Product design

Numerous open-source software packages now provide engineering math capabilities and go easy on the pocketbook. Leland Teschler • Executive Editor The Mars Climate Orbiter made headlines back in 1999 when it approached Mars on a trajectory bringing it too close to the planet and wound up either destroyed in the Mars atmosphere or orbiting the…

If you earned your engineering degree before the early 1990s, you never learned about the Python programming language in school. For those not familiar with Python who want to rectify that situation, Hardcore Programming for Mechanical Engineers might be a book to consider. It is about solving engineering problems with Python. In that Python is…

Well-publicized hacks illustrate why contactless credentials demand sophisticated security measures that can evolve as fast as the cracking techniques used by bad actors. Kiran Vasishta • ELATEC, Inc. In recent years, multinational corporations including Cathay Pacific, Facebook, and Uber have been heavily fined for security and data protection violations. This period has seen a rise…

Road-to-rig testing brings real-world emissions testing into a precision lab setting and is generally regarded as the future of vehicle development. JOSH ISRAEL | HORIBA AUTOMOTIVE TEST SYSTEMS In 1995, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) created Rover—a first-of-its-kind on-board mass emissions measurement system. In the 25 years since the creation of that first unit, the…

Teschler on Topic Leland Teschler • Executive Editor lteschler@wtwhmedia.com On Twitter @ DW_LeeTeschler Ever heard of the K890 sub-machine gun? A a prototype came out during the 1950s, but there were hardly any made. The reason was its awkwardly shaped stock which made the gun difficult to shoot accurately. It also had a weirdly short…

It’s rare to see product development efforts these days that don’t involve design software modules spanning multiple disciplines. The new challenge is getting work done without making a career out of formatting the output of one package for the input of another. Kaelly Farnham, Keysight Technologies Modern electronics are pushing the limits of electronic design…

A team of researchers from China, the U.S. and Japan has developed a way to strengthen graphene-based membranes intended for use in desalination projects—by fortifying them with nanotubes. In their paper published in the journal Science, the group describes how they created their fortified membranes and how well the membranes worked when tested. Baoxia Mi, with…

Self-cleaning surfaces and laboratories on a chip become even more efficient if we are able to control individual droplets. University of Groningen professor Patrick Onck, together with colleagues from Eindhoven University of Technology, have shown that this is possible by using a technique named mechanowetting. ‘We have come up with a way of transporting droplets…

Researchers from ETH Zurich have developed a novel technology that produces liquid hydrocarbon fuels exclusively from sunlight and air. For the first time worldwide they demonstrate the entire thermochemical process chain under real field conditions. The new solar mini-refinery is located on the roof of ETH’s Machine Laboratory building in Zurich. Carbon-neutral fuels are crucial…

The use of kites to capture wind energy and turn it into cost-effective ‘green’ electricity could be coming within reach, with EPSRC-funded research at Imperial College London playing an important role in making it possible. Linked to a wider Innovate UK-funded project, a team at Imperial’s Department of Aeronautics has put a kite-energy device through its…

Superconductors are quantum materials that are perfect transmitters of electricity and electronic information. Although they form the technological basis of solid-state quantum computing, they are also its key limiting factor because conventional superconductors only work at temperatures near -270 °C. This has motivated a worldwide race to try to discover higher temperature superconductors. Materials containing…

Researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s Mellon College of Science and College of Engineering have developed a semiliquid lithium metal-based anode that represents a new paradigm in battery design. Lithium batteries made using this new electrode type could have a higher capacity and be much safer than typical lithium metal-based batteries that use lithium foil as…

A key obstacle to controlling on Earth the fusion that powers the sun and stars is leakage of energy and particles from plasma, the hot, charged state of matter composed of free electrons and atomic nuclei that fuels fusion reactions. At the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL), physicists have been…

Under the JST-SENTAN program (Development of System and Technology for Advanced Measurement and Analysis, Japan Science and Technology Agency), the joint development team of Prof. Naoya Shibata at the University of Tokyo and JEOL Ltd., has developed a revolutionary electron microscope that incorporates newly designed magnetic objective lenses, and achieved direct, atom-resolved imaging of materials…

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, have discovered a completely new way of capturing, amplifying and linking light to matter at the nanolevel. Using a tiny box, built from stacked atomically thin material, they have succeeded in creating a type of feedback loop in which light and matter become one. The discovery, which was…

Researchers at NVIDIA, University of Washington, Stanford University, and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have recently developed a Rao-Blackwellized particle filter for 6-D pose tracking, called PoseRBPF. The approach can effectively estimate the 3-D translation of an object and its full distribution over the 3-D rotation. The paper describing this filter, pre-published on arXiv, will be…

A research group led by Professor Wang Feng at the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences recently developed a method to produce diesel fuel and hydrogen by exploiting light energy (solar energy or artificial light energy) and biomass-derived feedstocks. Their findings were published in Nature Energy. Biomass, including agricultural straw and…

Whether Harry Potter’s invisibility cloak, which perfectly steers light waves around objects to make them invisible, will ever become reality remains to be seen, but perfecting a more crucial cloak is impossible, a new study says. It would have perfectly steered stress waves in the ground, like those emanating from a blast, around objects like…

Carnegie Mellon University is going to the moon, sending a robotic rover and an intricately designed arts package that will land in July 2021. The four-wheeled robot is being developed by a CMU team led by William “Red” Whittaker, professor in the Robotics Institute. Equipped with video cameras, it will be one of the first American…

Combining two additives instead of one to facilitate the incorporation of lithium within capacitors: that is the solution proposed by researchers from l’Institut des matériaux Jean Rouxel (CNRS/Université de Nantes), in collaboration with Münster Electrochemical Energy Technology (University of Münster, Germany), in order to promote the low-cost, simple, and efficient development of the lithium-ion capacitors…

A new 3-D printed thermoelectric device, which converts heat into electric power with an efficiency factor over 50% higher than the previous best for printed materials – and is cheap to produce in bulk – has been manufactured by researchers at Swansea University’s SPECIFIC Innovation and Knowledge Centre. Around one-sixth of all the energy used…

When poisonous heavy metals like lead and cadmium escape from factories or mines, they can pollute the nearby soil. With no easy ways to remove these contaminants, fields must be cordoned off to prevent these toxins from entering the food chain where they threaten human and animal health. An experimental process to remove heavy metal…

It was once the stuff of science fiction security, open your eye wide and look into the camera to gain entry to the spaceship flight deck or press a finger tip or palm of your against the pad to access the secret database that lets you take control of the baddies’ weapons. Today, of course,…

MIT researchers have developed a novel “photonic” chip that uses light instead of electricity — and consumes relatively little power in the process. The chip could be used to process massive neural networks millions of times more efficiently than today’s classical computers do. Neural networks are machine-learning models that are widely used for such tasks…

Imagine a refrigerator so cold it could turn atoms into their quantum states, giving them unique properties that defy the rules of classical physics. In a paper published in Physical Review Applied, Andrew Jordan, professor of physics at the University of Rochester, and his graduate student Sreenath Manikandan, along with their colleague Francesco Giazotto from the…