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Category: engineering – Page 160

Tunable free-electron X-ray radiation from van der Waals materials

Technion researchers have developed accurate radiation sources that are expected to lead to breakthroughs in medical imaging and other areas. They have developed precise radiation sources that may replace the expensive and cumbersome facilities currently used for such tasks. The suggested apparatus produces controlled radiation with a narrow spectrum that can be tuned with high resolution, at a relatively low energy investment. The findings are likely to lead to breakthroughs in a variety of fields, including the analysis of chemicals and biological materials, medical imaging, X-ray equipment for security screening, and other uses of accurate X-ray sources.

Published in the journal Nature Photonics, the study was led by Professor Ido Kaminer and his master’s student Michael Shentcis as part of a collaboration with several research institutes at the Technion: the Andrew and Erna Viterbi Faculty of Electrical Engineering, the Solid State Institute, the Russell Berrie Nanotechnology Institute (RBNI), and the Helen Diller Center for Quantum Science, Matter and Engineering.

The researchers’ paper shows an experimental observation that provides the first proof-of-concept for theoretical models developed over the last decade in a series of constitutive articles. The first article on the subject also appeared in Nature Photonics. Written by Prof. Kaminer during his postdoc at MIT, under the supervision of Prof. Marin Soljacic and Prof. John Joannopoulos, that paper presented theoretically how two-dimensional materials can create X-rays. According to Prof. Kaminer, “that article marked the beginning of a journey towards sources based on the unique physics of two-dimensional materials and their various combinations—heterostructures. We have built on the theoretical breakthrough from that article to develop a series of follow-up articles, and now, we are excited to announce the first experimental observation on the creation of X-ray radiation from such materials, while precisely controlling the radiation parameters.”

Latest Flight Testing!

Latest wing testing and the evolution of our aerodynamic control at speed with the #JetSuit never stops at Gravity. Here with the awesome Benjamin Kenobi chasing with his Inspire drone🤘

LINKS
SHOP: http://www.gravity.co/mobile-shop/
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Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/takeongravity/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbrowninggravity/
Web: http://www.gravity.co
TED 2017 talk: http://go.ted.com/richardbrowning

BACKGROUND
With a rich family history in Aviation, former Oil Trader & Royal Marines Reservist, Richard Browning, founded pioneering Aeronautical Innovation company, Gravity Industries in March 2017 to launch human flight into an entirely new era.

The Gravity #JetSuit uses over 1000bhp of Jet Engine power combined with natural human balance to deliver the most intense and enthralling spectacle, often likened to the real life Ironman.

Gravity has to date been experienced by over a billion people globally and covered by virtually every media platform. The Gravity Team, based in the UK, have delivered over 100 flight & Speaking events across 30 countries including 5 TED talks.

“The team and I are delivering on the vision to build Gravity into a world class aeronautical engineering business, challenge perceived boundaries in human aviation, and inspire a generation to dare ask ‘what if…”

Continue reading “Latest Flight Testing!” | >

E-beam atomic-scale 3D ‘sculpting’ could enable new quantum nanodevices

Based on focused -induced processing (FEBID) techniques, the work could allow production of 2-D/3D complex nanostructures and functional nanodevices useful in quantum communications, sensing, and other applications. For oxygen-containing materials such as graphene oxide, etching can be done without introducing outside materials, using oxygen from the substrate.

“By timing and tuning the energy of the electron , we can activate interaction of the beam with oxygen in the graphene oxide to do etching, or interaction with hydrocarbons on the surface to create carbon deposition,” said Andrei Fedorov, professor and Rae S. and Frank H. Neely Chair in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “With atomic-scale control, we can produce complicated patterns using direct write-remove processes. Quantum systems require precise control on an atomic scale, and this could enable a host of potential applications.”

U.S. DARPA tasks Gryphon with nuclear thermal propulsion system

Gryphon provides digital engineering, analytics, cyber and cloud solutions to U.S. security organizations. It was awarded a $14million DARPA task order to support the development and demonstration of an uranium-based Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) System.

The system is a part of the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Operations (DRACO) program and will enable the U.S. military to operate spacecraft in cislunar space, Gryphon said. The cislunar space is the region outside the Earth’s atmosphere and just beyond the Moon’s orbit.

“A successfully demonstrated NTP system will provide a leap-ahead in space propulsion capability, allowing agile and rapid transit over vast distances as compared to present propulsion approaches,” said Gryphon’s Chief Engineer Dr. Tabitha Dodson.

“Gryphon is committed to providing high-end technical solutions to our nation’s most critical national security challenges,” said P.J. Braden, CEO of Gryphon. “We are proud to support DRACO and the development and demonstration of NTP, a significant technological advancement in efforts to achieve cislunar space awareness.”

Berlin, 30 September 2020. — The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) tasked DC-based Gryphon Technologies to develop a nuclear thermal propulsion system, the firm announced yesterday.

Former NASA Astronaut will be Commander of Axiom’s civilian flight aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon

Featured image source: NASA / spacex

Axiom Space Inc. is a Houston, Texas start-up, founded by Michael Suffredini who served as NASA’s International Space Station (ISS) Program Manager from 2005 to 2015. He was responsible for overseeing ISS transition from assembly to the initiation of commercial operations. Axiom is mostly staffed by NASA ex-employees, including former NASA Administrator Charles Bolden. – “The leadership team also includes world-class, specialized expertise in commercial utilization of microgravity, on-orbit operations, astronaut training, space financing, engineering, space system architecture/design/development, space medicine, marketing, and law,” the company states. Together, they are all working towards the commercialization of space.

Axiom aims to build a space station in low Earth orbit to continue operations once NASA retires the ISS program and moves beyond the orbiting laboratory to focus operations on the lunar surface. The company also offers spaceflights for regular civilians to experience microgravity and amazing views of Earth from ISS. “While making access to Low Earth Orbit global during the remainder of ISS’ lifetime, Axiom is constructing the future platform that will serve as humanity’s permanently growing home, scientific and industrial complex in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) – the cornerstone of human activity in space,” company states on its website.

Quantum Enhanced Atomic Force Microscopy: Squeezed Light Reduces Noise

Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory used quantum optics to advance state-of-the-art microscopy and illuminate a path to detecting material properties with greater sensitivity than is possible with traditional tools.

“We showed how to use squeezed light – a workhorse of quantum information science – as a practical resource for microscopy,” said Ben Lawrie of ORNL’s Materials Science and Technology Division, who led the research with Raphael Pooser of ORNL’s Computational Sciences and Engineering Division. “We measured the displacement of an atomic force microscope microcantilever with sensitivity better than the standard quantum limit.”

Unlike today’s classical microscopes, Pooser and Lawrie’s quantum microscope requires quantum theory to describe its sensitivity. The nonlinear amplifiers in ORNL’s microscope generate a special quantum light source known as squeezed light.

ESA awards €129.4 million contract to planetary defence mission Hera

Darmstadt, 15 September 2020. – The European Space Agency (ESA) awarded a €129.4 million contract covering the design, manufacturing and testing of Hera, the space agency’s first mission for planetary defence, ESA announced today.

The contract was signed by Franco Ongaro, ESA Director of Technology, Engineering and Quality, and Marco Fuchs, CEO of Germany space company OHB, prime contractor of the Hera consortium, ESA said today. The signing took place at ESA’s European Space Operations Centre (ESOC) in Darmstadt, Germany, which will serve as mission control for the 2024-launched Hera.

The mission will be Europe’s contribution to an international asteroid deflection effort, set to perform sustained exploration of a double asteroid system, ESA said.

Hera will be, along with NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirect Test (DART) spacecraft, humankind’s first probe to rendezvous with a binary asteroid system, a little understood class making up around 15% of all known asteroids, the agency said.

Hera is the European contribution to an international planetary defence collaboration among European and US scientists called the Asteroid Impact & Deflection Assessment (AIDA).

Transistor-integrated cooling for a more powerful chip

Managing the heat generated in electronics is a huge problem, especially with the constant push to reduce the size and pack as many transistors as possible in the same chip. The whole problem is how to manage such high heat fluxes efficiently. Usually, electronic technologies, designed by electrical engineers, and cooling systems, designed by mechanical engineers, are done independently and separately. But now, EPFL researchers have quietly revolutionized the process by combining these two design steps into one: They’ve developed an integrated microfluidic cooling technology together with the electronics that can efficiently manage the large heat fluxes generated by transistors. Their research, which has been published in Nature, will lead to even more compact electronic devices and enable the integration of power converters, with several high-voltage devices, into a single chip.

The best of both worlds

In this ERC-funded project, Professor Elison Matioli, his doctoral student Remco Van Erp, and their team from the School of Engineering’s Power and Wide-band-gap Electronics Research Laboratory (POWERLAB), began working to bring about a real change in designing by conceiving the electronics and together, right from the beginning. The group sought to extract the very near the regions that heat up the most in the . “We wanted to combine skills in electrical and mechanical engineering in order to create a new kind of device,” says Van Erp.