engine design

Bill Hammack of Engineer Guy explains the engineering behind the aluminum beverage can: why it is cylindrical, how it is manufactured, why it narrows at the top, the double seam, and how the pull tab works.

The final part of Dan Gelbart's 18-part Building Prototypes series, focused on mechanical design. It opens with a demonstration of stiffness and covers practical design principles for prototype machines.

Technology Connections praises a 1940s-50s Sunbeam toaster and explains what makes a toaster well designed, drawing on a vintage Sunbeam video.

Episode 7 of the Inside Koenigsegg series, where Christian von Koenigsegg demonstrates the camless Free Valve engine technology. It discusses how such innovation could affect the wider auto industry.

Engineering Explained examines BMW's Hydrogen 7, a V12 that burns liquid hydrogen or gasoline. He covers cryogenic storage at -253C and why the approach is impractical.

Engineering Explained argues that internal combustion engines are far from dead, and discusses the continued development of ICEs and the problems facing electric vehicles.

Scott Manley explains the plumbing of rocket engines, including pressure-fed, gas generator, expander and staged combustion cycles. He shows why more complex designs exist and what they gain.

SuperfastMatt looks at how the Tesla Model S retracting door handles were redesigned over time, from many parts to a motor plus sensor, with a focus on engineering and reliability.

A short test firing of the XRS-2200 linear aerospike engine at NASA Stennis Space Center, which was designed for the cancelled X-33 VentureStar. The engine is shown at roughly 80 percent of max thrust.

An engineering explainer on why Tesla abandoned the induction motor for the Model 3 and used an IPM-SynRM design. It covers the reluctance torque and permanent magnet principles behind the choice.

AngeTheGreat describes building a physically realistic internal combustion engine simulator in C++, drawing on fluid dynamics, physics and chemistry. It generates procedural audio for engines such as a V8.

Tim Dodd's hour-long deep dive on how rocket engines start, from solid motors to liquid engines. It covers thermal conditioning, spin-up, ignition methods, starting in space, and a step-by-step RS-25 startup.

Veritasium explains how jet engines run hotter than their components' melting points, using cooling air and single-crystal superalloy turbine blades. It covers how the blades are grown as aligned crystals.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy explains how medieval engineers designed stone cathedrals using rules of thumb, with no science, mathematics or literacy. He uses it to define the engineering method.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Engineering Explained examines Toyota's hydrogen-burning V8 engine built with Yamaha and explains the practical problems of hydrogen combustion vehicles. It covers efficiency, storage and distribution issues.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

Tim Dodd of Everyday Astronaut gets a close-up walkthrough of SpaceX's Raptor 2 engine from Elon Musk at Starbase. They cover how Raptor 2 was simplified and upgraded relative to Raptor 1, including cooling and thrust vectoring details.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Short Curious Droid video on why NASA could not simply rebuild the Saturn V's Rocketdyne F-1 engine for the SLS boosters. It explains that the engines were hand-tailored and that much of the know-how was never documented, so the blueprints were not enough.

Mike Acton of Insomniac Games argues that a program's purpose is transforming data, and shows how common C++ approaches work against that in performance-critical game development. He covers cache behavior, data layout and the limits of compilers.

Brian Bucklew of Freehold Games discusses design decisions behind Caves of Qud and Sproggiwood at IRDC 2015. The talk centers on data-driven, event-driven engine design.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

Cockpit footage of a Swiss Airbus A340 crew dealing with rising oil temperature in one engine on a Zurich to Shanghai flight, ending with a safety landing. It shows the pilots' procedures through the emergency.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

The trailer for Tim Hunkin's series The Secret Life of Components, eight guides to mechanical and electromechanical parts for designers and makers.

A Channel 4 Equinox documentary on the NK-33 engines built for the Soviet N1 moon rocket and how they ended up in the USA. It includes rare footage and interviews with veterans of the early Soviet space program.

Technology Connections explains how refrigerator and freezer design affects energy use, using chest freezers to show why top-opening designs and layout choices matter. It includes thermal-camera footage of cold air spilling out of upright units.

A Disney Research SIGGRAPH 2013 demo of an interactive system that lets non-experts design animated mechanical characters. The user sketches motion curves and the system generates optimized mechanisms and gear trains for 3D printing.

Stuff Made Here designs and builds an "unpickable" lock, then calls in a locksmith to see if it can be defeated. It covers the mechanical design effort and the attempt to pick it.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

A clip of Sandy Munro, a veteran automotive engineer, describing his visit to a SpaceX Starship design review and meeting Elon Musk. He says he was struck by how deeply Musk is involved in engineering.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

The Godot Engine 2022 showreel of apps and tools built with Godot, with a timestamped list of each project. It shows the engine being used well beyond games.

Mark Bastian contrasts top-down object-oriented design with bottom-up, data-oriented design in Clojure. He models a board game as plain data plus small composable functions and compares it with a roughly 22-class OOP version.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, talks at Curry On 2015 about user-focused language design. He explains the principles behind Elm and how to make a functional, typed language as approachable as JavaScript.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.