Articles

Organic Photovoltaic Technology

Organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology has been rapidly growing in performance and popularity over the past few years and is expected to become a major PV technology within the next decade. Here’s why.

CAMERA TRENDS 2013: A Simpler Machine Vision

Today’s cameras are cheaper, smaller, and more capable than ever before. Without breaking the budget, a company manager who needs products inspected can buy a camera, quickly code in commands to...

Mars 2020: The Next Journey

Building on the success of Curiosity’s landing, NASA has announced plans for the next robotic science rover, which is set to launch in 2020. The proposed 2020 rover mission is part of NASA’s Mars Exploration...

Potting Compounds Offer Superior Protection for Electronic Circuits

Product reliability is an absolute must for manufacturers to succeed in today’s competitive marketplace. As customers demand ever-increasing levels of performance at lower...

LEDs Go Organic: The Science behind OLED Lighting Systems

Organic is a term more often associated with vegetables than lighting systems, but some LED manufacturers are now incorporating organic molecules into their products to meet specific...

Single-Stage vs. Two-Stage Drivers

The key circuit elements in an LED lamp are the LEDs, the optics, the casing (including heat-sinking) and the driver. The driver now represents anywhere from 10% to 40% of total bulb cost, so selecting the...

Advanced Exercise Concepts for Long-Duration Spaceflight

Long-duration spaceflight poses many hazards to the health of a space exploration crew, including physiological deconditioning of the musculoskeletal and cardiovascular systems due to...

Picking the Pattern for a Stealth Antenna

A frequency selective surface that acts as an RF filter and helps reduce the radar cross-section of antennas consists of a pattern of geometrical objects. There are literally thousands of possibilities,...

Using Source Measure Units to Characterize High-Power Semiconductors (Part 1)

The proliferation of electronic control and electronic power conversion into a variety of industries (e.g., energy generation, industrial motor drives and control,...

Using Source Measure Units to Characterize High Power Semiconductors (Part 2)

Part 1 of this article, which appeared in the August 2013 issue of NASA Tech Briefs, dealt with ON-state characterization of high power semiconductors (link to Part...

Real-Time Software Enables Multi-Core PCs for Industrial Automation

As early as 25 years ago, industrial system integrators saw the great potential that the Windows operating system brought to PCs. They saw the possibility of using the advanced...

Water Treatment Technologies Inspire Healthy Beverages

At NASA’s Johnson Space Center in the mid-1990s, Mike Johnson assisted the scientists who were developing technology to convert urine into drinking water. The research conducted by the...

Sensor-Web Experiments Advance Earth Science

NASA funds more atmospheric research by far than any other government agency or private concern internationally. More than 100 different instruments have been developed and flown in support of NASA...

Using Vacuum Technology to Cool CCDs

Imagine a CCD camera operating on a long exposure and seeing only 1 electron per pixel every 16 minutes. That equates to dark current of less than 0.000001 electrons/pixel/sec. Imagine the same camera...

Alternate Methods for Testing LED Tube Lights

LED tube lights, designed as replacements for T8/T10/T12 fluorescent bulbs, represent a significant portion of the growing commercial LED lighting market. According to the United States Department...

Network Interface Links Sensor-Web Instruments

NASA Airborne Science operates a fleet of aircraft in conjunction with orbiting satellites for Earth observations. In 2004, NASA started planning missions to employ constellations of instruments...

Adhesives for Optoelectronics

The beginning of the 21st century finds optoelectronics being one of the key disciplines on technological development. Substantial progress in computer technology, communication, imaging, illumination technology,...

Spacesuit Materials Add Comfort to Undergarments

More than two decades ago, NASA started looking for a new way to keep astronauts comfortable in their space gloves. During a spacewalk, temperatures can range between 250 °F and -250 °F. One of...

Flexible’ Machine Vision: Sensors, Lenses, and Software

Machine vision has become indispensable in today’s highly automated manufacturing environments, which rely on accurate in spec tion to ensure high product quality and high process...

Pixel-Scale Coated Sensors Bring Multispectral Imaging to New Users

The pixel-scale patterning of optical filters directly onto sensors has the potential to drastically simplify and scale down the cost of real-time multispectral imaging....

NASA Announces 2012 Inventions of the Year

Digital Picture Technology Connects Sports Teams with Fans

NASA’s twin Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, remain one of the Agency’s greatest achievements in exploration. On Earth, these robots are best known for their stunning pictures...

Linear Guide Systems Streamline Aircraft Seat Assembly and Operation

When airline passengers travel in coach class, expectations are fairly low with regard to comfort. For example, most seats only offer two positions: straight for takeoff and landing, and a slight recline for the journey. Coach seats are relatively simple and lightweight structures compared to their more sophisticated counterparts in business class, first class, and super first class. Whereas a coach seat weighs approximately 100 pounds, seats in higher classes weigh 200 to 300 pounds each, depending on their features.

Fiber Delivery of Lasers in Bioinstrumentation

In many laser-based types of bioinstrumentation, including flow cytometers, confocal microscopes, and array readers for proteomics, laser output is delivered to the system’s final optics regime...

Turbomachinery Solutions for Green and Renewable Energy

For more than two decades, nearly all renewable energy endeavors have incorporated the latest advances in turbomachinery design and turbomachinery manufacturing technology in an evolving...

Energy Harvesting Wireless Lighting Control Systems

Energy can be found everywhere — in the movement of doors and windows or machine components, the vibration of motors, changing temperature or variances in luminance level. These energy...

Ensuring Fixture Compatibility for LEDs

Lighting, as an industry, has seen very few significant innovations in the basic technology of light production in the past century. As a result of this static situation, lighting companies have largely...

Driving The Future of LCD Backlighting

One of the most pervasive challenges in the world today is increasing energy efficiency. The consumer electronics industry is evolving towards higher efficiency due to newer and stricter energy...

Space-Inspired Trailers Encourage Exploration on Earth

Garrett Finney moved the office coffeemaker into the full-size, cardboard mockup of the new trailer he was designing. The need for caffeine — and the threat of hot coffee accidentally...