Low-Current Cathodic Protection of Metal

A proposed extension of the impressed-current method of cathodic protection of metal against corrosion in wet environments would reduce the current and power needed. The proposal involves (1) the...

Novel Coating Technology Improves Ball Lenses for Fiber Coupling

Small ball (full sphere) lenses in the 0.5-mm to 3.0-mm diameter range offer a number of practical advantages for fiber-to-fiber coupling and fiber collimation. Ball lenses are...

Electric-Arc and Electrochemical Texturing of Surfaces

Electric arcs and electrochemical etching can be used to impart microscopic textures to surfaces of metals. In electric-arc texturing, one strikes an arc between a water-cooled...

Software for Minimizing and Removing Burrs in Manufacturing

An integrated suite of computer programs is undergoing development to address issues pertaining to the formation of burrs — undesired projections of metal that are generated on...

Miniature, Tunable, Wide-Band-Pass Optical Filters

A proposed miniature, electrically tunable, band-pass optical filter would have a Fabry-Perot configuration, but would be designed to trade the high spectral resolution (narrow-band pass)...

Fabricating Refractory-Metal Solar-Engine Components by VPS

Vacuum plasma spraying (VPS) has been demonstrated to be an effective technique for the fabrication of refractory-metal components of solar-thermal engines. Heretofore, such...

Improved Packaging of Silica Optical Fibers in Sensor Heads

A process for the fabrication of improved high-temperature fiber-optic sensor heads has been proposed. Fiber-optic sensor heads that can withstand hot, dirty, noisy environments are...

Voltage-Tunable Surface-Plasmon Band-Pass Optical Filters

Voltage-tunable optical band-pass filters based on surface plasmon waves have been proposed. These filters would function at both visible and infrared wavelengths. Whereas...

Improved Bond-Coat Layers for Thermal-Barrier Coatings

Current production thermal-barrier coatings (TBCs) have been shown to be capable of reducing the average temperatures of metallic components by 50 to 80 °C and hot-spot temperature by...

Emergency-Shutoff Valves Would Be Triggered by Accelerations

Automatic valves have been proposed for shutting off flows of liquids when abnormally large accelerations occur. These valves could be used, for example, to prevent outflows of...

Ion-Beam-Deposited DLC Coatings on Fine-Grain CVD Diamond

Ion-beam-deposited surface layers of diamond-like carbon (DLC) on fine-grain chemical-vapor-deposited (CVD) diamond have been found to be effective in reducing friction and wear in a...

Apparatus for Coating and Cold Welding in Vacuum

The figure illustrates selected aspects of a manually actuated apparatus for use in coating two small objects with suitable metals, then forcing the two objects together at the coated flat...

Fabricating Diffusion-Cooled Hot-Electron-Bolometer Elements

Microbridges that constitute the superconducting-transition sensory elements of electron-diffusion-cooled hot-electron bolometers can now be fabricated in increased yield and...

Sputter Deposition of Pure and Fluoropolymer-Filled Al₂O₃

Experiments have shown that nonreactive ion-beam sputtering can be used to deposit a transparent film of aluminum oxide on a polycarbonate, silicon, or fused-silica substrate....

Polyimide Passivation for Making High-Tc Josephson Junctions

Passivation by coating with OCG285 (or equivalent) polyimide at critical steps of fabrication has been found to enhance the quality of tapered edges in high-critical-temperature...

Self-Lubricating Composite Coating for High-Temperature Use

PS300 is a self-lubricating solid coating material for use in sliding contacts at temperatures up to 800°C. PS300 is a composite of metal-bonded chromium oxide with barium...