Greg Twiss’s students have tested liquid-fueled rocket motors, designed colorful jets of water to dance through fountains, and sent high-altitude balloons soaring 20 miles into the atmosphere to meet the central design challenge he creates for EGR 190 Applied Engineering Design, a mechanical engineering class that continues to build upon the design and ideation skills…
Disordered Materials Could Be Hardest, Most Heat-Tolerant Carbides
Materials scientists at Duke University and UC San Diego have discovered a new class of carbides expected to be among the hardest materials with the highest melting points in existence. Made from inexpensive metals, the new materials may soon find use in a wide range of industries from machinery and hardware to aerospace. A carbide…
Breaking The Guinness World Record For Fuel Efficiency
Duke Engineering is now the official home of the most fuel-efficient vehicle in history, a hydrogen fuel cell car that gets the equivalent of 14,573 miles per gallon. Duke Electric Vehicles (DEV’s) record-breaking run took place on Saturday, July 21 at Galot Motorsports in Benson, North Carolina. Guinness World Records has confirmed that the attempt to set a new…
Ricocheting Radio Waves Monitor Tiniest Movements In Room
Relief may be on the horizon for anyone who has ever jumped around a room like a jack-in-the-box to get motion-sensing lights to turn back on, thanks to a new motion sensor based on metamaterials that is sensitive enough to monitor a person’s breathing. In a pair of new studies, researchers from Duke University and…
Thin Engineered Material Perfectly Redirects And Reflects Sound
Metamaterials researchers at Duke University have demonstrated the design and construction of a thin material that can control the redirection and reflection of sound waves with almost perfect efficiency. While many theoretical approaches to engineer such a device have been proposed, they have struggled to simultaneously control both the transmission and reflection of sound in…
New Tool Tells Bioengineers When to Build Microbial Teams
DURHAM, N.C.—Researchers at Duke University have created a framework for helping bioengineers determine when to use multiple lines of cells to manufacture a product. The work could help a variety of industries that use bacteria to produce chemicals ranging from pharmaceuticals to fragrances. The research was published online the week of February 19, 2018 in…
Deterring Drones From Ballparks And Botanical Gardens
To study how an outdoor public space might shoo away unwanted drone aircraft, researchers from Duke University are teaming up with the Durham Bulls and the Sarah P. Duke Gardens to develop a set of affordable and aesthetic guidelines for deterring drones. As of the end of 2016, there were already more than 600,000 hobbyist…
Breaking Glass in Infinite Directions
Zoom in on a crystal and you will find an ordered array of atoms, evenly spaced like the windows on the Empire State Building. But zoom in on a piece of glass, and the picture looks a bit messier — more like a random pile of sand, or perhaps the windows on a Frank Gehry…
Computers Create Recipe for Two New Magnetic Materials
Material scientists have predicted and built two new magnetic materials, atom-by-atom, using high-throughput computational models. The success marks a new era for the large-scale design of new magnetic materials at unprecedented speed. Although magnets abound in everyday life, they are actually rarities — only about five percent of known inorganic compounds show even a hint…
Nanowire ‘Inks’ Enable Paper-Based Printable Electronics
By suspending tiny metal nanoparticles in liquids, Duke University scientists are brewing up conductive ink-jet printer “inks” to print inexpensive, customizable circuit patterns on just about any surface. Printed electronics, which are already being used on a wide scale in devices such as the anti-theft radio frequency identification (RFID) tags you might find on the…
Nanocubes Simplify Printing and Imaging in Color and Infrared
Duke University researchers believe they have overcome a longstanding hurdle to producing cheaper, more robust ways to print and image across a range of colors extending into the infrared. As any mantis shrimp will tell you, there are a wide range of “colors” along the electromagnetic spectrum that humans cannot see but which provide a…
Video Privacy Software Lets You Select What Others See
Camera-equipped smartphones, laptops and other devices make it possible to share ideas and images with anyone, anywhere, often in real-time. But in our cameras-everywhere culture, the risk of accidentally leaking sensitive information is growing. Computer scientists at Duke University have developed software that helps prevent inadvertent disclosure of trade secrets and other restricted information within…
Robotic Motion Planning in Real-Time
Once they’ve mastered the skills of toddlerhood, humans are pretty good at what roboticists call “motion planning” — reaching around obstacles to precisely pick up a soda in a crowded fridge, or slipping their hands around a screen to connect an unseen cable. But for robots with multi-jointed arms, motion planning is a hard problem…
Finding Other Earths—the Chemistry of Star and Planet Formation
In the last two decades, humanity has discovered thousands of extrasolar planetary systems. Recent studies of star- and planet-formation have shown that chemistry plays a pivotal role in both shaping these systems and delivering water and organic species to the surfaces of nascent terrestrial planets. Professor Geoffrey A. Blake in Chemical Engineering at the California…
Building Bridges in a Third World Country
Before Duke engineering students could build a suspension bridge across the upper headwaters of the Nile this summer, they had to learn to communicate with their Rwandan partners. Unfamiliar with the local dialect of Kinyarwanda, they got to know the community of Cyohoha, Rwanda by sharing smiles and meals before learning each other’s languages through…
MicroCT Scanner Peers into Every Dimension
The MicroCT scanner at Duke University is available for use by anyone, whether it be a Duke researcher, a scientists from another university or someone from the private sector. The machine uses x-rays to create 3D models of objects and even lets researchers look through their interiors slice-by-slice. Watch the video for some examples of…