Electrical/​Electronics

The Wallops Flight Facility of the Goddard Space Flight Center has designed and built in-house a Mobile Range Control System (MRCS), which is a self-contained system to be deployed in support of rocket launches at remote ranges in cases in which termination of flight may be required for...

The split-geometry design for arrays of photoconductive HgCdTe infrared photodetectors described in the preceding article can also be used to mitigate the deleterious effect of a phenomenon called "sweepout," which degrades performance. Sweepout occurs in conventional small HgCdTe...

Focal-plane arrays of HgCdTe photoconductors have been designed and fabricated to satisfy special requirements for high-performance long-wavelength infrared (LWIR) photodetectors. The special requirements are the following:

A report describes a study of nominal-performance (H2), robust-performance (μ-synthesis), and mixed H2/μ methods for designing fixed-order controllers applied to an active-tendon control system for suppressing seismic vibrations in a structure. The study involves an application of...

A proposed charge-coupled-device (CCD) camera would be mechanically shuttered by a planar array of micromachined, electromechanically actuated shutters. This proposal has arisen as part of the solution to the problem of designing a visible/near-infrared imaging spectrometer using a commercial...

Active-pixel-sensor (APS) circuits and perhaps other dense complementary metal oxide/semiconductor (CMOS) very-large-scale integrated (VLSI) circuits would be powered by infrared beams transmitted by laser diodes and received by photodetectors, according to a proposal. Clock signals for...

Thermoplastic coupling is a patented welding process that is used to join thermoplastic parts. At the drill press, during a connector design brainstorming session, an engineer at Lucent Technologies' Bell Laboratories inserted a plastic rod into a cavity that was slightly too small in its...

Several modifications of the design and operation of lithium-ion rechargeable electrochemical cells have been proposed to prolong the cycle lives of the cells. As explained below, overdischarge can result in dissolution of a metal current collector in the anode of a cell, with consequent...

A Luneberg lens is a microwave lens consisting of a series of concentric shells of differing dielectric constants. The highest dielectric constant, or refractive index, resides at the core and the lowest, at the outer shell. Microwaves passing through this arrangement of shells are focused in the...