Engineers at Duke University are developing a smart robotic system for sniffing out pollution hotspots and sources of toxic leaks. Their approach enables a robot to incorporate calculations made on the fly to account for the complex airflows of confined spaces rather than simply ‘following its nose.’ “Many existing approaches that employ robots to locate…
Dielectric Metamaterial Is Dynamically Tuned By Light
Researchers at Duke University have built the first metal-free, dynamically tunable metamaterial for controlling electromagnetic waves. The approach could form the basis for technologies ranging from improved security scanners to new types of visual displays. The results appear on April 9 in the journal Advanced Materials. A metamaterial is an artificial material that manipulates waves like light…
Absorbing Electromagnetic Energy While Avoiding the Heat
Electrical engineers at Duke University have created the world’s first electromagnetic metamaterial made without any metal. The device’s ability to absorb electromagnetic energy without heating up has direct applications in imaging, sensing, and lighting. Metamaterials are synthetic materials composed of many individual, engineered features that together produce properties not found in nature. Imagine an electromagnetic…
Inventing Biomedical Prototypes
There’s an old adage in the aviation industry that pilots make the best airplane design engineers. Having a spatial sense of a cockpit and knowing how controls feel and how the airplane responds is invaluable when building the next Dreamliner. The same is true in the biomedical device industry. A design that works in a…
Lens Design Drastically Improves Kidney Stone Treatment
Duke engineers have devised a way to improve the efficiency of lithotripsy—the demolition of kidney stones using focused shock waves. After decades of research, all it took was cutting a groove near the perimeter of the shock wave-focusing lens and changing its curvature. “I’ve spent more than 20 years investigating the physics and engineering aspects…
Engineers Use Brute Force Computing to Find New Materials
In the search for cheaper materials that mimic their purer, more expensive counterparts, researchers are abandoning hunches and intuition for theoretical models and pure computing power. In a new study, researchers from Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering used computational methods to identify dozens of platinum-group alloys that were previously unknown to science but could…