Posted in engineering, nuclear energy, space | 2 Comments on Kilopower is a small, light-weight fission nuclear power system capable of providing up to 10 kilowatts of electrical power
Kilopower is a small, light-weight fission nuclear power system capable of providing up to 10 kilowatts of electrical power — enough to run several average households continuously for at least 10 years.
Four Kilopower units would provide enough power to establish an outpost on the Moon or Mars.
#engineering
Here’s another neat thing drones can do—beam power across the sky to recharge sensors in hard-to-reach places.
Remote sensors play a valuable role in collecting data—but recharging these devices while they are scattered over vast and isolated areas can be tedious. A new system is designed to make the charging process easier by using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to deliver power using radio waves during a flyby. A specialized antenna on the sensor harvests the signals and converts them into electricity. The design is described in a study published 23 March in IEEE Sensors Letters.
Joseph Costantine and his colleagues at the American University of Beirut, in partnership with researchers at the Institute of Electronics, Computer, and Telecommunications Engineering in Italy, were exploring ways to remotely charge sensors using radio frequency waves (the same form of energy used to transmit Wi-Fi). However, a major challenge was that the source of the radio waves must be fairly close to the sensor in order to sufficiently charge it.
This prompted the researchers to consider the use of UAVs, which could soar over each sensor. “In addition, a UAV can follow an optimized trajectory that maximizes energy transfer to the sensors in question,” Costantine explains. He says his team developed this system to control and recharge sensors used in agriculture, but that it could be extended to any situation where sensors are deployed in hard-to-reach areas.
Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your Automaton bloggers. We’ll also be posting a weekly calendar of upcoming robotics events for the next few months; here’s what we have so far (send us your events!):
Let us know if you have suggestions for next week, and enjoy today’s videos.
In 2017, a team of USC Viterbi researchers created ADAMMS (Agile Dexterous Autonomous Mobile Manipulation System), a robot designed to support repetitive human tasks, like transporting equipment or tending a 3D printer at 3 a.m. ADAMMS can perform specific actions like opening doors or picking up objects autonomously. These researchers, including postdoctoral researcher in the USC Viterbi Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Pradeep Rajendran, AME Ph.D student Shantanu Thakar, Department of Computer Science master’s student Hyojeong Kim and M.S. AME’18 Vivek Annem, envisioned a tool that could support humans remotely.
Inspired by how human bone and colorful coral reefs adjust mineral deposits in response to their surrounding environments, Johns Hopkins researchers have created a self-adapting material that can change its stiffness in response to the applied force. This advancement can someday open the doors for materials that can self-reinforce to prepare for increased force or stop further damage. A report of the findings was published today in Advanced Materials.
“Imagine a bone implant or a bridge that can self-reinforce where a high force is applied without inspection and maintenance. It will allow safer implants and bridges with minimal complication, cost and downtime,” says Sung Hoon Kang, an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Hopkins Extreme Materials Institute, and Institute for NanoBioTechnology at The Johns Hopkins University and the study’s senior author.
While other researchers have attempted to create similar synthetic materials before, doing so has been challenging because such materials are difficult and expensive to create, or require active maintenance when they are created and are limited in how much stress they can bear. Having materials with adaptable properties, like those of wood and bone, can provide safer structures, save money and resources, and reduce harmful environmental impact.
MYSTERY WIRE — Are psychic abilities real, and if so, can they be measured? Yes to both questions, says Dr. Dean Radin.
For decades, the Department of Defense sponsored secret studies of psychic phenomena in hopes of training an elite team of psychic soldiers. Officially, the program was canceled, but research into psychic abilities continues in the private sector, and one of the scientists on the cutting edge is featured this week on mysterywire.com.
Radin earned advanced degrees in both electrical engineering and psychology, worked for prestigious companies and labs, and has spent decades trying to measure psychic abilities.
The Universidad Carlos III de Madrid (UC3M), together with the Universidad Pontificia de Comillas and the University of Porto, has patented a magnetic cork that could remove polluting particles from water, among other uses.
The magnetic cork has been created through a process of co-precipitation of iron oxide through which magnetite is obtained. This mineral is absorbed as soon as it comes into contact with the surface of the cork. “The patent arises from the need to make graded adhesive joints. It occurred to me, when reading about the various techniques that are used for graded joints and about cork, that we could make the cork magnetic using the process that is currently used to obtain magnetite,” notes Juana Abenojar, researcher in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering and Chemical Engineering at the UC3M.
Thanks to the magnetisation of cork, the ease of capturing particles with the help of a magnet allowing them to be positioned in a particular place —for example, to modify rigid polymers when an area needs to be more ductile than the rest as it is going to be subjected to impact—is added to the inherent advantages of the material, such as its low weight an impact resistance. Using the magnet, a greater number of magnetic cork particles are put in a certain place to achieve greater flexibility.
The synthesis of plastic precursors, such as polymers, involves specialized catalysts. However, the traditional batch-based method of finding and screening the right ones for a given result consumes liters of solvent, generates large quantities of chemical waste, and is an expensive, time-consuming process involving multiple trials.
Ryan Hartman, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering, and his laboratory developed a lab-based “intelligent microsystem” employing machine learning, for modeling chemical reactions that shows promise for eliminating this costly process and minimizing environmental harm.
In their research, “Combining automated microfluidic experimentation with machine learning for efficient polymerization design,” published in Nature Machine Intelligence, the collaborators, including doctoral student Benjamin Rizkin, employed a custom-designed, rapidly prototyped microreactor in conjunction with automation and in situ infrared thermography to study exothermic (heat generating) polymerization—reactions that are notoriously difficult to control when limited experimental kinetic data are available. By pairing efficient microfluidic technology with machine learning algorithms to obtain high-fidelity datasets based on minimal iterations, they were able to reduce chemical waste by two orders of magnitude and catalytic discovery from weeks to hours.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine and other institutions have architecturally designed plate-nanolattices—nanometer-sized carbon structures—that are stronger than diamonds as a ratio of strength to density.
In a recent study in Nature Communications, the scientists report success in conceptualizing and fabricating the material, which consists of closely connected, closed-cell plates instead of the cylindrical trusses common in such structures over the past few decades.
“Previous beam-based designs, while of great interest, had not been so efficient in terms of mechanical properties,” said corresponding author Jens Bauer, a UCI researcher in mechanical & aerospace engineering. “This new class of plate-nanolattices that we’ve created is dramatically stronger and stiffer than the best beam-nanolattices.”
To process information, photons must interact. However, these tiny packets of light want nothing to do with each other, each passing by without altering the other. Now, researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology have coaxed photons into interacting with one another with unprecedented efficiency — a key advance toward realizing long-awaited quantum optics technologies for computing, communication and remote sensing.
The team, led by Yuping Huang, an associate professor of physics and director of the Center for Quantum Science and Engineering, brings us closer to that goal with a nano-scale chip that facilitates photon interactions with much higher efficiency than any previous system. The new method, reported as a memorandum in the Sept. 18 issue of Optica, works at very low energy levels, suggesting that it could be optimized to work at the level of individual photons — the holy grail for room-temperature quantum computing and secure quantum communication.
“We’re pushing the boundaries of physics and optical engineering in order to bring quantum and all-optical signal processing closer to reality,” said Huang.
Circa 2011 essentially a magnet could be a battery and cpu and a gpu with magnonics.
Harvard physicists have expanded the possibilities for quantum engineering of novel materials such as high-temperature superconductors by coaxing ultracold atoms trapped in an optical lattice — a light crystal — to self-organize into a magnet, using only the minute disturbances resulting from quantum mechanics. The research, published in the journal Nature, is the first demonstration of such a “quantum magnet” in an optical lattice.
As modern technology depends more and more on materials with exotic quantum mechanical properties, researchers are coming up against a natural barrier.
“The problem is that what makes these materials useful often makes them extremely difficult to design,” said senior author Markus Greiner, an associate professor in Harvard’s Department of Physics. “They can become entangled, existing in multiple configurations at the same time. This hallmark of quantum mechanics is difficult for normal computers to represent, so we had to take another approach.”
