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Mar 12 | News
At 1.3 million cubic feet, the Goddard Space Flight Center’s High Bay Clean Room, where the components of the James Webb Space Telescope are now being assembled, circulates a staggering one million cubic feet of air per minutes, ensuring no more than 10,000 particles larger than 0.5 microns. Progress on the telescope can now be viewed by webcam.
Feb 23 | News
A patent has been filed by Purdue engineers for a heat exchanger that uses standard automotive coolant to help shed heat created by a metal-hydride-based hydrogen storage system. The great thing about metal hydrides is that pressure changes can release hydrogen for fuel, but the heat generated by absorption can drastically slow refueling.
Feb 9 | News
P2i, a leading maker of liquid repellent nano-coating technology, has teamed up with U.S.-based to commercialize a new plasma process that dramatically reduces the surface energy of a material so that when liquids come into contact with it, they form beads and simply roll off.
Feb 5 | News
Faster and more dexterous than its predecessor, Robonaut2, or R2, is being designed by engineers for use both in automotives plants and space travel. A combination of control, sensor, and vision advances are allowing R2 to perform complex tasks using its hands.
Feb 4 | News
MIT researchers have demonstrated the first laser built from germanium that can emit wavelengths of light useful for optical communications. It’s also the first germanium laser to operate at room temperature. Unlike the materials typically used in lasers, germanium is easy to incorporate into existing processes for manufacturing silicon chips.
Feb 3 | News
Workers at NASA and Northrop Grumman had to invent the techniques, materials, and mechanisms needed to build the James Webb Space Telescope’s complex sunshield system. The tennis court-sized solar deflector relies on five layers of Kapton, each as thin as a human hair.
Feb 2 | News
NIST is looking for university teams to automate and improve on one of the common warehouse tasks: pallet-stacking. Using a cheap computer gaming engine, participants will have to develop computer code to deal with a complexity of modern warehousing called mixed palletizing, which is efficient for transporting good, but is tough to automate.
Feb 2 | News
Y-Carbon Inc., the winner of a 2009 R&D 100 Award for its Tunable Nanoporous Carbon, has recently been awarded a National Science Foundation SBIR phase I grant in the amount of $150,000 for scaling up production of its carbon nanomaterials. Y-Carbon, Inc. will occupy a new 2,000 square foot facility in Bristol, UK for its pilot plant. In the past two years, Y-Carbon has successfully transitioned from producing milligram quantities using methods developed at a Drexel University lab to manufacturing tens and hundreds of grams of material without performance degradation.
Jan 29 | News
Novel research on improving the simulation performance of hardware models created in a language called SystemC, often used to shorten manufacturing design cycles to improve the time it takes to bring a product to the marketplace.
Jan 14 | News
Engineering companies are increasingly leveraging the power of 3D and finite-element modeling. Terrafugia, an aeronautical startup by a group of MIT aeronautical engineers and business grads, recently partnered with design software maker Dassault Systemes to help refine the Transition Roadable Aircraft, an airplane that takes advantage of new FAA rules.