Features

Auxiliary Power Solutions for 1500 VDC Photovoltaic Systems

Photovoltaic systems are continually evolving to improve their efficiency and financial viability. One trend is to move to larger strings of cells giving higher dc voltages to be...

Reducing Weight and Design Time for Dream Chaser Spacecraft

Collier Research CorporationNewport News, VAwww.hypersizer.com With the go-ahead from NASA for a first mission to the International Space Station (ISS), the Sierra Nevada Corporation's...

Q&A: MIT's Dr. Yanfei Xu Transforms Heat Insulators into Heat Conductors

Plastics are excellent thermal insulators — a quality that can be an advantage in some applications. But this property is less desirable in products such as plastic...

Design Issues with Wearables From the Perspective of Electromechanical Components

Life Alert's “I've fallen and I can't get up®!” became one of the most famous infomercial catchphrases in the late 1980s. The company's device, targeted at...

Products of Tomorrow

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 innovation.

5 Ws of the Injectable Alcohol Monitoring Sensor

Who Patients in substance abuse treatment programs.

New on the Market: July 2018

Coupled Inductors Coilcraft, Cary, IL, offers LPD8035V Series miniature, high-voltage, 1:1 coupled inductors that provide 1500 Vrms and one-minute isolation (hipot) between windings. The inductors are available in...

Remote Sensing for Smarter Forest Fire Fighting

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

Autonomous Vehicles and the Burden of Testing

AB DynamicsWiltshire, Englandwww.abdynamics.com Autonomous vehicles cannot be tested for every eventuality that might transpire in their operating environment. As the technology becomes more...

New Products

Trilinear Line Scan Cameras Teledyne e2v (Milpitas, CA) has announced its next generation of line scan cameras — the high-resolution ELiiXA+ trilinear color range. These new 8k pixel cameras are suited for industrial applications...

Eyes in the Sky: Using Optical Filters to Observe and Measure Earth From a Different Perspective

“Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it....

Principles of Laser Scanning Confocal Microscopes

Today’s high-resolution laser scanning confocal microscopes (LSCM), also referred to simply as laser scanning microscopes, are powerful high-magnification surface metrology instruments with a...

Military Optics Technology

The demand for innovative solutions to enhance the safety of military personnel is continually on the rise. This includes the need to improve the performance of military vehicles and aircraft, in terms of both safety...

Rethinking FPGAs for Smart Cameras

The term “smart camera” has been used for decades, but there has been little agreement on the actual definition. This article will use the term “smart” as the Merriam Webster dictionary defines it: the...

Taking It to the Streets: Designing Streetlamp Optical Components

The task of creating a streetlamp optical system has changed over the last 20 years and due to this change, so has optical design software. Let’s compare the task of designing...

Bringing Multispectral Imaging to Industrial Applications

A mere 20 years ago, machine vision system designers did all they could to avoid color imaging applications due to higher costs and greater system and software complexity. But as...

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Established in 1943, Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico was site Y of the Manhattan Project for a single purpose: to design and build an atomic bomb, which took just 27 months. The Los Alamos of...

Selecting a Force Measurement Solution to Minimize Variables and Protect Tensile Testing Data

Computers and software play a major role in force measurement and quality control. Whether in the engineering lab, quality control inspection area,...

Product of the Month

Altair, Troy, MI, released the 2018 versions of electromagnetic (EM) simulation software FEKO®, WinProp®, Flux®, and FluxMotor®. These electromagnetic solver tools are part of the HyperWorks® design platform. FEKO...

Sensors Expo Preview 2018

The 2018 Sensors Expo and Conference will be held at the McEnery Convention Center, San Jose, CA from June 26 – 28. It is an opportunity to catch up on the latest trends and products in this increasingly important...

New Products & Services

Miniature IP68 Rated Data Recorder The new SLICE IP68 data acquisition system from DTS (Seal Beach, CA) is designed to capture physical signals in challenging environments. Targeted at applications with size or mass...

Benefits of Using Encoders to Improve Step Motor System Performance

Step motors are widely used in automation due to their high resolution, precision positioning, minimal control electronics, and low cost. As an open loop system, traditional...

Guiding the Way in Automotive Plants

Vision-guided robotics commonly used in today's automotive plants enables robots to “see” the object they are working on so they can perform the required activity accurately on/to an object that is not...

Plastic Bearings Reduce Weight and Improve Durability

When engineer Mark Doyle started to put together plans for an exoskeleton to support surgeons in 2012, he wanted to develop a lightweight product that they could wear comfortably for...

Sensing the Future of Pneumatics

Some species of sharks must constantly swim to keep water flowing over their gills to stay alive. That same concept also tends to apply to technology — once a technology stops evolving and moving forward, it's...

New Products

Rotary Position Sensors Novotechnik, U.S. (Southborough, MA) announced industrial and redundant channel industrial versions of the SP 2800 Series rotary position sensors. The industrial version is offered in standard electrical...

Force Sensing — An Addition to the Physical Therapy Toolbox

Undergoing treatment for a physical injury or condition can be a long and frustrating experience. Broken bones, sprains, torn muscles or ligaments, as well as painful conditions that...

New Products

CMOS Linear Image Sensor The S13774 from Hamamatsu Corporation (Hamamatsu City, Japan; Bridgewater, NJ), is a CMOS linear image sensor developed for industrial cameras that require high-speed scanning. The column-parallel readout...

How Sophisticated Wearable Sensors are Changing Healthcare

In the traditional model of healthcare, a patient would visit a doctor regularly for checkups or for evaluations when there’s an ailment. This model, however, isn’t ideal for...