Genius Inventions: Technical Marvels That Will Shape Tomorrow | Full Series | FD Engineering

mechanical and aerospace engineer Philip Watts from California marine biologist Frank Fish from Pennsylvania and filmmaker and entrepreneur Steven duer from Toronto three men thousands of miles apart so what connects them all we all love the sea and we all love animals we're all interested in the relationship between biology and Technology we all wanted to build something new and sustainable we founded a company we called whale power efficient turbine blades copied from nature it was a chance occurrence over 35 years ago that ultimately led to the invention on which their company is based I was on vacation in Boston and went into this shop that had all this animal art and in the center of the shop was was a pedestal with a little figurine of humpback whales and I looked at that and I saw that the Leading Edge of the flippers of the humpback had these bumps on them and that made no sense compared to what I knew about fluid mechanics and just looking at airplanes you always have a straight Leading Edge and so I had to know what was going on with these whales and why they had these curious bumps from then on the question really got him thinking he watched humpback whales in the water they Glide and turn lightly and elegantly on their own axis even though they're as large and as heavy as a bus 7 years later fish had the chance to examine the flipper of a stranded humpback he felt that the bump on the flipper called a tubic was somehow related to the whale's swimming skills for the humpback whale having the two Les Del lays stall to higher angles and so the whale can develop lift and thus turn tightly if it didn't have the tubes and its flipper stalled it would be like driving on a road that's covered by ice and when you take a turn instead of following the curve what would happen is you would go off tangentially he recreated the almost 2 m long Flipper on the computer and also made an x-ray image his hypothesis was confirmed but how could he prove it and I went around to a number of people and uh I got some interest but I never got much interest at all and then what happened is I met this person Phil Watts Phil watts is not a biologist but an engineer a man who loves the sea and loves animals with his expertise in mechanical engineering and in aviation he was just the man for the job I had already been working in biomechanics and so I understood uh the importance of biomimicry about drawing engineering ideas from Evolution and uh when Frank shared that humpback whales were the only whales that had bumpy leading edges on their flippers I immediately realized that that could have some important engineering consequences so I ran some fluid Dynamic simulations of wings with tubes and wings without tubes and the tubes increase the lift and simultaneously reduce the drag and for uh an engineer who works on Wing performance that's a spectacular achievement to be able to increase the lift and reduce the drag at the same time further investigations followed now with several researchers involved soon it became clear that these were bumps with benefits to uh Focus the flow between the bumps and that focused flow helps keep the flow attached to the wing and it also helps isolate the lift in between the tubes so if you have a bump here and a bump here we're going to get a high lift region in between and what improved the performance in the water could also bring big benefits in the [Music] air and so what the tubes do is they prevent The Flipper or any Wing from stalling stall is when uh the wing or flipper would lose its lift now for a whale that's not a big deal because the animal is neutrally buoyant in the water so it's not going to fall out of the water for a plane if it stalls then you start falling out of the [Music] sky the marine biologist and the engineer jointly published their research results and they formulated a first patent for tubic technology 700 km away Canadian journalist and entrepreneurs Steven deer read about their work and was instantly captivated I was struck by the fact that this totally changed what we thought we understood about management I was so taken by this that I tried to contact the scientists so I called Frank and Phil and we were talking about how this all worked and I asked them what they were doing with it commercially they called me back the next day and said can we set up a company with you and we were off and running the whale Power Team developed prototypes and tested them they measured 20% Energy savings improved deficiency greater stability and greater durability as a result a second patent was filed this time covering Europe the US and several other countries our tests have shown that blades with tubes are more energy efficient and quieter than standard blades and so we can use this for applications such as wind turbin fans compressors and pumps our plans with wheelpower were to make designs and prototypes that could demonstrate the technology which we would license to manufacturers and that's what we've been doing from small fans for cooling computers to larger ceiling mounted fans retrofit models for turbines and wind farms and much more one is already under license the others are planned for the future tubercle technology is both sustainable and unique and it owes its existence to three men who were inspired by the secrets of nature from animals we can learn so much we just have to look carefully tubes are a technology for the future they'll allow us to create a sustainable planet and allow future generations to thrive we were able to get an understanding of what was possible because nature had done so much work on this [Music] malamu a Swedish Metropolis full of fascinating contrasts tradition and innovation water and land old buildings and modern architecture and melma is where the young industrial designer mad majubi lives and works even as a student he realized that he was more interested in what went on inside a building than in how it looked from the outside for who how are we going to use our Vital resources in the future water is one of our most important ones so we must f focus on [Music] it all our buildings are permeated by an invisible and highly dense network of water pipes the arteries that Supply our cities and passing through those pipes every second are vast amounts of purified water domestic consumption of fresh water in Western Europe is around 200 L per person per day for things like washing up up cooking and cleaning in a city like Malmo with around 300,000 inhabitants that adds up to 60 million lers every day one of the biggest wasters of water is the shower only 10% of the water gets contaminated by soap and dirt the remaining 90% heated and almost clean drains away into the sewage system as so-called waste water so we need to save water but who would invent an entire shower to do just that he did a conventional shower uses more than 100 liters of water in 10 minutes and then you also need 5 kwatt hours of energy to heat the water up to body temperature our show needs fewer than 5 L of water and less than 1 kilowatt hour because we recycle the water but just because saving water is the number one priority doesn't mean the shower should be any less enjoyable the design is set this isn't just about creating a product that saves more water and energy it also has to make showering even more comfortable and enjoyable here you can see that we use an especially large shower hit with lots of water flowing through it making showering as comfortable as possible interestingly enough despite the large shower head a great deal of water is saved the trick a closed loop shower system the interior is a cleverly designed recycling system a kind of miniature wastewater treatment plant the water flows from the pipe into the shower head at the drain a sensor checks 20 times every second to see if the quality of the water is sufficient for cleaning if so its recycling Journey Begins a micro filter strains out larger particles such as skin or hair another filter removes impurities in the Nano range ultraviolet light kills harmful germs then the water only a few degrees cooler at this point passes through a heater which warms up until it reaches a pleasant shower temperature puf IED in real time the water is now even cleaner than that in normal Taps and is ready for the next shower again and again the inventor's technology is a completely new approach it's currently the most efficient shower system for saving water and energy in the world only contaminated water is exchanged immediately the rest is recycled to keep things hygienic the filters are exchanged every 200 showers or so feel the filters are easy to exchange and hold around 20,000 L So a family would need to replace them around three times a year mau's shower system has already been installed in several hotels as well as in hospitals and gyms that is wherever a lot of people shower and hygiene is especially important one of our first customers was a hospital one day they had an outbreak of Legionnaire's Disease and all their water pipes were contaminated with bacteria that wasn't the case with the shower's weed Supply though thanks to the closed loop cleaning process in our [Music] system mau's shower of the future is also smart water consumption and also service data such as filter changes are recorded digitally and can be easily monitored by users One smartphone app for instance even shows how much water has been [Music] saved the inspiration from ajju's invention came from his time at University when he studied space travel for a mission to Mars how can you generate clean water without having to take gallons of it with you into [Music] space I was involved in a project with NASA at the University of Lun we wondered whether we could live under the same conditions on Mars as we do on Earth then I realized that we'd have to use our resources as cleverly as possible and that's what we're doing here the name of his company orbital systems is a reminder of that time but mau's developments are intended for people on Earth his inventions are the subject of several granted patents or patent applications relating to different ele ments of the system over 50 employees are now working on further development and distribution so the shower system is becoming less expensive all the time and can be adopted worldwide since showers use up onethird of the water in a household saving water with this technology is already having a huge impact in more and more markets with rapid Urban growth worldwide water scarcity will become an increasingly urgent problem impacting all levels of the population and that is precisely why Mead mau's shower is an invention for the [Music] [Applause] [Music] future wind it's an unlimited source of energy but could we use it to meet the power requirements of the entire planet we can try a lifetime of trying began with a simple weekend trip to the seaside taken by a father and his 12-year-old son stor it was a stormy day and we wanted to watch the big waves when we reach the dunes we really had to battle against the wind you could just lean into the wind for support and almost fly along with it I've never forgotten the sheer power of it I had a feeling that it could surely be put to some kind of good use his feeling was right from that day forward Henrik stale who is now 61 devoted his entire career to wind energy as an engineer he found a way of generating enery far out to seea he developed rotor blades up to 80 M long that were formed as a single piece and he made climate neutral energy available to everyone but first things first it All Began on the Family Farm in vilber they needed a solution the Farm's energy Supply was growing increasingly expensive after the 1973 oil crisis electricity became very expensive I was a student and felt there had to be a radical change we needed a windmill that would provide enough power for the entire farm so I started to build a small experimental one after that I built a wind turbine 3 m in diameter and we tested that and finally I built one 10 m in diameter and that supplied almost enough energy for the whole [Music] Farm this is the very first windmill I ever built it's made of two boards glued together and cut into the shape of a propeller and a 1 cm water pipe so you hold it in your hand like this and you can really feel the energy of the wind now you're talking these EXP experiments made him eager to continue in 1978 Henrik stale designed his first commercial turbine it's where it had three rotor blades that was far better than the conventional two they had back then the rotor blades were positioned at the front of the Tower and aimed into the wind automatically and the wind turbine also had a generator so it could slow down in a light wind and run quickly in a strong one to achieve a maximum degree of efficiency for the wind industry this this approach was a revolution the classic designs until then had been based on propellers from the aircraft industry henrik's turbine with three rotor blades was far more stable and efficient and it paved the way for the so-called Danish concept the dominant concept behind the design of wind farms from the 1980s right up to the present day the young Henrik steale kept on improving his turbines in the years that followed it was in 1991 that he finally realized a mammoth project the construction of the world's first ever offshore wind farm in vindu once again he designed the turbines and not only that when the quality of the rotor blades failed to live up to his standards Henrik steale came up with an entirely New Concept in the mid 1990s we had big problems the quality of the rotor blades at the time they consisted of two sections glued together and the glue connection was the weak point I concluded that the only radical solution was to dispense with the adhesive Bond entirely and to cast the rotor blades in a single piece instead and here's what his solution looks like from the inside it's called integral blade a rotor blade made of fiberglass formed as a single section up to 75 M long the blades sweep an area equal to 2 and 1/2 footall Fields a true feat of engineering there are no limits to Sale's ideas onshore or offshore even after officially retiring he developed the tetras Spar wind turbine platform and it's changing the industry his entire way of thinking yet again conventional Marine wind turbines are limited to water depths of 40 to 50 m that's why it's so hard to build offshore wind farms in say California or Japan they need floating Solutions there St Dale's idea is to manufacture the equipment on the coast and then to tow it by ship to its destination there the ballast tanks are flooded with water making them sink so the platform is not fixed rigidly to the Sea Flor but anchored using cables that saves time and money Stell estimates that these floating wind turbines could reduce the cost of offshore energy by up to 75% so could wind energy really cover the power requirements of the entire planet it hasn't yet yet but if it ever does that success will largely be due to Henry stale and his [Music] inventions the light of a laser a fascinating phenomenon electromagnetic waves intense sharply focused and sometimes destructive a light of almost mythical power for me laser light is the most beautiful light in the world but for a long time Ula Keller never dreamt that this light would become such an important part of her life and lead to such a great scientific [Music] career with reading and writing I just messed everything up I kept getting it all wrong and my work got covered in red ink but I was really good at mathematics it really interested me and I enjoyed it and even though I was a girl growing up in the middle of Switzerland I was still able to pursue maths and physics Ula Keller's Talent was recognized and encouraged she convinced her father to let her study Physics at eth Zurich her successful graduation was followed by a scholarship at Stanford University in California the young Swiss woman then landed in the most renowned research and development laboratory in the world at that time AT&T Bell Laboratories in New Jersey [Music] USA when I got there and saw the lab it was totally full of junk so the first thing I had to do was clean it all up but it didn't really bother me because I wanted to do my own research and get something of my own off the ground actually I had complete freedom to go in any direction that interested me on the one hand it was a bit scary but on the other it was incredibly exciting once exponent the lab table where OA Keller spent four years researching now stands in her Institute in zeric after all it's the table where she revolutionized laser physics for the first time in principle a laser functions like this if you pump energy into a certain medium a crystal for example it releases that energy in the form of light with the help of two mirrors the light is reflected and repeatedly sent back through the crystal this creates intense extremely uniform laser light finally one of the mirrors allows some of the light through a continuous laser ever since the laser was discovered people have wanted to transform materials with it but a continuous laser heats up material too much and damages it the solution pulsed laser light but for a long time the technology for that was far too complicated the lasers were also unstable this was the exact problem that Ula Keller wanted to solve at the AT&T Bell Laboratories and she succeeded by installing a small small section of semiconductor into the system that had the same effect as a mirror when laser beams are created some peaks of higher energy are generated and the semiconductor mirror responds to them in a particular way the more energy the light contains the better the mirror reflects it these high energy Peaks take precedence they're sent back and forth between the mirrors and are Amplified when they reach a threshold the system emits some of the laser light as a short pulse Ula Kella called this laser seam seam seam is an acronym it's a semiconductor saturable absorber mirror seam makes everything much more stable shorter and better and far easier too of course the entire iPhone wouldn't exist without these short pulse lasers laser seam has made many things possible the principle is used today in almost all areas of industry in welding in The Cutting of materials in Optical communication and in medical technology seesam is a scientific sensation it was Ula Keller's first big success just one year after inventing it the young physicist was awarded a professorship back home in Zurich at first I thought it was a joke during my entire time at eth Zurich I had never seen any female professors also I was extremely young I was only 33 years old but the conversation got more serious and in the end they finally made me an offer I simply couldn't refuse so I became the first woman to be awarded a professorship in the Natural Sciences Keller and her team improved the sisam technology even further then she decided to try to produce the shortest laser pulses in the world using entirely new technology the physicist was constantly pushing the limits of what was possible deeper Research into Laser Technology finally gave Keller a completely new idea here a clock no not an elegant traditional Swiss time piece more of a monstrous measuring device using laser light as the most accurate secondhand in the world or rather an atto second hand the clock measures in billionths of a billionth of a second light needs about a second to reach the moon from Earth but light only needs one at a second to get from one atom to the next in other words we had entered the world of atoms the world of quantum mechanics and that's why atos time is also referred to as quantum mechanical time the atoc clock enables us to see inside worlds that were previously invisible it helps us to understand the hidden secrets of life so that they can one day be imitated by technology in in fact the atto clock could even be used to investigate our entire physical world [Music] viw with these clocks we're also hoping that at some point we'll be able to measure whether our natural constants really are constant after all after her time at University together with her husband Ula Keller ran a company of her own they manufacture sisam lasers for the computer and smartphone Industries hold several patents and were recently acquired by an American company the startup now has access to the global market another company is being planned with a new patented Laser Technology her lasers will make it possible to examine the skies far more precisely in the search for a second Earth Ula Keller where will light lead her next [Music] this is Alex kipman software engineer and inventor at Microsoft in Seattle USA group of cameras inir these are kipman is working on a technology that we only know from science fiction what you see around is that we'll have 106 cameras there's 53 IR cameras 53 normal high resolution cameras there's microphones all around so we can capture beautiful spatial audio kipman wants to place the laws of space and time on hold and then beam people from one place to another to do that here in the so-called holographic capture Studio they will create three-dimensional test images the object to be beamed is the master himself we had a dream about freeing ourselves from the footage of the 106 cameras a 3D model is calculated and then transferred to a meeting room a few doors away and here he is kipman as a hologram talking to his colleagues we wanted to invent an entirely new way of operating then we reconstruct kipman and his team haven't managed beaming in real time just yet the data processing still takes too long but basically the technology [Music] works at the heart of it all are these futuristic smart glasses called the hollow lens a product to wow the masses unlike conventional VR or virtual reality glasses these ones are intended to fuse the real and Virtual Worlds into one Microsoft calls it mixed [Music] reality you see through the real world it's unlike any other device out there where you're either looking through a screen or you actually don't get to see the real world virtual objects that can be positioned spun and moved around inside a space just as if they were part of the real world that's the vision of mixed reality the only question is how are the glasses supposed to manage all of that feature number one the sensors they are constantly measuring what the wearer is doing and what the space around him looks like this is the depth camera that shifts inside of the hollow lens right here on the sensor bar it has four different light sources which means it's able to do spatial mapping and semantic understanding of the spaces with you know what we'll call Long throw um lasers here on the bottom and it does also short throw um illumination so that we can do things like human understanding things like gesture recognitions or hand tracking the sensors are the eyes of the glasses but all their data would be useless without a powerful computer processor even your best inclass available mobile processor out there even today is not capable of processing terabytes of data per second that these sensors are giving you and then translating them into artificial intelligence which is what it takes for you to both be able to see a hologram or interact with it so we had to invent a special piece of silicon we call it the hpu perhaps the most important feature the lenses tiny screens hidden inside the glasses uh most people think that you know we can just project an image on the lens um that's actually not the case um as a matter of fact if you put your finger right near your ey eye you can't focus that close so we actually have to form the images on the back of your eye much like the real world happens two tiny light projectors on the bridge of the glasses send millions of light rays into lenses 240 times a second the light rays are distributed there as far down as the lower third and from there the rays are directed on towards the eye so if you put it in front of your eye think about light expanding this way this way and then escaping when it hits total internal reflection and coming this way to the back of your eyes and that's how the light rays create the virtual image that the viewer sees but at the same time the real world remains visible Beyond these lenses are the key to fusing the real world and the virtual world into [Music] one the technology is still in the development stages Microsoft says that about 50,000 copies have been sold so far but many believe in the potential of these smart glasses experts are predicting that over the next four years the market for mixed reality applications will grow to over 70 billion EUR becoming three times larger than the market for virtual reality products but why in contrast to the closed virtual reality glasses mixed reality ones offer far more potential applications Architects and designers can project their models directly onto a space manuals for complicated devices can be brought into the real world even experts can be brought in directly whenever help is [Music] needed this technology will be uh something that transforms the way that we communicate in a pretty profound way I'm from Brazil and my entire family is in Brazil and and you know my daughter my wife are here in the United States and I do believe and I can't wait to have my daughter you know just playing doll in the morning in her room with her little cousins in Brazil and they forget for a moment that there's any technology involved hitman's inventive genius has already earned him numerous patents including three European ones for the sensor technology in the hollow lens he won't stop working towards his vision mixed reality the complete Fusion of the digital world with the real [Music] one you can find them inside computers smartphones cars household appliances and robots microchips our digital world would be impossible without them and they're getting smarter all the time in fact every 2 years their performance doubles but conventional technology is reaching its Technical and economic limits to pack even more electronic switches and circuits onto even smaller microchips for the engineer Eric lobra and the physicist vadin banin it's obvious light is setting the limits microchips are made on Silicon Wafers by exposing their surface to light like a film a process known as photolithography each chip uh consists of billions of transistors so and you cannot carve them with a hand what you basically do is you make a pattern which you want to project on the w and liography is that as a machine which projects this pattern on the waer the smaller the wavelength the smaller the lines we can produce the current generation of chips is made with light with a wavelength of 193 nanometers shorter wavelengths just don't work anymore with normal lasers it's impossible to make better chips using that method this limitation was already predicted 20 years ago and that's exactly why vadin banin and Eric lstra worked on the development of a completely new tech [Music] technology extreme ultraviolet lithography or euvl for short however euvl first needed a new light source a high-powered laser was fired onto tiny drops of tin heated up to 500,000 de this process emits extreme ultraviolet light with a wavelength of only 13.5 nanom this makes it possible to create electronic structures 5 millionths of a millimeter in size on a wafer however putting the light to work inside a new machine was anything but easy because it gets absorbed by the air and [Music] glass means that we have to go to go into high vacuum systems which we didn't do before and nobody did and we need to use Optics to uh projection illumination and projection Optics to project the mask on the wafer and normal Optics doesn't work in this wavelength we have to make a mirrors and not just mirrors but multi miror we do in an instance and miracles take a little bit longer the reflecting material uh to make it is not that difficult to make it efficient is very difficult the game was to make your mirrors so that they really reflect only the E and not all the other wavelengths the mirrors that capture the light and then guide it through the scanner also need Extreme Performance and they also have to be incredibly smooth for comparison's sake if this mirror was the size of Germany any unevenness on its surface would need to be no more than 1 mm high and there was a further challenge our big enemy are particles in the system and even if one particle of dust will get on the um our musk and will be projected on uh on the wafer then the chip will not work and when we talk about the particle of dust we talk about a particle of the size of 30 40 nanometers which is uh more than thousand times smaller than ha size the solution a fine membrane to keep away the dust particles extremely thin but still very robust but at first nobody knew how to produce this material I was watching a um documentary about how they make uh the swords in Japan and what they do there they make us the sort with a a lot of layers of the steel and next day I talked about with a colleague of mine who was uh producing this Pro uh thin thin membrane he said said well that's a good idea let's try this he made a phone call and in 2 weeks we had the first sample like the Japanese katana swords the membrane now consists of several ultra thin layers these keep dust particles away from the mask but they still allow the extreme ultraviolet light through to expose the [Music] wafer it took 20 years to develop extreme ultraviolet lithography more than 1,000 people worked on it at asml alone without patents developments like these would be quite [Music] impossible you need patterns to secure that you can do uh can use your own inventions that you can do what you want that you have your hands free when the machine will produce the first chip in a mobile device or however it will be kind of a quiet and life fulfillment extreme ultraviolet lithography is now ready for the market in the future 256 GB will fit on a microchip the size of a fingernail and it will hardly consume any electricity at all technology for a billion Euro business the air we breathe has not been clean for a long time too many cars too many emissions the combustion of diesel produces especially harmful and invisible toxins nitrogen oxides they damage the respiratory tract according to the World Health Organization 75,000 people across Europe die each year from the consequences making the air not just a bit cleaner but really clean in the future that's the vision of this man the Dane 2A johanneson together with his team developed a revolutionary system to eliminate pollutants from diesel combustion already inside the car a key technology that has numerous [Music] benefits it's an important invention it not only leads to a very low nitrogen oxide value in the vehicle exhaust the engine can also run at its optimal operating temperature leading to a low CO2 value 15 years ago Tu johanneson started doing research while still at the Technical University of Denmark he's now one of the founders of the company to which the university transferred the patents for commercial development his colleague ulri quada is responsible for research and development while Tu johanneson himself is the chief technology officer this collaboration proved success ful as far back as their University days in the team they worked on the task of reducing vehicle emissions johanneson as a chemical engineer quada as a physicist for this they wanted to use a gas ammonia it can bind and reduce gases however for decades ammonia has been used in power plants to reduce nox ammonia can be processed there in its pure form but using gaseous ammonia in vehicles poses a big safety risk in its gaseous State ammonia is dangerous no one has yet managed to put it into solid and therefore harmless form not until now that is in 2005 the Danes achieve their breakthrough they present their magic tablet outwardly inconspicuous but inside ammonia tamed in this solid material ammonia is bound at the center of the crystal structure this enables very large quantities of ammonia to be stored it's almost magical that such large amounts of gas can be bound in solid form the metallic salt pill weighing just 1 G can store around half a liter of gaseous ammonia that's invisible to the eye but it's a sensation and opens undram of possibilities when the firm was founded one of our first important steps was to enlarge the 1 G tablet and here we already have an upgrade to our 100 G block and this block contains around 60 L of ammonia equivalent to the size of this balloon and that's not all the 100 G block is going to be even bigger and be given a cartridge making it suitable for use in [Music] cars and now we reached the point at which the system is mature it can easily be integrated into Vehicles this cartridge has now been expanded for 4 kg of usable ammonia equivalent to 6,000 L of ammonia gas that's equivalent to the balloon that ulri is just rolling up here this balloon therefore contains enough ammonia gas to entirely neutralize another balloon of the same size filled with nox meanwhile The Invention has been patented and further developed and has reached the production stage here we're at the first stage of production this is where the material that binds ammonia is added to the production this sack contains one ton of salt which will bind the ammonia later it's a harmless white powder [Music] the moment the salt reaches the pipes there's no more Daylight this is a completely sealed system with high quality assurance the next step in production is the drying process in which the salt is freed from any moisture content it may [Music] have the next the next step is the heart of the whole operation the ammonia comes out of the tank and meets the salt for the first time in this process inside this machine the ammonia and the salt are quickly bound after this process the ammonia salt material moves on further into the [Music] cartridge now we come to the last part of the production line here the container with the finished processed material is welded after it has been filled then a further leak test for quality assurance and the product is ready to leave the [Music] factory cartridges in bulk and they've already been successfully launched in buses with diesel engines since the system requires little space the buses can easily be retrofitted with it a further benefit we now have 300 buses driving through Copenhagen with clean exhaust emissions we also have test Vehicles stationed in London and have already started trials in the US and there are test drives underway in Asia too the results are outstanding while previous systems to reduce pollution perform poorly in urban driving the Dan's invention reduces up to 99% of nitrogen oxides that makes it the most CO2 friendly way to drastically reduce nox emissions and meet future EU emission standards but how does it work in exhaust gas after treatment using the system three areas are involved the diesel engine the ammonia cartridge and the catalytic converter normally nitrogen oxides reach the atmosphere almost unfiltered until now via a sensor the cartridge detects that the engine is heating up and it releases a ammonia in a targeted manner in the catalytic converter the ammonia meets the nox emissions in a chemical reaction ammonia and nitrogen oxides are converted into water and nitrogen the harmless mixture leaves the exhaust as humid air the system is not only extremely effective but also extremely sustainable the cartridges last for 10 years they can be refilled hundreds of times over this has potential to make a big impact on our air quality it's important for us and our children for me being a father of two sons was also a big motivating factor after the large diesel vehicles Tu johannson's and urri quad's invention is now due to be developed for smaller Vehicles a technology for the environment and for Humanity that clears the air and sets a whole new benchmark [Music] even if he doesn't have any more time for it today Steve Lindsay hopes that one day he will return to Racing for more than 10 years he was a racing driver and tested cars during all that time he was quite unaware that he was using a technological principle that would one day radically change his life the engine of his car ignited a mixture of petrol and compressed air a turbocharger on the engine used compressed air for added performance and without compressed air the tires on his racing car could never have been inflated in fact our daily lives are full of applications that work with compressed air and with compressors that produce it I think compressor are already interesting because to be honest to begin with I didn't know a great deal about compressors like many people and then I read somewhere that 10% of electricity that's used by industry within Europe across all industry goes into compressors it's a fantastically High figure and I realized that if you could make a difference to that you could potentially make a big difference to energy usage across Europe with clever engineering Lindsay wants to design a new compressor above all it should be more energy efficient Lindsay studies patents and learns about the inventions of past decades and then he realizes that to achieve his goal he needs to think quite differently [Music] the previous type of compressor which is still in use is the Piston compressor here an engine drives a piston inside a cylinder when the Piston slides downwards air flows into the cylinder when it is pushed upwards the air is compressed producing compressed air the problem here only half of the energy used produces compressed air the compressor wastes the other half when it sucks air back in even though the principle has been continuously improved there has not been a real breakthrough so far our is the First new compression technology which is inherently oilfree it leaks less and so we have a unique combination of attributes which gives you a machine which is more efficient and surprisingly is cheaper to produce to achieve this goal Lindsay has to think long and hard he knows that an energy saving compressor would have to operate continuously in rotary motion and function better than anything else so far it's long been recognized that rotary motion is good for compressors but traditional rotary compressors suffer very badly with sealing where they seal along a single line our geometry uniquely allows you to seal across a broad area and this gives you a lot less internal leakage which gives you a more efficient machine but also a machine that you can run oil free and a machine if you choose you can run more slowly for long reliability Steve Lindsay hires a small team of Engineers the inventor writes his own software which enables him to virtually design and test his idea yeah after hundreds of tests and calculations the design of the new compressor is finally ready the originally straight cylinder of the Piston compressor becomes a circular tube resembling a donut the Piston inside becomes a blade that rotates continuously behind the blade air is constantly sucked in as soon as the blade passes the suction opening a rotating disc blocks the circular cylinder now all the air is compressed in front of the blade until it is released through a valve the blade slips through the slot in the rotating disc again and compresses the next load of air the compressor sucks air in and compresses it simultaneously after we' built a number of virtual prototypes our first real world application went into the Worcester Wastewater Plant a real site in 7 Trent water in the UK and there it ran and showed an astonishing 21% reduction in electricity usage a true step change in energy usage from a relatively simple change in future Steve Lindsay wants to license the patented technology with his company lra but he also wants to make compressors himself several new prototypes are already being tested more will follow basically there are no limits to the use of lens's Blade compressors I think the exciting thing about compressors that they're behind nearly every part of Modern Life from the compressor that opens the doors on a train or a bus to the compressor that power the tools in factories or power the spray guns in factories two compresses in air conditioning or in the back of your fridge and our compress potentially replace all of them over time Steve Lindsay estimates that the blade compressor could save approximately two ter hours of energy in Europe every year the consumption equivalent of a city with 200,000 [Music] inhabitants if he has success with his compressor he'll probably take time off to do a few more laps on the circuit then he can indulge in wasting a bit of energy again [Music] [Music] too [Music] music means a great deal to [Music] me listening to music clears my head so that afterwards I can tackle technology again with new thoughts Anton van zanton is an engineer and he's one of the greatest inventors in the field of road safety he invented the break that thinks and also steers whenever necessary ESP the electronic stability program even during his Doctorate in the US in 1973 the Dutchman was concerned with Vehicle Safety in 19 77 at Bosch in stutgart he played a major role in establishing the antiock braking system ABS his next Big Goal the development of a dynamic and intelligent stability program for vehicles but to do this van zanon's team first had to create the electronic preconditions in a panic situation can Electronics respond faster and above all more intelligently than a human brain how can valves autonomously generate brake pressure without the driver himself self decelerating these were the main questions that van zanton had to answer all his life the engineer has been fascinated by the concept of breaking safety and that's probably what makes him so special you only become an inventor when you're not satisfied when you're satisfied with everything you have no urge to create anything new van zanton was dissatisfied with the limitations of ABS in particular vehicles with a higher center of gravity have a serious drawback during any sudden evasive maneuver this vehicle design skids easily and flips over one well-known upset in this regard was a model from Mercedes which like this test vehicle had a higher center of gravity this was the turning point for Van zanon's invention the aass flipping over back then was a big Stroke of Luck for Bosch and for road safety because ESP then became instead of taking the vehicle off the market Mercedes integrated ESP into it as standard there were no more upsets since 2014 ESP has been compulsory in all new vehicles in Europe on the test track in malim near stutgart Anton van zanton is reminded of some memories on the old airport site during the early 1980s he did the first test drives for ESP with his team and they used a system that was entirely new at that time a computer it weighed 15 kilos and took up the entire passenger seat and here's how ESP works all the wheels the center of the vehicle and the steering wheel are equipped with sensors the data are collected in a control unit at the front in this evasive maneuver the driver just HS the steering wheel to the left but instead of going left according to the wheel position the car carries straight on towards the obstacle the sensors on the steering and in the middle of the car have noticed the difference right away the control unit of the ESP reacts instantly it breaks the left rear tire and generates the necessary counter Force without the driver having to do anything at all steering in the opposite Direction after an evasive maneuver can also have fatal consequences the tail of the vehicle loses traction the car begins to skid and in the worst case it spins before that happens ESP briefly breaks the left front wheel it comes back on track and remains stable the result has been phenomenal 45% fewer fatalities due to the intelligent braking system The Next Step autonomous assistance systems that help the driver in extreme situations or even Take Over Control of the vehicle completely today's driving safety technology would be inconceivable without van zanon's pioneering work that makes the inventor proud ESP ESP has cost the company a lot of money but it's been worth it it's become a market success and it saves a great many lives a life's work devoted to the safety of millions of Road users the story starts in 2004 in a restaurant in Washington scientists from Europe have traveled here to talk with their American colleagues about the future of European satellite navigation but the negotiations are a failure for the Europeans that same evening they discuss what to do next yes from the start we wanted to find signals that would still be valid 20 years into the future our ambition was to develop a navigation system that could be used for many decades A system that wasn't just as good as GPS but even better Jose anel AA Rodriguez together with lauron Lear Jean Luke is Leon El Ree and gter Hine all search for a solution that evening they turned the restaurant into a laboratory full of modulation technology nothing less than the future of one of Europe's biggest technology projects lies in their hands the five researchers have to ensure that Europe can build its own system of satellite navigation in orbit Galileo their mission is to develop a technology that will make Europe independent of American GPS Galileo is also expected to provide more precise position data than the American system what's still missing is a signal that can transmit 10 different Navigation codes at the same time the problem is that the authorized transmission frequencies are already almost filled up by the GPS signal receivers on Earth such as satnav devices in cars can use the data from the satellite signals to calculate their positions and plot routes exit and here the more precise the information transmitted by the satellites the better it has to contain data on the position of each individual satellite for instance and the number of satellites is also very [Music] important to determine your position you need to have four Galileo satellites in view at the same time that gives you latitude longitude and altitude and also the receivers time atomic clocks on the satellites ensure precise time measurement this data also has to be sent via the satellite signal because the receiver uses the time stamp to calculate how far the signal traveled and hence its own position on Earth the Telecommunications experts need to find a way to store this information which is needed for navigation inside made the Galileo signal and to make it powerful and stable alongside the GPS signal there were three important criteria to be considered first we needed compatibility with the other satellite navigation systems we had to share the same transmission frequencies without causing interference with them secondly the systems had to be able to work together and thirdly there was the performance of the Galileo signal itself to avoid transmission errors and to get high performance out of their signal at the same time the researchers rely on a complex procedure known as coded modulation the advantage here is that information and data can be integrated in such a way that other signals on the same frequency cause no interference they successfully managed to do this by modulating their new signal between the existing GPS signals the performance of their own signal suddenly increases improving so much that even the scientists are surprised at their own success with their Galileo signal they have made huge progress researching into the digital waveforms known as [Music] boc B signals meaning binary offset carrier signals are waveforms that enable more precise positioning while still having a spectrum that allows compatibility with other satellite navigation systems Galileo has been in operation since the end of 2016 transmitting the modulation researchers special signal waves which are far more precise and stable than those of the other systems the signals travel more than 20,000 km and the researchers receive them in the lab as noise which initially seems hard to Define they filter the clear code of their signal out of the noise and this makes positioning with Galileo accurate to within a few centimet in this way the researchers have created a basis for all kinds of ideas and applications for a service reserved exclusively for rescue for instance experts estimate the economic success of the European satellite navigation system at more than 90 billion EUR for example developers of the bike citizens app for cycling through cities rely on Galileo signals and in agriculture crop protection products can be used far more precisely and economically thanks to the exact signals from the [Music] satellites at first no one expected the kind of performance we've achieved especially the Americans who were very surprised at our unimaginable Discovery today with their solutions for satellite navigation the five scientists are regarded as the artist par excellance among signal wave modulation research [Music] when it comes to the right sound and how it can be recorded and transmitted this man is in a league of his own L lilar rude is an entrepreneur an autodidact and a musician he's also contributed Good Vibrations to the digitization of sound I've invented technology or spectral band replication which improves sound codes like MP3 and AAC and increases the effectiveness of the coding by about 50% this is what the world has been waiting for since the 1990s the digitization of sound has been a big issue because people need digital sound on mobile phones Digital radio and the Music Services on the internet since audio documents are large but the transmission rates have to remain low the audio data is compressed this is already happening over the phone these so-called codecs such as MP3 or AAC remove information at high and low frequencies however with increasing compression the sound quality starts to suffer at some point this technology was soon considered to have reached its limits experts believed that it couldn't be developed any [Music] further after the AAC sound code was developed experts felt that it had reached its maximum and I thought they were rather Locked In traditional thinking then I got the idea of reducing frequency redundancy in a new way that was the foundation for this solution the basic idea behind lar lud's concept of spectral band replication or SBR makes use of two phenomena sound and human hearing in most cas we don't hear a pure tone but rather a sound mixture a sound composed of many partial tones the deepest of these partial tones is the fundamental tone on top of this are the so-called overtones their frequencies can be calculated from the frequency of the fundamental [Music] tone the predictability of overtones the fact that they can be calculated is the basis for L Lilia rud's idea for an entirely new kind of sound compression the way spr works is that instead of transmitting all of the frequency information you only transmit the lower frequencies then on the listener's side you restore the higher frequencies again each fundamental tone on say a trumpet or a violin or a human voice contains information about the entire vocal Spectrum so you only have to transmit the lower fundamental tones and then artificially restore the upper frequencies at the receiving end with the help of the Telecommunications Engineers Christopher Sherling and per extrand Laz lerude succeeds in making his idea workable in 1997 he registers the first [Music] patent those are only the fundamental [Music] terms here you can enjoy the SB sounds that's the $250 million trick here we combine both of them [Music] the science behind sound encoding is characterized by being very traditional I had a different angle on the problem that led to me being regarded as someone who wanted to introduce a disruptive technology into traditional thinking the Swedish inventor's concept is in demand however in 2007 the world famous audio engineering company Dolby bought his company which he had founded together with the frown Hofer Institute in aangan for the amazing price of $250 million my original thought was a technology that would be a kind of Turbo which could be added to existing encoders such as MP3 or AAC so as to improve their performance the business model was to sell these turbo units to sound code manufacturers the plan turned out differently Today l lilar ruds technology has been licensed by Dolby worldwide experts estimate that SBR is now being used for over 6 billion devices and applications in Mobile phones PCS apps and on radio stations with his invention the crazy Outsider as he calls himself has revolutionized the transmission of digitized [Music] [Music] sound uncomplicated fast Wireless and above all mobile we can no longer imagine life without a constant internet connection and data transfer Wi-Fi and 4G LTE mobile networks give us this Freedom good evening how are you how's Chennai it is warm and hum here good so it was a busy day yesterday today so hopefully it it's going to be pretty busy today also what time are they wrapping up this evening I think by about 5:00 I just made a Skype call to my wife at Chennai India about 14,000 km away from my mobile phone this amazing possibility was en enabled by an idea I had some years ago the first mobile phone with internet capability came out on the market in the late '90s but with this generation of smartphones sending large amounts of data such as photos or videos was still extremely slow it was the electrical engineer aroga Swami Paul Raj who changed all that thanks to his invention there is a mobile technology today that can not only shift data far more quickly but also in larger quantities the beginning of a new age in modern [Music] communication it was his pioneering spirit and as so often a lucky coincidence that first made His Brilliant Invention possible born in 1944 in polachi Southern India at the age of just 15 he joined the Indian Navy where he trained as an electrical engineer and after my initial training I was pulled into building Sona systems for the Indian Navy I began to understand how to use antenna Rays for detection of submarines submarine detection so that gave me a lot of background of using antenna rays in 1991 after 25 years in the Indian Navy Paul Raj moved with his family to California to do research at Stanford University and here he was able to make direct use of his multi- antenna systems knowhow his first assignment was to solve a problem for the US Air Force the idea there was an aircraft flying at very high altitude looking at enemy radios on the ground and to trying to listen to them it turns out at at very high levels of an aircraft many of these radios on the same frequency CH cannot be listened to without with a single receiver you need an antenna array to make this happen with an antenna array the radio signals can be separated and received individually to do this Paul R had to rewrite the existing algorithm of the computer progam program but how the engineer took two students and simulated the situation faced by the Air Force project on campus he used two 900 MHz telephones to simulate the enemy radio stations one frequency two signals he also set up a base station with two antennas now he only had to adapt the algorithm so that the signals would not interfere with each other of course it worked well outside as long as the users were well separated but when they came close it would not separate and that was expected and then one day we had some rain the rain forced them to move the experiment indoors this was the turning point of his research and I did this inside a fire of this building and now when the signals users were well separated it worked very well but to my great surprise it also worked well when the were closely separated when the two men stood side by side there was no interference theoretically impossible because normally the signals would be expected to interfere at the same frequency but inside the building they suddenly stopped doing that so the question was how did that happen then I realized that the signals emanating from the two phones next to each other were bouncing off the walls called scattering and that induces different signatures as at the antenna aray and therefore the aray was able to separate signals from closely support closely located transmitters the alignment of the signals had changed and as a result had canceled out the interference by bouncing off the walls they had shifted minimally and could now be captured by the antenna Base Station 2 days later at the hairdresser Paul Raj had the decisive idea while having a haircut I realized that if we can then convert this this physical phenomena to be able to send multiple streams from a single phone to a base station and actually increase the throughput of the system and the throughput will be multiplied by number of antennas at the transmitter and number of antenas at the receiver and that was the birth of the myo concept myo means multiple input multiple output instead of just one antenna as before several or at least two antennas are mounted on the transmitter as well as on the receiver for example in a smartphone the transmitter antennas first split up the data and transmit them to a base station since the radio signals collide with obstacles such as trees or houses their directions change as a result they are offset when they arrive at the receiver's antenna so there is no interference the receiver recomposes the signal sign and the data are complete so once you have uh a 2x2 system you get tce thr put 4x4 system four times the throughput so in Cellular Communications or in Wi-Fi spectrum is very very limited and therefore if you have multiple antennas you can increase the speed of the link and uh so myo has become an essential part of all Broadband Wireless Communications myo lies at the heart of wireless networks and will also be a part of the 5G Network planned for 2020 aroga Swami Paul rajj has already changed the lives of billions of people and will continue to do so in the future environmental pollution and climate change 20 years ago neither seemed much of a threat and so gutian Gruta had no quals about thinking of ways to use crude oil in the production of plastic for bottles packagings and textiles throughout his career the Dutchman has had dealings with all the global players in the chemical industry and has also witnessed what is being done to this planet so he made a decision nowadays 300 million tons of plastic are being used worldwide and the volume will quadruple over the next 30 Years to more than 1 billion tons to make the transition from fossil fuels to sustainable Plastics we have to rely on biomass but for this we need new materials that's the only way to bring about this change up until that moment Guan grter had been solving chemical problems on behalf of customers in his company avantium but this time he decided to do research on his own account he wanted to continue making plastic but quite differently from how it was currently being made his idea a plant-based plastic 100% renewable his vision centered on the chemical conversion of plant sugar that is starch from it theoretically the raw material for plastic fine dicarboxylic acid or fdca for short could be made the only problem producing fdca in large quantities is far from simple in in the last over the past 100 years more than 1,000 Publications and patents have been published on fdca ultimately however neither research nor any of these patents had resulted in a viable method of producing this material in large quantities and at competitive prices competitive price to make fdca two synthetic steps are required in the first step certain building blocks are produced from the starch of Maze and grain then in the Second Step fdca can be made from these blocks the problem was that until then the first step had only been tried in water and in water the building blocks for the fdca are not stable without these blocks no fdca so gr's idea was to use alcohol instead of water however that presented his team with a further challenge the big problem for us at first was that only 1% of sugar can be dissolved in alcohol but we finally found a way to dissolve much more sugar in alcohol 30% more without any additional stages or extra costs and that was the decisive step towards a commercially viable process G Yan gr's invention has led to the creation of an entirely new technology platform he has named it ixie in a pilot plant the production of fdca is currently being tested on a large scale the plant sugar still comes from Maze and grain but should soon also come from grass wood and vegetable waste from the fdca in the plant a plastic granulate is finally produced the chemists refer to it as PF bottles foils and textile fibers can all be easily produced from it a plant based plastic 100% renewable and a further sensation PF actually has far better properties than those of pet when we managed to produce p for the first time we also made the first bottle and the bottle turned out to have extraordinary characteristics it was very hard for oxygen to get in and for Carbonic acid from soft drinks to get out so we saw that this packaging material PF prolongs the shelf life of food and is more resistant all of that makes this plantbased plastic a material for the future Coca-Cola Danon and ala the world's largest producer of plastic bottles are already cooperating with Gruta shortly after its initial public offering in March 2017 his company avantium was worth almost 300 million the global market for plastic bottles is currently worth about 35 billion EUR thanks to patents on the ixie technology this will also be worthwhile for gr's company above all however the environment will benefit from this invention making this green plastic produces 70% less CO2 and consumes 70% less energy than the production of fossil Plastics so this makes the CO2 footprint of the plastic quite small get Yan Gruta is certainly making his mark on the way towards a sustainable future for us [Music] all oil is the fuel of our world 95 million barrels of it are consumed daily that's over 15 billion lers the so-called Black Gold can easily become poisonous however if it reaches the environment unhindered as it did here in the 2010 disaster in the Gulf of Mexico nature suffers serious damage a small company from Saxon anal could be of assistance here the company do Rex currently manufactures waxes for paints and varnishes new to its product range a mysterious wax coton that absorbs oil from water just how well it does so is demonstrated by the chemist ER [Music] keninger we just have to move things around a bit for the oil to bind all over the [Music] cotton and then with just one movement you can get the oil out again and the water is clean once more in this way polluted water becomes drinking water again but where does the wax cotton get its astonishing properties from as with so many inventions the story of this discovery began quite by chance in Spring 2010 an employee made a mistake he incorrectly adjusted a machine having confused the values for pressure and temperature production continued overnight the next morning his boss G hmid was thunder struck by the sight that greeted him this one is it was pure chaos the product looked odd it was incredibly bulky and my first thought was is the machine broken is the spraying system still working that was my first reaction 10 tons of useless wax cotton what could be done with it hmid didn't want to waste anything just yet which in retrospect was a stroke of luck around the same time the images of the Gulf of Mexico oil disaster in which 11 people died were broadcast around the world there were discussions about how the oil could be removed from the sea and this gave G hmid an idea four weeks later I was watching TV with my children and that was when the oil disaster in the Gulf of Mexico occurred and the whole world started wondering about how to recover the oil from the sea and how to save the ocean and that was when I called Dr Klinger and asked him could you briefly check whether the wax cotton absorbs oil it wasn't such a far-fetched idea after all the fluffy wax cotton did resemble a sponge and it had also demonstrated amazing properties in the lab like oil the substance is hydrophobic and floats on the water surface measurements of its absorbency had shown that just 1 kgam was enough to absorb 6 L of oil 1/3 more than most other oil binders manage then lumps formed that were very easy to fish out of the water again this was also an advantage over many other binders that exist only in powder form the secret behind the wax Cotton's performance is its structure over it has an extremely large surface area which means it's incredibly branched there are lots of fibers in the nanometer range and these fibers cause a capillary effect and the highly viscous oil is absorbed the fibers continue branching out all the way into the Nano range this creates a huge surface on which the oil molecules accumulate they adhere to the surface because of a physical Force socalled absorption this is just like when two glass plates are stuck together by a thin layer of water in this case the glass and water do not bind such that unlike with a chemical adhesive there is no residue when the plates are torn apart again hu Schmid applies for a patent for his invention the miraculous white wax cotton is named pure the first buyers are soon found currently our biggest success is the application in wind turbines wind turbines lose oil constantly a channel containing the wax cotton traps the oil but lets rainwater through so the ring does not have to be pumped out after every rain shower and the wax cotton has already been shipped overseas as well together with the relief organization one Earth One Ocean dox supplies the product to Africa for the cleaning of polluted streams and lakes hmid believes that production Halls could soon be created worldwide it would even be possible to produce directly on board ships you we have a very simple idea that these production facilities for Pure can be set up de centrally in any location on land but also on every ship and the vision of putting such a production plant on a ship and distributing pure across the world's polluted oceans that would be my goal and my dream even though pure cannot prevent oil spills in the future it could effectively limit the destructive effects of major oil [Music] disasters [Music] Archimedes was a really bright guy over 2,000 years ago the old Sicilian already figured out why things float on water my duck for example it doesn't sink because the amount of water it's displacing is much heavier than it is and that's what provides [Music] buoyancy okay it all sounds logical enough but sometimes the physics of water is really paradoxical for example here in these two containers the amount of water in the left one is greater than in the right one nevertheless the pressure exerted by the water on the bottoms of the two containers is absolutely equal the pressure depends solely on the height of the water level not on the amount of water initially this seems totally irrational some of these paradoxes have long been known and recently one more joined the list one familiar to everybody at first the water flows straight towards the drain but then suddenly a Whirlpool forms the physics behind it is still a mystery today actually this phenomenon was studied in more detail only a few years ago by a Czech engineer and he transformed it into something [Music] astonishing the Charles bridge in Prague is a perfect place to look down on the Waters of the vava [Music] river miror Sedler Che had already seen lots of whirlpools in the river but he' never really thought about the physics involved until the day he noticed strange phenomena in these water [Music] edies I observed that inside the edes floating objects like leaves do move along with the current but if they're located on the edge of a water vortex they also rotate to the flow of the vortex around their own axis I found that fascinating and mysterious I tried to analyze the observations and organize them in my head and that's how I began to devote myself to this principle the Czech engineer could not get the phenomenon out of his mind he sensed that his discovery could be a source of energy generation of an entirely new kind so he tried to gain support from the highest level from the Rector of the Technical University I was surprised and thought that with the observation Miro made there could be New Perspectives for future energy Supply a source of renewable energy that could fundamentally change the way we think about energy generation together with his colleagues yirui Novak and vatslav Baran Sedler tried to explain the phenomenon mathematically it was difficult however and he was not entirely successful but clearly the scientists were on the track of a new hydrodynamic principle with little technology and only minor interventions in nature it allows to convert the energy of water into electrical energy this new hydrodynamic principle is simple it means we can take advantage of the power of Water by simple means and also that the Ecology of a natural water course will not be disturbed we can produce energy that is absolutely clean ecologically and something else became clear the principle already works with very small amounts of water and low flow rates that means energy can be generated in streams or even canals something impossible with conventional technology using just one system in a stream can probably generate enough electricity for three to four households all considerations and calculations made it clear that the principle should work putting Theory into practice however is not easy it involves countless trials and setbacks but finally a prototype type was found Sedler Che discovered that the turbine shaft the stator had to be of a certain shape and between the wall of the stator and the rotor marked here in red there could only be a small Gap only then did the water flowing through trigger a movement in the rotor that was very hard to stop rolling fluid turbine is the name Sedler has given to his invention he's patented in Europe and the US the reason the turbine works is that the rotor rolls inside the stator that's why the principle is called the rolling principle the rotor rolls along the edge of the stator and simultaneously rotates counter to the direction of roll around its own axis so water flows through the turbine shaft and through a narrow opening passing the rotor below it swirls up the flow of the water sets the rotor in motion it rolls in a circle inside the stator and simultaneously counter rotates around its own axis the two movements enable energy to be produced via a generator 1 hour's driveway from Prague Miroslav Sedler Che has set up a showroom it contains a more recent prototype of the Rolling fluid turbine the technology not only functions on Wheel ear small rivers and streams but also in irrigation canals and pipelines and the invention is already being sold in America where it's being used at Sea in a marine Current Power Station Miroslav sedek is proud of his invention the technology is ready to conquer the world most importantly it could be useful in remote areas and in developing countries the discovery of this new hydraulic principle gives me personally a very good feeling because I'm quite convinced it can help people who until now have had no access to electrical energy or to energy from hydr Power so far the physics of the new hydrodynamic principle is puzzling Sedler discovered it but neither he nor anyone else has been fully able to explain it just yet who knows things may even stay that way for a while but in the meantime the new turbines will already have generated a great deal of [Music] electricity paying with a credit or debit card what is everyday life for millions of people is based on encrypted communication and is meant to guarantee safety the pin unlocks the card only then can the tiny microprocessor inside communicate with the card reader and the bank's computers the principle behind this application is known as two Factor authentication and is also used in Mobile telepan to unlock you need two elements the pin and the phone with the smart card even a fingerprint or an iris scan can unlock devices or Grant access to a building in combination with an electronic ID card online transfers often require a password and an additional transaction number sent to the phone as a text message so two independent elements are always needed to carry out an application [Music] the small town of Rus in southern France here at the semiconductor manufacturer St micro Electronics experts are working on making smart cards and microprocessors even safer pierard and Yan Damon were among the world's leading data encryption [Music] Specialists cryptography as this specialist field is known is based on teamwork it's it's only on a team basis that the best Solutions can be found Alice it's always about making communication between transmitter and receiver which can be people or devices unreadable for Outsiders the more complex the encryption the more cryptography seems to be a secret [Music] science it's really like working working and then at some point there's some kind of of aha you see this is what we could do and then this simple idea you can put into practice but to get to that simple idea you have to go through a lot of wrong dead ends let's say also with this known encryption only one variable remains secret the key for the specific application the underlying method however has been published but what makes the function complex is that you do this 10 times and it's called advanced encryption standard I think it's used all over the world AES is even approved in the USA for the encryption of government documents the clean room at St microelectronics production site of the smart cards on which encryptions often run in everyday life silicon Wafers are the base material for the microscopically small circuits work is done in protective suits to prevent even the smallest Speck of dust from affecting production the result miniature technical Marvels which even present the cryptographers with special challenges so for instance if you want to make um a payment on a bus a contactless payment so just hold your card that's 200 millisecond in this 200 millisecond you must exchange data and you must do a cryptographic computation but there's an add additional constraint on this smart card it doesn't have a battery so it gets its energy from an electromagnetic field so there's an antenna built into the smart card but that means that your cryptography cannot consume too much energy otherwise it wouldn't work so these are all restrictions and that puts a lot of challenges on people developing these cars the high security module a type of severely restricted server this is where probably the most important step in smart card production is carried out the computer encrypts each smart card individually for its future user the highest security level already applies but experts have succeeded in making abuse of the HSM even more difficult for this purpose The Smart Card blanks are already programmed with a provisional identifier in advance this can be retrieved only once by the HSM before the smart card overwrites it otherwise with its master key it could access already individualized smart cards later clones of the cards could be made and used for criminal purposes although their encryption is considered secure it is also part of cryptographers daily work to detect possible weak points themselves this is referred to as ethical hacking this is the only way that Yan Damon and his colleagues can repeatedly for stall cyber [Music] criminals change recently oh we send the chips to Pi who will then try to attack it if we did our job right from the start they will not find anything but most of the time they find something it is a teamwork that we always pushing uh the whe try to attack succeed to attack give feedback to the designer and again make attack provide a result to the designer until we get something that is resistant to everything that we know cyber crime and data theft have long ceased to be abstract threats credit card fraud causes 1.5 billion EUR worth of damage each year in the EU alone add to that our increasingly networked everyday life in which we're growing increasingly dependent on electronic communication it's only when those applications are securely encrypted that we are protected from hackers and know that only people we trust will be able to read and use our data [Music] our world is full of it we use it to save and transmit information we pack with it and pay with it we're in concept with the material every minute of Our Lives life without paper almost inconceivable it's hard to imagine that this 2,000-year old material will soon be revolutionizing our lives yet again because paper won't remain just paper it's going to be transformed into an electronic medium with completely new undram of capabilities and features she started this revolution elira Fortunato from the University of Lisbon I'm an engineer and so I enjoy expanding the use of materials manipulating them a little so they can be used for quite different purposes for the Portuguese materials researcher it All Began during a discussion with her team her husband Rodrigo Martin was there too together they were seeking ways of attaching electronic circuits to flexible surfaces since the paper is a biopolymer and also a flexible material we came up with the idea of using paper as a carrier for transistors and electronic circuits that functioned very well as it turned out but then elira Fortunato came up with a further crucial idea why should paper merely be the carrier material for electronic circuits it could also be an electronic component in itself since we knew that paper had an insulating effect we wondered whether it could also be used as an active element within a transistor every microchip in our electronic devices contains millions of transistors they function like switches if there is current the transistor switches to on and current can flow for the transistor to work in this way one component is indispensable an insulating layer located between its electrical connections in conventional chips it consists of pure silicon that is exactly what Elvira Fortunato wanted to replace in her new transistors she asked a member of her team to put put the theory into practice he attached the switching element of a transistor onto a small section of paper and lo and behold the moment the voltage was switched on current flowed the paper transistor [Music] worked I must say I thought there was a very low probability that a transistor made of paper would work my colleague made the transistor and straight after the first attempt he said look it works we were really happy here in the lab to be the first people in the world to create something that was new and [Music] Innovative encouraged by their initial success the researchers adapted an inkjet printer in their lab instead of using ink the printer now prints the electronic components of a transistor onto the paper meanwhile the team led by Alvira Fortunato has produced many different paper transistors in this way at the Laboratories of the new University of Lisbon individual electronic applications sheet by sheet these include bio sensors for basic medical tests or circuits that render invisible images on paper suddenly visible solar cells on paper are also possible they generate current even in artificial [Music] light of course when we talk about electronic paper it certainly won't replace everything that's being done with silicon technology today but electronic paper will be used in addition to the existing Technologies for applications that cost little and need to be produced in large quantities in a future Supermarket therefore we might encounter packaging that displays changing prices or other information The Internet of Things is getting closer the energy comes from solar cells in the paper visiting cards when touched could show texts and images or switch to any desired language and in newspapers advertisements or Graphics could actually move the greatest benefit when using paper in the electronic sector is the fact that it's renewable it's also a flexible material the costs are low and the material is already there paper doesn't need to be newly invented the variety of products with paper transistors is seemingly endless because the properties of paper it's structure size and the nature of the fibers or minerals contained inside it can all influence the applications Ela fortunato's team is in the process of exploring these relationships meanwhile Research into electronic paper continues worldwide but Elvira Fortunato has the patent on this technology the Brave New World of paper Electronics is going to revolutionize our daily [Music] lives 6 5 4 sometime in the future after landing on the moon mankind finally wants to take the next big step and Conquer The Solar System 10 astronauts set out on the journey to the red planet the outbound Journey alone takes 6 months 6 months in zero gravity a journey which alongside numerous other challenges can only take place if a very specific medical problem can be [Music] controlled the present day following a traffic accident a patient is admitted to the emergency room doctors suspect that she has suffered severe traumatic brain injury it's a life-threatening situation if bleeding or swelling occurs inside the head pressure within the skull increases rapidly until now there's been only one method of measuring pressure in the skull reliably the skull is drilled open and a pressure gauge is implanted 5 cm inside the patient's head in the so-called ventricular interior this probe has a connection to the outside and remains in the patient's skull for the doctor it's the only way to continuously monitor the intracranial pressure to measure any pressure changes in the brain and to provide a targeted therapeutic response this being the right medication or emergency surgery the fact is that drilling into the skull used to be the only reliable technique for determining intracranial pressure no longer the University of Kanas in Li Lithuania a man working here claims that the skull no longer needs to be drilled for pressure in the skull to be measured arus ruskus has found an entirely different solution based on a technology that everyone knows blood pressure measurement the principle is as painless as it is simple for measuring blood pressure in the body an artery in the arm is initially blocked by inflating a cuff then the pressure is slowly reduced precisely until the moment the blood pressure of the body is exactly the same as the external pressure the blood flows back the doctor listens to the pulse in the artery and can now read off the exact blood pressure how to indicate the balance how to understand where where the balance is in this case uh some microphone or spigo monometer is used uh just to listen what noises are in the artery this principle can cannot be applied for measurement of the pressure in the brain why because uh we have rigid skull instead you can look inside the skull using ultrasound at the heart of rus' new intracranial pressure measuring device is a very special pair of glasses they're not only airtight when closed but also have an ultrasonic probe integrated into them and by by an air hose air pressure on the eye can be gradually increased what's it all for the principle behind it was a stroke of Genius during measurement the ultrasound focuses on the Opthalmic artery this vessel has a special feature one part of it lies within the skull and the other outside it directly on the eye ideal for agowas if there's a dangerous increase in pressure within the skull the Opthalmic artery is squeezed more and more as a result the blood in its inner part flows faster than in the outer one to determine this inner pressure the pressure on the outer part only has to be increased until the blood flows at the same speed again in both that is that the external pressure is exactly the same as the internal pressure sounds rather familiar somehow very close to the principle of non-invasive arterial blood pressure measurement but uh in the case of arterial blood pressure measurement you you are closing artery here we are just a little bit changing diameter of of talic artery in order to find the balance compressed air on the eye sounds painful but in fact the pressure exerted by the device on the eye is as minimal as water pressure at a depth of only 70 CM this is not a full depth of your bath in in your residence place that means nothing no no no injury here and if you will think about the flight if the plane is is taking uh heit in this case pressure in inside the cabin is changing in much much wider interval and no injuries this is safe procedure Hightech that looks good and most importantly doesn't hurt [Music] anyone arminus rus' invention originated at a time when the University of Kus still looked different from today collapse of Soviet Union I was working for for uh some uh let us say Aerospace industry in Soviet Union as a scientist as a engineer uh staying of course in Lithuania and during one night all all customers disappeared what to do after that it was a blow of Fate that finally got razas going unfortunately my mother passed away in Neurosurgical Intensive Care Unit I saw that a lot of technological problems in neurointensive Care Unit can be solved and uh fortunately in my lab I had our own patented devices for very different industrial applications ultrasonic devices which were unique and very sensitive and it was possible to think about medical application outer space rus' first subject of study is now his future too his technology is going to be tested in zero gravity the reason a phenomenon exists in space travel that continues to totally puzzle scientists after 1 to two weeks of weightlessness 60% of all astronauts slowly go blind scientists believe the C is located inside the astronaut's skulls and is connected to intracranial pressure regulus's technology will make it possible in the near future to achieve something impossible up to now to measure an astronaut's intracranial pressure on a space station in orbit without having to drill open their skull this syndrome is not manageable at the moment and NASA and other agencies which are interested in long-term flights they're interested to understand the Sy can you imagine invasive ICP measurement in the space That's Impossible Astronaut is very expensive specialty his invention should provide the key to solving the problem for the astronauts it could be even uh the decision making about suitability of this organism this person to longterm flight now nobody can simply select who will fly without the syndrome and who will fly with the syndrome one thing is certain a man trip to Mars will only be properly feasible if it has been previously ensured that six out of 10 astronauts will not reach the red planet almost blind and traumatic brain injury patients worldwide will certainly be able to benefit from rus' invention very soon savoring food almost everywhere in the world this is what Italian cuisine stands for and where would it be without wheat wheat is not only the base ingredient of pasta but also many kinds of bread or pastries whether crunchy or crispy the reason we love products made from wheat flour so much is mainly due to the gluten they contain the gluten makes for a special consisten and is also contained in many other grains such as barley spelt and Rye but not everyone can tolerate gluten around 1% of people are allergic to it and those are precisely the people this woman wants to help food technologist Vienna Cher has researched into gluten for 20 years food is a sensory experience we wanted people to still enjoy their food even if they've had to give up gluten Vienna Chen's goal is to find a quality replacement for gluten it's a major challenge because gluten is unique if it comes into contact with water it forms an elastic Network this gives the dough simultaneously strength and flexibility cereals or cereal likee plants without gluten don't achieve that this is a dough made of rice and you can see its consistency isn't good because it contains no gluten it has no elasticity and the structure isn't good without gluten the rice dough can't form a network the dough disintegrates in baked form too the difference is clear bread made from rice flour is Compact and tight rather than light and crispy for people with gluten intolerance so-called celiac disease they are not a satisfactory alternative celiac disease is a frequently hereditary autoimmune disease in which the wall of the small intestine is destroyed in a healthy body the intestine filters nutrients from chewed food through the villy for example sugars fats amino acids and Trace elements and passes them on to the bloodstream in the case of celiac disease the gluten protein destroys the villy as a result nutrients can only be ingested with difficulty and the mucous membrane of the small intestine becomes inflamed and permeable to bacteria and microbes the symptoms are very painful from stomach ache bloating diarrhea fatigue to depression and growth disorders in children Celiac patients have to stay away from foods containing gluten for their whole life the relationship between wheat gluten and celiac disease was first established in 1941 but the search for an alternative to gluten which Celiac sufferers could also eat has not been easy in addition to Rice there are other crops that do not contain the gluten protein Millet for example or pseudo cereals such as Buckwheat kinoa Kia and amaranth however even they do not have the properties of wheat gluten but the Italian scientist and her team take another way from other scientific research we know that corn has a protein mixture that is very close to wheat gluten corn protein can also form a network in dough now Vienna Cher and her team have to find the right method of extracting the protein from the wheat so it can be produced in large quantities wheat protein also contains Zen a storage protein in the wheat like gluten on bre poeni helped to search for the appropriate method from the very start it wasn't easy to find this method even though there are already existing methods to extract zeen they used in the pharmaceutical sector and they're quite complicated so for us it was difficult to find an easy way to get zean in an intact form extracting the wheat protein Zin requires the right mix of water alcohol and flour zein combines with the alcohol and separates from the flour starch the concentrated solution is finally heated until the alcohol and water have evaporated leaving behind the pure protein in powdered form but finding the right mixing r ratio is not easy we worked very hard on these Solutions it wasn't easy to find the right formula after countless trials the Italian scientists are finally successful on the basis of Zin it is now possible to produce bread pasta pastries and other foods that are glutenfree and still taste good even if you have to give up gluten for your whole life it doesn't mean mean that you can't enjoy food with her research Vienna Chen has helped to bring more enjoyment and Better Health to countless people [Music] worldwide 800 boxes 800 ideas and they're all to do with him elar mock he's turned inventing into an art form even though his first great invention is lying in one of the lower boxes that doesn't make it any the less spectacular when the Swiss Watch industry was having problems elar mock reinvented the wristwatch he came up with the Swatch the special trick was the use of a new material for a watch plastic the idea having fewer separate components would make the whole thing cheaper with his colleague Jack Miller he set to work Miller had the watchmaking expertise while engineer mock was skilled in Plastics processing and ultrasonic [Music] welding to achieve the objective new technologies had to be introduced to minimize work stages and to create far more complex forms in other words we used plastic to make not only the movement but also the case that way the quality was sharply increased and the price sharply reduced the development work at the watch company EA was top secret the two inventors melted and combined watch components the result a Time piece made of just 51 Parts instead of around double that amount but the cheap watch wasn't immediately popular everyone was against it they said it was a promotional item at best and that surely no Swiss product could ever be made of plastic what a cheap watch they said and they also believed that a watch that couldn't be repaired was a bad thing there again if it can't be repaired then its quality has to be that much better countless designs were added all fully in line with the trends of the 1980s it was a Triumph for the Swiss Watch industry but for mock the Pioneer this success took a lot of the fun out of it for chaotic person like myself it was a wonderful time but then the success of Swatch suddenly brought in order structure rules and systems that made me feel uncomfortable so I wanted to get back into Innovation again and so it was that the Swatch didn't mark the end of his inventing career but the beginning of it many people think that delving more deeply into what you already know brings novelty I feel that you have to be curious you have to see other things you have to be inspired by Nature technology or people you can't find mushrooms on a Motorway out but inspiration isn't enough on its own you also have to discover the benefits behind it and the tree in the ground seems to be very stable but the Earth with the tree inside it is not so stable however the tree roots its fractal connection with the soil give it very high stability mock recognized this potential and adapted it to plastic injected into a porous substrate and liquefied using ultrasound it solidifies within a fraction of a second inside the pores like the roots the connection holds and no screws are needed this so-called welding works with wood plastic and even with bone enabling Ultra Gentle operating techniques air soap water and a further gentle application that's what mock focused on in his next big area of research it saves resources but not at the expense of hygiene smix in is the name of his new hand washing machine the objective was to use less water today you need a lot of water because you have to rinse and during rinsing you dissolve the soap that's concentrated on your hands this enables me to dose the volume of soap and the volume of water precisely so the whole hand washing process can be done with only this amount of water normally you need 1 to 1.5 L L the smart mixing unit saves 90% water and 60% soap the device doesn't need a water supply it's mobile so it can be placed anywhere One Core invention many applications that's typical of the allrounder mock the most economical shower will use up only two instead of 8 l in the future tests are already underway the future lies in information technology the inventor is certain of that I see a big future in Optical sensors like our eyes they need to be mobile and they need to be able to adapt in smartphones his mini motor has already been installed a tiny drive that focuses incredibly quickly in the macro range but my most important contribution to the World Of Inventions is this here a collection of professional inv enters the crayer holic and this is really my life's work creativity and worker holism the name says it all have ideas take them seriously try them out together and work on an equal footing Mark founded his creative Collective as he terms it in 1986 whether Workshop kitchen or office everything is a creative space for the approximately 55 employees have great colleagues here they really are very creative people and a wolf needs a pack you can't do much on your own you can do far more in a team so this bundling together of skills and also expertise enables us to transcend our own limits that's why a team like this is important elar Mark's magic formula has worked he's created numerous startups along with jobs as a result of all his inventions 178 patent families bear his name an incredible output for a 30e long inventing [Music] career the blue gate in Fez Morocco is the entrance to a different world anyone who passes through it finds themselves in the old town the Medina of Morocco's oldest Royal City a UNESCO World cultural heritage site a Place full of History colors and above all Aromas this is the world of Adnan Ral aromatic plants and spices have been used in the Moroccan culture for a very long time for medicinal purposes to cure very ailments as well as in cooking even before I became a scientist I was convinced that aromatic plants contain pharmaceutical active ingredients and aromatic plants and spices did indeed become very important for the pharmacologist Adnan Ral for their fragrances are nothing but chemical compounds special molecules from essential plant oils the plants use them as a weapon they use them to fight off bacteria and parasites Adan Ral wanted to make this weapon his own in 1998 I met some surgeons who explained to me how they were often successful in difficult operations but that many patients still died in hospitals from becoming infected with multi-resistant germs against which antibiotics are no longer effective on that day I decided to dedicate my entire research career to this topic I wanted to fight multi-resistant bacteria and find a solution to this problem Adnan Ral finds the opportunity to do this at the University of fets here he devotes himself to meticulous basic res search finally he understands exactly how the substances from essential oils fight bacteria however the researcher also realizes that to defeat infections and germs in humans you would have to use a large amount of such substances but that is not possible the amount of essential oils we would need to give patients is rather high and there's a big risk of side effect so we decided that if we couldn't use essential oils on their own we would mix them together with antibiotics and try to create a Synergy effect raal searches for a substance that can make antibiotics extra powerful and he finds it carvacrol contained for example in margarum Thyme and oregano together with antibiotics this substance becomes a medical weapon that can kill resistant bacteria an antibiotic is like a key that unlocks a door in the bacterium and fights it that way but if the bacteria mutates and the key no longer fits then the bacterium is invulnerable and resistant we've shown that the essential oils don't function like a key but more like a sledgehammer that basically smashes the whole door down Adnan Ral patents his Discovery in the meantime he's also making use of a substance found in eucalyptus trees together with the Moroccan pharmaceutical company he wants to bring the antibiotics booster with its eucalyptus Essence onto the market according to the research it will be the first drug ever developed in Morocco but Adnan Ral already has new ideas he now wants to prevent resistant bacteria from forming in the first place antibiotics have long been used in agricultural livestock farming and to accelerate the growth of the animals this excessive use has caused many resistant bacteria to develop but on this Farm things are different now every evening the cattle here are given small pellets filled with essential oils antibiotics are no longer necessary the livestock owner thus achieves the same growth effect as with antibiotics at the same time the animals are healthier and perform better we were surprised that consumers are saying that the meat tastes better is more tender and it even smells [Music] better meanwhile Adnan Ral has little time for lab research more and more Farmers want to try out his new medication it's 30% cheaper than antibiotics and word has spread about its positive effect on meat the fact that no more resistant bacteria are being produced has almost become a side issue now for Adnan Ral however it remains crucial after all he's devoted his life to fighting This Global threat

Channel: Free Documentary - Engineering

Views: 2,240,164

Keywords: free documentary, free documentary engineering, engineering, engineering documentary, tech, tech documentary, constructions, constructions documentary, technology documentary, inventions 2023, inventions documentary

Id: iLj8ttLqfEI

Length: 142min 4sec (8524 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 22 2023