• Question: What is your favorite invention that you made?

    Asked by Doodle to Eimear, James, Lána, Willi on 26 Feb 2018.
    • Photo: William O'Connor

      William O'Connor answered on 26 Feb 2018:

      My favorite invention?
      Well it’s not really a “thing” but a method to control flexible mechanical things, like long and light robot arms, big spacecraft, big structures in space, the swinging loads on cranes, and even the moving arm on a computer disk drive.
      I also invented a way to count people automatically and invisibly.

    • Photo: Lána Salmon

      Lána Salmon answered on 26 Feb 2018:

      During my undergraduate degree we made a solar tracker – this is a robotic arm which automatically points at the sun in the sky, even when it doesn’t have a window to look out. I liked building this because it needed equations for the suns movement across the sky during the year, then we had to engineer the robotic arm and then deal with circuits.

    • Photo: James Geary

      James Geary answered on 26 Feb 2018:

      I don’t specifically invent new items, the type of role I have takes existing technology and enhances it to allow it to achieve higher performances e.g. On my project MTG we are working to enhance an existing pulse tube cooler performance. The pulse tube cooler was invented by W. E. Gifford and R. C. Longsworth in the 1960s.

      We use cryo coolers to take our Infra Red optical detectors down to low temperature, the lower temperature reduces the SNR (signal to noise ratio). In order to achieve these higher performances the cryocooler needs to pump at a higher frequency. When the cryo cooler is pumping at a higher frequency it vibrate more and the vibrations can impact the detection efficiency of Infra Red detectors.

      In engineering you often have to trade off performances against each other to get the right balance e.g. cooling power versus low vibrations

    • Photo: Eimear Tuohy

      Eimear Tuohy answered on 26 Feb 2018:

      I went to a beach in Kerry with a laser scanner. I scanned the beach dunes over 5 days. After processing all the results I made a really nice 3D image of the dunes.

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