Articles

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...

Robotic Accuracy Improves Aerospace Manufacturing

Where accuracy is concerned, robots have traditionally relied on repeatability. In the past, robotic accuracy has not been developed to a level of maturity acceptable to standard production...

A New Era in Automotive Design Requires a New Era in Simulation Tools

Automotive design is going through one of its most profound changes since the gasoline engine eclipsed steam power. Fuel prices and growing environmental concerns have made...

High-Pressure Systems Suppress Fires in Seconds

Orbital Technologies Corp. (ORBITEC) of Madison, WI, has been a longtime NASA partner, working with the Agency on numerous projects, many through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR)...

Building an Immersive Training Platform for Infantry Soldiers

Developing an effective immersive training tool requires a fine balance of technology capabilities with human factors. Achieving a training goal to build squad leadership skills,...

Modular Software & Metallography: Automating the Analysis Process

Today’s micro-imaging analysis software systems provide users with a module-based approach that allows imaging and measurement to be customized to specific workflow...

3D Printing: A New Mindset in Product Design

What is 3D Printing? The terms “3D printing” and “additive manufacturing” refer to processes that automatically build objects layer-by-layer from computer data. The technology is already well...

Optical Thin Films on Complex Substrate Geometries

A next-generation low pressure chemical vapor deposition (LPCVD) optical thin film coating process is permitting the manufacture of interference filter coatings, such as single wavelength, dual...

Designing LED Lighting for Commercial Applications

As specifiers and end users began moving away from incandescent lighting three decades ago, they started utilizing high intensity discharge (HID) and compact fluorescent (CFL) lamps and...

Efficient Thermal Simulation for Advanced LED Designs

A successful LED system design must be able to transfer the active device’s heat efficiently from its own PN junction to the ambient. This path includes the printed circuit board on which...

Software Programs Derive Measurements from Photographs

Following the Space Shuttle Columbia accident in 2003, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board spent nearly seven months examining the cause of the accident. To this end, investigators...

Hybrid Stepper Advancements Improve Medical Pump Performance

Designers of medical pumps often have to deal with the challenge of implementing precise, yet low-cost motion control. For most medical pumps, there are three basic technology...

INDUSTRY UPDATE: Design and PLM Software

Embracing Mobility When asked about how their customers are embracing the idea of using CAD online, in the cloud, or on mobile devices, most of our executives indicated that while customers are...

Technology Highlights from 2013 International CES

Tobii Technology Tobii REXwww.tobii.com Users of the Tobii Technology REX, a USB-connected peripheral, may want to be careful about rolling their eyes. REX, a device that can be placed on...

Retrofits Convert Gas Vehicles into Hybrids

One initiative at Glenn Research Center, the Hybrid Power Management (HPM) program, focused on joining new and mature technologies for optimal power systems applications in space and on Earth, with...

Trends In Fused Components For Fiber Lasers

High-power fiber lasers have been increasingly used for material processing, metal cutting, and welding applications due to high wall-plug efficiency, compactness, and superb long term reliability[ 1,...

Photonics Design Automation

Fuelled by an increasing demand for bandwidth combined with a continued drive towards cost and size reduction, larger scale photonics integrated circuits are now clearly breaking through. For example, fiber optics...

Software is the Driving Innovation for Consumer Electronics

You may not realize it, but many of the bells and whistles in the products that you engage with on a daily basis are actually powered by software.

Creating White Light Using LEDs

When it comes to creating white light using LEDs, there are many different methods, all of which have their advantages and disadvantages. First, the most common and traditional is chip-level conversion, where the...

Alloy-Enhanced Fans Maintain Fresh Air in Tunnels

The Partnership for Next Gen eration Vehicles (PNGV) is not a NASA initiative to develop powerful new rockets and spacecraft, even though it may sound like one. PNGV was a partnership...

LEDs Beware! The Rebirth of the Incandescent Light Bulb

The incandescent light bulb, first commercialized by Thomas Edison in 1879, was a remarkable invention for its day. Edison found that when an electric current was passed through a carbon...