Quote:
Originally Posted by Mr. Saint
Be careful; make sure it is a small fan and it may take a little while. Also, I have never tried it so let me know how it works.
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Oh man, nothing like writing long detailed engineering descriptions with real life analogies for comparison only to have things crash out and lose the post, it's like ugrad deadlines all over again. But I digress.....here's a quicky answer for the posts while I was away
Heavy duty machinery and high quality sports cars are designed to take the stress. They have little things that people take for granted like precision smoothed holes for joints, rubber shock absorbers in joints, and larger areas of contact. They also have higher quality materials that have been tested for their durability and have higher quality construction with less impurities that can act like pantyhose nicks that streak. Even then, as Mr. Saint said, certain parts break all the time, and most are actually designed to.
One of the first things taught to young engineers these days is to design failure and not overengineer things with valuable time and resource cost. I'd bet that whichever model is failing probably fails the exact same way for most people because someone said "that part's too expensive, use this, it's a cheap product, when it breaks, they'll buy a new one!"
I've seen first hand what happened when one of the largest wind tunnels in the country had a fan blade break, essentially turning it into a vibrator, and then tearing apart the entire building from the kinetic energy released from the failure cascade. Here are some pictures of a centrifuge that became imbalanced(a vibe is an imbalanced centrifuge)
http://www2.umdnj.edu/eohssweb/aiha/...osion.htm#High
Final note: Even when it's well constructed, on a microscopic scale things aren't as smooth as they look and stab/crack/break each other on impact with another surface during vibration. Modern high speed rotors now are split into sections where the highest stress section is replaceable so you don't have the catastrophic failures and have longer, less expensive life spans replacing tiny joints rather than entire blades and shafts.
*edit* Damn. Doing a quick rewrite post at 3am resulted in lots of redundant statements. Sorry about that.