Wind Turbine Projects

Congratulations to Derek Johnson, John Williams, and Ben Perry for producing 5.6 V!  (The maximum possible was 6 V)


Create your own video slideshow at animoto.com.

Company Develops Lighting Sheets Consisting Of Tiny LEDs.

Technology Review (10/28, Bullis) reported, "Nth Degree Technologies hopes to replace light bulbs with what look like glowing sheets of paper." The company "makes its light sheets by first carving up a wafer of gallium nitride to produce millions of tiny LEDs-one four-inch wafer yields about eight million of them. The LEDs are then mixed with resin and binders, and a standard screen printer is used to deposit the resulting "ink" over a large surface." The article reported that "on addition to the LED ink, there's a layer of silver ink for the back electrical contact, a layer of phosphors to change the color of light emitted by the LEDs (from blue to various shades of white), and an insulating layer to prevent short circuits between the front and back. The front electrical contact, which needs to be transparent to let the light out, is made using an ink that contains invisibly small metal wires."  

Device Turns Any Surface Into An Interactive Touchscreen.

Technology Review (10/19, Graham-Rowe) reports, "A new prototype can transform a notebook into a notebook computer, a wall into an interactive display, and the palm of your hand into a smart phone display. In fact, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University say their new shoulder-mounted device, called OmniTouch, can turn any nearby surface into an ad hoc interactive touch screen."

        Popular Science (10/19, Boyle) reports, "A Kinect-style infrared depth-sensing camera builds a dynamic 3-D map of your environment, using reflected infrared light to calculate surfaces even as you move around. The laser pico-projector adjusts accordingly, compensating for the surface's shape and size to prevent distortion." The device "is able to distinguish finger-shaped cylindrical objects, and can sense whether fingers are 'clicking' or hovering over something."
        The New Scientist (10/18, Aron) "One Per Cent" blog also covered the story.

POE Open House - Welcome Parents!

POE Open House on Prezi

Engineering Ground Zero

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Flavors of Engineering

Flavors of Engineering Presentation.
One slide, pick a flavor, talk about it for 30 seconds-ish.  Check back on the website or here and I'll post a short rubric tomorrow.  Here's a short preview:

• Minimal text
• Don't read the slide
• Use visuals to communicate.

If you create yours in PPT, it might be easier to take a screenshot of it, save it as a image file, and upload that image file.  OR build it right into the google presentation, your call.  You're engineers, PROBLEM SOLVE!
Reply to this post if you have issues and discuss it with each other.

Should humans use robotics to improve their senses or limbs?

Discuss in the comments below.

Marshmallow Challenge!

Welcome to Principles of Engineering!
On Day 1 we complete the Marshmallow Challenge.  Here's Tom Wujec, from Autodesk, talking about why it proves useful to kindergartners and CEOs alike.
"I believe the marshmallow challenge is among the fastest and most powerful techniques for improving a team’s capacity to generate fresh ideas, build rapport, and incorporate prototyping - all of which lie at the heart of effective innovation."

Tomorrow we'll talk about more details of the course, the syllabus, etc.

Researchers Engineer Cell To Emit Laser.

The Wired (6/13, Brown) "Wired Science" blog reports, "Medical researchers from Harvard University have created the first 'living laser'; a biological cell that's been genetically engineered to produce a visible laser beam." Researchers Seok-Hyun Yun and Malte Gather "genetically engineered human embryonic kidney cells to produce" green fluorescent protein (GFP). The protein, which makes jellyfish bioluminescent, produces green light when it is exposed to blue light. The researchers "placed a single cell between two mirrors" and exposed it to blue light. The cell responded by emitting a visible laser beam that "lasted for a few nanoseconds."

        Popular Science (6/13, Boyle) explains, "The mirrors served as the optical cavity, allowing light to bounce through the cell many times, amplifying it into a coherent green beam that was visible to the naked eye." Gather said living lasers "could have a wide range of medical uses," such as activating medications "or for new forms of imaging."

        PC Mag (6/14 Pachal) reports that "Yun suggests to Nature that his discovery could be used to build microscopic laser guns, which could be deployed in a patient to seek and destroy invaders or diseased cells. He says that cells that "self lase" could even be in the picture." He added that "such applications would face the problem of power and light generation as well as the development of practical nano-scale optical cavities...so they're likely a long way off."

Scholarship To Help UK Student Commercialize Renewable Energy Idea.

The Daily Telegraph (UK) (6/6, Tyler) reports Alistair Shepherd, a graduate student in aeronautics and astronautics at the University of Southampton in the UK, won a scholarship in which "he will spend six months with an elite group of international students in the US learning how to turn his renewable energy idea into a commercial reality." Shepherd designed a device that "uses the motion of ships to generate electricity in a device that is inside the ship itself." With the funding from the SETsquared partnership, "Shepherd will be tutored in the US by experts from Harvard Business School, MIT and the University of North Carolina and spend up to three months on an internship at an emerging company in the same field."

Companies Look To Promise Of High-Altitude Wind Power.

The AP (5/30, Lindsay) reports experts such as Cristina Archer, an atmospheric scientist at the California State University in Chico, say "there's 'not a doubt anymore' that high-altitude winds will be tapped for power," but the specifics remain hazy. According to one estimate from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the commercial application of such technology is roughly a decade away. Additionally, above 2,000 feet these power systems would encounter an array of federal air-space regulations which would need to be addressed. "And each turbine concept awaits extensive testing on its reliability, durability and effectiveness," said Fort Felker, director of NREL's National Wind Technology Center, adding that "keeping the turbines operating autonomously over long periods in changing weather may be the biggest obstacle." The AP notes that researchers are developing varying approaches to address this problem.

Commercial Spaceflight Could Offer Opportunities For Researchers.

Popular Science (5/18, Boyle) reports, "The transition away from the shuttle is promising for experimenters, as a new generation of privately built and operated spacecraft is poised to take over." With commercial spaceflight, "scientists will no longer need to apply to NASA to do their experiments" or "join the astronaut corps to get to space in person, a paradigm shift that could make cutting-edge research much more widely accessible." However, "scientists at universities and private research institutions could face some new legal questions," as "tourist spacecraft companies could conceivably craft contracts that ensure a royalty-free license to any new discoveries made on their ships" as well as "royalties if the owner derived any revenues from the invention."

Electrode Improvements Could Put Ultracapacitors On Par With Batteries.

Technology Review (5/4) reports that Nanotune, a California-based startup company, says it "has developed a way to make electrodes that results in ultracapacitors with five to seven times as much storage capacity as conventional ones." This, the company says, would put its ultracapacitors roughly on par with batteries, with the potential to eventually exceed the energy storage of batteries. In tests using different types of electrolytes, the company says it has achieved storage levels of 20-35 watt-hours per kilogram. "At 40 watt-hours per kilogram, the ultracapacitors would be an improvement over the batteries used in some hybrid vehicles," Technology Review notes.

ORNL Research Discovers More Efficient Way To Produce Solar Power.

William Pentland writes for Forbes (5/3), the according to research carried out by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, "solar cells designed with 3-D nanocone tips can boost the light-to-power conversion efficiency of photovoltaics by a whopping 80%." Pentland says that "the new technology solves significant performance problems resulting from the inefficient migration of electron charges associated with solar photons." Jun Xu, a member of ORNL's Chemical Sciences Division, said of the research, "The important concept behind our invention is that the nanocone shape generates a high electric field in the vicinity of the tip junction, effectively separating, injecting and collecting minority carriers, resulting in a higher efficiency than that of a conventional planar cell made with the same materials."

Pittsburgh To Host Engineering Sustainability Conference.

WDUQ-FM Pittsburgh (4/11, Nootbaar) reported on its website, "More than 300 academicians, engineers, architects and designers will gather in Pittsburgh over the next two days to showcase innovations in sustainable design at the 2011 Engineering Sustainability conference." The event will focus on how sustainable design incorporates a wide array of disciplines, organizers said. "When you talk about sustainability and you are an architect or an urban planner you are looking at large link scale things; communities, cities and regions, and then we have folks that are looking at sustainability from a molecular design perspective or from a device perspective," said Eric Beckman, co-director at the University of Pittsburgh's Mascaro Center for Sustainable Innovation. "Beckman says the event also looks at sustainable engineering at all stages of development."

Researchers Hold Quadrocopter Tennis Match.

Popular Science (3/29, Boyle) reports, "ETH Zurich's Flying Machine Arena hosted a quadrocopter tennis match, involving a human-robot volley, a doubles match and an impressive robot-to-robot juggling act." The match was part of a project "examining adaptive high-performance maneuvers." A video of the match was posted on the website.

Artificial Leaf Design Stable, Uses Inexpensive Components.

The Wired (3/28, Brown) "Wired Science" blog reports "MIT professor Daniel Nocera claims to have created an artificial leaf made from stable and inexpensive materials that mimics nature's photosynthesis process." The artificial leaf is "no bigger than a typical playing card, which is left floating in a pool of water" and "uses sunlight to split the water into its two core components, oxygen and hydrogen, which are stored in a fuel cell." Wired notes, "Nocera's leaf is stable - operating continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity in preliminary tests - and made of widely available, inexpensive materials." It is also substantially more efficient than a natural leaf at harvesting energy from the sun.

        Popular Science (3/28, Dillow) notes, "The Nocera Lab's artificial leaf, it should be noted, isn't the first working attempt at recreating photosynthesis in artificial materials." However, "previous attempts have led to artificial leaves full of unstable materials that are expensive and lead to short life spans."

Google Installing Wireless EV Charging Stations.

The Chicago Tribune (3/23, Bird) reports, "Like smartphones, inductive charging is coming to the nascent electric car market and Google is on the forefront of using the technology." Google announced that it will be installing a wireless charger, "called Plugless Power," for EVs at its Mountain View, California headquarters. Cars will need an adapter to make use of the charging system, "but the company doesn't reveal the cost." It also said that it "expects a less than 10% efficiency loss with wireless charging."

Researchers Developing Improved Search And Rescue Robots.

KBTX-TV Bryan/College Station, TX (3/8, Oder) reported, "International research at Disaster City near Texas A&M may eventually save lives worldwide" through the development of search and rescue robots. "We're seeing the mobility change to more biometric type, pneumatic types, where you've got snakes, you've got caterpillar robots," says Dr. Robin Murphy, head of Texas A&M's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue. The researchers are working with experts from the Japan Science and Technology Agency to improve disaster-assistance robotics. "There are several types of robots being tested at the Texas Engineering Extension Service 'Disaster City' this week" as the group continues its research.

Origami Finds New Dimensions at MIT

http://bcove.me/wjut8xzb

Car "Platooning" Test In Sweden Will Move To Public Test In Spain.

New Scientist (1/18, Graham-Rowe) reported on a road test of an automatic driving system in Sweden that showed "that a single car could join a platoon, be 'enslaved' by a lead truck" and become part of a convoy "and then exit safely." As a result, "discussions are now under way to carry out tests on public roads in Spain next year." The system, known as "platooning," was tested by Volvo, "one of the partners of the Safe Road Trains for the Environment (SARTRE) Project" coordinated by the Cambridge engineering firm Ricardo UK, which has "€6.4 million of European Commission money" for it. The system would theoretically let "drivers read a book, surf the net or possibly even have a snooze while behind the wheel." The SARTRE project aims to operate "platoons on public highways without having to change the infrastructure."

Wind Turbine Results!

After a shaky start, this compound gear train and dual fan set-up generated a voltage of 1.86 Volts, the highest in the class.  See other creative ideas on the MedwayEngineering YouTube Channel.

MedwayEngineering YouTube Channel

Announcing the MedwayEngineering YouTube channel!
See the latest projects and work being done in class.