Pneumatic Pipe Cutters Can Cut Underwater
With different blades, UPCs cut 6″ – 48″ (150-1300 mm) steel, ductile iron, cast iron, clay, concrete, PVC or PE pipe in one revolution.
These pneumatic powered cutters are lightweight, easy to set-up and use, fast cutting, require only 12″ (300 mm) clearance around the pipe, provide a square cut, and can be used underwater.
New, tough blades for steel and PE pipe give operators a great new use for these long-established Reed cutters.
Everyone needs a handy tubing cutter, so check out Reed’s new spring-loaded C Cutters in 1/2′, 3/4″, and 1″ tubing capacities.
Could This Be The Wheel of the Future?
Most typical males constantly worry about our cars. “Is my oil low?”, “what is that ‘clunk’ing noise?”, “Did my wife put premium unleaded in this like I told her?”, “Why is my ‘check engine’ light on again?”. They even occasionally check the tires to see if they look low on air, and make sure to change them to studded tires for brutal winters. But what if you didn’t have to ever change the tire again dependent on the weather? What if you could buy one tire that would be designed to change to the weather? Yes, there may be a new kid in town in terms of cars and transportation; the Pumplon wheel could be tire of the future.
The Pumplon wheel, which resembles the shape of a pumpkin, or even a melon depending on its shape (hence the name Pumplon), is designed to change shape to whatever the road conditions call for through a rotary mechanism.
Living in a climate where you get to experience the four seasons to their extreme, you can get wet & rainy springs, 100-plus degree summers, chilly and colorful falls, and blistering cold winters. If you were to install the Pumplon on your car, according to Pumplon, you would not need to change them for any weather reason or road condition. Say for instance it was spring-time and there was a heavy rainstorm, by switching the Pumplons to the skinnier shape, it would increase contact pressure, cutting through the water on the road, allowing you to more safely arrive at your destination. Or if the road is flooded, switch the tires to the widest setting to make the car amphibious. In the summer, one may just want to hit the highway and cruise with the top down and feel the find in their hair, and for that they would change the Pumplon to the normal, or “ball”-look setting. For the fall and winter, when you may be trudging through mud or snow (intentionally or not), you will need as much surface area out of my tires as possible. You would consequently set the tire to its “melon” shape to get as much grip and surface area as possible, hopefully getting yourself unstuck in the mountain, or get you through the snow-packed roads to grandma’s house for Christmas.
With the world “going green”, it has brought about some rather interesting, very innovative ideas and concepts, and this one is no exception. The green benefits can be very numerous, from reducing travel times to increasing fuel efficiency.
The Pumplon wheel is the creation of Osmar Vicente Rodriguez, a native of Brazil, also a professor of industrial design at RCA Innovation. His intention for creating the Pumplon was primarily for solving transportation problems for farmers in developing countries where the majority of roads are either unkempt and in very bad condition.
How does it work, you may ask? The secret to the Pumplon is a steel shaft that can expand and retract by means of a rotary mechanism, pneumatic or hydraulic, adjusting rings which makes the wheel deformation wider or narrower.
The material of the tires has been the subject of special consideration. According to Rodriguez, “initially they were steel, but we replaced it with a thermoplastic material, which is easier to produce, lighter and cheaper, and is recyclable. The cover is of vulcanized rubber, similar to that used in tires conventionally, but more flexible to allow changes in size.”
Hospital’s Pneumatic Tube System is a Medical Care Superhighway
One of the most important working parts of Stanford Hospital is practically invisible ― and its invention dates back more than 200 years.
Seven thousand times a day, in four miles of tubing laced efficiently behind walls from basement to rooftop, a pneumatic tube system shuttles foot-long containers carrying everything from blood to medication. In a hospital the size of Stanford, where a quarter-mile’s distance might separate a tissue specimen from its destination lab, making good time means better medicine.
Stanford Hospital’s container transport system, which also serves the adjacent Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, is one of the largest in the country. Its architecture is a sophisticated design of switching points, waiting areas, sending and receiving points. It hosts 124 stations (every nursing unit has its own); 141 transfer units, 99 inter-zone connectors and 29 blowers. To help alert employees to the arrival of containers, the system has more than three dozen different combinations of chiming tones.
Such pneumatic tube systems date back to the early 19th century, where they drove the workings of postal services, department stores and other commercial businesses whose physical size demanded something faster than standard human pace. But those versions were designed to move paper, which could handle a hard landing. When computers began to eliminate paper with electronically deliverable data, tube systems lost their value until engineers figured out a way to control airflow to slow down the containers for a soft landing at their destination station.
At Stanford Hospital, before 1993, a team of about 20 people had the job of transporting the multitudes of tissue, medications and documents. However, the increasing size of the Hospital, and the addition of two adjacent buildings, the Blake Wilbur Cancer Center and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, made the tube system option the most modern solution.
Depending on the diameter of a tube, cylinders can reach speeds of up to 25 feet per second, about 18 miles per hour, far faster than any human could ever manage.
It was also a question of best use of employee time, if, as often happened, a courier wasn’t available when a specimen needed to get to the lab. Having a nurse leave a patient’s bedside for a minutes-long run to the lab made no sense.
Reliable speed is crucial when the system carries blood products, some of which are temperature-sensitive and, by regulations, must be discarded if not properly maintained. The tube system, said Lab Operation Services manager Gay Routh, “is vital, very vital. I don’t know what we’d do without the tube system, especially when it comes to tests like those that happen in surgery. When arterial blood gases are sent from the operating room, we need to return results in a very short period of time, so physicians know if they need to change settings on a monitor. Years ago, before the tubes, we would get a phone call and we’d have to send somebody. It definitely slowed our turnaround time.”
The Hospital’s Chief Engineer Leander Robinson commands the system from a small basement office, where computer monitors light up every time someone puts a container in a shute, types in a numerical address and presses the ‘send’ button. The screen displays a tiny icon that reflects the container’s travel through various switches and transfers, but it moves so quickly it’s actually hard to track its passage. Even during the heaviest flow through the system, between noon and 2 p.m., a container can cover the longest start-to-finish distance ― 1,500 feet ― in less than three minutes.
The system has a complete set of checks and balances, sensing where containers are needed and sending them. Some departments, like the operating rooms, have dedicated lines that guarantee them a straight shot to the lab. “Blood products get first priority,” said Lee Chua, blood transfusion services manager.
The system does occasionally falter, but it’s operative 98.8 percent of the time, Robinson said. And no cylinder has ever gotten stuck in a tube, he said. He has software that monitors the system, charting its use station by station and watching especially those times when someone sends a cylinder “stat” ― the highest priority coding. It’s also a work in constant progress; the Hospital continues to evolve and locations can change. “The tube is everywhere,” Robinson said, “and the directories ever changing.”
