HOW IT WORKS | Coal Fired Power Plant, Mega Rollercoaster and More | Free Documentary

a massive coal plant cleans up its act and lights up millions of homes with explosive power this mega roller coaster cranks up the biggest scare for your buck a thrill machine that runs on gravity a half megaton telescope takes intergalactic snapshots from millions of light years away and a pin setting robot cleans up our game with surgical precision let's take a look inside these machines and see how they work this is drax a coal-fired power plant in england the size of two manhattan central parks side-by-side this machine puts out almost 4 000 megawatts of power enough to light up 5 million homes this new style coal burner has found a way to process and burn an old-style fuel and it does it so efficiently it's now among the cleanest mega coal plants in the world let's see how it works [Music] drax burns up to 36 000 tons of coal every day that's 26 train loads the trains dump the coal into giant hoppers they slow down but never stop every month they dump enough coal to fill a 70 000 seat football stadium but drax doesn't burn chunks of rock it's not explosive enough so it converts the coal to dust a network of conveyors sends the raw coal to these pulverizing mills each mill has ten one-ton steel balls packed together on a track coal drops into the mill through here and the ring of balls crush the rock a single pulverizer makes 36 tons of coal dust in an hour and drax has 60 of them the coal dust is now an explosive fuel lit up by propane and oil burners this coal dust and air mixture burns at over 2 000 degrees celsius each boiler is a mega kettle with flames five stories high 10 stories above the flames inside a network of steel tubes water transforms to high pressure steam hot enough to melt lead drax is now ready to generate some serious electricity the steam heads to the turbine hall the turbines are housed in six units each the size of a locomotive inside five steam turbines each spins a drive shaft connected to a generator when the steam hits the turbines its explosive pressure spins the blades at 3 000 rpm [Music] the blade tips travel at one and a half times the speed of sound pumping out a million horsepower that's the same as 6 500 passenger cars so burn coal boil water make steam and spin 300 tons of stainless steel at mach 1.6 to create 23 000 volts of electricity voltage measures how powerfully electrons flow through a wire and drax needs much more than 23 000 volts to get power to its millions of customers to ramp up its voltage which helps electricity travel great distances you need a transformer drax runs the 23 000 volts through a series of copper wire coils each wound around an iron core that creates a magnetic field power jumps from one coil to another when it goes from the looser coils to the tighter ones the voltage increases the transformers at drax take the 23 000 volts from the turbines and step it up to 400 000 which is great for the national grid but what about this stuff burning coal is dirty business it belches out harmful gases that cause smog and acid rain drax captures 90 of these toxic emissions before they hit the atmosphere smoke blows into these electrostatic precipitators toxic particles cling to these metal plates like fridge magnets as the smoke passes through but that filtered smoke still contains sulfur the culprit in acid rain so before it's sent to the smokestack it's cleaned again every week ten thousand tons of limestone is crushed into powder and mixed with water to form a slurry in this giant blender when smoke is pumped through the slurry sulfur is chemically locked into it the resulting combo makes 750 000 tons of gypsum every year the stuff that makes drywall and plasterboard there's one last problem the power plant still has huge amounts of steam to deal with once it's done powering the turbines the steam needs to get back to the boilers for reheating but first it needs to turn back to water so the steam tubes are cooled by an outside source a heat exchanger that uses river water drax uses 160 million liters of it every day from the river use but while cooling the steam tubes the river water heats up to the boiling point to protect the local ecosystem it has to be cooled before being returned enter the cooling towers drax has 12 two for each boiler the base of each one could hold the dome of saint paul's cathedral the heated river water is piped into the 20-story towers then drops through tightly woven plastic and turns to a fine spray as heat rises the towers draw a cool draft from the bottom and up through the falling droplets the cooled water drops into ponds at the base of the towers and releases back to the river cleaner than when they took it out 36 000 tons of coal burnt up in a day recovering most of its toxic emissions this machine has always been powerful but recent innovations have turned it into one of the cleanest plants of its size in the world [Music] an over one kilometer track built on 20 stories of concrete and metal the ride of steel is a machine designed to give you the biggest scare of your life doing 120 in an open top mini train is scary enough but not nearly as frightening as this for two whole minutes you're locked into a bucket on wheels the job of this machine is to keep you alive with no engine no steering and no brakes here's how it works you're on your way and the initial climb slopes gradually to a height of 65 meters 12 000 well-oiled moving parts make up the large gear and chain assembly that pull you to the top while butterflies churn in your stomach any one of those parts can snap without warning but over 40 sensors monitor the climb and if the chain breaks magnetically controlled safety locks stop the train within seconds the first hill on a roller coaster is always the tallest it has to be in order to harness enough gravity to launch you sixteen hundred meters to the finish fifty seconds into the ride the train free falls into a near vertical drop zero to 120 in under two seconds way faster than most dragsters [Music] as you drop you're weightless any falling body weighs nothing while in free fall until it hits something fortunately you're locked in by the lap bar without that you'd be airborne flying three stories above the track the force exerted on the cars as they corner around the track is more powerful than what's experienced on a space shuttle launch so to keep the train on the track the undercarriage has three sets of wheels built in all directions to handle every dimension of flight these are the load wheels during the most intense maneuvers they absorb nearly four times the weight of the car that's over 50 tons of force the guide wheels keep the car centered as it shifts from side to side and the up stop wheels grip the car on the track during its most extreme maneuvers 65 seconds into the ride you're halfway through just when you think you're slowing down you hit the ride of steel's double helix at 100 kilometers an hour and while your brain thinks it's going in a straight line your body is lashed to a train that is clinging to the edge of a circle up to four times the normal force of gravity pins your body down that cell phone in your pocket now weighs as much as a kilogram you've been flying for almost 120 seconds and the end is rapidly approaching remember this is technically a runaway train it has no brakes and you've got to stop in under three seconds you're going off the rails regular brakes on this train would tear the cars apart so the designers decided to stop the train from the outside and they use some of the most powerful natural magnets in the world to do it when copper fins fixed to the sides of the train slide through the magnets they create a swirl of opposing currents this magnetic braking stops the train in just 2.8 seconds the designers of the ride of steel had a plan build a giant machine insert humans scare them half to death and bring them back alive and it worked when scientists peer through a high-powered telescope they may like the view but they always want a better one so they came up with this it's called the large binocular telescope or lbt it probes deeper into the cosmos than any other instrument and it has ten times the resolution of the hubble space telescope a telescope is basically a magnifying glass it focuses light that enters here onto a single point in this case a mirror located here this bounces the light to an eyepiece that magnifies it even more up to 60 times that's pretty good but its vision is still limited big glass lenses are hard to make and distort light which is why the best telescopes use mirrors [Music] set three thousand meters up this arizona peak the machine took two decades to build it's a new generation telescope that reaches the edge of the universe hoping to shed light on some of its unsolved mysteries that's a tall order but it's a big machine the lbt is two telescopes in one with its giant pair of binoculars and two of the world's largest mirrors 16 tons apiece spanning eight and a half meters working together they capture more light than any telescope ever built starlight bounces off the two primary mirrors onto two smaller secondary mirrors and then back down through this center hole to where researchers can see it or record it but all this size doesn't do much for resolution so lbt has to overcome the three optical challenges of any earthbound telescope keeping up with the rotation of the earth fighting gravity that distorts the shape of thin mirrors this wide and keeping focus through the density of the earth's atmosphere first challenge get a fix on a target and compensate for the earth's rotation this half megaton machine has to position itself within a millionth of a centimeter that's about the thickness of a strand of dna may sound crazy but it's done with this altitude azimuth mount one axis turns with the earth the other tweaks the elevation a point and control system translates the location of the object in the sky into geographical coordinates and locks into them as the earth moves the entire telescope incrementally shifts on two giant c-shaped mounts like a big rocking chair floating on a super slick film of oil it's so perfectly balanced that all it takes is a set of four puny lawn mower size motors one on each axis to spin the heavy lbt a full 360 in just four minutes the outer building rotates in sync with the telescope as it rides on its own rail system [Music] and it does it to within 1.5 degrees of accuracy even in gale force winds [Music] the second optical challenge it needs to solve is gravitational distortion of the primary mirrors the mirrors are so large so thin gravity actually warps their perfect parabolic shape to correct this there are 160 computer-controlled actuators underneath each primary mirror these are like pistons that push up on the mirror to correct its parabolic shape and restore the image the third optical challenge for the lbt is correcting distortions caused by the atmosphere stars don't really twinkle it's the effect we see through atmospheric turbulence or haze to lock that star's image into a single steady point of light lbt locks onto a reference point like a bright star that's already known computers measure the real-time angular distortions in the star's image to determine how much and what optical adjustments are needed to correct those distortions 672 magnetic coils line the back of the hair thin secondary mirrors each coil moves the surface up and down one thousand times a second the adaptive mirror surface actually distorts in real time to mathematically compensate for the angular distortions on the reference image with the three major optical challenges figured out the lbt has one more trick to help it see better than ever before it ramps up its image brightness by swinging this pair of third mirrors into place combining its binocular images into one super bright picture that results in images like this nebula over 113 million billion kilometers away the lbt is the most powerful single mount telescope in the world a heavy rock solid machine tamed by precision feather touch controls its sole purpose is to capture and translate light into pictures of places we can only dream of visiting [Music] 95 million people all over the world throw a ball like this one and knock down billions of pins year after year after year not that long ago teenagers used to reset these pins by hand but that left restless bowlers waiting for the next shot this robot is about to turn 50 and it never stops working no lunch break here it's cheap to run doesn't suck up a lot of power and it's fast the brunswick a2 pin center can sweep up and rack a set of pins in just 9.2 seconds without fancy software just four thousand moving parts that run like a clock let's see how it works a typical throw will launch the three to seven kilogram ball into pins made from hard rock maple at over 30 kilometers per hour the pin center waits for its cue when the ball passes this electronic eye two things happen a relay switch tells the a2 to get busy while a camera snaps a picture and sends the data to the scoreboard the a2 locates the standing pins and snatches them up while a sweeper clears the pin deck of fallen ones the same pins are then set back down in the exact position the bowler left them in back in the pit area the fallen pins separate from the ball a belt sends the pins to the top of the machine where they drop into a metal tray called a turnaround pan the weight of the pins body makes it drop heavy part first into the pan so they always load right side up into the distributor wheel each time a pin loads it triggers a clutch which moves the carousel into the next position ready to take the next pin while all that's going on the a2 gets the ball back to the bowler asap the ball makes its way through here to an elevator and from there it rolls along a downslope tunnel as gravity sends it back to the player at the end of the shaft a series of motorized rollers send the ball up this s-shaped curve it all happens in about the same time that it takes to tie your shoes [Music] after the bowler takes his second and final shot of the frame the sweeper clears any remaining pins sensors on the pin deck detect that there's no more standing wood so it sends a message to the distributor wheel to release the pins all 10 of which are reset the a2 automated pin center machine completes its cycle like it has every day every year and every decade smoothly and efficiently this old boy rarely keeps a bowler waiting the desert sun focused beyond the boiling point to make electricity in this solar power plant it's all done with mirrors [Music] three quarters of the known universe is hydrogen but just a little in a fuel cell takes this ride a long way ever feel like you're just a small cog in a big machine well hop on the escalator and join the crowd 3 000 needle stabs a minute if you're not cringing yet wait till you meet the tattoo gun [Music] let's take the lid off these machines and see how they work there are a lot of ways to harness the sun's power like with a magnifying glass or a curved mirror both of which can concentrate sunlight into intense heat and that's exactly what inspired the creators of the solar one to build a low emission power plant out here in nevada's mojave desert let's see how it works in a desert where the sun shines 300 days a year 200 000 mirrors side by side row on row form hundreds of parabolic troughs reflecting sunlight with a surface area of about 50 football fields that makes enough electricity to keep the power on in 14 000 homes year round so yeah we're talking solar here but not the pricey silicon cells that run our calculators at this scale that would cost a fortune this is sunlight concentrated 70 times its normal strength hot enough to burn your skin instantly but here it's focused on heating oil inside these tubes and that hot oil is harnessed to boil water which makes steam that drives a turbine which makes electricity simple right well before you go out and build one there are a few problems to overcome on a solar power plant like this number one regular mirrors at home don't reflect nearly enough light to do the job two your mirror has to move all day the sun that is the earth won't sit still and finally what do you do with a solar plant at night okay first challenge the mirrors household mirrors are fine for touch-ups but are backed with a cheap spray-on coating that absorbs a lot of light pricey laboratory mirrors use silver coatings that reflect most of the light that hits them and the ones here take it up another notch reflecting almost 100 percent of the light that strikes them to heat things up even more they're curved this concentrates the light onto the oil tubes that sit perfectly at their focal point focusing light is one thing putting it to work another so engineers clad the oil tubes in a special glass that intensifies the sun's rays even more by the time the hot oil travels through nearly 20 kilometers of tubing it's four times hotter than the boiling point of water that's twice as hot as the oil used to make fries the oils now pumped into the guts of the plant and is ready to boil water oil tubes run down the center of these water pipes the water absorbs heat from the oil turns to steam and heads straight to the machine's generating station all of the electricity from this power plant is produced with conventional steam turbines steam drives the blades which spin a generator which delivers electricity to the local grid once the steam has fueled the turbine blades it cools down and loses its well steam it's not hot enough to drive anything but it's still vapor it's got to cool down before it can be used again so it heads to a rain room where steam is trapped condensed and returned to the system the second challenge for this machine is to follow the sun's ark [Music] sunflowers have to move all day in order to capture the sun's energy if these mirrors were stuck in one place like a traditional solar panel they would only reach their maximum potential for a few minutes a day so electric motors are placed within groups of mirrors that allow them to follow the sun's arc onto the third challenge what happens after sundown no sun no power there are plans for thermal storage tanks filled with heat trapping molten salts but they're still on the drawing board so at night the solar 1 switches to this natural gas burner to keep the turbine spinning good thing that demand for electricity peaks during the day and that's when this machine delivers and boy does it deliver 60 megawatts of power with almost no emissions preventing 20 000 cars worth of co2 from entering the atmosphere every year the solar one a giant machine with a small footprint capturing energy from the sun it's no magic trick but it is done with mirrors and no smoke this motorcycle is powered by hydrogen the simplest and most plentiful element in the known universe [Music] its creators call this bike envy short for emissions neutral vehicle and you can make a cup of tea from the only thing that comes out of its exhaust you guessed it water and what makes the nv go is this mini power plant called a fuel cell which produces enough electricity to keep the bike rolling not bad for a machine that can hit 80 kilometers an hour okay so it's not exactly a rocket but it is fueled by rocket science the first practical fuel cell system was developed by nasa in the early 60s to generate electricity in space capsules a good way to understand fuel cells is to see how hydrogen is produced and it's actually pretty simple fill a container with water and run an electric current through it this splits hydrogen and oxygen from the water molecule and the process is called electrolysis this is the science behind producing hydrogen gas now if you reverse that process and figure out how to rejoin hydrogen and oxygen you'll create electrical energy along with water and a little heat but it's not a fuel cell yet you need to figure out how to harness its electrical energy and to power this bike it needs to be compact and portable [Music] here's how it works these vents near the handlebars stream outside air to the fuel cell the attraction between oxygen and hydrogen helps the fuel cell produce electricity and that's all about electrons electricity is simply a flow of electrons a fuel cell's primary function is to liberate them hydrogen enters the fuel cell on the left oxygen on the right a platinum film strips electrons in yellow from the hydrogen leaving behind protons both are attracted to the oxygen on the other side but electrons are stopped by this membrane they now need to find their way back to the protons the only way out is along wires to an electric motor that spins a drive belt and gear on the back wheel after passing through the motor the electrons find their way to the other side of the fuel cell as they meet up with protons and oxygen they form h2o a chemical soup known as water that's the only emission this fuel cell belches out and save the jokes about this having a sewing machine engine cause this puppy could power 60 of them okay the env is powered up how do you keep it going simple a fuel cell will go on forever so long as it has a source of hydrogen when the fuel cell runs out all it needs is a fill-up and there's a ready supply of it here at left borough university in england where this prototype was born filling up a fuel cell is as exciting as topping up the gas tank in your car minus the fumes and unlike a conventional motorcycle the only sound you'll hear from this machine is the rubber on the road we're still a few years away from hydrogen-powered vehicles in the local parking lot but when we get there you may have your own personal fuel cell to power or charge just about anything anywhere and oh yeah a motorbike too [Music] this is the great cattle drive [Music] day in day out over and over again in some office somewhere flow dynamics experts study our patterns to get us onto a machine that's basically a tricked out set of stairs on a conveyor belt so how does it work escalators not only get us upstairs they process crowds without damaging the goods today's escalator designers have three major challenges keep it running smooth quiet and safe powering a busy escalator is like pulling a fully loaded suv up a 30 degree hill but under this machine there's nothing but a puny 10 horsepower motor how is that possible sure it spins fast but there's no way it can drive a fully loaded escalator it was installed because it's whisper quiet and that's important if you want people to use them in public spaces going with the larger direct drive motor would make way too much noise so to generate enough power this little guy needs a gearbox the gearbox steps down the motor's rpm that translates into increased horsepower to the larger drive gear and when you tow anything up a hill power is always better than speed but this is also a powerful potentially deadly machine and fatal accidents still occur around the world on a regular basis tumble into one of these and you may as well fall into the jaws of a shark and that's no joke escalator accidents kill more people per year than sharks so when it comes to safety designers look at every inch of the escalator especially at the two trickiest parts of the ride how you step on and off the machine to make life easier they came up with the level loading platform this design feature remains flat for the first few steps as you walk on and gives you a moment to adjust before the step beneath you rises some early escalator models force patrons to jump onto the first rising step not exactly the challenge you're looking for at a shopping mall each step has upper and lower wheels on its ends which fit into two sets of tracks the upper set of wheels join together to form parallel chains in a continuous loop this chain of wheels fits into a cog of the main drive gear and into notches in the main drive wheel the steps rise and stay level through the ride at one to three kilometers per hour then collapse to let you off while riding you hang on to flexible handrails they have their own rollers and their own path but are driven by the same drive mechanism as the steps so they stay perfectly in sync other welcome design features on this machine are the comb plate and the step grooves at the end of the run they work together to keep loose shoelaces debris and curious little fingers from getting caught and if the handrail ever goes out of sync if anything gets jammed or slows it down or if the impact sensors in the comb plate sense anything wrong the brakes will bring everything to a safe stop [Music] the escalator first appeared as an amusement park ride in 1896. today they give over 90 billion rides a year in north america alone and the only time we ever notice them is when they break down and we haul ourselves and our assets all the way to the next floor [Music] tattoos have been around for thousands of years and they've never been more popular one in eight american adults have at least one tattoo that's 40 million people which is pretty crazy when you realize how much it hurts to get one and well they're kind of permanent it's a mechanical rattlesnake that spits ink instead of venom so how does this machine work on the surface tattoo machines are pretty basic you can build one using a motor from a hair dryer or a vibrating toothbrush with guitar strings and erasers and your ink can be taken from a simple ballpoint pen or you can sharpen a stick put dye on the end and poke holes in your skin just don't go trying any of this at home all you have to do to make a tattoo is puncture the epidermis or outer layer of skin and deposit color into the dermis or second layer of skin about one millimeter below the surface and this machine does it up to 50 times a second [Music] which means for every minute in the chair you're getting stabbed three thousand times and if it takes up to three hours to create one that's five hundred and 000 punctures ouch then there's the problem of accuracy you can't make detailed art like this without micro precision the tattoo machine controls needle depth speed and application to within a fraction of a millimeter it hurts like a dental drill sounds like a dental drill and is as precise as a dental drill it starts with a bunch of parts and one elastic divided into three main sections the base the mechanism and the needle the business end is of course the needle it's soldered to a metal arm that connects to the armature bar the part that does all the work going up and down a spring connects the armature bar to the base the hunk of metal that looks like a rabbit ear with a screw in it and the elastic it keeps the hyper-fast needle from going off track no coloring outside the lines here the tattoo machine is armed with razor-sharp stainless steel not tipped with a simple sewing machine needle modern tattoo needles come in a wide array of designs they may look medieval but are created to deal with some amazingly intricate and well special requests the needles make tiny successive holes in the skin picture a sewing machine working through fabric the ink is deposited into skin just like the thread that creates a stitch the skin has to be stretched tight during the process if left loose the needles get stuck the ink bleeds out and makes a mess let's see how it works on a new design it begins with an outline in order to trace it the machine is set up to draw a fine line so it's loaded with a needle that's round like the tip of a pencil after the outline is complete it's time for shading so the machine needs a new set of teeth shading needles are configured like a comb the more needles in a configuration the more ink is transferred the multiple needles create matching holes that are filled at the same time the needles get up to speed by harnessing electromagnetism and that's controlled by this power supply a foot pedal turns the juice on and off this drives the machine at rates of over 4 000 revolutions per minute a sports car can hit 150 kilometers an hour at the same rpm power travels along cables to these coils and creates a magnetic field this pulls down the armature bar and forces the needle into the skin as soon as the armature bar hits the coils it breaks the electrical circuit the magnet turns off and this spring snaps the bar back up as soon as it hits this contact the magnet is reactivated and the needle is driven down again the rate of the needle in this machine is so fast it matches the wing speed of a hummingbird but bird's wings do not cause sharp burning pain in a world where everything is disposable these works of art are for keeps whether for social prestige spiritual devotion tribal rite of passage or a momentary lapse of reason tattoos are the ultimate visual sacrifice for personal expression this machine has taken an ancient art form and made it perfect with a little modern know-how [Music] you

Channel: Free Documentary

Views: 285,610

Keywords: Free Documentary, Documentaries, Full documentary, HD documentary, documentary - topic, documentary (tv genre), how it works, how machines work, machines, engineering documentary, science documentary, Coal fired power plant, Mega Rollercoaster, Large Binocular Telescope, Bowling Pinsetter, Solar Power plant, Hydrogen powered bike, Escalator, Tattoo Machine, how it's made

Id: iBrV_7LYBxc

Length: 48min 55sec (2935 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021