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Category: engineering – Page 217

Columbia Engineering Professor Changxi Zheng’s new approach could lead to better tagging and coding, leveraging 3D printing of complex geometries.

New York — July 18, 2016 — Columbia Engineering researchers, working with colleagues at Disney Research and MIT, have developed a new method to control sound waves, using a computational approach to inversely design acoustic filters that can fit within an arbitrary 3D shape while achieving target sound filtering properties. Led by Computer Science Professor Changxi Zheng, the team designed acoustic voxels, small, hollow, cube-shaped chambers through which sound enters and exits, as a modular system. Like Legos, the voxels can be connected to form an infinitely adjustable, complex structure. Because of their internal chambers, they can modify the acoustic filtering property of the structure—changing their number and size or how they connect alters the acoustic result.

“In the past, people have explored computational design of specific products, like a certain type of muffler or a particular shape of trumpet,” says Zheng, whose team is presenting their paper, “Acoustic Voxels: Computational Optimization of Modular Acoustic Filters,” at SIGGRAPH 2016 on July 27. “The general approach to manipulating sound waves has been to computationally design chamber shapes. Our algorithm enables new designs of noise mufflers, hearing aids, wind instruments, and more — we can now make them in any shape we want, even a 3D-printed toy hippopotamus that sounds like a trumpet.” VIDEO: http://www.cs.columbia.edu/cg/lego/

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Graphene, a two-dimensional wonder-material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms linked in a hexagonal chicken-wire pattern, has attracted intense interest for its phenomenal ability to conduct electricity. Now University of Illinois at Chicago researchers have used rod-shaped bacteria — precisely aligned in an electric field, then vacuum-shrunk under a graphene sheet — to introduce nanoscale ripples in the material, causing it to conduct electrons differently in perpendicular directions.

The resulting material, sort of a graphene nano-corduroy, can be applied to a silicon chip and may add to graphene’s almost limitless potential in electronics and nanotechnology. The finding is reported in the journal ACS Nano.

“The current across the graphene wrinkles is less than the current along them,” says Vikas Berry, associate professor and interim head of chemical engineering at UIC, who led the research.

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The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has demonstrated a new mathematical framework that works to help researchers discover patterns in complex scientific and engineering systems. DARPA said Thursday researchers at Stanford University created algorithms designed to explore patterns in data in order to gain insights into network structure and function under the Simplifying Complexity in Scientific Discovery [ ].

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Nice.

“Our study suggests for the first time that the doping-induced modulation of the charge carrier density in graphene influences its wettability and adhesion,” explained SungWoo Nam, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering at Illinois. “This work investigates this new doping-induced tunable wetting phenomena which is unique to graphene and potentially other 2D materials in complementary theoretical and experimental investigations.”

Graphene, being optically transparent and possessing superior electrical and mechanical properties, can revolutionize the fields of surface coatings and electrowetting displays, according to the researchers. A material’s wettability (i.e. interaction with water) is typically constant in the absence of external influence and are classified as either water-loving (hydrophilic) or water-repelling (hydrophobic; water beads up on the surface). Depending on the specific application, a choice between either hydrophobic or hydrophilic material is required. For electrowetting displays, for example, the hydrophilic characteristics of display material is enhanced with the help of a constant externally impressed electric current.

“What makes graphene special is that, unlike conventional bulk materials, it displays tunable surface wetting characteristics due to a change in its electron density, or by doping,” said Ali Ashraf, a graduate student researcher and first author of the paper, “Doping-Induced Tunable Wettability and Adhesion of Graphene,” appearing in Nano Letters. “Our collaborative research teams have discovered that while graphene behaves typically as a hydrophobic material (due to presence of strongly held air-borne contamination on its surface), its hydrophobicity can be readily changed by changing electron density.

Continue reading “Tunable wetting and adhesion of graphene demonstrated” | >

Robots so small they can enter the bloodstream and perform surgeries are one step closer, a research team from Monash University has discovered.

Led by Dr Zhe Liu, the Monash Engineering team has focused on graphene oxide — which is a single atom thick — as an effective shape memory material.

Graphene has captured world scientific and industrial interest for its miracle properties, with potential applications across energy, medicine, and even biomedical nano-robots.

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Could augmented reality headsets help helicopter rescue pilots to fly more safely in extreme weather conditions — including heavy fog — in which they have poor visibility? That’s the question set out by a group of researchers at Germany’s Technical University of Munich (TUM). Their answer? An overwhelming yes.

Carried out in collaboration with the Institute of Helicopter Technology, the project uses a helicopter-mounted LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) system to create virtual images of upcoming hazards and other obstacles. This signal data is then processed onboard the helicopter and transmitted to the transparent head-mounted display worn by pilots.

“Databases containing obstacles and terrain data are used together with real-time data from sensors in order to substitute the lost visual cues in degraded visual environment” Franz Viertler, a professor of aeronautical engineering who worked on the project, told Digital Trends. “The other part of the research then deals with how to best visualize the data for the pilot in order to enable a safe flight. The head-mounted display is a perfect means to do this, because the pilots can keep their eyes out of the window, while they get additional information about hazardous obstacles.”

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Joshua Brown, 40, believed in the power of engineering. He was a former Navy SEAL, a technology consultant, and a Tesla fan. He had posted YouTube videos of himself driving a Tesla Model S on autopilot, taking his hands off the wheel to show how the car could avoid a collision on its own. He had nicknamed his car “Tessy.”

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Adam Crowl talking about the energy of the Sun and what we can do with it.

No one thinks big better than Adam Crowl, a Centauri Dreams regular and mainstay of the Icarus Interstellar attempt to reconfigure the Project Daedalus starship design of the 1970’s. If you’re looking for ideas for science fiction stories, you’ll find them in the essay below, where Adam considers the uses to which we might put the abundant energies of the Sun. Starships are a given, but what about terraforming not just one but many Solar System objects? Can we imagine a distant future when our own Moon is awash with seas, and snow is falling on a Venus in the process of transformation? To keep up with Adam, be sure to check his Crowlspace site regularly. It’s where I found an earlier version of this now updated and revised essay.

By Adam Crowl

crowl

Continue reading “Interstellar Comparisons” | >

With a radio specifically designed to communicate through tissue, Professors David Blaauw (http://web.eecs.umich.edu/faculty/blaauw/) and David Wentzloff (http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~wentzlof/) from the University of Michigan’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department (https://www.eecs.umich.edu/ece/) are adding another level to a computer platform small enough to fit inside a medical grade syringe.

With this enabling technology, real time information can be applied to devices monitoring heart fibrillation as well as glucose monitoring for diabetics.

This new radio, designed by Graduate Student Research Assistant Yao Shi, can transmit information from inside the body up to one foot to a data base receiver, more than 5 times the distance from any known radio of equal size.

ABOUT THE PROFESSORS

Continue reading “Injectable Computers” | >

BMI technology is like anything else; you have an evolution process to finally reach a level of maturity. The good news is that at least at this point of time BMI is at least in that cycle where we are no longer crawling and trying to stand up. We’re in that stage of the cycle where we are standing up and taking a couple of steps at a time. In the next 3 to 5 years, things should be extremely interesting in the BMI space especially as we begin to introduce more sophisticated technology to our connected infrastructure.

Will future soldiers be able to use a direct brain interface to control their hardware?

Imagine if the brain could tell a machine what to do without having to type, speak or use other standard interfaces. That’s the aim of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which has committed US$60 million to a Neural Engineering System Design (NESD) project to do just that.

“Today’s best brain-computer interface systems are like two supercomputers trying to talk to each other using an old 300-baud modem,” said Phillip Alvelda, the NESD program manager. “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.”

Continue reading “Futures: Interfacing with DARPA’s cyborg soldiers” | >