170501 Sailing on the Rhein River and Visit to the Hydro-station

On the 1st of May, 2017, Auntie Ruth drove us to Argotech where Kurt and Margrit Roppel works in Ormalingen. He told us the work was established for 27 years now and what he does is to examine welding seals if there are porous or holes in them. He uses the X-Ray to test these materials (eg. metal tubes used in chemical industries or gas pipe lines). He ran examples of these test for us to see and it was really interesting. We came home from there.

At about 13:45 we went to the hydro power station at Augst Kraftwerk built on the Rhein river which is closer to the hydro power station in Germany also on the same Rhein river. It was built in 1900. This man who was an attendant there called Hr. Rychener who took us round through the turbine rooms. He said there were 2 different turbines there namely Straflo turbine which are new and 6 in number and Francis turbine which are 4 in number. The Straflo turbines are automatically operated and its efficiency is 94% and that is what is being used now but for the old Francis turbines are shut down until the water level is very high before it is used. The 6 Straflo turbines are able to produce about 26.3MW of power. The whole big place is operated by only 6 people and everything there is automated, I think this is strange, with the number of people who have job in the country.

We were fortunate to join one of the boats that travels from Rheinfelden to Basel Dreilanderech on the Rhein river for fun and relaxation. It was fantastic and superb. I was amazed about the engineering work at its peak. There was a mechanism that could level the boat to about 6m deep to be leveled with the water for a big gate to open for the boat to move to Basel. This system was built for about 100 years and it is still functioning correctly. It was spectacular, wow.