CHRIS: Hey, everyone, my name is Chris Anderson, and today on Science Around Cincy, we're going to learn how mass, forces, and energy shape our world.

(music) Today I'm at the University of Cincinnati's Central Utility Plant.

This is where much of the electricity that is used on campus, and in area hospitals is generated.

That's huge demand, so energy engineers Sid Thatham is going to show me how they generate that much electricity.

Hey, Cyd.

SID: Hey, Chris, how are you?

CHRIS: Good, man.

How are you doing?

SID: Good, thanks.

CHRIS: Thanks for inviting me out here.

SID: Glad you could make it.

CHRIS: So what is electricity?

SID: In very basic, very simple terms, electricity is flow of charge.

CHRIS: OK. SID: What happens is when you energize an electron, it tends to jump from one atom to the other.

And when it jumps to the second atom, the electron that jump from one atom to the other repels and knocks out the electron and the second atom.

This flow of negative charge, the flow of electrons is essentially electricity.

CHRIS: So it's kind of like leapfrog then for these electrons.

They just kind of keep bouncing.

SID: Exactly.

CHRIS: And atoms, so you guys must be -- you guys must be moving a lot of electrons around here.

SID: Yeah, a lot of electrons, trust me.

CHRIS: So how do you guys generate that much electricity?

SID: So what we do is we generate electricity using what we call a combustion turbine, which is kind of like jet engines on the airplanes, if you will.

What happens is air is drawn and squeezed and pressurized inside a compressor.

So air is compressed and when air is compressed, it increases the temperature and the pressure within the compressor and that mixes with fuel, which in our case is natural gas, and it further heats this whole thing up.

This, in turn, spins a turbine, which is kind of like a pinwheel, which then generate electricity through the generator.

So that's a long path, but it happens like that.

CHRIS: Ok, so let me get this straight.

So you get -- you basically get air really, really hot and you use it to push a giant pinwheel to generate electricity?

SID: Kind of like that.

CHRIS: Cool.

Can you show me how to do that?

SID: Absolutely.

Let's go check it out.

CHRIS: All right.

So how do you guys go about getting the air and steam generated in the first place?

MOJO: We have gas generators and 1400 degree heat comes off the generator itself.

We have boilers, 600 pound boilers, 125 pound boilers, water enters the boiler and we just take the waste heat off of the engine itself.

It takes about 750 degrees to boil 600 pounds of steam.

CHRIS: How is that possible?

Because I know the boiling point of water is 212 Fahrenheit.

So how are you guys able to get water up to 700 degrees?

MOJO: We take water with the application of heat in a pressurized vessel.

That's the key right there, it has to be in a pressurized vessel and the application of heat to the water creates steam.

The easiest way I tell people to kind of visualize it, take a bottle of pop, shake it up.

It becomes under pressure, you know what I mean?

CHRIS: Right, and if you open it, it's going to want to go somewhere.

MOJO: Yeah, that cap is going to explode off of there.

SID: So imagine this, we know that when we increase the temperature of water, the molecules change state from liquid to gas.

Right?

CHRIS: Right.

SID: Which is essentially the molecules going away from each other.

But if all the molecules are in a tight enclosure, they don't have anywhere to go so they retain that state.

CHRIS: Ok, so it's still water at 700 degrees.

MOJO: Yes.

CHRIS: 750 degrees.

MOJO: Yes.

CHRIS: So you guys get this water that's under a lot of pressure.

You use the boilers to get it really, really hot.

MOJO: Yes.

CHRIS: OK, and then that steam then pushes the turbines, correct?

MOJO: Correct.

CHRIS: OK. MOJO: The steam coming off of the CTG HRSG units is 600 pounds of steam.

That's what we need to push our turbines at 5438 reps per minute.

The turbine blades is connected to a shaft, OK?

The shaft is connected to a generator.

Inside a generator you've got the magnet, you've got coils in there.

CHRIS: And you guys just happen to generate a lot of electricity.

MOJO: Up to, on this unit, 20,000 kilowatts.

CHRIS: What is your guys fuel for those things?

SID: So at the crux of it, all of this is concentration of energy.

Right?

Energy is just changing forms.

What happens is you're converting the chemical energy from the fuel, which in this case is natural gas.

CHRIS: You've got the chemical energy in the bonds of the natural gas.

SID: Um-hmm.

Chemical, energy, plus compressed air, to mechanical energy, or kinetic energy, which moves the turbines to generate electricity.

CHRIS: OK. SID: Heat happens to be a by-product of that process.

So what this plant does is it recovers that heat to convert water to steam, which is then used again to move a turbine, kinetic energy, mechanical energy.

And from there to generate electricity using a generator.

CHRIS: So you guys are using the excess heat after the process has been done to kind of get started the next set of water that's going to get used to generate electricity.

Right?

MOJO: We're recycling all our steam.

I'd say we probably trap 85% of our steam that we send out to campus and to the hospital.

And like I said, that's our most efficient water source, this condensate.

CHRIS: I was going to say, because it's got to save you guys a lot in terms of how much natural gas you have to burn because you don't have to get the water all the way up to temperature.

You can -- it's already pretty hot water as it is.

MOJO: The condensate is already hot and it's already clean.

CHRIS: Wow.

SID: We have the capacity to generate close to 47 megawatts of electricity, which is equivalent to powering close to 39,000 homes in the State of Ohio.

CHRIS: Just off this plant alone, you can almost power, not just 40,000 people, 40,000 individual homes.

MOJO: Correct.

CHRIS: That's a lot of electricity.

That's pretty cool.

SID: To charge your mobile phones and whatnot, everything that's on campus.

So that electricity is essentially all that powers all of our appliances.

CHRIS: You guys are powering all of campus's Tik-Toks.

SID: Yeah, you could say that.

You could say that.

(music) CHRIS: So, tell me a little bit, you guys have so many processes at the plant that help conserve energy, make things energy efficient.

Why is that so important?

SID: If you look at a global scale, about 40% of the carbon emissions are from the fact that power plants use fuels to generate electricity.

It is the responsibility of all such power plants to be as efficient as we can that would help us not only conserve energy, save money, but also bring down the carbon footprint.

So I think it's very essential that all of us be more efficient.

CHRIS: Well, Sid, thank you so much for inviting me down here.

This facility was awesome and it was really great to learn how you guys generate electricity and how you do it efficiently.

That was really cool.

SID: Absolutely, no, the pleasure was ours to have you over.

And this is something that we like to do here at the power plant.

We do a lot of tours for the folks at the university and the Cincinnati community.

So if you or your viewers want to visit our facility and see what we do, the kind of science that happens at the plant, we're more than happy to have people over.

We're more than happy to host people.

So please feel free to reach out and hope to see you soon.

CHRIS: Firefighters and rescue workers have one of the most dangerous jobs in the world, but a new engineering firm called Bailout Systems has a new design that is throwing these heroes a lifeline.

I can't wait to find out more about what they're doing.

BEN: I'm Ben Krupp.

I'm the lead mechanical engineer on this project.

MICHAEL: Michael Ragsdale, founder and CEO of Bail Out Systems.

Essentially just got started way back when a friend told me about a problem in the fire industry.

So he told me I need to quit designing toasters and with my experience in the military and rock climbing, stuff like that, he said, "You need to come up with a better way for us to jump out of a building."

CHRIS: Hey, guys.

BEN: Hey, Chris.

CHRIS: How's it going.

Ben.

MICHAEL: Nice to meet you.

Good to see you.

CHRIS: Good to see you guys.

So you guys are doing something really awesome here.

You're finding a way for firefighters or rescue workers to be able to jump out of buildings.

You guys are saving lives here, right?

How does this system work?

How are you able to get someone to jump out of a four or five story building without hurting themselves?

BEN: Well, that is the the challenge at hand.

So, you know, if you think about a roller coaster, you know, at the at the top of the hill you have a whole bunch of potential energy and very little kinetic energy.

And at the bottom of the hill, you have transitioned all of that potential energy to kinetic energy.

You're moving really quickly.

So a firefighter has the same situation.

At the at the top of the building, when he's on the roof, he has a whole bunch of potential energy and very little or no kinetic energy.

We need to get him to the bottom of the building without producing a whole bunch of kinetic energy.

So really, our goal is to take his potential energy and move it into some other energy form, not kinetic.

CHRIS: Not kinetic.

BEN: So the way you do that is basically by converting your potential energy into heat energy.

So you can, you know, rub two sticks together to generate friction.

And that friction is, you know, is taking kinetic energy, in this case, and turning it into heat energy.

So basically, what we're going to do is we're going to take that potential energy, transition it into kinetic energy, and then use the kinetic energy to generate heat and to burn off the energy that the firefighter would have normally hit the ground with.

CHRIS: That makes a lot of sense because the less kinetic energy you have the less velocity, so you're hitting the ground slower.

BEN: Exactly.

CHRIS: And with less force.

BEN: Exactly.

CHRIS: So what has been the biggest challenge in putting your design together?

MICHAEL: The problem was that it was the size of a canister, which was oddly enough, it was a step up because they could wear it on their air pack and they didn't even know it was there.

So you would have like the harness, you'd have the rope that was smaller than this, all contained in a canister.

They would jump and it lowered them to the ground.

So then Ben got involved.

And when Ben got involved, he took what we did, the size of a canister, and literally got it down to the size of a soda can.

And since then, Haskell and Ben, both the two engineers, they got our device down to the size of a hockey puck.

CHRIS: So you guys have shrunk it down considerably, like 80 or 90%.

MICHAEL: Right.

CHRIS: And that's got to be so great for the firefighters because it's something that they don't have to worry about getting in the way of their equipment, as they're actually doing their job of putting out fires.

MICHAEL: Exactly.

CHRIS: You've got your guys' experimental setup here.

What are some of the things that you're looking for as you guys are testing?

DAVID: So we've mocked up the firefighter with something simple.

And then we want to be able to measure how that energy is being absorbed by our device.

That's what's going to control the firefighter's descent.

So we have figured out that if you measure the force and you measure the speed that the rope is coming out.

CHRIS: The velocity, right?

DAVID: The velocity.

So then you have the force times the velocity, which is going to give you power when you look at how long you have been doing it.

CHRIS: OK. DAVID: So that's basically the basic equation for power.

And so the bag falling down is power being generated and then this is where power gets absorbed.

So we measure the basic things that allow us to measure and control the energy absorption and that's how we change our design.

CHRIS: So was just so I got your setup here.

So you're measuring the force of what's the -- that's being -- DAVID: The tension in the rope.

CHRIS: The rope that's being pulled, the tension in the rope, OK. And then how fast that rope is being things being pulled.

OK, and that will give you let you know how much energy is being dispersed.

DAVID: Yes, that's exactly right.

CHRIS: Well, I definitely want to see you guys test it.

All right.

Well, you guys ready to rock and roll?

DAVID: I think so.

CHRIS: All right, let's do it.

(music) DAVID: All right, ready to go.

CHRIS: All right, the light is green.

The light is green, the trap is clean.. You'll want to back up a little bit in case something happens.

All right.

Safety first.

I'm ready.

I'm ready.

DAVID: One, two, three.

(music) CHRIS: That is smooth, yeah.

Geeze.

Man, Bruce Wayne doesn't have anything on you guys, DAVID: And so that's a cold turkey set up from data that we had collected already.

So it performed the way it was supposed to.

CHRIS: And if it didn't, you guys would -- DAVID: We would be very surprised and disappointed.

CHRIS: But you guys would then use that to make a change in your design.

DAVID: Yes.

CHRIS: Yeah.

DAVID: This is the test bucket that generates the information that will allow us to design the one that goes on your belt.

CHRIS: That's awesome.

DAVID: So we can minimize the size and know that it's going to work.

CHRIS: Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's, I mean, and if you think about how many times it hasn't worked or it hasn't come back, like, that's got to give you guys good information.

DAVID: Oh, yes.

Bad information is good information.

A lot of people don't want to fail, but having the limits of where failure occurs is very important to understanding the true performance of anything you build.

CHRIS: Yeah, I mean, as long as you're getting data out of that failure, that's information for you to know for next time.

DAVID: That's right.

CHRIS: That's awesome.

So that was awesome to watch you guys test your material here.

MICHAEL: Well, I'm glad you guys were able to come and check it out.

We have a lot of fun doing this.

I know we talked about a lot of the failures, a lot in the process.

But at the end of the day, we come here and we test and it's cool to see the progress from where we started with this canister and now we've got something the size of a hockey puck.

CHRIS: So what are you guys hearing from people in the field, some of these rescue workers, about how your product is helping impact their jobs?

MICHAEL: Well, that's actually the best part.

When we go and we test it out in the field with firefighters and they jump it for the first time and you see the look on their face when they land and they've just jump from like 25, 50, 60 feet off the ground.

And they they literally land sitting in a seated position and sometimes they land on their feet.

And just to see the fact that they realize that they didn't have to do anything.

All they had to do was jump and everything was taken care of.

That is probably one of the most gratifying things, I think, that any of us get from this.

CHRIS: That's awesome.

Well, Michael, thank you so much for inviting me out here.

You guys are doing awesome work.

Yeah, it's been great.

(music) Dr. Matt Baylis, who is an astrophysicist here at the University of Cincinnati.

And he's going to explain a little bit to me about how the universe began.

So, Matt, how did the universe begin?

MATT: Our best understanding is that the universe began in an instance of infinite density.

The universe was infinitely small and infinitely dense, compressed, and expanded out from that.

And that's what we call the Big Bang.

CHRIS: And it expanded into what we see, to everything that exists today.

MATT: Everything, all the mass, all the energy in the universe was there at that first instant.

CHRIS: OK. MATT: And it has been expanding ever since.

And, you know, the laws of physics mean that, you know, mass is attracted to mass, so things change over time.

But the amount of mass, the amount of energy, that has never changed.

CHRIS: So, it's still -- the universe is still expanding then?

MATT: Yes.

CHRIS: OK, so how do we know that the universe is expanding even today?

MATT: Well, the concept of light has a finite speed, that light travels at a particular speed.

So if light reaches you, you know that it took some time for the light to travel to you.

CHRIS: Basic distance -- rate equals distance over time.

MATT: Exactly, right.

So as you observe light from a thing farther and farther away, you were -- it took that light longer and longer to reach you.

And so when we observe things farther and farther away, we are seeing light from longer and longer ago.

So as we observe more distant parts of the universe, we are observing them as they were much farther back in time.

CHRIS: Ok, so something that's really far away, the light that we see now isn't -- didn't happen just now.

It happened sometime in the past because light had to travel to get here.

MATT: Yeah.

I mean, even our own, like the sun, which we know and love, is relatively nearby, astronomically speaking.

It takes about 8 minutes for light to reach us from the sun.

So even the sun, when you look at it in the sky, you're not seeing as it is right now.

You're seeing is seeing it as it was 8 minutes ago.

CHRIS: So when you're talking about galaxies, it could be -- MATT: Years to tens of years to hundreds of years to millions, billions, tens of billions is kind of the max for that.

CHRIS: So when we're looking at a galaxy that light, what we're looking at is something that was -- could be millions of years ago.

MATT: Yep.

CHRIS: OK, so we're looking back in time.

So how do we know that then the universe is continuing to expand?

MATT: So this idea, the way that we actually measure these specific expansions of individual sources is through something we call redshift, which is literally just light of a particular wavelength.

So if you think of blue lights as being a particular wavelength, blue light that has traveled from a very distant source in the universe is shifted red-ward.

It's due to the expansion of the universe, CHRIS: So if a light is is getting shifted toward the red end of the spectrum, which is a longer wavelength than the blue end, right, because the universe is expanding?

MATT: That's correct.

So the light, basically because the light, imagine a little light photon traveling through the universe.

It's traveling through space and that's fine.

But underneath it, space is expanding.

So it basically has to expend more energy to make it to overcome that expansion.

CHRIS: OK. MATT: Light has to follow the rules of physics.

It has to travel at the speed of light.

So if its speed can't change, but it has to give up energy, the only way it can do that is by basically turning redder or becoming a lower energy photon.

CHRIS: And that is what makes the wavelength stretch out.

MATT: Right.

CHRIS: OK, now you have a little demo to help me understand this.

MATT: So, yeah, I have marked on this balloon, well, we'll see it when it's bigger, but us and some distant galaxy.

CHRIS: Ok, so there's two galaxies on the balloon.

MATT: All right, so if we have, say, a model of the universe, as it was 10 billion years ago, let's say.

We might measure our location, us as this X and the location of some distant galaxies as other X.

And literally what we could measure is the distance between these two things.

So you imagine taking a ruler or the whatever the astronomical equivalent of a ruler is, measuring the distance between these two things.

I'm getting something like five centimeters in my arbitrary unit here.

So that's the universe of an early time.

If we didn't allow time to run forward under this expansion, the universe gets bigger or not bigger, more spread out.

So here is our model of the universe now at a later time.

We still have us.

We have a distant galaxy.

Within this model universe, the X is in the same place, right?

I didn't actually move the X on the surface of the balloon.

The distant galaxy has not been moved on the surface of the balloon, our model universe.

But if we actually measure the distance between these two things at this later time with my astronomical ruler, we now get about seven centimeters.

So the distance between us and this distant galaxy has increased, not because, you know -- Neither thing here was moving in space, but space itself was actually doing the expanding.

It's things, becoming more separated over time, not because they're moving relative to space, which in this case is the balloon, but because space is becoming larger.

Cool.

Cool.

[balloon deflates] I work with a lot of different aspects of my research.

It's more of a tool than the pure topic of what I do.

But fundamentally, it's a phenomenon that happens when gravity bends light and produces what we call lensing, which is -- we're seeing it exactly the same way that like a glass lens like bends light in a pair of glasses or a magnifying glass.

It's just the gravity is doing the bending of the light instead of a material like glass.

So if we have an observer over here on Earth and we observe a source in the sky, the galaxy would normally appear to an observer to be located right here.

But the gravitational lensing effect causes light from the background galaxy that's traveling through space in some of the directions to be deflected and bent down and redirected to the observer.

Intrinsically, you don't know that light has been bent.

Right, if you see light, you just assume it's coming at you from a straight line.

An observer would see this image of this galaxy at both this position on the sky and this position on the sky.

And that's because light was deflected by an intervening source, what we call a lens, which is really just a large concentration of mass, and that produces images in the sky from two apparent locations.

Because it's lensing, and I said it works like a magnifying glass.

It literally does magnify things.

So what happens, the background galaxy has been magnified.

So it's literally brighter and bigger and easier to study than it would otherwise have been.

So we use lensing for that.

And then the other sort of more complicated side of things in astronomy in general are really limited in what we measure.

We can only ever measure, basically detect light and catch light.

And then from all the light that we catch, we have to infer all the physics of the universe.

You know, we can't measure the mass of a thing in the way that you can the laboratory.

We can't weigh it.

But we have to come up with clever ways -- or therefore we have to come up with clever ways to try and infer things like mass.

So lensing is actually a really great tool for measuring the masses of these intervening lensing structures.

Because we know the laws of gravity and if we can measure these deflections, then we can actually constrain how much mass is causing the deflection.

So it's actually a really great tool for not only studying distant magnified background sources, but also for actually studying the physical properties of the things that are doing the lensing.

(music) CHRIS: That's our show.

Thank you so much for watching.

We hope you learned a little more about how our universe works.

We'll see you next time on Science Around Cincy.

I can't wait to find out more about what they're doing.

Talking is hard when you think about it.

MICHAEL: Confidence in the fact that they didn't have to use their hands -- oh, my lord.

[laughter] CHRIS: That's a good blooper.

When the lights go out.

All right.

Science Around Cincy is an independently produced collaboration between educators and students in Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky.

Funding is provided in part by: Northern Kentucky University's College of Informatics and Department of Communication, The Hamilton County Educational Service Center, Outsider Production, and Fuel Cincinnati.

Stay curious, my friends.

Captioning: Maverick Captioning CIN OH maverickcaptioning.com