omniomni/omni-engineering huggingface dataset:
DeSoto Bridge. DeSoto Bridge was a trussed deck-arch bridge that spanned the Mississippi River in St. Cloud, Minnesota. It was built in 1958 by the Minnesota Department of Transportation.  The bridge was painted black, which is typical for railroad bridges but unusual for a highway bridge.  The river banks on either side are relatively high, so the bridge required deep trusses which arched over the river.

After the collapse of the I-35W Mississippi River bridge in Minneapolis on August 1, 2007, Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty ordered the DeSoto Bridge and two other bridges in Minnesota to be inspected. The three bridges have a design similar to that of the former I-35W bridge.

The bridge was inspected on August 3, 2007 and found to be structurally sound.  However, on March 20, 2008, four gusset plates were found to be bent.  The bridge was closed indefinitely as a precaution and demolished in October 2008.

After inspections by the Minnesota Department of Transportation and the National Transportation Safety Board, it was determined that the DeSoto Bridge should be replaced. The replacement project started in September 2008 and was originally projected to be completed by June 2010.  The new replacement bridge, named the Granite City Crossing, opened October 29, 2009.

See also
List of crossings of the Upper Mississippi River

References
General references
 
Cited references

External links
 Minnesota Department of Transportation - Hwy 23 Bridge in St. Cloud

Bridges completed in 1958
Bridges over the Mississippi River
Buildings and structures demolished in 2008
Buildings and structures in St. Cloud, Minnesota
Open-spandrel deck arch bridges in the United States
Demolished bridges in the United States
Former road bridges in Minnesota
Truss bridges in the United States
Metal bridges in the United States
1958 establishments in Minnesota
2008 disestablishments in Minnesota
VDL Bova. VDL Bova was a luxury coachbuilder based in Eindhoven, in The Netherlands which began building coaches in 1931. In particular, it is well known for the Bova Futura, a streamlined coach usually powered by a DAF engine, which was first introduced in the 1980s and is still in production as of 2018 as the VDL Futura. 

In 1878 Jacob D. Bots founded a timber business in Valkenswaard. When he died, he left the business to his eldest son Simon who first introduced the name Bova, which was derived from Bots Valkenswaard.

In 1931 the company began building coaches, and in 1969 introduced the Benelux, a self-supporting integral coach. The company was purchased by VDL Groep in 2003, who also owned the Berkhof, Jonckheere and VDL Bus Chassis brands. From 2010 the individual brands were discontinued and VDL Bova became part of VDL Bus & Coach.

Products

Integral Buses and Coaches
 Benelux (coach/interurban, replaced by Europa)
 Europa (coach, replaced by Futura)
 Futura (coach/interurban, replaced by VDL Futura 2)
 Magiq (coach, derivative of Futura, replaced by VDL Futura 2)
 X-press (low-floor bus with rear engine, only 16 built in 1980)

Bus and Coach Chassis
 Calypso (coach, with Europa underframe and Duple bodywork)

Bus and Coach Bodywork
Initially Bova built bus bodywork on a variety of chassis, but switched to building integral vehicles in the early 1970s.  After becoming part of VDL Groep some chassis/bodywork combinations of DAF/Berkhof heritage were sold as complete vehicles under the VDL Bova name:
 Lexio (interurban bus based on VDL SD400 chassis, replaced by VDL Citea)
 Synergy (double-deck coach based on VDL SBR4000 chassis, rebadged from Berkhof Axial 100.  Replaced by VDL Futura FDD2)

References

External links
 
Bova website

VDL Groep
Vehicle manufacturing companies established in 1931
Vehicle manufacturing companies disestablished in 2010
2010 disestablishments in the Netherlands
Dutch companies established in 1931
List of non-building structure types. A nonbuilding structure, often referred to simply as a structure, is any built structure that is not a building, i.e. not designed for continuous human occupancy. The term is particularly used by architects, structural engineers, and mechanical engineers to distinguish load-bearing structures not designed for continuous human occupancy.

Examples
 Aerial lift pylons
 Avalanche dams
 Barriers
 Beehive stone
 Blast furnaces
 Boat lifts
 Brick kilns
 Bridges and bridge-like structures (aqueducts, overpasses, trestles, viaducts, etc.)
 Bus stops
 Canals
 Aqueduct
 Acequia
 Carports
 Chimneys and flue-gas stacks
 Coke ovens
 Communications towers
 Conservatories
 Covered bridges
 Dams
 Docks
 Dolphins
 Driveways
 Electricity grids
 Elevators
 Fountains
 Ferris wheels
 Ferry slips
 Flumes
 Footpaths
 Fortifications
 Fractionating towers
 Garden
 Gates
 Gate guardian
 Pylon
 Granaries
 Greenhouses
 Hayracks
 Hay barracks
 Headframes
 Infrastructures
 Landmarks
 Marinas
 Monoliths
 Megaliths
 Memorials
 Monuments
 Mounds
 Stupas
 Offshore oil platforms (except for the production and housing facilities)
 Oil depots
 Oil platforms
 Piers
 Pitch
 Pyramids
 Radio masts and towers
 Railroads
 Ramadas
 Retaining walls
 Roads
 Roller coasters
 Sheds
 Ski lifts
 Silos
 Storage tanks
 Street lights
 Street signs
 Swimming pools
 Structures designed to support, contain or convey liquid or gaseous matter, including
 Cooling towers
 Distillation equipment and structural supports at chemical and petrochemical plants and oil refineries
 Tank farms
 Thoroughfares
 Tombs
 Towers of some types
 Lattice towers
 Obelisks
 Tramways and aerial tramways
 Transmission towers
 Triumphal arches
 Tunnels
 Underwater habitats
 Water towers
 Wharves
 Windmills

Exceptions

Some structures that are occupied periodically and would otherwise be considered "nonbuilding structures" are categorized as "buildings" for life and fire safety purposes:
 Aviation control towers
 Cruise ships
 Factories
 Kiosks
 Lighthouses
 Outhouses
 Power stations
 Refineries
 Warehouses

See also
 Architectural engineering

References

nonbuilding
Samuel Leeds Allen. Samuel Leeds Allen (May 5, 1841 – March 28, 1918) was the founder of S.L. Allen & Company in Philadelphia. He was the inventor of, and his company manufactured, both the Flexible Flyer sled and Planet Jr farm and garden equipment. For over one hundred years these products were the best selling and most famous market gardening tools and American sleds. During his lifetime and for the first half of the 20th century  S.L. Allen was far more renowned for his company's seed drills and cultivating equipment than the sleds.

Biography

Allen was born on May 5, 1841, in Philadelphia to Quaker parents: John Casdorp Allen, a prominent druggist, and Rebecca Smith Leeds, his wife.

In 1861, Allen moved to Ivystone, his father's farm near the community of Westfield in Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey.

On November 22, 1866, Samuel Leeds Allen and Sarah Hooton Roberts, the daughter of Elisha Roberts and Elizabeth West Hooton, were married in the Friends Meeting House, Moorestown, New Jersey.

Allen's revolutionary sled was developed and tested at Ivystone. Stokes Hill, a popular sledding area located next to Breidenhart, Allen's Moorestown home, has been mistakenly identified as the "birthplace" of the Flexible Flyer sled. Allen actually built his house in 1894, five years after the Flexible Flyer was introduced. However, the early versions of the sled were likely tested on Stokes Hill, which led to Allen fine tuning his invention. His Sled Patent No. 381,655, dated April 24, 1888, lists Allen as being from Cinnaminson, New Jersey. Another of his sled patents, Patent No. 797,165, dated Aug. 15, 1905, lists Allen as being from Moorestown, New Jersey.

Legacy
Allen was awarded almost 300 patents for a wide range of farming machinery, including the fertilizer drill, seed drill, potato digger, cultivator, furrower, pulverizer, grass edger and numerous other farm implements. In order to provide year-round employment for his workers producing farm equipment, Mr. Allen sought to create a product that could be sold during the winter. His passion for sledding led him to develop a series of sleds and sled improvements. Allen was issued U.S. Patent number 408,681 on August 13, 1889, for the Flexible Flyer.

Notes

Bibliography
Allen, Elizabeth Roberts (1920). Samuel L. Allen; intimate recollections and letters. Philadelphia: Franklin Printing Co.
DeCou, George (1929). Moorestown and her neighbors; historical sketches. Philadelphia: Harris & Partridge, Inc.

External links
United States Patent and Trademark Office: The Story of the Flexible Flyer
New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame
Biographical information about Samuel L. Allen
Sledding at Westtown

1841 births
1918 deaths
20th-century American inventors
Quakers from Pennsylvania
People from Cinnaminson Township, New Jersey
People from Moorestown, New Jersey
Westtown School alumni
Electromagnetic weapon. Electromagnetic weapon may refer to:

 Electromagnetic pulse (EMP), a natural or man-made transient electromagnetic disturbance
 Directed-energy weapon (DEW), a ranged weapon that emits highly focused energy

See also
 Electroshock weapon, a less-lethal weapon that utilizes an electric shock to incapacitate a target
 Magnetic weapon, one that uses magnetic fields to accelerate or stop projectiles, or to focus charged particle beams
Injured Engine. Injured Engine is a game released for the Apple II and Commodore 64 by Imagic. The player must diagnose problems in a simulated automobile engine. The game aims to teach how engines work and how engine parts relate to each other. It was created by an auto mechanic and a graphic artist. Imagic demonstrated it at the 1984 Consumer Electronics Show.

Gameplay

Reception 
Rhea J. Grundy of Home Computer Magazine compared it to a Revell V-8 engine model and said the game teaches an "increased awareness of your automobile" rather than the skill necessary to make repairs. Mark Cotone of Commodore Microcomputers wrote that Injured Engine will not replace mechanics or detailed manuals, but it can aid in learning proper maintenance. Joyce Worley of Electronic Games called it an easy game that can help novices to talk more knowledgeably to mechanics. Kiplinger's Personal Finance called it an easy way to learn the basics of car engines.

References

External links 
 

1984 video games
Apple II games
Children's educational video games
Commodore 64 games
Multiplayer and single-player video games
Puzzle video games
Video games developed in the United States
Elevator mechanic. An elevator mechanic is someone who constructs, modernizes, repairs or services conveyances. Typically, elevator mechanics work on elevators, escalators, dumbwaiters, wheelchair lifts, moving walkways and other equipment providing vertical transportation. In many places, particularly in North America, elevator mechanics belong to a company called Elevator Constructors. Labor unions have a large impact on the industry, depending on the country. Mechanics make an average annual wage of US$70,910 (as of May 2010). Elevator mechanic jobs are expected to grow of 13% from 2014 to 2024.

Work environment
Elevator installers are usually required to lift and carry heavy parts and equipment. They are also often required to work overtime due to demand for quick repairs and emergencies.Elevators can stop working at any time, therefore many workers are on call 24 hours a day.

Elevator installers go through formal apprenticeships to learn the trade. Most US states require a license.

References

Mechanic
Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations
Mechanics (trade)
GamePC Consortium. The GamePC Consortium was an ad hoc PC industry standards organisation in the mid-1990s.  It was founded through the joint efforts of ATI's Ken Nicholson and Diamond Multimedia's Glenn Coffman.  The two competing companies shared a common interest in the evolution of PC games and agreed that the PC graphics industry was limited by a lack of standards.  At that time, the vast majority of games for PCs were written for MS-DOS and had no standardized way to access expanded memory, accelerated graphics or digital audio capabilities.

Based on the notion of "a rising tide lifts all boats", the two companies established the GamePC Consortium as a way for PC hardware manufacturers and PC game software publishers to combine their efforts to establish game API standards that would enable PCs to compete with successful console game systems such as the Sega Genesis.

The GamePC Consortium's member companies included 80 of the leading entertainment hardware and software PC companies of the time, including Intel, nVidia, Rendition, Sigma Designs, ATI, Diamond Multimedia, S3 Graphics, Trident, Cirrus Logic, Rendermorphics and Lucas Arts. Microsoft, most notably, refused to recognize the GamePC Consortium, though Alex St. John, Microsoft's first game evangelist, spoke at several of the meetings.

One of the consortium's early efforts resulted in establishing a 2D graphics 'manifesto' that called for the creation of a Windows graphics API that offered the following new capabilities:

 The ability for games to change the display mode of any supported display resolution or color-depth without requiring a system reboot.
 The ability for games to read and write graphics memory, including the framebuffer.   This allowed the CPU to draw directly onto the screen, hence the origin of the name "DirectDraw."  Direct access to screen memory was not possible under the Windows GDI architecture.
 The ability for games to allocate offscreen memory and to store graphics data in offscreen memory.
 The ability for games to make use of the blitter
 The ability for games to utilize page flipping
 Support for transparent blts as a technique for implementing 2D Sprite (computer graphics)

The consortium expressed its intent to create such an industry standard API for Windows if Microsoft did not. Microsoft embraced all of the proposed features of the manifesto and added considerably more with the first release of DirectDraw in DirectX 1.0.

The GamePC Consortium was significant in being one of the early examples of an industry consortium influencing the development of a standard API in the otherwise proprietary Windows operating system. It was also significant in prompting the game industry's rapid adoption of the nascent DirectX standard.

The GamePC Consortium disbanded when it became clear that Microsoft had begun to undertake the architectural, technical and marketing responsibilities necessary to further Windows game standards. In 2008, a similar organization called the PC Gaming Alliance was formed.

References

 Richter, J.  "Life As A '90s Game Developer Must Be Tough", PC Graphics Report, November 8, 1994.

Standards organizations in the United States
Cholesteric liquid crystal. A cholesteric liquid-crystal display (ChLCD) is a display containing a liquid crystal with a helical structure and which is therefore chiral. Cholesteric liquid crystals are also known as chiral nematic liquid crystals.  They organize in layers with no positional ordering within layers, but a director axis which varies with layers.  The variation of the director axis tends to be periodic in nature.  The period of this variation (the distance over which a full rotation of 360° is completed) is known as the pitch, p. This pitch determines the wavelength of light which is reflected (Bragg reflection).

The technology is characterized by stable states i.e. focal conic state (dark state) and planar state (bright state). Displays based on this technology are called “bistable” and don’t need any power to maintain the information (zero power). Because of the reflective nature of the ChLCD, these displays can be perfectly read under sunlight conditions.

Examples of compounds known to form cholesteric phases are hydroxypropyl cellulose and cholesteryl benzoate.

Some companies, such as Chiral Photonics, have begun to explore CLCs as the basis for photonic devices.

A US company, Kent Displays, has developed "no power" Liquid Crystal Displays using Polymer Stabilized Cholesteric Liquid Crystals: these are known as ChLCD screens. A drawback of ChLCD screens is their slow refresh rate, especially at low temperatures. In 2009, Kent demonstrated the use of a ChLCD to cover the entire surface of a mobile phone, allowing it to change colours, and keep that colour even when power is cut off.

The Industrial Technology Research Institute has developed a flexible ePaper called i2R based on ChLCD technology. ITRI

The German company BMG MIS (formerly AEG MIS) has developed “Geameleon”- ChLCDs full color and monochrome in various sizes and resolutions. These ChLCDs can be used in extremely wide temperature applications i.e. for outdoor application. Various update versions can be applied to achieve a reasonable update time even at very low temperatures. Because of its very low power consumption, this technology is highly preferred to be used in self-sustaining applications (solar power applications).

References

Liquid crystals
Gérard Brachet. Gérard Brachet (born 27 October 1944 in Lyon) is a French space scientist.

Career
Brachet earned an engineering degree from the Ecole Nationale Superieure d'Aeronautique in 1967 and a MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from the University of Washington in 1968. He began his professional career at the Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) in France, and from 1972 to 1982 was successively Head of the Orbit Determination and Spacecraft Dynamics Department, the Scientific Programmes Division and the Application Programmes Division.  During this period he helped prepare and implement several major space programmes, at the European level and internationally. In particular he was the French signatory for the COSPAS-SARSAT programme for satellite-based search and rescue. He was also Chairman of ESA-PBEO, where he helped define the ERS-1 and ERS-2 EO programmes.

Brachet was directly involved in defining and developing the French SPOT satellite programme in 1978 and was principally responsible for setting up the SPOT IMAGE company to market their earth observation images. In 1982 Brachet was appointed chairman and chief executive officer of SPOT IMAGE and remained in this position until 1994. At the same time he was an advisor on space matters to the European Commission, and in 1991-2 he helped formulate space policy for the European Union.

From 1981 to 1989 Brachet was President of the Societe Française de Photogrammetrie et de Teledetection (French Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing). In 1992 he received the Brock Gold Medal Award, a prize that is awarded every four years by the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing. He is the only French person to have been distinguished in this way. In 1994, he received the Remote Sensing Society Award. He is a member of the International Astronautics Academy and a corresponding member of the Academie Nationale de l'Air et de l'Espace (National Air and Space Academy). Brachet is an Officier de l'Ordre national du Mérite (1997) and a Chevalier de la légion d'honneur (1986).

Brachet returned to CNES in 1994 where he was successively the Director for Programmes, Planning and Industrial Policy, and Scientific Director and Director General from July 1997 to December 2003. Brachet was also chairman of the international Committee on Earth Observation Satellites (CEOS), which gathers together 20 space agencies and 7 international organizations with the objective of coordinating Earth observation satellite programmes. Since January 2004 he has been a highly respected aerospace consultant. He is serving as a chairman of the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) from 2006 to 2007.

References

  https://web.archive.org/web/20110712235204/http://www.iafastro.com/index.html?title=Gerard_Brachet
  http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/IMG/pdf_Gerard_BRACHET-2.pdf
  http://www.ambafrance-uk.org/IMG/pdf_Gerard_BRACHET.pdf
  Interview 

1944 births
Living people
French aerospace engineers
20th-century French engineers
CNES directors
CNES researchers
Abary. Abary is a small community in the Mahaica-Berbice Region of Guyana, near the mouth of the Abary River,  from Georgetown. Abary is known for the Abary Bridge located on the Main Highway. The bridge was originally a railway bridge with a very steep grade. The bridge was designed by Joseph Walter Holder who also built the Demerara Harbour Bridge.

References

Populated places in Mahaica-Berbice
Grand potential. The grand potential or Landau potential or Landau free energy is a quantity used in statistical mechanics, especially for irreversible processes in open systems.
The grand potential is the characteristic state function for the grand canonical ensemble.

Definition

Grand potential is defined by

where U is the internal energy, T is the temperature of the system, S is the entropy, μ is the chemical potential, and N is the number of particles in the system.

The change in the grand potential is given by

where P is pressure and V is volume, using the fundamental thermodynamic relation (combined first and second thermodynamic laws);

When the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium, ΦG is a minimum. This can be seen by considering that dΦG is zero if the volume is fixed and the temperature and chemical potential have stopped evolving.

Landau free energy

Some authors refer to the grand potential as the Landau free energy or Landau potential and write its definition as:

named after Russian physicist Lev Landau, which may be a synonym for the grand potential, depending on system stipulations. For homogeneous systems, one obtains .

Homogeneous systems (vs. inhomogeneous systems)
In the case of a scale-invariant type of system (where a system of volume  has exactly the same set of microstates as  systems of volume ), then when the system expands new particles and energy will flow in from the reservoir to fill the new volume with a homogeneous extension of the original system.
The pressure, then, must be constant with respect to changes in volume:
 

and all extensive quantities (particle number, energy, entropy, potentials, ...) must grow linearly with volume, e.g. 

In this case we simply have , as well as the familiar relationship  for the Gibbs free energy.
The value of  can be understood as the work that can be extracted from the system by shrinking it down to nothing (putting all the particles and energy back into the reservoir). The fact that   is negative implies that the extraction of particles from the system to the reservoir requires energy input.

Such homogeneous scaling does not exist in many systems. For example, when analyzing the ensemble of electrons in a single molecule or even a piece of metal floating in space, doubling the volume of the space does double the number of electrons in the material.
The problem here is that, although electrons and energy are exchanged with a reservoir, the material host is not allowed to change.
Generally in small systems, or systems with long range interactions (those outside the thermodynamic limit), .

See also 
 Gibbs energy
 Helmholtz energy

References

External links 
 Grand Potential (Manchester University)

Thermodynamics
Lev Landau