omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
Frank Brian Mercer. Frank Brian Mercer (22 December 1927 – 22 November 1998) was an English engineer, inventor and businessman.

He was born into a Blackburn family, which for generations had been involved in the textile industry and which owned and controlled companies engaged in spinning, weaving, dyeing and finishing, and educated at the Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn.

In the 1950s, he invented the Netlon process, in which plastics are extruded into a net-like process in one stage, winning the Queen's Award for Technological Achievement. With his inspiration, leadership and drive, he founded Netlon Ltd in 1959 to manufacture the products but most importantly to commercialise the concept. Throughout Brian Mercer's career, he strongly believed in the importance of cooperative research and development through instigating discussion and debate through international commercial and technical conferences.

In 1978 he became a Fellow of the Institute of Materials and the second person to receive their Prince Philip Award. He was elected a Fellow of the Textile Institute in 1973 and in 1988 it bestowed on him an Honorary Fellowship. In 1981 he received the OBE and in 1984 was made a Fellow of the Royal Society. He made a bequest to the Royal Society to establish the Brian Mercer Award for Feasibility, which is given to allow researchers to investigate the technical and economic feasibility of commercialising an aspect of their scientific research.

Modern Tensar geogrids were invented by Dr. Mercer in the late 1970s and early 1980s for the construction industry to provide stabilisation and reinforcement with the underlying concept of simplicity, flexibility and strength.  They are now used throughout the world for soil stabilization applications.

His portrait, painted by Salvador Dalí in 1973, is now owned by the Royal Society.

References

Further reading
 Burland, J,B (2009), Opening Address, Jubilee Symposium on Polymer Geogrid Reinforcement. , Published 2010
 http://www.nce.co.uk/brian-mercer-1927-1998/674493.article

1927 births
1998 deaths
Fellows of the Royal Society
Officers of the Order of the British Empire
20th-century British engineers
People educated at Queen Elizabeth's Grammar School, Blackburn
LION (cable system). Lower Indian Ocean Network (LION) is a submarine communications cable network that connects Madagascar, Réunion, and Mauritius.

History 

The construction of a new submarine cable to connect the Southeast African islands was announced in March 2008. The project was financed by a consortium made up of Orange Madagascar, Mauritius Telecom and France Telecom S.A. Overall, the LION project cost an estimated 37 million dollars. The Mauritius Telecom group has reportedly invested 10.8 million in the project. The LION I network was inaugurated in March 2010. This cable digitized the region, and paved the way for the development of an outsourcing economy (call centers).

LION II, linking Madagascar, Mayotte and Kenya, was launched in April 2012. In July 2017, Orange announced the construction of FLY-LION III, a 400 km extension of LION I and II. The capacity of this new cable should be 4 terabits/s.

In July 2018, the website Cable.com ranked Madagascar 22nd in the list of countries with the fastest connections.

On 5–6 October 2018, the LION II cable broke, leading to a severe decrease of digital access in Mayotte the following days. While Emtel had to play the diplomacy with its users, Mauritius Telecom, thanks to its global participation in the LION consortium, was able to re-route on other LION cables for balance-loading.

Description 

The LION is 1,000 kilometres long and delivers up to 1.28 terabits per second.  To reach Europe and other destinations, the LION cable is linked to the SAFE cable and will be connected to the EASSy and the East African Marine System (TEAMs) cable when they are operational.

It has cable landing points at:
 Toamasina, Toamasina Province, Atsinanana Region, Madagascar
 Sainte Marie, Saint-Denis Arrondissement, Réunion
 Terre Rouge, Pamplemousses District, Mauritius

The LION II submarine cable network (2700 km), which required a 57 million euro investment, connects the LION I network to Mayotte and Mombasa, Kenya. The LION II network enables a shorter cable distance to the Middle East and Europe, thus lowering latency between servers.

References

External links 
 LION optical fiber submarine cable system
 https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1038143/000130817909000044/chap8p13302.jpg

Submarine communications cables in the Indian Ocean
France–Madagascar relations
France–Mauritius relations
2009 establishments in Madagascar
2009 establishments in Mauritius
2009 establishments in Réunion
European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology. The European Society for Fuzzy Logic and Technology (EUSFLAT) is a scientific association with the aims to disseminate and promote fuzzy logic and related subjects (sometimes comprised under the collective terms soft computing or computational intelligence) and to provide a platform for exchange between scientists and engineers working in these fields. The society is both open for academic and industrial members.

History

EUSFLAT was founded in 1998 in Spain as the successor of the National Spanish Fuzzy Logic Society, ESTYLF, with the aim to open the society for members from other European countries. Since then, the society managed to attract a large share of members from outside Spain, and even beyond Europe, with the Spanish members still being the largest group inside EUSFLAT. For these historical reasons, the society is officially registered in Spain.

Conferences

Starting with 1999, EUSFLAT has been organizing its biannual conferences in odd years. Previous meetings:

Palma de Mallorca, Balearic Islands, Spain, September 22–25, 1999 (jointly with National Spanish conference, ESTYLF)
Leicester, United Kingdom, September 5–7, 2001
Zittau, Germany, September 10–12, 2003
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain, September 7–9, 2005 (jointly with 11th Rencontres Francophones sur la Logique Floue et ses Applications)
Ostrava, Czech Republic, September 11–14, 2007
Lisbon, Portugal, July 20–24, 2009 (jointly with 13th World Congress of the International Fuzzy Systems Association)
Aix-les-Bains, France, July 18–22, 2011 (jointly with Les Rencontres Francophones sur la Logique Floue et ses Applications)
Milan, Italy, September 11–13, 2013
Gijón, Spain, June, 30–3 July 2015

Publications

 EUSFLAT publishes the proceedings of its conferences in an open access manner.
 Until 2010, Mathware & Soft Computing was the official journal of EUSFLAT. On July 1, 2010, the International Journal of Computational Intelligence Systems (Atlantis Press,  (print) /  (on-line)) became the official journal of EUSFLAT.
 EUSFLAT publishes an electronic newsletter with three issues a year.

Presidents
EUSFLAT is led by the President, who is elected for a two-year period, and cannot serve for more than two consecutive periods.

 Francesc Esteva (1998–2011)
 Luis Magdalena  (2001–2005)
 Ulrich Bodenhofer (2005–2009)
 Javier Montero (2009–2013)
 Gabriella Pasi (2013–present)

References

External links
The EUSFLAT website

Information technology organizations based in Europe
Fuzzy logic
Mathematical societies
Organizations established in 1998
Non-profit organisations based in Spain
Walter Bradley (engineer). Walter L. Bradley is a retired professor of engineering, old Earth creationist and an advocate of intelligent design.

Academic career 
Bradley taught mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University. He is a professor at Baylor University a private Baptist college in Waco, Texas.

Intelligent design
Bradley is the co-author, along with Roger Olsen and Charles Thaxton, of The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories. This book, published in 1984, presents a creationist interpretation of abiogenesis, attributing it to "Special Creation by a creator beyond the cosmos", and says that Special Creation holds "that the source that produced life was intelligent".  William Dembski has described Bradley as one of the originators of the intelligent design movement, and the book as seminal in the ID movement.

Bradley was one of the pioneers of the concept of intelligent design, attempting to explain topics not yet understood by science as the activity of God.  Bradley's writings on the subject anticipated some of the concepts later articulated by William Dembski and Michael Behe, and he was a participant in early meetings regarding the wedge strategy, a religious public relations campaign with a goal of reshaping American culture to adopt evangelical Protestant values.

As of 2007, Bradley was on the selection committee for the Trotter Prize, which rewards work on intelligent design.

References

21st-century American engineers
Christian Old Earth creationists
American Christian creationists
Intelligent design advocates
Living people
1943 births
Swarts fluorination. Swarts fluorination is a process whereby the chlorine atoms in a compound – generally an organic compound, but experiments have been performed using silanes – are replaced with fluorine, by treatment with antimony trifluoride in the presence of chlorine or of antimony pentachloride. Some metal fluorides are particularly more useful than others, including silver(I) fluoride, mercurous fluoride, cobalt(II) fluoride and aforementioned antimony. 

Heating the mixture of the metal fluoride and the haloalkane (chlorine and bromine are replaced readily) yields the desired fluoroalkane. In some particularly reactive cases, heating is unnecessary; shaking or stirring the reaction mixture is sufficient. This reaction has a good yield. 

The process was initially described by Frédéric Jean Edmond Swarts in 1892.

Mechanism 
The active species is antimony trifluorodichloride 2, which is produced in situ from the reaction between antimony trifluoride 1 and chlorine; this compound can also be produced in bulk, according to a patent of John Weaver. This then undergoes a halogen exchange with a haloalkane (here trichloroethylsilane), as in 3, replacing the halogen atom (here chlorine) with fluorine and affording the fluorinated product 4.

References

Halogenation reactions
Substitution reactions
Name reactions
International Wood Products Journal. The International Wood Products Journal is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of wood science, engineering, and technology. It is currently published by Sage Journals on behalf of the Wood Technology Society (Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining) and the editor-in-chief is Gervais Sawyer and the associate editor is Carmen-Mihaela Popescu.

History
The journal was established in 1958 as the Journal of the Institute of Wood Science, and was published in London by the Institute of Wood Science, the predecessor of the Wood Technology Society.

The first editor of the journal was Bernard Alwyn Jay, Deputy Director of the Timber Development Association (with later became TRADA), until he died in 1961. By then the journal was considered to be one of the leading publications of its kind, with subscribers in 31 countries including USA, China, India and Russia.

The Institute of Wood Science merged into the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining in 2009, and as a consequence the journal was renamed, obtaining its current name in 2010. At the same time it came to be published by Maney Publishing. Maney was acquired by Taylor & Francis in 2015. From 2024 the publisher is Sage, following a 2023 agreement with the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining for Sage to take over publication of the journals of the institute.

External links

The Wood Technology Group of IOM3

References 

Wood products
Materials science journals
Academic journals established in 1958
English-language journals
Taylor & Francis academic journals
Forestry journals
Quarterly journals
Wood science journals
Flight – The Passionate Affair. Flight – The Passionate Affair was a Canadian documentary television miniseries which aired on CBC Television in 1976.

Premise
Canadian aviation history was featured in this four-part documentary series, written and narrated by Patrick Watson.

Scheduling
The hour-long episodes aired Sundays at 10:00 p.m. (Eastern) from 19 September to 10 October 1976. It was rebroadcast in May 1981. Subjects included the Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow, Billy Bishop, and the development of competing Canadian airlines such as Trans-Canada Air Lines and Canadian Pacific Air Lines.

References

External links
 
 Flight - The Passionate Affair at CBC Digital Archives
 

CBC Television original programming
Documentary television series about aviation
1976 Canadian television series debuts
1976 Canadian television series endings
Lime softening. Lime softening (also known as lime buttering, lime-soda treatment, or Clark's process) is a type of water treatment used for water softening, which uses the addition of limewater (calcium hydroxide) to remove hardness (deposits of calcium and magnesium salts) by precipitation. The process is also effective at removing a variety of microorganisms and dissolved organic matter by flocculation.

History
Lime softening was first used in 1841 to treat Thames River water. The process expanded in use as the other benefits of the process were discovered. Lime softening greatly expanded in use during the early 1900s as industrial water use expanded. Lime softening provides soft water that can, in some cases, be used more effectively for heat transfer and various other industrial uses.

Chemistry
As lime in the form of limewater is added to raw water, the pH is raised and the equilibrium of carbonate species in the water is shifted. Dissolved carbon dioxide (CO2) is changed into bicarbonate (HCO) and then carbonate (CO). This action causes calcium carbonate to precipitate due to exceeding the solubility product. Additionally, magnesium can be precipitated as magnesium hydroxide in a double displacement reaction.

In the process both the calcium (and to an extent magnesium) in the raw water as well as the calcium added with the lime are  precipitated. This is in contrast to ion exchange softening where sodium is exchanged for calcium and magnesium ions. In lime softening, there is a substantial reduction in total dissolved solids (TDS) whereas in ion exchange softening (sometimes referred to as zeolite softening), there is no significant change in the level of TDS.

Lime softening can also be used to remove iron, manganese, radium and arsenic from water.

Future uses
Lime softening is now often combined with newer membrane processes to reduce waste streams. Lime softening can be applied to the concentrate (or reject stream) of membrane processes, thereby providing a stream of substantially reduced hardness (and thus TDS), that may be used in the finished stream. Also, in cases with very hard source water (often the case in Midwestern USA ethanol production plants), lime softening can be used to pre-treat the membrane feed water.

Waste products
Lime softening produces large volumes of a mixture of calcium carbonate and magnesium hydroxide in a very finely divided white precipitate which may also contain some organic matter flocculated out of the raw water. Processing or disposal of this sludge material may be an additional cost to the process. Drying and re-calcining the waste allows the lime to be almost fully re-cycled, but drying and re-calcining is more expensive than producing new lime from limestone.

References

Water treatment
Osprey GP-4. The GP-4 is an experimental aircraft designed to fly cross country with two passengers  at . Aircraft Spruce & Specialty Co has the rights to distribute the kits for the aircraft, while the plans are distributed by Osprey Aircraft.

Design and development
The GP-4 is the fourth aircraft from designer George Pereira, It is a low wing side-by-side retractable gear aircraft of wood construction. It has a single spar stressed to +8 to -6G loading.

The aircraft's wooden construction is labor-intensive and an estimated 3000–4000 hours are required to construct it.

Operational history
In 1984, the GP-4 won the Grand Champion Custom Built and the Outstanding New Design awards at the Experimental Aircraft Association Airventure airshow in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

Specifications GP-4

See also

References

Homebuilt aircraft
GP-4
Single-engined tractor aircraft
Low-wing aircraft
1980s United States sport aircraft
Aircraft first flown in 1984
Inventel. Inventel was a French company developing consumer electronics and communication systems, noted for domestic gateways and considered one of the primary architects of Triple play in Europe. Founded in 1990 in Paris by Jacques Lewiner and Eric Carreel, the company was acquired by Thomson SA in 2005.

History
Inventel was founded in 1990 by two researchers from  ESPCI ParisTech, Jacques Lewiner and Eric Carreel, who later co-founded Withings.  The company was successful at commercializing scientific research, and providing full product development (software, electronics, and mechanical) in-house.

In the 90’s Inventel succeeded in the pagers market with Tam Tam: a paging service using the ERMES standard, which was marketed by large operators.

In 1997, Inventel began its engineering activities in DECT. Since then, many Inventel features for DECT phones have been distributed by the major European operators. By 1999, Inventel was working on a device integrating wired and wireless voice and data.  The BlueDSL was released in 2001.  In 2001, Inventel accepted a €6 million investment from Banexi Ventures and Innovacom.

Inventel became the first major manufacturer of ADSL wireless secured access, with the DWB200 released in 2002.  Further ADSL modems for wireless hotspots and the consumer electronics market were developed, including the Livebox gateway which was distributed by France Telecom and several other European operators.

In March 2005, Thomson announced the acquisition of Inventel.  Based in the 5th arrondissement of Paris near the École supérieure de physique et de chimie industrielles de la ville de Paris, the company had around 75 employees when it was acquired by Thomson.

References

Electronics companies of France
Great Plains Aircraft Supply Company. Great Plains Aircraft Supply Company is an American aircraft manufacturer of experimental plans based primarily on the Volkswagen air-cooled engine. Great Plains provides VW engine conversions for use in experimental aircraft.

Great Plains has been selling and manufacturing conversions of VW engines since circa 1982. Among their offerings is the Great Plains Type 1 Front Drive engine series.

Great Plains also helds the rights to the Sonerai series of aircraft designed by John Monnett until 2015, when they were acquired by Sonerai Works LLC, of Franksville, Wisconsin. Previous owners of the design were INAV Experimental in 1987.

Aircraft

References

External links
http://www.sonerai.com
http://www.easyeagle1.com

Homebuilt aircraft
Aircraft engine manufacturers of the United States
Tropical EC-60043. Tropical EC-60043 was an electric-powered 4-seat city car produced by Tropical, a Greek company specializing in the development of electric and hydrogen-powered vehicles and machinery. The EC-60043, essentially an assembled version of a U.S. model, had a 5.2 hp (4 kW @ 48V) electric engine, a maximum speed of  and a maximum range of . As of 2018, the vehicles are no longer being sold.

External links
 Company website (archived) 

Cars of Greece
Electric city cars
Roll hardness tester. A roll hardness tester is a device to measure the roll hardness, hardness profile and hardness variation of paper rolls.

Method

In the preparation phase, the plunger, guide bar and guide disk are pushed forward by the compression spring. At the end of the movement the hammer mass is hooked by the pawl. During the loading phase the hammer is pushed towards the surface in a controlled movement. The hammer mass remains locked in place by the pawl. This has the effect of stretching the impact spring to put it under tension. 
Impact Rebound: At the very end of the movement, the pawl spring releases the hammer mass. The impact spring contracts causing the hammer mass to strike against the plunger. This is the impact. The hammer mass then rebounds back to the body of the hammer and distance travelled is recorded on the scale. 
The rebound distance depends directly on the hardness of the roll under test: 
A softer roll will absorb more of the impact energy and the rebound distance will be less.
A harder roll will reflect more of the impact energy and the rebound distance will increase.

Standards
 TAPPI T 834 om-07: Determination of containerboard roll hardness
 TAPPI TIP 1004-01: TAPPI Roll Number for inventory/tracking systems and bar codes

Application
Roll hardness is one of the most important parameters when deciding whether a paper roll is good or bad. A roll that is wound too softly can go out of round when handled. A roll that is wound too hard, on the other hand, can crack during transportation. These variations are difficult to detect. Above all, it is typically the variation in hardness across a given roll that relates most directly to such converting issues with soft edges being perhaps the biggest contributor.

See also
 Paper mill
 Pulp (paper)
 Tablet hardness testing

References

Hardness instruments