SAIL to produce specialised rails for Indian Railways

Offering a plethora of products for most infrastructure development projects, the Steel Authority of India (SAIL) is India’s largest manufacturer of steel. It was established in 1954 and is a public sector undertaking with a turnover of nearly INR 50 crore (approx. 8 million USD). The fully integrated iron and steel manufacturer’s production was up by 3% in July this year. This Maharatna is India’s second largest maker of iron ore. Bhilai, Salem, Rourkela, Durgapur, Bokaro, and Burnpur house SAIL’s primary integrated steel plants. It has special steel set ups in Bhadravati and Kanpur as well and a ferro-alloy plant in Chandrapur.

Indian Railways and SAIL have a relationship that goes back many years. However SAIL shipped out its first consignment of 'thick web asymmetric rails' from its Bhilai Steel Plant on July 13. These switch rails or point blades help trains move over to another track and will go a long way in helping the Indian Railways cope with the high speeds and increased axle loads. Until now, these switch point rails were being imported since very few local steel manufacturers produce them on a commercial scale. R. K. Sinha, the General Manager of Rail & Structural Mill at the Bhilai Steel Plant said, "We have developed the capability to supply the entire requirement of Indian Railways for such kind of rails."

India is likely to require 10,000 tonnes of these rails. The end-forging plant will be set up at a cost of around INR 45.54 crore (approx. 7.5 million USD). The Railway Design & Standards Organisation has specific standards for production of the switch rails, and it costs about INR 1-1.5 lakh (approx. 1,650 – 2,470 USD) per tonne. With domestic production now established, the average price estimates are expected to come down by 20-30%. The consignment was sent to West Bengal’s (Talmuk) Rail Vikas Nigam Limited. SAIL now provides 130 and 260m long rails to Indian Railways. Currently the Bhilai Steel Plants supplies single piece rail that is 65m long which is then welded to make long rails. But for safety and cost effectiveness, the plant has decided to make rails that are longer with fewer joints. "The new universal rail mill will produce world's longest single piece rail of 135 meter as rolled length and 130 meters finished length. The mill will also be world's largest in terms of its rated capacity of 1.2 million tonne per annum,” a spokesperson for the Bhilai Steel Plant was quoted as saying to the Business Standard.

SAIL is India’s now produces high quality rail track as well as wagons and other parts such as wheels, tracks and axles. SAIL wants to establish an independent passenger coach making plant with an investment of INR 1,000 crore (approx. 164 million USD). The Kulti wagon plant in West Bengal is expected to produce 1,500 coaches by the end of next year. "We are in talks with the Railways for passenger coaches. We have different locations in mind but are yet to finalise. The detailed project report is getting readied," SAIL Chairman C. S. Verma told the Press Trust of India.

details about first American killed by a car

It was the evening of September 13, 1899, when 69-year-old Henry H Bliss stepped from a trolley car along New York’s Central Park, was hit by a taxi cab and died the next morning from injuries. He was gentlemanly helping a lady friend off the trolley when he was run down.

“Fatally hurt by automobile”, The New York Times story read, seizing on gruesome details such as “crushed” skull and chest, and gossipy ones such as the fact that the taxi’s passenger was David Edson, the son of a former mayor. Edson also happened to be a doctor, returning from a sick call, and performed triage to Bliss on the scene. The driver was arrested and jailed but later acquitted.

The story makes the history books because Bliss was the first fatal car accident victim, pedestrian or otherwise, in North America. (A woman died 30 years and two weeks earlier in Ireland when she was thrown from a steam-powered conveyance built by her cousins.)  But the most surprising detail, in hindsight, was not even noteworthy enough to make the newspaper account: the car was electric.

No, Henry Bliss wasn't killed by a time-travelling, retro-fitted DeLorean. In the late 1800s, electric-powered cars were among the highest performing, and most popular, vehicles on the road. In 1900, there were more electric cars in New York City than gasoline-powered ones, and for good reason. They were less smelly and quieter than their fuel-burning counterparts, didn't require a hand-crank start and they eliminated the hardest part of early driving: shifting gears. The fleet of taxis that ultimately were the death of Bliss were built by the Electric Vehicle Company, an enterprise that was eventually done in by the difficulty of maintaining infrastructure for charging the batteries – talk about back to the future.

But the most surprising detail was not even noteworthy enough to make the newspaper: the car was electric. 

For years the Electric Vehicle Company cleverly swapped out old batteries for fresh ones at the end of a taxi’s shift, but as the fleet grew, it became harder to maintain and organise the battery facilities. Mainly because the company failed to properly scale its success, it went bankrupt in 1907, a 100-plus year setback for electric passenger vehicles. A different cautionary tale.

At the corner of 74th Street and Central Park West, inside an area once known to trolley drivers as the “Dangerous Stretch” for the many non-fatal accidents that had occurred there in the summer months before Bliss was killed, a plaque was erected that read, in part: “When Mr. Bliss, a New York real estate man, died the next morning from his injuries, he became the first recorded motor vehicle fatality in the Western Hemisphere. This sign was erected to remember Mr. Bliss on the centennial of his untimely death and to promote safety on our streets and highways.”

So next time you are helping a lady exit a trolley, watch out for cars. If it’s electric, you may not hear it coming.

Japan launches 'affordable' Epsilon space rocket

Japan has launched the first in a new generation of space rockets, hoping the design will make missions more affordable.

The Epsilon rocket is about half the size of Japan's previous generation of space vehicles, and uses artificial intelligence to perform safety checks.

Japan's space agency Jaxa says the Epsilon cost $37m (£23m) to develop, half the cost of its predecessor.

Epsilon launched from south-western Japan in the early afternoon.

Crowds of Japanese gathered to watch the launch, which was also broadcast on the internet.

It was carrying a telescope that is being billed by Jaxa as the world's first space telescope that will remotely observe planets including Venus, Mars and Jupiter from its Earth orbit.

Jaxa said the rocket successfully released the Sprint-A telescope as scheduled, about 1,000km (620 miles) above the Earth's surface.

Epsilon's predecessor, the M-5, was retired in 2006 because of spiralling costs.

Jaxa said the Epsilon was not only cheaper to produce, but also cheaper to launch than the M-5.

Because of its artificial intelligence, the new rocket needs only eight people at the launch site, compared with 150 people for earlier launches.

Japan's other recent space innovations included sending a talking robot to the International Space Station.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24090322

Why we might not be able to live on the Moon ?

There’s nothing wrong with that – after all, space and its exploration have always been a source of reverie, from Johannes Kepler’s youthful space-travel fantasy simply called The Dream to visions of the ‘final frontier’. The problem with dreams is that sooner or later you must wake up.To judge from an article on lunar bases on Nasa’s web site, it’s reluctant to do that. “When multiple spacecraft all found unequivocal evidence for water on the moon it was a boon to possible future lunar bases, acting as a potential source of drinking water and fuel,” the article says. It explains that the atomic components of water – hydrogen and oxygen – on the lunar surface move towards the poles, “where [water] accumulates in the cold traps of the permanently shadowed regions.” Since it was first proposed several years ago, this idea that the polar craters, particularly the so-called Shackleton crater at the south pole, are lined with ancient ice has inspired many hyperbolic newspaper stories about colonising the Moon. But it’s looking ever less likely that it is true.
A new paper in the journal Geophysical Research Letters drives another nail into the coffin of lunar living. It suggests that what was at first taken to be bright, reflective ice in the Shackleton crater is in fact more likely to be white rock.
When the Apollo missions reached the Moon at the end of the 1960s, they brought back a sobering message: it seemed to be a dry, barren dustball. But the modern dream of “water on the Moon” began in earnest in 1994, when Nasa’s spacecraft Clementine orbited the Moon and studied the mineral composition of its surface. The reflections of radio waves beamed into the shadowed polar craters suggested that they might contain ice. But follow-up studies using radio telescopes on Earth failed to find any such evidence.
Then in 1998 another Nasa Moon mission, the Lunar Prospector spacecraft, used a special instrument to search for hydrogen atoms – a possible signature of water molecules – on the Moon’s surface. It detected the hydrogen signals from polar craters, but when at the end of its mission the spacecraft was purposely crashed into a south polar crater in the hope that it might send up a plume of water detectable from Earth, nothing of the sort was observed.
No Moon river
Each alleged sighting of lunar ice provoked new headlines forecasting future moon bases, feeding an apparent public thirst for space colonization. But for scientists, the debate has remained unresolved. In 2009 NASA launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, designed to map the Moon’s surface in even more detail and carrying several instruments that might be able to detect ice. Last year a team of planetary scientists reported that the south polar Shackleton crater has a bright floor and even brighter inside walls, suggesting that some material has gradually slipped down the slopes onto the bottom of the crater. The researchers suspected that this stuff could be simply lunar “soil”, called regolith because it is really just mineral dust, with no organic matter. Lunar regolith is bright and reflective when freshly exposed – the bombardment from cosmic rays, solar wind and meteorites gradually darkens it, but on the crater’s walls it is particularly well sheltered from such disturbances. But the team also offered the tentative possibility that the bright material could be a very thin layer of rock dust mixed with 20% ice....................................

Global Warming

An increase in the near surface temperature of the Earth. Global warming has occurred in the distant past as the result of natural influences, but the term is most often used to refer to the warming predicted to occur as a result of increased emissions of greenhouse gases. Scientists generally agree that the Earth's surface has warmed by about 1 degree Fahrenheit in the past 140 years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently concluded that increased concentrations of greenhouse gases are causing an increase in the Earth's surface temperature and that increased concentrations of sulfate aerosols have led to relative cooling in some regions, generally over and downwind of heavily industrialized areas.

Definition of Greenhouse Gas:  A gas, like CO₂, which traps the sun's heat.

Human causes:  Carbon dioxide (CO₂), e.g. exhaust from cars and power plants.

Natural causes:  Some claim the sun is getting hotter (it's not). Cause unknown.

 

It's virtually impossible that none of it is caused by people, because we know we have increased CO₂ in the air from 280 to 380 ppm, and we know CO₂ has a warming effect. But there's still a very small chance that the effect is tiny. But there is no evidence that it's tiny.

 In 1896 Svante Arrhenius (1903 Nobel Prize in Chemistry) predicted thedecrease in CO2 needed to cause past ice ages. He wasn't far off, and it is not a large decrease. This helped confirm the 1859 prediction that human-producedincreases in CO2 would cause just the reverse: global warming.

What's to be done? A global problem requires a global solution, and that requires countries to cooperate. The science of games and strategies explains what leads to cooperation and what doesn't. The basic situation—what each country does helps that country very little—is a classic game call the prisoner's dilemma. And the prisoners do not cooperate. Unfortunately the Kyoto approach actually makes the problem worse. But a better design leads to cooperation, as explained in the Green Fund Game.

What Causes Global Warming (climate change), human activity or the sun? The final answer is not in, but you can see the results so far. (1) Exhaust is clearly the source of CO₂. (2) Everyone now agrees the earth is warming. (3) Decide for yourself if warming is better explained by CO₂, or the sun's heat.

The Effects of Global Warming. We can see the long-term effects coming in the melting of polar ice and glaciers. But apowerful trend in Atlantic hurricane data indicates we can already see the impact. Katrina was partly the result of a normal weather cycle, but that cannot explain away stronger hurricanes world wide.
It's too late for that, but we can slow it down and lessen its effects. CO₂ does not last as long in the air as was once thought, so the big problem is slowing human use of fossil energy, especially coal. (Especially since CO₂ goes into the ocean and destroys coral reefs.)