Transforming Flat Elastomers into 3D Shapes

Mechanical systems such as engines and motors rely on two principal types of motions of stiff components: linear motion, which involves an object moving from one point to another in a straight...

Selecting Electric Traction Solutions for AGVs and Mobile Robots

Smarter, better, faster, less expensive — those words are the mantra of today’s global economy. As organizations seek to streamline operations and do more with less, they...

Failsafe Linear Magnetic Brakes

Linear permanent magnet brakes, also known as eddy current brakes, are a failsafe, power-free deceleration system that is used in conjunction with a metal reaction plate. Ceramic or rare earth magnets are...

Multimaterial 3D Printing Used to Develop Fast-Response, Stiffness-Tunable, Soft Actuator

Fast-response, stiffness-tunable (FRST) soft actuators — or movable machine elements — were developed that could be used in soft robots.

Smart Microrobots Adapt to Surroundings

Researchers, drawing inspiration from bacteria, have designed smart, bio-compatible microrobots that are highly flexible. Because these devices are able to swim through fluids and modify their shape...

Self-Lubrication Improves Standard Braking Systems

By mixing carbon fibers into polymer-based brakes, researchers designed brakes that are self-lubricating. These new and improved brakes can prevent wear-and-tear and have better frictional...

Understanding the Basics of Gas Spring Application

When choosing a gas spring for a particular application, it’s imperative to have a basic understanding of the workings and terminology used when specifying gas springs. This article offers...

Keck Telescopes Get a Motion Control Upgrade

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Hawaii Island is surrounded by thousands of miles of thermally stable seas. The 13,796-foot Maunakea mountain summit has no nearby ranges to roil the upper...

Directly Cooled Electric Motor Made from Polymer Materials

Making electric cars lighter also involves reducing the weight of the motor. One way to do that is by constructing it from fiber-reinforced polymer materials. A new cooling concept...

New Products: April 2019 Motion Design

Bearing Sensor

ABB (Zurich, Switzerland) introduced the ABB Ability™ smart sensor that enables health checks for bearings. The smart sensor technology provides an early indicator of...

Synthesizing Renewable Oils for Use in Lubricants

Industrial machinery, agricultural equipment, transportation vessels, and home applications depend on lubricants; however, they leave a heavy environmental footprint. Common lubricants, oils,...

Thin, Durable Heating Patches

Thin, durable heating patches were created using intense pulses of light to fuse tiny silver wires with polyester. Their heating performance is nearly 70 percent higher than similar patches. The inexpensive...

Q&A: Texas A&M's Jaime Grunlan Creates a Non-Toxic Flame-Retardant Coating

Texas A&M professor Jaime Grunlan and his team are developing a new flame-retardant coating using renewable, nontoxic materials readily found in nature that...

Material Captures and Removes Toxic Atmospheric Gas

A metal-organic framework (MOF) material was developed that exhibits a selective, fully reversible, and repeatable capability to remove nitrogen dioxide gas from the atmosphere in ambient...

Novel Dielectric Ceramic by Spark Plasma Sintering

Researchers at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have developed a new dielectric material based on barium titanate nanopowder processed via spark plasma sintering (SPS). The rapid and...

Skin-Like Sensor Maps Blood-Oxygen Levels

A new type of oximeter — or blood-oxygen sensor — is made of organic electronics printed on bendable plastic that molds to the contours of the body. Unlike fingertip oximeters, it can detect...

Achieving Carbon Footprint Reduction with Flywheel Technology

Recent technical advances have enabled flywheel energy storage systems (FESS) to become more compact and able to support higher-power applications. Due to their proven...

Using Common WiFi to Detect Weapons, Bombs, and Chemicals in Bags

Ordinary WiFi can easily detect weapons, bombs, and explosive chemicals in bags at museums, stadiums, theme parks, schools, and other public venues using a low-cost suspicious...

Fabric Alternative to Batteries for Wearable Devices

Wearable biosensors for health monitoring lack a lightweight, long-lasting power supply. A new method was developed for making a charge-storing system that is easily integrated into...

New Material Provides Enhanced Tactility for Soft Sensors

Flexible and wearable sensors measure and track body motion, a task made more complex by the human anatomy’s numerous potential contortions. For a wearable sensor to work properly,...

Rechargeable, High-Temperature, Molten Salt Battery

Growing demand for electric vehicles and more sustainable forms of transport means finding new forms of energy storage such as batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells. Currently, a major...

Laser Measurement Sensors Solve High-Speed Package Profiling

Banner Engineering
Plymouth, MN
www.bannerengineering.com

Sorting parcels and packages prior to delivery is an essential step in shipping and handling. Order...

Electric Vehicle Fast Chargers Present Some Overlooked Circuit Protection Challenges

The first mass-produced electric vehicles (EVs) hit the road late in 2010 with the introduction of the Nissan Leaf, which remains the world’s top-selling,...

Metal 3D Printing for Complex Heat Exchangers

Renishaw
West Dundee, IL
www.renishaw.com

HiETA develops metal additive manufacturing (AM) methods for the production of complex, lightweight structures for heat management...

Wearable Devices Allow Direct Communication by Touch

Emergency situations such as trying to escape heavy smoke from fire could leave the sense of touch as the only way to find an exit. Rather than trying to look at a smartphone screen, a...

Metallic Hollow Nanoparticle Fabrication

NASA Langley Research Center has developed new methods for fabricating hollow nanoparticles using dendrimer molecules. Dendrimers are used as templates to control the size, stability, and solubility...

Extrans Permeation Measurement System

Many applications in science and industry require an apparatus that creates a controlled amount of a fluid introduced into another fluid. For instance, some material corrosion testing applications...

Multiplexing of Wireless Surface Acoustic Wave Sensors

The traditional approach for wireless sensors involves interrogators that communicate with each other (i.e., the two boxes “talk” to each other). In contrast, surface acoustic wave...

Facility Focus: Battelle Memorial Institute

Battelle Memorial Institute was founded in the early part of the 20th century as a charitable trust focused on research in metallurgy and allied industries. Founder Gordon Battelle studied...

5 Ws of the Heart Energy Harvester

Who

Millions of people who rely on pacemakers, defibrillators, and other livesaving implantable devices powered by batteries that need to be replaced every five to 10 years.

In-Situ Selective Reinforcement of Near-Net-Shape Formed Structures

NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed a method in which a metal matrix composite (MMC) material is incorporated into a metallic structure during a one-step...

Products of Tomorrow: April 2019

This column presents technologies that have applications in commercial areas, possibly creating the products of tomorrow. To learn more about each technology, see the contact information provided for that...

Lockheed Martin Explores a Different Kind of Space for NASA

Protolabs
Maple Plain, MN
www.protolabs.com

Mankind first set foot on the Moon in 1969; nearly five decades have now passed. Today, NASA is developing the Orion...

Quantum Radio Aids Communications and Mapping

GPS signals do not penetrate very deeply or at all in water, soil, or building walls, and therefore can’t be used by submarines or in underground activities such as surveying mines. GPS also...

See-Through Film Rejects 70 Percent of Incoming Solar Heat

A heat-rejecting film was developed that could be applied to a building’s windows to reflect up to 70 percent of the Sun’s incoming heat. The film remains highly transparent...

Organic Compound Turns Toxic Waste into Harmless Byproducts

Spinoff is NASA’s annual publication featuring successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercialization has contributed to the development of products and services in...

New on the Market: April 2019

Wave Springs

Smalley, Lake Zurich, IL, announced a Nested Spirawave Wave Springs series. The multiple-turn, flat wire wave springs are coiled in parallel to produce two to three times as much force as...

Polarization Imaging Sensor for Enhanced Scene Analysis

Along with intensity and color, polarization is a property of light that can provide useful information for scene analysis; however, the human eye and most cameras cannot detect...

Wear-Resistant Platinum Gold Alloy

From cellphones to satellites, industry spends millions on traditional gold alloy electrical contact coatings. While gold and other metal alloys have been an industry standard to protect metal components...

Wake Vortex Avoidance System and Method

NASA Langley Research Center scientists have developed a microphone that detects infrasound, i.e., acoustic waves ranging from 20-Hz frequencies down to DC. Infrasound is emitted in a number of...

Virtual Test Laboratory

The mechanical properties of sheet metal materials are directional. Their deformation behavior and their strength differ significantly depending on the viewing direction; for example, in the direction of rolling, or...

The Teletenna — a Hybrid Telescope Antenna System

Innovators at NASA’s Glenn Research Center have developed a hybrid telescope antenna system — Teletenna — to deliver high-data-rate communication over great distances. Teletenna has...

Nickel with Nanoscale Pores Has the Strength of Titanium and Density of Water

Titanium is as strong as steel but about twice as light. These properties depend on the way a metal’s atoms are stacked but random defects that arise in the...

Laser Ranging Can See 3D Objects Melting in Fires

Optical range measurements, already used in manufacturing and other fields, may help overcome practical challenges posed by structural fires, which are too hot to measure with conventional...

Chip Measures Quantities with Quantum Precision

Many devices use light to probe the quantum states of atoms in a vapor confined in a small cell. Atoms can be highly sensitive to external conditions, and therefore make superb detectors....

Product of the Month: April 2019 Tech Briefs

nanotron, Munich, Germany, introduced 360° Edge Analytics tools and location-aware wireless sensors for manufacturing and healthcare. The products automatically extract event information...

Woven into Clothing, 'Smart' Threads Sense Gases

The dyed threads change color when they detect a variety of gases.

Miniature, High-Performance, Low-Cost 5G Transceiver Design

Researchers at the Tokyo Institute of Technology have devised a strategy to support high-speed mobile data access using the millimeter-wave spectrum for a fifth-generation (5G)...

Fast, Flexible Ionic Transistors for Bioelectronic Devices

Many major advances in medicine, especially in neurology, have been sparked by recent advances in electronic systems that can acquire, process, and interact with biological...

Nanoscale Organic Transistors Tailored for High or Low Current Densities

In the field of inorganic semiconductors, dimensions below 100 nanometers are already standard. However, organic semiconductors have not been able to keep up. In...

Automate Show 2019: Introducing New Robots to North America

On day one of the Automate show in Chicago, Stäubli introduced its new TS2 four-axis robots to the North American market.

How Fitness Wearables Began – With a Plug-In Sneaker

Dr. Peter Cavanagh talks with Tech Briefs about his journey in the 1980s as he turned a running shoe into a tracking computer.

Answering Your Questions: When to CT Scan in the 3D Printing Process

The 3D-printing process has a number of steps. Find out where CT scanning should fall.

Higher-Strength Plastics: How to Turn Polyethylene into ‘Transparent Aluminium’

Researchers created transparent polythene sheets that have a strength greater than aluminum – at a fraction of the weight.

Snow's Power Potential: How to Generate Electricity from a Blizzard

A new 3D printed device turns snowfall into electricity.

NASA Selects Space Tech Research Institutes

NASA has selected two new Space Technology Research Institutes (STRIs) to advance space habitat designs using resilient and autonomous systems. The proposals create two multi-disciplinary,...

AI-Based Human-Friendly Robot

Blue – a low-cost, human-friendly robot – was designed with durable, plastic parts and high-performance motors that total less than $5,000 to manufacture and assemble. Its arms are sensitive to outside...

Student-Built Satellite Tests 3D Printing

A group of undergrad students at Virginia Tech has built a CubeSat satellite with a 3D-printed side panel that includes temperature gauges to test how the material will hold up in space. The...

Here's an Idea: Sports

In this episode, we explore how sensors are being used to detect concussions, track player performance, and even provide new opportunities to bet.

Answering Your Questions: CNC Machining or 3D Printing?

Some parts should be CNC machined, and some parts should be 3D printed. Our expert compares the two manufacturing processes.

3D-Printed Glass Paves Way for ‘New Era’ of Photonics

For the first time, researchers have 3D printed a unique material that demonstrates optical transparency in the mid-infrared range: chalcogenide glass.

Soft Robots Created with 3D Printers

Recent advances in material science have enabled the fabrication of robots with deformable bodies or the ability to reshape when touched, but the complex design, fabrication, and control of soft...

AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2019: A Close-Up Look at Air Taxis

Taxi! A steady stream of AUVSI XPONENTIAL attendees got to see Bell's new air vehicle up close.

AUVSI XPONENTIAL 2019: A Real Thrill Ride

You think riding your Harley Davidson is exciting? Try the ElectraFly.