A tale of two cities…

Which looks more like a place where serious and meaningful research gets done?

Death of a turbo

Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles currently has a nice post up on vacuum pumps - equipment that’s pretty much essential for anyone doing any kind of nanofabrication or materials characterisation work. Coincidentally, someone in the lab hauled out a turbopump today so we had an opportunity to take some photos.

Though, of course, you really, really never want to see turbopumps in this state.

Here’s a view through the top connecting flange of the turbo. Normally, you should see quite nice, regular, closely-spaced blades arranged around a central shaft, much like the turbines of a jet engine. Obviously that’s not quite the case here - this is a turbopump that’s just gone through a rather catastrophic failure, possibly arising because of some small object, a wafer fragment say, dropping right into it. There’s usually a safety mesh placed over the turbo opening to prevent such occurrences from happening, but sometimes holes get ripped in it.

A large turbopump like this usually has its turbines spinning around 3000 rpm or so - about 50 times per second. That’s pretty darned fast, and when something gets in the way of something with this much angular momentum, well, bad things happen. Like turbine blades jamming and then shearing off:

A turbopump typically contains a series of rotors; each one compressing and driving gas towards the outlet leading to a backing pump. Here, about two or three levels down, the rotor itself has been thrown off axis:

Did I mention that these guys can cost SGD$100,000 or more?

A*STAR’s Star Challenge Updates and White Paper

It looks like the deadline for the competition registration has been extended; originally February 29th, now, registration closes on March 31st. Perhaps they couldn’t find enough good teams to make this an exciting show?

But never mind that. More details of the search tasks are now available in a recently released white paper. There are two broad categories, each with three subtasks:

Audio (Voice) search tasks:

• Search by International Phonetic Alphabet
• Search by voice example (of a given word/phrase/sentence)
• Search for recurrent voice segments

Video search tasks:

• Search by a single query image
• Search by video shot
• Scene/event categorization

The initial knockout and subsequent qualifying rounds will consist of some combination of the above tasks, on various databases, both monolingual and multilingual.

The preliminary schedule is given in the white paper as well. A summary:

• Registration deadline: March 31
• 1st knockout round: May 4-15
• 2nd knockout round: June 4-20
• 3rd knockout round: July 4-20
• Qualifying race: August 20-23
• Grand final: October 23

Since it’s already been stated that the grand final will take place during Fusionopolis opening week, we now know when the official opening of Fusionopolis will be taking place as well (assuming the schedule has been fixed). Mark your calendars!