Electrical Equipment
LED incandescent replacement bulb gets Energy Star nod
April 18, 2012 12:24 pm | News | CommentsPhilips recently announced that its EnduraLED 12.5 W bulb has met or exceeded the quality and energy efficiency requirements for a 60 W light-emitting diode (LED) equivalent set forth by the Environmental Protection Agency’s Energy Star program. Philips was the only company to enter the Department of Energy’s L Prize contest, which sought a product like the EnduraLED.
R & D caucus highlights NSF's tie to innovation
April 2, 2012 5:32 am | News | CommentsLast Friday, the National Science Foundation held a congressional briefing to call attention to its research successes, particularly the process of bringing relevant fundamental research from the laboratory to the marketplace. Particular attention was called to Small Business Innovation Research grant beneficiaries, some of whom shared their success stories at the briefing.
Naval Research Lab to build robot for shipboard firefighting
March 8, 2012 12:04 pm | News | CommentsEquipped with an advanced sensing and navigation suite of instrument, the Shipboard Autonomous Firefighting Robot (SAFFiR) is the product of a interdisciplinary team and is designed solely to fight fires aboard U.S. Navy and Marine Corps vessels. A humanoid-type robot was chosen because it was deemed best suited to operate within the confines of an environment that was deigned for humans in the first place.
Pasta-shaped radio waves beamed across Venice
March 2, 2012 7:13 am | News | CommentsA group of Italian and Swedish researchers appears to have solved the problem of radio congestion by cleverly twisting radio waves into the shape of fusilli pasta, allowing a potentially infinite number of channels to be broadcast and received. To demonstrate, they did this in real-life conditions by beaming two corkscrewed radio waves across the waters of Venice, Italy.
New company hopes to replace Wi-Fi with Li-Fi
February 29, 2012 3:06 am | News | CommentsVisible Light Communications (VLC), a University of Edinburgh spin-out, will soon launch its first prototype light-emitting diode communications technology. “Li-Fi” relies on optical spatial modulation and an Internet protocol technology to allow LED light to carry optical wireless communications streams.
Experimental smart outlet brings flexibility, resiliency to grid architecture
February 28, 2012 3:51 am | News | CommentsSandia National Laboratories has developed an experimental smart outlet that autonomously measures, monitors, and controls electrical loads with no connection to a centralized computer or system. The goal of the smart outlet and similar innovations is to make the power grid more distributed and intelligent, capable of reconfiguring itself as conditions change.
R & D in the 1970s
February 15, 2012 6:30 am | by R&D Editors | Articles | CommentsAs integrated circuits and environmentally friendly technologies emerged, R&D 100 Award winners set the pace.
Industrial robot finds its muse
February 10, 2012 6:30 am | News | CommentsNot all artists are extroverts. A portraitist at the CeBIT show in Hanover, Germany, this week is cool, precise, and metallic. Other artists, in fact, helped it get started as a project to test image-evaluation technologies that equips the robot with a sense of “sight”.
Engineer to 'sculpt' more powerful electric motors and generators
January 26, 2012 11:25 am | News | CommentsMost electric motors and generators operate in just one direction. There's no real need for them to go into reverse, but they’ve been designed to work both ways. Dionysios Aliprantis of Iowa State University wants to change that, incrementally chipping away at motor design and optimize performance in just one direction.
Sandia develops power-over-fiber communications cable
January 18, 2012 3:56 am | News | CommentsSometimes total electrical isolation is a good thing—and that's the idea behind a power-over-fiber communications cable being developed by engineers at Sandia National Laboratories. The Sandia team is developing a hybrid cable design that uses fiber to send and regulate optical power to the communications electronics integral to the cable. A patent is pending on the design.
Switch to LEDs will extend meat shelf life, researchers say
January 17, 2012 5:52 pm | News | CommentsAfter comparing light-emitting diodes against fluorescent lights in meat refrigeration units, Kansas State University’s Kyle Steele found that retailers could save a substantial amount of money by using them, and not just because of the LEDs’ operating efficiency.
Tiny transmitter sets frequency record
January 12, 2012 10:55 am | by Christian Meier | News | CommentsA team in Germany has built a transmitter less than a millimeter square that has generated the highest frequency ever attained by a microelectronic device: 1.111 THz. Compared to previous transmitters that have been bulky and expensive, the new device could soon find use in engineering applications.
New device could bring optical information processing
January 3, 2012 3:20 am | News | CommentsResearchers have created a new type of optical device, the passive optical diode, small enough to fit millions on a computer chip that could lead to faster, more powerful information processing and supercomputers.
Self-healing electronics could work longer, reduce waste
December 21, 2011 12:01 pm | News | CommentsA team of University of Illinois engineers has developed a self-healing system that restores electrical conductivity to a cracked circuit in less time than it takes to blink. Their solution was to adapt a microcapsule healing solution used for polymers to conductive systems.
Heated AFM tip used as voltage tester for the first time
December 20, 2011 5:07 am | News | CommentsAtomic force microscope cantilever tips with integrated heaters are widely used to characterize polymer films, and to study fundamentals of nanometer-scale heat flow. Until University of Illinois engineers adapted such a tip to read electrothermal voltage, however, no one had used a heated nano-tip for electronic measurements.
'Smart Connector' senses failure in radio-frequency cables
December 15, 2011 11:26 am | News | CommentsResearchers at Rochester Institute of Technology and PPC Corp., Syracuse, N.Y., have developed a new sensor that, once installed in the connecting units of coaxial cables, can find the exact location of cable damage through a technology called back scatter telemetry.
2012 Global R & D Funding Forecast Resources
December 15, 2011 6:27 am | by Martin Grueber, Research Leader, Battelle and Tim Studt, Editor-in-Chief, Advantage Business Media | Articles | CommentsThe following Websites are good sources of information related to the global R&D enterprise. Much of the information in the 2012 Global R&D Funding Forecast was derived from these sources, which are certainly not all-inclusive.
World's largest Li-Ion battery factory launched in Russia
December 15, 2011 4:11 am | News | CommentsLiotech, a joint venture between RUSNANO and Chinese holding company Thunder Sky, has launched the world's largest high-capacity lithium-ion battery factory near Novosibirsk. Covering more than 40,000-m 2 , it has a design capacity of more than 1 GWh, or approximately one million batteries per year.
New generation of PTFE membranes for cartridge filters
December 12, 2011 7:31 am | Product Releases | CommentsW. L. Gore & Associates has introduced new expanded polytetrafluoroethylene (ePTFE) membrane in high-density polyethylene cartridge filters to support the manufacture of high-purity chemicals used in the semiconductor and liquid-crystal display industries.
Icy test rig helps design fast bobsled runners
December 8, 2011 5:48 am | News | CommentsDetermining the friction of a bobsled run can mean the difference between winning and losing, but it has always been more of an art than a science. Researchers have now figured out a way to measure friction level accurately, helping them to build effective simulations prior to the 2014 Olympic Winter Games.
Thomson Reuters publishes list of top global innovators
November 16, 2011 8:03 am | by R&D Editors | News | CommentsThe 100 top innovators have been ranked this week by the Thomson Reuters’ intellectual property (IP) consulting arm. The U.S. continues to lead this list with a large share of innovators, and Asia and Europe place second and third, respectively. However, China is not yet ranked because of its practices regarding protecting IP and commercializing products globally.
World’s largest digital camera gets green light
November 8, 2011 11:13 am | by Mike Ross | News | CommentsA U.S. Department of Energy review panel last week approved a project to create the world’s largest digital camera. Designed for a new Chilean telescope’s 8.4-m primary mirror, the camera has 189 semiconductor sensors that can record infrared to ultraviolet light, and has the capacity to produce 15 terabytes of data every night.
Boston Dynamics’ BigDog gets a humanoid buddy
November 1, 2011 8:12 am | News | CommentsThe robotics company famous for building BigDog, a four-legged robot that moves in a fashion that is both strange and disturbingly life-like, has added arms to its two-legged variant, PETMAN. A new video from Boston Dynamics shows in the anthromorphic robot in motion.
Diode lasers may vie with LEDs for lighting supremacy
October 26, 2011 7:15 am | News | CommentsLight-emitting diodes (LEDs) are widely accepted as a more efficient and reliable option than tungsten incandescent bulbs. But recent research at Sandia National Laboratories shows that humans are as comfortable with white light generated by diode lasers, which are more efficient than LEDs at higher amperages.
Venture investments grow in 3Q from last year
October 19, 2011 5:05 am | by Barbara Ortutay, AP Technology Writer | News | CommentsAccording to a study out Wednesday venture capitalists invested more money in more U.S. startups in the third quarter than they did a year earlier. Though overall investments dropped from the second quarter, the software industry showed especially big jumps in venture capital quarter to quarter.
