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Category: engineering – Page 124

Take a closer look at the complex choreography involved in building NASA’s Europa Clipper as the mission to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa approaches its 2,024 launch date.

The hardware that makes up NASA’s Europa Clipper is rapidly taking shape, as engineering components and instruments are prepared for delivery to the main clean room at the agency’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. In workshops and labs across the country and in Europe, teams are crafting the complex pieces that make up the whole as mission leaders direct the elaborate choreography of building a flagship mission.

The massive 10-foot-tall (3-meter-tall) propulsion module recently moved from NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, to the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) in Laurel, Maryland, where engineers will install electronics, radios, antennas, and cabling. The spacecraft’s thick aluminum vault, which will protect Europa Clipper’s electronics from Jupiter’s intense radiation, is nearing completion at JPL. The building and testing of the science instruments at universities and partner institutions across the country continue as well.

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Some kinds of water pollution, such as algal blooms and plastics that foul rivers, lakes, and marine environments, lie in plain sight. But other contaminants are not so readily apparent, which makes their impact potentially more dangerous. Among these invisible substances is uranium. Leaching into water resources from mining operations, nuclear waste sites, or from natural subterranean deposits, the element can now be found flowing out of taps worldwide.

In the United States alone, “many areas are affected by uranium contamination, including the High Plains and Central Valley aquifers, which supply drinking water to 6 million people,” says Ahmed Sami Helal, a postdoc in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering. This contamination poses a near and present danger. “Even small concentrations are bad for human health,” says Ju Li, the Battelle Energy Alliance Professor of Nuclear Science and Engineering and professor of materials science and engineering.

Now, a team led by Li has devised a highly efficient method for removing uranium from drinking water. Applying an electric charge to graphene oxide foam, the researchers can capture uranium in solution, which precipitates out as a condensed solid crystal. The foam may be reused up to seven times without losing its electrochemical properties. “Within hours, our process can purify a large quantity of drinking water below the EPA limit for uranium,” says Li.

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This next jump in battery-tech could solve a lot of EV problems.

The world of the internal combustion engine will sadly, but very necessarily, come to a close at some point in many of our lifetimes. Hybrids and electric vehicles are becoming more affordable and more advanced at a rapid pace, which means batteries are taking the place of fossil fuels. This has led to an equally rapid progression in battery technology, with the main goals of improving capacity, charging times, and safety. One major advancement in this field is the advent of solid-state batteries, which promise to push the boundaries of the limitations that current lithium-ion batteries carry.

Electric vehicles have been powered by lithium-ion batteries for years, which are similar to the ones used in laptops, cell phones, and other consumer electronics. They are constructed with a liquid electrolyte inside, which makes them heavy and susceptible to instability at high temperatures. Because each individual battery pack can’t generate all that much energy on its own, several have to be linked together in series, further adding to the weight. The cost of engineering, manufacturing, and installing battery packs makes up a considerable portion of the overall cost of an electric vehicle.

Continue reading “What You Need to Know About Solid-State Batteries” | >

Polymer semiconductors—materials that have been made soft and stretchy but still able to conduct electricity—hold promise for future electronics that can be integrated within the body, including disease detectors and health monitors.

Yet until now, scientists and engineers have been unable to give these polymers certain advanced features, like the ability to sense biochemicals, without disrupting their functionality altogether.

Researchers at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) have developed a new strategy to overcome that limitation. Called “click-to-polymer” or CLIP, this approach uses a chemical reaction to attach new functional units onto .

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Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, And Precision Medicine — Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, President and CEO, and Dr. Joe Alexander, MD, Ph.D., Director, Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab, NTT Research.

Mr. Kazuhiro Gomi, is President and CEO of NTT Research (https://ntt-research.com/), a division of The Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation, commonly known as NTT (https://www.global.ntt/), a Japanese telecommunications company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Mr. Gomi has been at NTT for more than 30 years and was involved in product management/product development activities at the beginning of his tenure. In September of 2009, Mr. Gomi was first named to the Global Telecoms Business Power100 — a list of the 100 most powerful and influential people in the telecoms industry. He was the CEO of NTT America Inc. from 2010 to 2019 and also served on the Board of Directors at NTT Communications from 2012 to 2019. Mr. Gomi received a Masters of Science in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Keio University, Tokyo. Mr. Gomi is a member of the board at US Japan Council, a non-profit organization aimed at fostering a better relationship between the US and Japan.

Dr. Joe Alexander, is Director of the Medical and Health Informatics (MEI) Lab at NTT Research, where he oversees the MEI Lab research in multi-scale Precision Cardiology platforms such as the cardiovascular bio-digital twin, as well as heart-on-a-chip technology, specifically aimed at developing the infrastructure for a digital replica of an individual’s heart. In addition, the MEI Lab is working on nano-and micro-scale sensors and electrodes, other organ-on-a-chip micro-fluidics technologies, as well as wearable and remote sensing to support future bio-digital twin applications.

Continue reading “Kazuhiro Gomi & Dr. Joe Alexander — Bio-Digital Twins, Quantum Computing, Precision Medicine — NTT” | >

Nanoracks has hired a former NASA official most recently involved with planning for Artemis to lead its efforts to develop commercial space stations.

WASHINGTON — Commercial space services company Nanoracks has hired a former NASA official most recently involved with planning for the Artemis program to lead its efforts to develop commercial space stations.

Nanoracks announced Aug. 2 it hired Marshall Smith to be its senior vice president of commercial space stations. Smith retired from NASA at the end of July after more than 35 years at the agency, most recently as deputy associate administrator for systems engineering and integration in the Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate.

In his new role, Smith will oversee the company’s Outpost program, which seeks to convert upper stages of launch vehicles into modules that can be used for in-space manufacturing or habitats, as well as plans to develop free-flyer commercial space stations. Smith will run the company’s new office in Huntsville, Alabama.

Continue reading “Former NASA official joins Nanoracks to lead commercial space station work” | >

Daniel Korsun’s undergraduate career at MIT

MIT is an acronym for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It is a prestigious private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts that was founded in 1861. It is organized into five Schools: architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; management; and science. MIT’s impact includes many scientific breakthroughs and technological advances.

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Thrilled to see Paradromics’ $20M fund raise lead by the talented Dr. Amy Kruse! Paradromics is building a brain computer interface supported by DARPA’s Biologi… See More.

The investment demonstrates confidence in Paradromics as a well-positioned player in the $200 billion BCI therapy market. Last year, Paradromics successfully completed testing of its platform, demonstrating the largest ever electrical recording of cortical activity that exceeded more than 30000 electrode channels in sheep cortex. This recording allowed researchers to observe the brain activity of sheep in response to sound stimuli with high fidelity.

“We are combining the best of neural science and medical device engineering to create a robust and reliable platform for new clinical therapies,” said Paradromics CEO Matt Angle. “This funding round is a validation of both our technology and strategic vision in leading this important developing market.”

The current funding round follows $10M in early stage private funding as well as $15M of public funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Department of Defense (DARPA).

Continue reading “Paradromics Raises MM in Seed Funding Led by Prime Movers Lab to Advance Brain Computer Interfaces” | >

The Koenigsegg Gemera is a four-seat hypercar that can do 0–62 mph in a claimed 1.9 seconds, but perhaps the most remarkable thing about this Swedish rocket ship is its 2.0-liter twin-turbocharged inline-3, which makes a staggering 600 horsepower (plus 443 pound-feet of torque).

Jason Fenske at Engineering Explained has the details on how Koenigsegg extracted so much power from such a small engine. It starts with the cylinders. There may not be many of them, but they are pretty big. They’re actually larger than the cylinders in Koenigsegg’s 5.0-liter V8, Fenske noted.

Koenigsegg’s new Gemera makes over 1700 horsepower, with close to a third of that figure coming from a 3-cylinder engine.

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CHINA’S NEW THORIUM-BASED NUCLEAR REACTOR is well situated for being adopted for Space applications.

China is slowly but steadily positioning itself to leap ahead of the US Space program. It is doing this without pomp and fanfare, and without the idea of a “space race,” simply based upon what it requires for its future.

1) Recent noteworthy progress on molten salt thorium reactors could be a key component of future Chinese space-worthiness. Originally designed by the USA’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the 1960’s, they were planned to be used for nuclear powered strategic bomber planes, before the nuclear submarine concept became adopted as more feasible. They were chosen because they can be miniaturized to the size of an aircraft. By the same token, they could conceivably be used in advanced atmospheric or space propulsion.

2) Recently, China announced successful tests on a new type of aircraft that takes in air from the surrounding atmosphere, ionizes it with electricity, and expels it as exhaust. The only thing needed would be a strong enough on-board electrical supply to supply the huge amount of power required. Only a nuclear power plant could supply that power unless it were to be beamed from ground stations. Such a plane would require no fuel for its entire lifetime. It could also function in any atmosphere, not only Earth’s atmosphere, since it is not based on burning fuel chemically, which requires oxygen. Versions of such air-plasma-breathing thrust could be used as part of the boosting phase of a rocket launch system.

3) A few days ago, China tested part of its fully reusable space plane, which is a vastly superior system to SpaceX’s “Starship” rocket. While Starship uses old-fashioned ballistic rocket technology, the Chinese spaceplane, according to reports that have come out, involves something similar to the Sanger space plane design. An early version of the Space Shuttle design also had this configuration. Instead of the Space Shuttle’s dangerous solid rocket boosters on the side, and its external fuel tank, which is dumped once the fuel is used up, such systems have a second “booster aircraft” which glides to a runway after boosting the upper stage orbiter into its atmospheric launch position. So, there are two vehicles which land on a runway, with only the orbiter going into space. In addition to this, the Chinese are adding “combined cycle” technologies, where more than one type of propulsion is being used on the aircraft. So, perhaps turbojets, and scramjets, and rocket engines will be used as one example of such a configuration.

Continue reading “China unveils design for first waterless nuclear reactor” | >