But currently the world’s largest bearings are installed in the base of the world’s two largest tub cranes, gigantic shipping cranes that can each lift 10,000 metric tons (22 million pounds).īoth the bearings and the huge tub cranes were built by a company called Huisman to be installed on a semi-submersible crane vessel called the Sleipnir. Some of the world’s biggest bearings are used in mining as part of large, fast-rotating drill bits. Pieter Stam De Jonge/ANP/AFP/Getty Imagesīearings are miracles of engineering, allowing heavy, fast-moving parts to glide smoothly and reduce friction. The Sleipnir, the largest crane ship in the world, sails into the port of Rotterdam on March 22, 2020. But few are as massive-or as powerful-as the huge hydraulic cylinder that Hunger Hydraulics made for a Japanese dredging barge in 2015. Hydraulic cylinders are a key component of heavy construction equipment like bulldozers, dump trucks and cranes, used to raise and lower massive arms and buckets. Scientists hope that this technology will usher in an era of unlimited, carbon-free energy.
The job of this ultra-powerful laser is to apply extreme heat and pressure-similar to the conditions found inside stars-to fuse hydrogen atoms together and release massive amounts of energy (fusion reaction). Temperatures at the target site instantly reach 180 million degrees Fahrenheit (100 million degrees Celsius). Inside the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, these lasers emit a blinding flash of light lasting only a billionth of a second but delivering 2 million joules of energy. The world’s most powerful laser is actually 192 separate beams aimed at a target roughly the size of a pencil eraser. Engineers work outside the structure where the array of lasers at the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are focused.