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Category: engineering – Page 132

Circa 2020

Learn how a young team of additive manufacturing engineers helped bring 3D printed parts to the design of the GE9X, the world’s largest jet engine.

Stefka Petkova enjoys building things. It’s a passion she’s had since she was a small child when her dad, an electrician who liked to work on cars, kept the door to his workshop open. “I was exposed to that as a very young child and just got a lot of encouragement,” says Petkova, who she spent many afternoons watching him weld and wire automobiles.

Her childhood tinkering led her to study mechanical engineering at the University of North Florida, near America’s Space Coast, where she joined the school’s space club. She traveled with the club to Cocoa Beach to watch the liftoff of Space Shuttle Atlantis in 2011, NASA’s final flight in its Space Shuttle Program. “At the Atlantis launch, we were able to go in the overhaul facility, touch the space tiles protecting the shuttles and talk to the engineers,” she says. “It was an amazing experience.”

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Israel’s Aquarius Engines this week gave the world a first look at the tiny hydrogen engine it hopes can supplant gas engine-generators and hydrogen fuel cells in future electrified vehicles. Weighing just 22 lb (10 kg), the simple engine uses a single moving piston to develop power. Beyond vehicles, Aquarius is developing the engine for use as an off-grid micro-generator.

First created in 2014, Aquarius’ efficient single-piston linear engine has a single central cylinder in which the piston moves between two engine heads. In previous iterations, Aquarius used more conventional fossil fuels to create combustion, but now it’s turning attention to emissions-slashing hydrogen. The company says Austrian engineering firm AVL-Schrick recently completed third-party testing, verifying that a modified version of the engine can operate purely on hydrogen.

“It was always our dream at Aquarius Engines to breathe oxygen into hydrogen technology as the fuel of the future,” explains Aquarius chairman Gal Fridman. “From initial tests, it appears that our hydrogen engine, that doesn’t require costly hydrogen fuel-cells, could be the affordable, green and sustainable answer to the challenges faced by global transport and remote energy production.”

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www.iBiology.org.

Dr. Kate Adamala describes what synthetic cells are and how they can teach us the fundamental principles of life.

Life on Earth evolved once — this means that all biological systems on our planet are rooted in the same fundamental framework. This framework is extremely complex and we have yet to fully understand the processes inside each living cell. One way of understanding complex systems is to break them down into simpler parts. This is the principle of engineering the synthetic cell: to use our current knowledge of biology for building a living cell with the least amount of parts and complexity. Synthetic cells can be used to teach us about the basic principles of life and evolution, and they hold promise for a range of applications including biomaterials and drug development. Dr. Kate Adamala narrates an introduction to this exciting field.

0:00 Introduction.
2:22 How do we build a synthetic cell?
7:12 How can we use synthetic cells?

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Kate Adamala is a synthetic biologist and a McKnight Land-Grant Assistant Professor in the Department of Genetics, Cell Biology and Development at the University of Minnesota. Her research interests include astrobiology, synthetic cell engineering and biocomputing. Adamala is a co-founder and steering group member of the international Build-a-Cell Initiative, which seeks to broaden the impact of synthetic cell engineering. Find more information on Adamala’s lab at:
http://www.protobiology.org.

Credits:

Continue reading “Kate Adamala (U of M) 1: Synthetic Cells: Building Life to Understand It” | >

A University of California San Diego engineering professor has solved one of the biggest mysteries in geophysics: What causes deep-focus earthquakes?

These mysterious earthquakes originate between 400 and 700 kilometers below the surface of the Earth and have been recorded with magnitudes up to 8.3 on the Richter scale.

Xanthippi Markenscoff, a distinguished professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, is the person who solved this mystery. Her paper “Volume collapse instabilities in deep earthquakes: a shear source nucleated and driven by pressure” appears in the Journal of the Mechanics and Physics of Solids.

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As researchers learn more about the brain, it has become clear that responsive neurostimulation is becoming increasingly effective at probing neural circuit function and treating neuropsychiatric disorders, such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s disease. But current approaches to designing a fully implantable and biocompatible device able to make such interventions have major limitations: their resolution isn’t high enough and most require large, bulky components that make implantation difficult with risk of complications.

A Columbia Engineering team led by Dion Khodagholy, assistant professor of electrical engineering, has come up with a new approach that shows great promise to improve such devices. Building on their earlier work to develop smaller, more efficient conformable bioelectronic transistors and materials, the researchers orchestrated their devices to create implantable circuits that enable allow reading and manipulation of brain circuits. Their multiplex-then-amplify (MTA) system requires only one amplifier per multiplexer, in contrast to that need an equal number of amplifiers as number of channels.

“It is critical to be able to detect and intervene to treat brain-disorder-related symptoms, such as epileptic seizures, in real time,” said Khodagholy, a leader in bio-and neuroelectronics design. “Not only is our system much smaller and more flexible than current devices, but it also enables simultaneous stimulation of arbitrary waveforms on multiple independent channels, so it is much more versatile.

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Debris from an out-of-control Chinese rocket likely plunged into the Indian Ocean, just west of the Maldives, on Saturday night ET, China’s space agency said.

Most of the huge Long March 5B rocket, however, burned up on reentering the atmosphere, the China Manned Space Engineering Office said in a post on WeChat.

It was unclear if any debris had landed on the atoll nation.

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How an MIT engineering course became an incubator for fusion design innovations.

“There is no lone genius who solves all the problems.”

Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC), is reflecting on a guiding belief behind his nuclear science and engineering class 22.63 (Principles of Fusion Engineering). He has recently watched his students, working in teams, make their final presentations on how to use fusion technology to create carbon-free fuel for shipping vessels. Since taking on the course over a decade ago, Whyte has moved away from standard lectures, prodding the class to work collectively on finding solutions to “real-world” issues. Over the past years the course, and its collaborative approach to design, has been instrumental in guiding the real future of fusion at the PSFC.

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John Martinis has done groundbreaking research on coherent superconducting devices since his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1985. These superconducting devices can be modeled as lumped-element electric circuits using Josephson junctions, capacitors and inductors as components. The fact that a superconducting phase across a Josephson junction can display coherent quantum behavior – even though it is a property of the wave function of an immense number of electrons – can be viewed as a fundamental discovery [1], kickstarting, in retrospect, the field of superconducting quantum computing.

John Martinis invented and developed the superconducting phase qubit, based on a current-biased Josephson junction, for the purpose of scalable multi-qubit quantum computing [2]. In 2002, he first demonstrated coherent Rabi oscillations and quantum measurement for such superconducting phase qubit [3]. He has had a longstanding interest in understanding the origin of noise in superconducting electric circuits as these sources of noise naturally limit qubit coherence. In particular, his understanding of noise sources such as dielectric loss, flux noise and the presence and dynamics of quasi-particles [4], by means of simple physical models, have been instrumental in the field. The effect and mitigation of quasi-particles and how they are affected by radiation and cosmic rays continues to be of high interest for the future of superconducting quantum devices [5, 6].

An important step showing his leadership and commitment to building a quantum computer came with his 2014 move, as a Professor at UCSB, to Google, where he gathered a large team of physicists and engineers to tackle the challenge of making a multi-qubit programmable processor. This team has excelled in its relentless focus on optimizing device performance by implementing successful engineering choices for qubit design, couplers and scalable I/O.

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Tomographic 3D printing is a revolutionary technology that uses light to create three-dimensional objects. A projector beams light at a rotating vial containing photocurable resin, and within seconds the desired shape forms inside the vial. The light projections needed to solidify specific 3D regions of the polymer are calculated using tomographic imaging concepts.

The technology was first demonstrated by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in 2019, and a Swiss group at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in 2020. It is significantly faster than traditional 3D printing in layers, can print around existing objects, and does not require support structures.

Though incredible, the technology can get messy in the lab. The vial’s round shape makes it refract rays like a lens. To counter this, experts use a rectangular index-matching bath that provides a flat surface for rays to pass through correctly. The vial of resin must be dipped in and out of the bath for each use—creating a slimy situation.

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Deep-tech healthcare & energy investments for a sustainable future — dr. anil achyuta, investment director / founding member, TDK ventures.

Dr. Anil Achyuta is an Investment Director and a Founding Member at TDK Ventures, which is a deep-tech corporate venture fund of TDK Corporation, the Japanese multinational electronics company that manufactures electronic materials, electronic components, and recording and data-storage media.

Anil is passionate about energy and healthcare sectors as he believes these are the most impactful areas to building a sustainable future – a mission directly in line with TDK Ventures’ goal.

At TDK Ventures, Anil has reviewed over 1050 start-ups and invested in: 1) Autoflight — an electric vertical take-off and landing company, 2) Genetesis — a magnetic imaging-based cardiac diagnostics company, 3) Origin — 3D printing mass manufacturing company, 4) Exo — hand-held 3D ultrasound imaging company, 5) GenCell — ammonia-to-energy hydrogen fuel cell company, 6) Mojo Vision – augmented reality contact lens company, and 7) Battery Resourcers – a direct to cathode lithium ion battery recycling company.

From his seven investments, Anil has secured two exits. GenCell IPO’d on Tel Aviv’s Stock Exchange, and Origin was acquired by the #1 3D Printing company in the world, Stratasys, for $100M.

Continue reading “Dr. Anil Achyuta — TDK Ventures — Founding Member — Deep-Tech Healthcare And Energy Investments” | >