Environmental Engineering Reference
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students to make them familiar with their research and technology
development. Germany's first technical university was founded as
Collegio Carolino zu Braunschweig in 1745 at the time of Galilei,
Kepler, von Guericke, Newton and Leibniz out of the need to join
theory and practice—with the intention to realise mechanical
constructions, such as perpetuum mobiles that could not work
for theoretical reasons, and to develop manufacturing know-how
for mechanic computing machines, which at that time failed due
to lack of understanding about the accumulation of mechanical
tolerances. And now, over 200 years later, putting theory to
practice, it once more became a challenge: cybernetics and mathe-
matical engineering were well advanced and the programming
flexibility of the microprocessors would now allow to carry over-
advanced methods to broad application in a wide range, unlocking
creativity and challenging the engineers' spirit of invention.
In the university's laboratories, as students in the beginning
of the 1980s, we were of course electrified to see first examples of
what should become common in the next decades. At that time,
benefits of technology in general were much under public discussion
and we just had seen the Three Mile Island 1979 nuclear disaster.
The energy technology professor fresh from nuclear business,
reacting to the students union was open to discuss necessity
and safety of nuclear power instead of other high voltage topics.
Engineers became ready to take responsibility for the technology
they developed, not few of us hoping to be able to contribute to
society as engineers instead of creating surveillance, nuclear or war
technology.
We had the opportunity for a round-trip on the transrapid
prototype outside, where micro- and power electronics were
enabling both magnetic driving, and lifting by advanced control in
the instable equilibrium between gravitation force and permanent
magnet field. According to the linear drive, for the lab a synchronous
multi-pole ring-machine of 1 m diameter had been constructed.
For investigating smooth movement, that is, transition to the next
sections, not the whole number, but only two permanent magnets
were needed. Fully equipped, this topology was perfectly suited
for electromechanical generation at low rotational speed, that
is, gearless wind converters. By means of contemporary micro-
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