Technology Trends

I’ve recently noticed this post on OhGizmo! about amazing fast trucks. And I decided to look further inside this trucking world. For example, did you know that the fastest fire truck in the world lives in the Hawaiian Fire Department? It’s a refurbished 1940 Ford truck, powered by two Rolls Royce Bristol Viper engines. It reached a speed of 655 km/h (407 mph) in 1998 and still holds the Guinness World Record for this. As they say in Hawaii, “this truck is guaranteed to be the first at any fire, maybe even before its own sirens!” But read more to discover other incredibly fast trucks.

Let’s start with a picture of this fire truck in action (Credit: Hawaiian Eagle Inc.). A question remains: where is the fire? Ahead of the truck or behind?

Here is a link to a larger version of this picture. And for more information, you can check these pages on the Hawaiian Eagle or at the Guinness World Record web sites.

Sponsored by AutoAnything

Whether you’re in search of performance parts for your car like a K&N cold air intake or Flowmaster exhaust, or just a new set of floor mats like Husky floor mats, AutoAnything is one of the leading online stores to shop at.

Before going further, you might wonder how can jet engines can safely power a truck? For an answer to this question, you should read “How does a jet truck work?” from the HowStuffWorks site.

Now that you know that these jet-powered trucks can roll — and pretty fast — let’s explore Les Shockley’s Jet Shows web site.

Both the Shockwave triple engine and the Super Shockwave twin engine jet trucks are valued at $500,000, but the Shockwave is the fastest of the both. Here are some details coming from the owner’s web site.

The ShockWave Jet Truck runs over 300 mph racing airplanes at airshows; holds the world record in a quarter mile for trucks at 256 mph in just 6.36 seconds; and holds the world record for full size trucks at 376 mph as recorded by Guinness Book of World Records. At 36,000 horsepower, the ShockWave has enough power to accelerate at 3 Gs vertical, which is as much as the Space Shuttle!

Below is a picture of this truck racing with a plane (Credit: Les Shockley’s Jet Shows). And here is a link to a larger version.

But is this possible to design very fast trucks without integrating jet engines? The answer is yes, as you can discover in this gizmag article about the Bandag Bullet truck, which broke several speed records last week at the Queensland International Air Show held at Bundaberg Airport in Australia.

The Bandag Bullet smashed the world record for a one kilometre run and potentially set eight world records on the way. The eight tonne Kenworth T400-based Bandag Bullet ran a standing start kilometre in 18.6 seconds with a terminal speed of over 300km/h.

Below is a picture of the Bandag Bullet truck starting to compete with a plane (Credit: Bandag Bullet team).

And below is a picture of the Bandag Bullet almost on fire before starting (Credit: Bandag Bullet team). You’ll find other pictures on their web site.

Seriously, would you feel safe driving one of these trucks? I wouldn’t. I would feel scared. But I’m just a guy living in a city where you’re ticketed if your drive a car at over than 30 mph…

Anyway, if you ever saw one of these monster trucks — or even better, if you drove one of them — please drop me a note.

Sources: OhGizmo!, July 21, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  
  
• Miscellaneous
  
  
• Transportation
  

After several years of research, engineers from the University of Hawaii are now testing the first autonomous robotic vehicle for deep-ocean work in the U.S. This robot is called SAUVIM, short for Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions. It’s roughly the size of an SUV and it is designed to operate to a depth of about 4 miles. With its computers, its sensors, and a 5-foot, 150-pound autonomous manipulator, or robotic arm, it will be able to move towards a specific target, such as a wrecked pipe laying on the ocean floor — and maybe fix it. Right now, this robot has an autonomy of about eight hours, but this range should soon be extended when the researchers move from batteries to fuel cells to power the undersea vehicle.

Here is the introduction of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin article, which shows that it’s not always easy to move from a lab to real life.

A sensor failed to work, causing a glitch in the performance of the group’s Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention during a demonstration Friday at the UH Marine Center at Snug Harbor, Sand Island. But industry and Navy research officials were enthusiastic about the unique vehicle’s potential.

This project has received about $12 million from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) since 1997 and is led by Song K. Choi, who leads the Autonomous Systems Laboratory at the Center for Underwater Robotic Technology (CURT).

Song Choi also founded the Marine Autonomous Systems Engineering to commercialize this robotic undersea vehicle (web site ‘under construction’).

But now, it’s time to look at some images of the SAUVIM — by the way, how did these researchers find such an unappealing name?

For more information, here are two links to the SAUVIM project page and to a short simulation movie from 2003 (41 seconds, 7.65 MB)

Now, what kind of help can we expect from this autonomous robot?

Choi said there is no underwater vehicle with the capabilities of the semiautonomous underwater vehicle. “We’d be the first ones to do it.”

Choi said 99 percent of the vehicle’s system is autonomous, with 1 percent semiautonomous for a communications link for safety. A signal could be sent to the vehicle to stop and return if necessary, he said.

It will be able to go to a target automatically, and the arm will deploy to do a task with no humans involved, Choi said. “The ultimate goal is to leave it in the water, and it will come back when the batteries are down. Safety-wise, it can’t get better.”

Future versions of this autonomous undersea robots should be able to work continuously for several days when batteries are replaced by fuel cells.

Sources: Helen Altonn, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, Hawaii, July 19, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  
  
• Military Applications
  
  
• Robotics
  
  
• Sensors
  

Printed maps are easy to manipulate, provide an easy way of interacting for multiple users, but are static and can be out of date. On the contrary, computer-based map displays can provide dynamic and more recent information than paper-based maps, but do not help a group of people to communicate. So why not mix them? This is what have done researchers at England’s University of Cambridge with their augmented maps, which add digital graphical information and user interface components to printed maps. Here is how this works: the printed maps are placed on a flat surface; an overhead camera linked to a PC tracks the map via the live video stream; and an overhead projector adds graphical information to the maps. This could be useful for many applications, and the researchers have applied it to a flood simulation of the Cambridge area. Read more…

First, here is a diagram showing the whole system and its components (Credit: University of Cambridge, UK).

And below is an augmented map showing the flooded River Cam. “The image browser to the right shows views corresponding to locations and different stages of the flood, while the PDA to the left controls a helicopter unit” (Credit: University of Cambridge, UK).

Here is a description of the system which has been developed by Dr T.W. Drummond, Dr G. Reitmayr and Ethan Eade.

Tom’s demonstration of the dynamic paper map comprises of a camera and a projector looking down at a paper map from above. The system performs interactive tracking of the map on a table top environment using the live video stream captured by the camera. Once the locations of the maps are known, the projector displays extra information directly on the maps.

The system also tracks user interface devices which can be placed on the map and which enable access to information that is linked to locations on the map. A simple physical prop, for example a piece of white card, becomes a selection tool and projection surface at the same time. Images referenced by the location pointed at are displayed in the white card.

So far, Tom and his colleagues have used their system to show how it could be used to monitor a flooding situation in the Cambridge area and how easy it would be to deploy emergency units, such as an helicopter, by controlling it with a PDA.

Now, the researchers want to move out from their labs and build a deployable and mobile system.

You’ll find more information on the project page, with more technical explanations and different images.

For your viewing pleasure, here is a link to a short video (2 minutes and 43 seconds, 25.2 MB) showing the different tools and components of the system.

And if you’re interested by these augmented maps, a technical paper will be published soon under the name “Localisation and Interaction for Augmented Maps.” This paper will appear in the Proceedings of the 4th IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2005), which will be held in Vienna, Austria, on October 5-8, 2005.

Sources: University of Cambridge, Engineering Department, News & Features, July 7, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Computers
  
  
• Engineering
  
  
• Human Computer Interface
  
  
• Innovation
  
  
• Vision and Visualization Apps
  

Like every year, this is the season for the Shell Eco-Marathon annual fuel-economy competition. Last week, the hydrogen-powered Swiss PAC-Car II broke a new record, using 1.02 gram of hydrogen to finish the race. This is the equivalent of 5,385 kilometers per liter of gasoline. For users of other units, this translates to a whopping 15,210 miles per British gallon or 12,670 miles per U.S. gallon. And this week, the British Ech2o car will attempt to break this record. Its designers say that this car, also hydrogen-powered, “can travel on less electricity than it takes to power a light bulb.” It will be driven by a 13-year old experienced go-kart driver.” Read more…

Let’s start with the PAC-Car II, designed at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich). After breaking the world record for fuel efficiency, ETH Zürich published this news release on June 28, 2005.

ETH Zurich set itself a goal to construct a vehicle that used as little fuel as possible and provided the highest possible fuel efficiency. So they gave the so-called PAC-Car a fuel cell that produces electrical energy from hydrogen and drives two electric motors. The only “emission” from PAC-Car is pure water. The car is lightweight, weighing in at only about 30 kilograms.

And, PAC-Car has now achieved its goal: it finished the course at the Shell Eco-Marathon taking place on the Michelin test track at Ladoux, France, using only 1.02 grams of hydrogen. This converts to about 5385 kilometres per litre of petrol, a new world record in economical fuel consumption. This means that PAC-Car would only use eight litres to drive around the globe.

Sponsored by AutoAnything

While it may be difficult for your car to perform as well as the Eco-car, you can still find performance products such as an air intake like an AEM cold air intake system that improves your MPG, horsepower and torque. Also, reusable air filters like AFE air filters and the K&N filter are reusable for their lifetime, have lifetime warranties, and are environmentally friendly.

Below is an image of the PAC-Car II in Zürich on May 10, 2005 (Credit: ETH Zürich). And here is a link to a larger version (2.37 MB).

And this is a picture of the PAC-Car II during the Shell Eco-marathon in Nogaro on May 21, 2005 (Credit: ETH Zürich) with a link to a larger version (418 KB).

You’ll find tons of other photographs in the different galleries available from this page.

And for more information, please visit this technical section.

The following paragraphs come from the Aerodynamics page.

PAC-Car II is equipped with 3 wheels; the single rear wheel is powered and steered, and the front wheels have a camber angle of -8°.

This solution allows the reduction of the frontal surface area because the room needed to steer the wheels is not needed. Some experiments on a test bench have shown that this camber angle does not provide too much rolling resistance.

[Note: for those of you not familiar with the notion of "camber," here is an explanation provided by the Ford Motor Company in this glossary: "Camber is the relative tilt of the wheels, usually slightly inward at the top edge, as viewed from the front of the vehicle. Camber is set to optimize handling and tire wear Front and rear wheels must also be aligned with respect to each other."]

You’ll find also more details about the fuel cell system on the Powertrain and Control page.

The fuel cell, a by-product of the PowerPac project, is of the PEM type (Proton Exchange Membrane) and benefits from an embedded auto humidifying area specially designed by PSI. The stack efficiency is exceptional, close to 70%.

Now, let’s move to the British challenger, described by CNN on July 5, 2005, in a short article, “Eco-car more efficient than light bulb.”

The Ech2o car is built by the BOC Group, a British gas firm, which issued a news release on July 4, 2005.

The BOC Ech2o has been designed with a simple goal to demonstrate fuel efficiency. But unlike most other eco-marathon vehicles that run on petrol or diesel, the BOC Ech2o’s driving force comes from electricity, created in a hydrogen fuel cell.

The car could travel around the world on less than the equivalent of two gallons of petrol, using 25 watts — a fraction of the power a light bulb uses.

It could also be the most efficient vehicle ever to move on wheels and, as its only emission is water, the car heralds a new age of clean virtually silent road travel, according to experts.

And why did the company choose such a young driver to try to break this fuel efficiency world record?

The BOC Ech2o car, driven by Jack Dex, 13, of Southam College, Warwickshire, will attempt to break the world fuel efficiency record of over 10,000 miles per gallon next week, during the Shell Eco Marathon at Rockingham Raceway in the Midlands.

The youngster was chosen because he is small and light enough to control the vehicle, without weighing it down — and because of his experience as a junior TKM Kart driver.

Will he break the record? Check the news near the end of the week.

Sources: Various news releases and web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Energy
  
  
• Engineering
  
  
• Environment
  
  
• Future
  
  
• Transportation
  

At Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), researchers are using new materials to build new and more efficient batteries to put in the vests that will wear next-generation soldiers. For example, the future Army’s Power Vest will use lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries which will deliver almost twice energy as current Li-ion ones. But Argonne scientists are also developing implantable batteries. These rechargeable batteries, which are 100 times smaller than a standard AA battery, can power implantable microstimulator systems designed to help patients with neurological disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease, or muscular impairments. These batteries are currently under evaluation by industrial partners and should soon be available. Read more…

The ANL news release is almost written in PR lingo, so you’ll find below only short excerpts of it. Let’s start with the body batteries.

Below is a picture of “the world’s smallest cylindrical, rechargeable battery ever made. It is 100 times smaller than a standard AA battery.” (Credit: ANL)

With research partners Quallion LLC and the University of Wisconsin, Argonne developed the battery chemistry for a tiny rechargeable battery — the smallest cylindrical polymer rechargeable battery ever made. The battery is 100 times smaller than a standard AA battery, and powers an implantable microstimulator system designed to help patients with neurological disorders and muscular impairments, such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease and urinary incontinence.

These microstimulator systems would be implanted near nerves, where they emit electrical micropulses that stimulate nearby muscles and nerves. Batteries previously used for medical devices are large, have short lives and are not rechargeable.

Quallion is already selling implantable batteries and here are its I SERIES Specifications.

Now, let’s look at the wearable batteries designed for the Army at ANL’s Chemical Engineering Division known as CMT.

The Army’s Power Vest requires almost double the best energy density currently available and safe, stable operation at varying temperatures. Some of CMT’s patented electrode materials and one of its electrolyte systems are being adapted for the Power Vest.

Compared to conventional materials, Argonne’s new cathode material extends the useable capacity from 150 milliampere-hours per gram to 260. When combined with Argonne’s new process for making spherical dense cathode particles, the combination could provide a 40 percent increase in available energy from the same size battery.

If you’re interested by these developments of new batteries at ANL, you should check this page about their lithium battery technology patents.

Sources: Evelyn Brown, Argonne National Laboratory news release, June 24, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Energy
  


• Engineering
  


• Materials
  


• Medicine
  


• Military Apps
  


• Wearable
  

Surveying and measuring buildings don’t look like sexy occupations. However, with the current boom of real estate prices in many countries, it’s a good idea to hire a professional surveyor to measure a future property and to avoid to pay some extra square meters for several thousand dollars each. And now, an Israeli company, EZ2CAD, has developed a new system which can measure accurately an apartment inside a building, without the limitations of the current (and more expensive) systems. In this article, IsraCast says that the new device is composed of two units, a base station and a lightweight mobile unit called Rover. Besides being as accurate and cheaper as current systems, this device also creates a CAD model directly usable by a software such as AutoCAD to build a 3D model in real time. It should become available in about two years for a starting price of $3,000. Read more…

Before going further, here is what you can read about modern surveying technologies in this page at Wikipedia.

Modern surveying utilizes an instrument called a total station, a small telescope equipped with an electronic distance-measuring device (EDMD) and set up on a tripod, although the modern use of satellite positioning systems, such as a Global Positioning System (GPS), is also well established, with the robotic total station becoming widely used. Though GPS systems have increased the speed of surveying, they are still only accurate to about 20 mm. It is because of this that EDMDs have not been completely phased out. Robotics allows surveyors to gather precise measurements without extra workers to look through and turn the telescope or record data.

So how does this new system work?

To overcome these limitations a team of Israeli professional surveyors and engineers set out to create a revolutionary new device called QuickSurveyor. The new system is composed of two units, a base station and a lightweight mobile unit called Rover. The Base station is essentially a 50cm high metallic pyramid with nine tiny RF and ultra sound transmitters / receivers built into it.

The Rover is a portable unit shaped like a telescopic rod 1meter in length, which can extend up to 3m to help measure high ceilings, and other hard to reach places. The rod includes 3 sensors triangular in shape and can be aided by laser distance meter to increase its range. The Rover unit can also include a handheld computer which shows the measurements’ progress in real time.

Below is a picture of the base station composed of its three base beacons and its nine radio transmitters (Credit: EZ2CAD).

Now, what about the performance of QuickSurveyor?

In the current prototype stage of development, the Rover can operate in a radius of approximately 30 m from the base station and create a 3D model of the measured area with an accuracy of about 2 cm within less than a second. In the finished product the accuracy level should improve to about 5 mm (almost the level of accuracy of the much more expensive TS system).

On its web site, EZ2CAD mentions a precision of 1 millimeter and a range of 200 meters, but these are probably of the future version of the product.

And by the way, when will this product be available?

The company plans to market its innovative system in about two years. [...] The estimated price of the commercial version should be between $3,000 and $10,000 depending on the system configuration.

Even if this system is not currently available, EZ2CAD is pretty optimistic about its potential market, and gives numbers I am unable to confirm from other sources.

EZ2CAD advisor Benny Marcus told Isracast that the market for surveying systems like the RTK-GPS and the QuickSurveyor is currently estimated to be more than $3 billion annually and should grow to more than $5 billion by 2008.

Finally, if you want more information about this system, including animations, please visit these two pages, QuickSurveyor Review and QS4AsBuilt.

Sources: Iddo Genuth, IsraCast, July 1, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Architecture
  
  
• Engineering
  
  
• Hardware
  
  
• Physics
  
  
• Vision and Visualization Apps
  

What would happen if all U.S. current vehicles — powered by fossil fuels — were converted to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles? In this article, Nature writes that a very detailed study from Stanford University reveals that up to 6,400 lives could be saved each year. Besides saving lives, this also may significantly improve air quality, health, and climate. After looking at several ways to produce hydrogen, the scientists have concluded that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen. It’s even cheaper if some hidden costs to produce gasoline are taken into account: gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline). Now the researchers are calling for an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy. Read more…

Let’s start with some short excerpts from the Nature article.

If all the nation’s vehicles were powered by hydrogen fuel cells rather than fossil fuels, the drop in pollutants that cause asthma, respiratory problems and other potentially life-threatening conditions could reduce deaths by over 6,000 a year. So says a study in Science conducted by Mark Jacobson and colleagues at Stanford University, California.

The work challenges a common objection to working towards a ‘hydrogen economy’, in which hydrogen replaces oil as the main fuel source. Many people argue that because hydrogen will probably be generated by burning fossil fuels, a hydrogen system is no better for our planet than oil. Both produce the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, although at different points in the cycle of fuel production and use.

However, the problem with the internal combustion engine is not just its carbon dioxide emissions. It also produces poisonous carbon monoxide, smog-inducing nitrogen oxides, and ozone, an eye and respiratory irritant. Worst of all, it creates microscopic soot particles that cause a host of health risks and affect climate.

The research work has been published by Science on June 24, 2005 under the name “Cleaning the Air and Improving Health with Hydrogen Fuel-Cell Vehicles.” Here is a link to the abstract.

Converting all U.S. onroad vehicles to hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles (HFCVs) may improve air quality, health, and climate significantly, whether the hydrogen is produced by steam reforming of natural gas, wind electrolysis, or coal gasification. Most benefits would result from eliminating current vehicle exhaust. Wind and natural gas HFCVs offer the greatest potential health benefits and could save 3700 to 6400 U.S. lives annually. Wind HFCVs should benefit climate most. An all-HFCV fleet would hardly affect tropospheric water vapor concentrations. Conversion to coal HFCVs may improve health but would damage climate more than fossil/electric hybrids. The real cost of hydrogen from wind electrolysis may be below that of U.S. gasoline.

Jacobson has put a copy of the Science article on Stanford’s servers. Here is a link to the article (PDF format, 5 pages, 462 KB).

This research work was also commented by the Stanford Report in this article where Jacobson says that an ‘Apollo Program’ for hydrogen energy is needed.

The Science study compared emissions that would be produced in five cases — if all vehicles on the road were powered by 1) conventional internal-combustion engines, 2) a combination of electricity and internal combustion of gasoline, as in hybrid vehicles, 3) hydrogen generated from wind electrolysis, 4) hydrogen generated from natural gas and 5) hydrogen generated from coal gasification.

After concluding that wind is the most promising means of generating hydrogen, the study compares the cost of a gallon of gasoline with that of a gallon of hydrogen generated by wind electrolysis.

The cost of making hydrogen from wind is $1.12 to $3.20 per gallon of gasoline or diesel equivalent ($3 to $7.40 per kilogram of molecular hydrogen)—on par with the current price of gas. But gasoline has a hidden cost of 29 cents to $ 1.80 per gallon in societal costs such as reduced health, lost productivity, hospitalization and death, as well as cleanup of polluted sites. So gasoline’s true cost in March 2005, for example, was $2.35 to $3.99 per gallon, which exceeds the estimated mean cost of hydrogen from wind ($2.16 equivalent per gallon of gasoline).

Jacobson calls for a two-step plan, generating electricity from wind and producing hydrogen using wind-generated electricity.

While wind subsidies are on the order of $100 million per year, Jacobson said, other energy sources hog subsidies of $15 to $20 billion. He advocates supporting the infrastructure needed for wind production of hydrogen to a level similar to the $20 billion recently proposed for a new natural gas pipeline from the continental United States to Alaska.

What do you think? Will Jacobson’s ‘Apollo Program’ be ever launched? Please post your thoughts below.

Sources: Philip Ball, Nature, June 23, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Economy
  


• Energy
  


• Engineering
  


• Environment
  


• Transportation
  

Once again, man is imitating nature for the best. A team of Dutch physicists has created artificial cricket hairs, which are among the most sensitive sound detectors on Earth. These artificial sensory hair systems will help to develop sensor arrays useful for a variety of applications. For example, these sensor arrays could be used to visualize airflow on surfaces, such as an aircraft fuselage. But more importantly, this “could lead to a new generation of cochlear implants, for people with severe hearing problems.” Even if it doesn’t happen overnight, the low energy consumption and costs of fabrication are excellent news for deaf people. Read more…

First, let’s look at how real crickets are using their hairs.

Crickets spend most of their lives on the ground, making them vulnerable to wandering and flying predators. Species such as the wood cricket Nemobius sylvestris have developed a pair of hairy appendages at the abdominal end of their body called cerci, which are incredibly good at detecting small fluctuations in air currents — the kind that might be caused by the beating of a wasp’s wings or the jump of an attacking spider.

On the figure below, you can see the sensory hairs of the cricket (Credit: University of Twente, The Netherlands).

The sensory hairs of the cricket are situated on the back of the cricket’s body on appendices called cerci. [...] Each hair is lodged in a socket, guiding the hair to move in a preferred direction. The hair is held in its socket by an elastic material surrounding the base. Airflow causes a neuron to be fired, by rotation of the hair base. The cricket is able to pinpoint low-frequency sound from any given direction, by using the combined neural information of all sensory hairs.

Now, let’s focus on how these Dutch physicists have created artificial cricket hairs.

Physicists at the University of Twente in the Netherlands have now succeeded in building artificial sensory hair systems, which they hope will enable them to unravel the underlying process and develop sensor arrays with a variety of important applications.

The Twente team built a mechanical array with up to a few hundred artificial hairs using technologies often referred to as MEMS technology. The sensors are made by depositing and structuring various thin layers of electrically insulating and conducting materials, creating structured electrodes on a suspended membrane. The structured electrodes form two capacitors with the underlying substrate.

Below is a picture of an array of spiral-suspended sensory hairs, obtained through “a relatively simple fabrication process” (Credit: University of Twente, The Netherlands).

The news release gives some more details, but for more information, the research work has been published on June 20, 2005 by the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering under the name “Artificial sensory hairs based on the flow sensitive receptor hairs of crickets.” Here is a link to the abstract.

This paper presents the modelling, design, fabrication and characterization of flow sensors based on the wind-receptor hairs of crickets. Cricket sensory hairs are highly sensitive to drag-forces exerted on the hair shaft. Artificial sensory hairs have been realized in SU-8 on suspended Si_xN_y membranes. The movement of the membranes is detected capacitively. Capacitance versus voltage, frequency dependence and directional sensitivity measurements have been successfully carried out on fabricated sensor arrays, showing the viability of the concept.

And if you’re a registered member of the Institute of Physics, here is a link to the full paper (PDF format, 7 pages, 686 KB) (you can register for free from the abstract link). The above illustrations were extracted from this paper.

Finally, you can find other technical information on the CICADA project page at the University of Twente — CICADA standing for ” Cricket Inspired perCeption and Autonomous Decision Automata.”

Sources: Institute of Physics news release, June 20, 2005; and various web sites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  


• Medicine
  


• Nature
  


• Physics
  


• Sensors
  

Computer scientists from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD) have developed a wireless application for ubiquitous video dubbed ‘RealityFlythrough.’ By mixing images and video feeds from mobile cameras, the application dynamically creates a 3D virtual environment that remote viewers can explore. The software has already been tested by emergency response teams during the simulation of a terrorist attack. They had head-mounted wireless video cameras and GPS devices, and the control center was able to virtually explore the site of the disaster. This technology could also be used for virtual tourism or virtual shopping, but one of the researchers had a ‘cool’ idea, delivering a driving experience on the Web. Instead of looking at a set of instructions telling you to turn left or right, imagine if you could ‘fly’ the drive before doing it. Read more…

The UCSD news release also says that remote users could watch a single view of a virtual environment instead of looking at a wall of monitors.

“Instead of watching all the feeds simultaneously on a bank of monitors, the viewer can navigate an integrated, interactive environment as if it were a video game,” said UCSD computer science and engineering professor Bill Griswold, who is working on the project with Ph.D. candidate Neil McCurdy. “RealityFlythrough creates the illusion of complete live camera coverage in a physical space. It’s a new form of situational awareness.”

Here is how RealityFlythrough works.

The RealityFlythrough software automatically stitches the feeds together, by integrating the visual data with the camera’s location and direction it is pointing. “Our system works in ubiquitous and dynamic environments, and the cameras themselves are moving and shifting,” said McCurdy. “RealityFlythrough situates still photographs or live video in a three-dimensional environment, making the transition between two cameras while projecting the images onto the screen.”

Of course, this system has some limitations, for example when there are not enough live video coverage, or where GPS cannot provide adequate location information. But the researchers said they almost solved these technical challenges.

The research work was presented on June 6, 2005, at the MobiSys 2005 conference held on June 6-8 in Seattle. And it has been published under the name “A Systems Architecture for Ubiquitous Video” (PDF format, 14 pages, 760 KB). The images shown above come from this document.

You’ll find other references and videos on the RealityFlythrough website. But be warned: the sizes of the videos vary between 99 and 209 MB.

McCurdy, who expects to finish his Ph.D. in 2006, might start his own company this year to promote this technology for commercial markets.

Sources: Doug Ramsey, UCSD news release June 7, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  


• Military Applications
  


• Vision and Visualization Apps
  


• Virtual Reality
  


• Wireless
  

Making diesel-like liquid from carbohydrates found in plants has been done before by fermenting glucose into ethanol added to gasoline. But this process was inefficient and expensive because the ethanol needed to be separated from water at the end of the fermentation process. Now, a team of chemists at University of Wisconsin-Madison has found a new way to create green diesel from plants which avoids this costly separating phase. Nature adds that this fuel born from carbohydrates could be clean and easy. And this plant-derived fuel can use existing infrastructures for distribution, which is not the case for hydrogen. But don’t rush to your gas station today. Even if this new way to produce green diesel is promising, there are still some challenges to overcome before it becomes commercially available. Read more…

Here is a short description of this new process, provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering researchers have discovered a new way to make a diesel-like liquid fuel from carbohydrates commonly found in plants.

Professor James Dumesic and colleagues [have built] a four-phase catalytic reactor in which corn and other biomass-derived carbohydrates can be converted to sulfur-free liquid alkanes resulting in an ideal additive for diesel transportation fuel.

Nature gives additional details.

A magnesium-based catalyst then knits these molecules together to create the longer carbon chains required for diesel fuel. Adding more pressurized hydrogen, and removing any remaining oxygen atoms with a platinum catalyst, delivers the finished fuel.

Below is a diagram showing the four-phase catalytic processing (Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering).

This other diagram illustrates the conversion of carbohydrates to a diesel fuel additive (Credit: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering).

Both of these images come from the headlines news for June 2, 2005 at the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering.

According to the University, this process is very energy-efficient compared with the production of ethanol.

About 67 percent of the energy required to make ethanol is consumed in fermenting and distilling corn. As a result, ethanol production creates 1.1 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed. In the UW-Madison process, the desired alkanes spontaneously separate from water. No additional heating or distillation is required. The result is the creation of 2.2 units of energy for every unit of energy consumed in energy production.

So will we buy soon such fuels at our gas stations? Here are some answers from Nature.

If all goes according to plan, Dumesic estimates one could grow enough plants in the United States to power a significant percentage of the country’s vehicles.

The next challenge is to work out how to extract the all-important carbohydrates from plant matter. The chemists used a pure carbohydrate supply in their tests, and Dumesic says that plants may have to undergo extensive processing to remove unwanted chemicals.

The research work has been published by Science under the title “Production of Liquid Alkanes by Aqueous-Phase Processing of Biomass-Derived Carbohydrates” (Vol. 308, Issue 5727, Pages 1446-1450, June 3, 2005). Here is a link to the abstract (Free registration required).

Sources: University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering news release, June 2, 2005; Mark Peplow, Nature, June 2, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Chemistry
  
  
• Energy
  
  
• Engineering
  
  
• Environment
  
  
• Transportation
  

Researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) have designed an interface for non-musicians to play music. This interface, part of the Expression Synthesis Project (ESP), is based on the fact that more people know how to drive a car than an orchestra. In “Baby, you can drive my song,” the researchers explain how they converted real musical scores into digital virtual roads. Then using a steering wheel and foot pedals, you ‘drive’ on this road to interpret the piece of music, becoming a real maestro. Such a system should be demonstrated in a public exhibit by 2008 and become available to everyone in the same time frame. Read more…

Here are some details about the ESP project, devised by a team led by Elaine Chew of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

ESP “attempts to provide a driving interface for musical expression,” according to Chew’s published description. “The premise of ESP is that driving serves as an effective metaphor for expressive music performance. Not everyone can play an instrument but almost anyone can drive a car. By using a familiar interface, ESP aims to provide a compelling metaphor for expressive performance so as to make high-level expressive decisions accessible to non-experts.”

Created by Chew, Alexandre R.J. François, a research professor in the Viterbi School, and graduate students Jie Liu and Aaron Yang, ESP starts with a piece of music in the Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) format, one that has been converted from the printed score.

Below is a diagram showing how the system works, from a real musical score to a virtual digital road, and then from this road to real music played by you (Credit: USC Viterbi School of Engineering).

This image comes from this document about the Expression Synthesis Project(PDF format, 2 pages, 658 KB).

Of course, the difficult part is to convert a real musical score into a digital road.

The group is building tools to automate the process of creating such roads, applying artificial intelligence techniques to the analysis of the score. “Having the road build itself will be the most difficult part,” says François.

The road’s turns suggest to the driver when to slow down and speed up. however, the ultimate decision on what to do at each turn is entirely in the driver’s hands (or foot). The foot pedals control both the tempo and the volume of the music. Additionally, buttons mounted on the wheel act as the equivalent of the pedals on the piano, making the notes either sustain or cut off crisply.

This research work was presented at the 2005 International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), held on May 26-28 in Vancouver, Canada.

Here is a link to the paper which was presented at this conference, “ESP: A Driving Interface for Expression Synthesis” (PDF format, 4 pages, 289 KB).

You can also find more information about this project by visiting the Music Computation and Cognition website (but it appears that some links are broken right now) or the USC Integrated Media Systems Center (IMSC).

Finally, on this poster about the project (PDF format, 1 page, 439 KB), you’ll read that the goal is to have an interactive public exhibit in 2008.

Ready to drive an orchestra?

Sources: USC Viterbi School of Engineering news release, May 30, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  
  
• Human Computer Interface
  
  
• Innovation
  
  
• Music
  

According to this news release from the National Science Foundation (NSF), American researchers have developed a porous-silicon diode that “convert low levels of radiation into electricity and can have useful lives spanning several decades.” The new ‘BetaBattery’ is more efficient than conventional chemical batteries and potentially cheap to manufacture. It uses a radioactive source as its fuel, the tritium, an hydrogen isotope. When the tritium releases electrons in a process called beta decay, the ‘BetaBattery’ generates electricity by absorbing these electrons. So far, the ‘BetaBattery’ doesn’t deliver as much power as chemical batteries, but it could be extremely useful to power devices which have a long life and are difficult to service, such as structural sensors in bridges and satellites. Read more…

Here is the description of the ‘BetaBattery’ concept.

Using some of the same manufacturing techniques that produce microchips, researchers have created a porous-silicon diode that may lead to improved betavoltaics. Such devices convert low levels of radiation into electricity and can have useful lives spanning several decades.

While producing as little as one-thousandth of the power of conventional chemical batteries, the new “BetaBattery” concept is more efficient and potentially less expensive than similar designs and should be easier to manufacture.

The battery’s staying power is tied to the enduring nature of its fuel, tritium, a hydrogen isotope that releases electrons in a process called beta decay. The porous-silicon semiconductors generate electricity by absorbing the electrons, just as a solar cell generates electricity by absorbing energy from incoming photons of light.

This is not the first time that a radioactive element or even the tritium is used. The real difference of this new device is not its source.

The new cell will have a unique advantage — the half-millimeter-thick silicon wafer into which researchers have etched a network of deep pores. This structure vastly increases the exposed surface area, creating a device that is 10 times more efficient than planar designs.

On the photo below, “Wei Sun of the University of Rochester holds the wafer test fixture the researchers used to test the new porous-silicon diode and its interactions with tritium gas. The diode is the dark wafer in the center of the top plate.” (Credit: University of Rochester; BetaBatt, Inc.)

You can see a larger version of this picture and other images on this page at NSF.

And what will be some applications for these future batteries?

“The initial applications will be for remote or inaccessible sensors and devices where the availability of long-life power is critical,” says Larry Gadeken of BetaBatt, [the only commercial entity involved in this research].

If the new diode proves successful when incorporated into a finished battery, it could help power such hard-to-service, long-life systems as structural sensors on bridges, climate monitoring equipment and satellites.

If you’re interested by the subject, the research work has been published by Advanced Materials on May 3, 2005 (Volume 17, Issue 10, Pages 1230-1233), under the name “A Three-Dimensional Porous Silicon p-n Diode for Betavoltaics and Photovoltaics.” Here is a link to the paper if you’re a registered user (there is no abstract).

And please note that BetaBatt, from Houston, is already selling “a quarter size battery with a 12-20 year lifespan and mission critical reliability” based on its patent number 6,774,531 which carries the name “Apparatus and method for generating electrical current from the nuclear decay process of a radioactive material.”

Sources: National Science Foundation news release, May 10, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Energy
  


• Engineering
  


• Materials
  


• Nuclear
  

Virtual reality (VR) modeling has been used for years in various industries, including the automotive sector. But most of the applications were neglecting the effects of lightning. In “Getting the Feel of Virtual Reality,” IST Results, a EU organization, says that RealReflect, a project started in 2002 at several European universities, is about to change this. It uses “a new image acquisition technique known as Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) that captures the look and feel of different materials.” The system handles both lighting and viewing direction and can acquire and render very subtle textures in VR environments. With previous VR modeling applications, you could see the results as believable. But, according to the researchers, with RealReflect, you think the model is real. The system has been targeted for the automotive industry, but could be used for other applications, such as architecture design or computer games. Read more…

Here are the opening paragraphs of the article.

A giant leap forward in the realism of virtual reality (VR) may be just around the corner as a team of European researchers near the completion of a pioneering project to add textures, lighting effects and ‘feel’ to computer-generated 3D models.

Launched in 2002, the RealReflect project was the first attempt to use a new image acquisition technique known as Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF) that captures the look and feel of different materials. When this IST programme funded-project ends this October it is expected to result in the first comprehensive application using BTF for industrial modelling.

Researchers are pretty enthusiast about the new system.

“RealReflect is a major advancement over traditional virtual reality modelling, which basically relies on simplifications of reality by describing optical properties of a surface by a 2D matrix of data that does not show the real effects of lighting,” explains project coordinator Attila Neumann at the Technical University of Vienna. “Traditional virtual reality modelling, despite its name, lacks the feeling of reality and is a poor representation of it because the way things look highly depends on how they are illuminated and from what direction they are being viewed.”

Below is a rendering of the complete exterior of a Mercedes C-Class: “Taken directly from the VR-System, this screenshot shows the standard rendering subproduct using environment mapping (Credit: RealReflect).

You’ll find other screenshots, demos and a movie in the Media & Downloads Library section.

Because RealReflect takes into account both lighting and viewing direction, it is able to acquire and render in VR even the most subtle textures. But there is the price to pay: the system generates lots of data.

In order to be able to realistically represent textures the system requires a thousand times more data than other VR modelling tools, leading the project partners to develop compression techniques for the BTF information. The compression allows the models to be viewed and worked on in real time.

If the models created with RealReflect can feel like real cars, is this the end of prototypes?

“When a car company wants to make a new model around 50 prototypes of different designs are built, of those most will be rejected before the company reaches the final stage of choosing a model from maybe five examples,” the coordinator says. “With RealReflect there would be no need to produce 50 physical prototypes as they could be created and viewed virtually, requiring maybe only five or 10 real prototypes or even less to be produced.”

Besides cost savings and reduced times to market a new model, RealReflect can be used for other purposes.

Besides displaying in detail the look of the vehicle, the system could also enhance safety by allowing designers to see the way different types of illumination reflect off its surfaces. This could, for example, allow designers to reduce potentially dangerous reflections on the windshield that may otherwise go unnoticed.

Beyond the automotive sector, the RealReflect system could also be applied to architecture, allowing architects to better visualise the appearance of materials used in construction, while offering clients the opportunity to virtually tour a building.

Today, the project partners have not yet decided how the system will be put on the market. But as the EU financial funding will stop in October 2005, they have to decide pretty soon if RealReflect will be sold as a full application or as individual components targeting different industries.

Sources: IST Results, April 27, 2005; and RealReflect website

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Architecture
  


• Engineering
  


• Transportation
  


• Virtual Reality
  


• Vision and Visualization Apps
  

Laser lights can be used for optical sensing applications, for example to identify unknown gases emitted by an engine. And as these unknown substances react differently to different wavelengths, researchers at the University of Wisconsin at Madison have developed unique wavelength-agile lasers. And I’m amazed by the beauty and the simplicity of their idea. They’re using white lasers which produce all colors simultaneously — but with a twist. The white laser light goes through a 20-kilometers long optical fiber before reaching its target. And because different colors ‘travel’ at different speeds, this produces independent results for the different wavelengths. The researchers are using spectral resolutions smaller than a thousandth of a nanometer and they are able to get all the results within a millionth of a second. This method could be used to design cleaner engines or data storage applications in a few years. Read More…

Let’s start with some technical explanations about this technology developed by Professor Scott Sanders in his labs.

Sanders’ laser builds on a phenomenon known as supercontinuum generation, in which researchers convert single-color lasers, such as a green or a red laser, into a multicolored beam using a special kind of optical fiber. Photonic crystal fibers enable them to generate this “white” laser beam, says Sanders.

While that method produces a range of laser colors-and thus, a large amount of information-the drawback is that the white laser delivers all of the colors simultaneously, says Sanders. Rather, researchers want to measure rapidly their subjects’ responses to individual colors.

So by directing the laser through an additional optical fiber about 20 kilometers long, Sanders created what he calls a “color-dependent speed limit.” Although all of colors leave the white laser at the same time, red travels through the fiber more quickly, while blue brings up the rear, and the rest of the colors fall somewhere in the middle. In photographs, they look like a continuous stream; in reality, each color exits the long fiber one after the other, like drops from a faucet. The entire laser scan occurs in a couple of millionths of a second.

Below is a photo showing how UW-Madison engine researchers gather useful data about the gases they study by using these wavelength agile lasers (Credit: UW-Madison College of Engineering).

Here is a link to a higher quality of this picture (3,264 x 2,448 pixels, 5.04 MB).

This research work about ‘rainbow’ lasers is making the cover story of Optics and Photonics News in its May 2005 issue. Full access to the paper (PDF format, 6 pages, 446 KB) is available via this page about “Wavelength-Agile Lasers.”

The figure below, which shows the evolution of wavelength-agile lasers within the author’s laboratory, has been extracted from this article (Credits: UW-Madison College of Engineering and Optics and Photonics News).

These colorful lasers should soon be used in such applications as spectroscopy or high-speed scanning.

Sources: University of Wisconsin at Madison, April 28, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Engineering
  
  
• Nanotechnology
  
  
• Optics
  
  
• Photonics
  
  
• Sensors
  

I’m sure that almost all of you have used a fountain pen. But imagine a pen drawing lines only 40 nanometers in width. Now, it can be done with the Nanofountain Probe (NFP) developed by scientists at Northwestern University. This innovative fountain pen “employs a volcano-like dispensing tip and capillary fed solutions to enable sub-100 nanometer molecular writing.” But it needs to be mounted on an atomic force microscope (AFM) to be useful, so it probably is something you’ll not find at your local drugstore for a while. However, this nanofountain probe could have applications for nanosensors, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals. Read more…

Here is the description of the Nanofountain Probe.

The Nanofountain Probe (NFP) developed by Horacio D. Espinosa, professor of mechanical engineering, and his colleagues employs a volcano-like dispensing tip and capillary fed solutions to enable sub-100 nanometer molecular writing. The NFP was microfabricated on a chip to be mounted on commercially available AFMs.

The device consists of an on-chip reservoir, microchannels and a volcano-like dispensing tip. The microchannels are embedded in the AFM cantilevers of the chip and the volcano dispensing tip has an annular aperture to guide ink dispensing. The ink on the reservoir is driven through the microchannel via capillary action to reach the dispensing tip. At present, the smallest feature width achieved with the device is 40 nanometers.

Below are two images illustrating the technology, with associated comments from the researchers.

High-speed patterning over large areas with the resolution of dip-pen nanolithography (DPN) is the goal of this research by both removing the need for repeated dipping as in the DPN technique and by parallelizing the writing. Our strategy is to combine continuous ink feeding with the DPN technique using micromachining technology.

A novel AFM cantilever integrated with microchannels has been designed and microfabricated. Ink is supplied and stored in an on-chip reservoir, and subsequently fed through the microchannels by capillarity to reach a volcano-shape dispensing tip attached at the end of the cantilever. Batch-fabricated chips can be mounted into commercial atomic force microscopes.

The images above and their legends belong to Espinosa’s Micro & Nanomechanics Laboratory and come from this page about the Nano Fountain Active Probe (NFAP).

But what will be able to do with these probes?

The standard microfabrication techniques used for the NFP chip — an important feature of this development — provides scalability to massively parallel arrays of probes and reservoirs for high throughput patterning with multiple molecular inks.

“The writing capability of such NFP arrays with chemical and bimolecular inks in fountain-pen mode is unique,” said Espinosa. “We believe the technology will likely lead to many high-impact applications in the field of nanosensors, biotechnology and pharmaceuticals.”

The research work has been published by Small, a new scientific journal from the Wiley & Sons group, under the name “A Nanofountain Probe with Sub-100 nm Molecular Writing Resolution.”

Here are two links to the (empty) abstract and to the full paper (PDF format, 4 pages, 176 KB). It also contains other images illustrating the technology.

Here is the conclusion of the paper.

In summary, sub-100 nm molecular patterning has been achieved in fountain-pen writing mode with an AFM probe integrated with a volcano tip, microchannels, and a reservoir. The volcano tip has experimentally shown controlled transport of ink to avoid molecular flooding of substrates, ensuring high-resolution patterning. Standard microfabrication techniques were used, which allow the fabrication of massively parallel fountain probe arrays and integration of multiple reservoirs for sub-100 nm patterning over large areas with multiple inks. The devices have application in the fields of nanolithography, combinatorial nanochemistry, biosensors, nanodevices, and beyond.

Finally, if you want to become a partner of Northwestern University to develop such applications, please check their Technology Transfer Program about the High Speed Nano Fountain Pen.

Sources: Northwestern University news release, April 26, 2005; and various websites

Related stories can be found in the following categories.

• Biotechnology
  


• Engineering
  


• Nanotechnology
  


• Sensors