams were put into place in July 1970; the concrete beams were made by Matthews & Mumby of Windmill Lane, Denton, Greater Manchester. The project manager for Christiani-Shand was Mr A.K. Robertson.

31-year-old Harry Russon was killed instantly on the bridge construction on Wednesday 6 August 1969.

The construction of the five-mile motorway was completed in December 1970. The five-mile motorway opened for traffic at 11am on Sunday 21 February 1971; the viaduct would open with hard shoulders; the Thelwall Viaduct on the M6 was not originally built with a hard shoulder. The section to Preston Brook at junction 11 opened on Thursday 23 September 1971.

Structure
Due to its position, on the eastern edge of the exposed Cheshire Plain, there can be high crosswinds over the bridge, and the bridge may be closed as a result. Many high-sided vehicles have had accidents on the bridge.

It has a 222 ft span over the River Weaver and a 125 ft span over the Weaver Navigation. There are 30 approach spans of 90 ft each.

References

External links
 History

1970 establishments in England
Bridges completed in 1970
Bridges in Cheshire
Cheshire West and Chester
Concrete bridges in England
M56 motorway
Motorway bridges in England
Isobutyryl chloride. Isobutyryl chloride (2-methylpropanoyl chloride) is the organic compound with the formula .  A colorless liquid, it the simplest branched-chain acyl chloride.  It is prepared by chlorination of isobutyric acid.

Reactions
As an ordinary acid chloride, isobutyryl chloride is the subject of many reported transformations. Dehydrohalogenation of isobutyryl chloride with triethylamine gives 2,2,4,4-tetramethylcyclobutanedione. Treatment of isobutyryl chloride with hydrogen fluoride gives the acid fluoride.

References

Acyl chlorides
Reagents for organic chemistry
Dichloroacetyl chloride. Dichloroacetyl chloride is the organic compound with the formula CHCl2COCl.  It is the acyl chloride of dichloroacetic acid. It is a colourless liquid and is used in acylation reactions.

Preparation
Unlike typical acid chlorides, which are often prepared from the associated carboxylic acid, dichloroacetyl chloride is not prepared from dichloroacetic acid. Instead, industrial routes include oxidation of 1,1,2-trichloroethane, hydrolysis of pentachloroethane,  and the carboxylation of chloroform:
CHCl2CH2Cl  +  O2   →   CHCl2COCl  +  H2O
CHCl2CCl3  +  H2O   →   CHCl2COCl  +  2 HCl
CHCl3  +  CO2   →   CHCl2COCl  +  1/2 O2

Uses
It is a precursor to various herbicides including dichlormid.

Hydrolysis gives dichloroacetic acid. It is one of the precursors to antibiotics, including chloramphenicol.

References

Acyl chlorides
Jenni Gibbons. Jennifer "Jenni" Anne MacKinnon Sidey-Gibbons (born 3 August 1988) is a Canadian astronaut, engineer, and academic. She was selected by the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) as one of the two members of the 2017 CSA Group alongside Joshua Kutryk. In 2023, CSA assigned her to be Jeremy Hansen's backup for the Artemis II lunar flyby mission. As of the 2023 CSA Artemis announcement, she uses her married name, Jenni Gibbons.

Early life and education 
Jennifer Anne MacKinnon Sidey was born on 3 August 1988 in Calgary. She earned a Bachelor of Engineering with honours in mechanical engineering from McGill University, where she conducted research in collaboration with the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) and the Flight Research Laboratory of the National Research Council Canada on flame propagation in microgravity.

In 2015, she completed a PhD in engineering at Jesus College, Cambridge. Her doctoral research, supervised by Professor Nondas Mastorakos, focused on combustion processes.

Academic career 
Before joining the CSA, Gibbons was a lecturer in internal combustion engines at the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge. Her research centered on turbulent flame dynamics and pollutant reduction in combustion systems. She also taught undergraduate and graduate students in the Energy, Fluid Mechanics, and Turbomachinery Division on topics such as energy production, thermodynamics, and flame physics.

In 2016, Gibbons received the Institution of Engineering and Technology's Young Woman Engineer of the Year Award and a Royal Academy of Engineering Young Engineer of the Year Award.

CSA career 

Gibbons was selected by the CSA in 2017 as part of its fourth astronaut recruitment campaign, joining Joshua Kutryk in the 2017 CSA Group. She was the third female astronaut candidate chosen by the CSA, following Roberta Bondar and Julie Payette. At 28 years old, she became the youngest astronaut candidate ever selected by the agency.

In July 2017, Gibbons relocated to Houston, to complete the two-year NASA Astronaut Candidate Training Program at the Johnson Space Center, training alongside the 2017 NASA astronaut class.

On 22 November 2023, during a public ceremony at CSA headquarters, Gibbons was announced as the backup for Jeremy Hansen on the Artemis II mission. The mission, part of NASA's Artemis program, is slated to fly no earlier than April 2026.

References

External links 

 
 
 CSA Video Gallery
 CSA Photo Gallery

1988 births
Living people
Alumni of Jesus College, Cambridge
Canadian astronauts
Canadian women engineers
Fellows of St Catharine's College, Cambridge
McGill University Faculty of Engineering alumni
People from Calgary
Women astronauts
21st-century Canadian engineers
Fort Raymond (Alaska). Fort Raymond was a U.S. Army Post established in Seward, Alaska in 1942.  The fort was named for Charles W. Raymond, who had served in Alaska as a captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  At one point the garrison included more than 3,000 officers and men.  The post was established to protect the dock and railroad facilities in Seward, critical to the buildup of military facilities throughout Alaska, with coastal and anti-aircraft artillery. Supplies and materials arriving by ship to Seward were transported to Anchorage and Interior Alaska via the Alaska Railroad.

The defense of Seward became less important after 1943 when the Japanese forces in the Aleutians were defeated and the threat of attack or invasion was greatly reduced.  The construction of the deep water port in Whittier, Alaska, much closer to Anchorage, also reduced Seward's importance.

The Army troops stationed at Fort Raymond were used as stevedores when needed.

Fort Raymond was closed in 1945. The fort's hospital was quickly transferred to the Territory of Alaska by the War Assets Administration, and it was operated as a tuberculosis sanitorium until 1957.  The airfield associated with the fort remained and became Walseth Air Force Base after the U.S. Air Force was established as an independent branch of the U.S. armed forces in 1947.  Walseth AFB was closed in 1948.

References

Installations of the United States Army in Alaska
1942 establishments in Alaska
Raymond
1945 disestablishments in Alaska
Military installations closed in 1945
Junior Solar Sprint. Junior Solar Sprint (JSS) is a competitive program for 5th- to 8th-grade students to create a small solar-powered vehicle. JSS competitions are sponsored by the Army Educational Outreach Program (AEOP), and administered by the Technology Student Association (TSA). Objectives of JSS are to create the fastest, most interesting, or best crafted vehicle. Skills in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) are fostered when designing and constructing the vehicles, as well as principles of alternative fuels, engineering design, and aerodynamics.

History

Junior Solar Sprint was created in the 1980s by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) to teach younger children about the importance and challenges of using renewable energy. The project also teaches students how the engineering process is applied, and how solar panels,  transmission, and aerodynamics can be used in practice.

Since 2001, the AEOP has funded JSS events. TSA began hosting competitions in 2011, and it became a middle school-level event in 2014. In association with TSA, Pitsco Education has sold recommended materials for the project.

Competition

Since Junior Solar Sprint became a TSA event, the rules for creating the vehicle have been defined in the TSA rulebook. At the conference, the total cost of creating each car must be less than US$50. The team must also document their process in a notebook.

During the time trials section, each car is raced three times down a lane  long, on a hard surface like a tennis court. To keep the vehicle pointed straight ahead, a guide wire is run across every lane attached by an eyelet. When the cars are racing, they must remain attached to the wire with no external control. During the race, no modifications are allowed, though anyone may watch.

The fastest time of the three trials is used for qualification to the semifinal round. In the next stage, a single- or double-elimination tournament, cars are raced against each other at the same time, until one of the 16 semifinalists is determined the fastest.

Junior Solar Sprint competitions are held at the national-, state-, and some regional-level TSA conferences, as well as other AEOP-hosted locations. In the event that the site is overcast, and the solar panels won't work, two 1.5 volt AA batteries will be given to each team. Judges determine the three best vehicles for each category: speed, craftsmanship, and appearance.

The 2017 national TSA conference was held June 21–25, in Orlando, Florida, and many middle school students across the country traveled to compete with their vehicles. The team from Joan MacQueen Middle School in Alpine, California, won first place.

References

External links

 Junior Solar Sprint from the Army Educational Outreach Program
 Junior Solar Sprint from the Technology Student Association

Engineering competitions
Engineering education in the United States
Technology Student Association
American military youth groups
Heritage unit. A heritage unit or commemorative locomotive is a railroad locomotive painted in an honorary paint scheme; usually the paint scheme is that of a now-defunct railroad that merged with or was acquired by the locomotive's owner.

Among North American railroads  

Heritage units are popular among North American railroads. As of 2023, all major Class I railroads have official heritage units, except for BNSF Railway.

The Union Pacific Railroad painted six EMD SD70ACes in stylized paint schemes of six of its predecessors between 2005 and 2006. The Norfolk Southern Railway did the same in 2012 with 20 of its locomotives for its 30th Railroad Anniversary. 10 of them are EMD SD70ACes, while the others are GE ES44AC units. For its 40th anniversary in 2011, Amtrak painted four GE P42DCs, a P40DC, and an EMD F40PH converted to an NPCU into its older paint schemes. Several more were painted for its 50th anniversary in 2021. 

In 2019, the Canadian Pacific Railway, now Canadian Pacific Kansas City, painted nine EMD SD70ACU units in a maroon and gray paint scheme with a different font style. In late 2020, the Canadian National Railway revealed five new heritage units after they had been first spotted a month earlier. These included four GE ET44ACs and one EMD SD70M-2. They were painted in honour of the 25th anniversary of CN's initial public offering. Beginning in 2023, CSX revealed its first of many heritage units, ES44AH 1827 with a Baltimore & Ohio paint scheme.

List of heritage units 

Below is a list of heritage units in active service by various railroads.

See also 

 Heritage Units

Notes

References

Locomotives by type
Nostalgia