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Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
The figure presents a cross-sectional view of a supercharged, variable-compression, two-cycle, internal-combustion engine that offers significant advantages over prior such engines. The improvements are...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Flexible Structural-Health-Monitoring Sheets
A generic design for a type of flexible structural- health- monitoring sheet with multiple sensor/actuator types and a method of manufacturing such sheets has been developed. A sheet of this type contains an array of sensing and/or actuation elements, associated wires, and any other associated circuit...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
The design, fabrication, and microgravity flight-testing are part of a continuing development of palm-sized mobile robots that resemble spiders (except that they have six legs apiece, whereas a spider...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Advanced Active-Magnetic-Bearing Thrust-Measurement System
An advanced thrust-measurement system utilizes active magnetic bearings to both (1) levitate a floating frame in all six degrees of freedom and (2) measure the levitation forces between the floating frame and a grounded frame. This system was developed for original use in measuring the...
Briefs: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Thermally actuated hydraulic pumps have been proposed for diverse applications in which direct electrical or mechanical actuation is undesirable and the relative slowness of thermal actuation can be tolerated....
Briefs: Medical
Purifying Nucleic Acids From Samples of Extremely Low Biomass
A new method is able to circumvent the bias to which one commercial DNA extraction method falls prey with regard to the lysing of certain types of microbial cells, resulting in a truncated spectrum of microbial diversity. By prefacing the protocol with glass-bead-beating agitation...
Briefs: Medical
The term “Multi-Angle and Rear Viewing Endoscopic tooL” (MARVEL) denotes an auxiliary endoscope, now undergoing development, that a surgeon would use in conjunction...
Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing
UV-Resistant Non-Spore-Forming Bacteria From Spacecraft-Assembly Facilities
Four species of non-spore-forming bacteria collected from clean-room surfaces in spacecraft-assembly facilities could survive doses of ultraviolet (UV) radiation that would suffice to kill most known cultivable bacterial species. In a previous study, high UV resistance was...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
An alternative approach to apertureless near- field optical spectroscopy involving an atomic-force microscope (AFM) entails less complexity of equipment than does a prior approach. The...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
A method of simplified computational modeling of oxidation of hydrocarbons is undergoing development. This is one of several developments needed to enable accurate computational simulation of...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Hard-X-Ray/Soft-γ-Ray Imaging Sensor Assembly for Astronomy
An improved sensor assembly has been developed for astronomical imaging at photon energies ranging from 1 to 100 keV. The assembly includes a thallium-doped cesium iodide scintillator divided into pixels and coupled to an array of high-gain avalanche photodiodes (APDs). Optionally, the...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Hyperspectral Fluorescence and Reflectance Imaging Instrument
The system is a single hyperspectral imaging instrument that has the unique capability to acquire both fluorescence and reflectance high-spatial-resolution data that is inherently spatially and spectrally registered. Potential uses of this instrument include plant stress monitoring,...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
A system that comprises optical and electronic subsystems has been developed as an infrastructure for a spectroradiometer that measures time- dependent spectral radiance of the daylight sky,...
Briefs: Software
Toward Better Modeling of Supercritical Turbulent Mixing
A study was done as part of an effort to develop computational models representing turbulent mixing under thermodynamic supercritical (here, high pressure) conditions. The question was whether the large-eddy simulation (LES) approach, developed previously for atmospheric-pressure...
Briefs: Information Technology
An alternative approach has been devised for encoding image data in compliance with JPEG 2000, the most recent still-image data- compression standard of the Joint Photographic Experts Group....
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
An intelligent integrated health management system (IIHMS) incorporates major improvements over prior such systems. The particular IIHMS is implemented for any system defined as a...
Briefs: Information Technology
Delay Banking for Managing Air Traffic
Delay banking has been invented to enhance air-traffic management in a way that would increase the degree of fairness in assigning arrival, departure, and en-route delays and trajectory deviations to aircraft impacted by congestion in the national airspace system. In delay banking, an aircraft operator...
Briefs: Software
Constrained fitting for airfoil curvature smoothing (CFACS) is a spline-based method of interpolating airfoil surface coordinates (and, concomitantly, airfoil thicknesses) between specified discrete...
Briefs: Information Technology
Reducing Spaceborne-Doppler-Radar Rainfall-Velocity Error
A combined frequency- time (CFT) spectral moment estimation technique has been devised for calculating rainfall velocity from measurement data acquired by a nadir-looking spaceborne Doppler weather radar system. Prior spectral moment estimation techniques used for this purpose are based...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Solar-thermal-radiation concentrators in the form of transmissive diffractive optical elements (DOEs) have been proposed as alternatives to mirror- type solar concentrators now in...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Nematic Cells for Digital Light Deflection
Smectic A (SmA) materials can be used in non-mechanical, digital beam deflectors (DBDs) as fillers for passive birefringent prisms based on decoupled pairs of electrically controlled, liquid crystalline polarization rotators, like twisted nematic (TN) cells and passive deflectors. DBDs are used in...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
The ultra-stable beacon source (USBS) provides a laser-beam output with a very low angular jitter and can be used as an absolute angular reference to simulate a beacon in the...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Suitably configured whispering-gallery-mode (WGM) optical resonators have been proposed as delay lines for trains of short light pulses. Until now, it has been common practice to implement...
Briefs: Physical Sciences
Improving the Optical Quality Factor of the WGM Resonator
Resonators usually are characterized with two partially dependent values: finesse (ℱ) and quality factor (Q). The finesse of an empty Fabry-Perot (FP) resonator is defined solely by the quality of its mirrors and is calculated asℱ = πR1/2/(1 – R).
Briefs: Software
The propagation of shear (S) and compression (P) waves within the Earth represents a critically important phenomenon for geologists. For many years, geologists have developed...
Briefs: Software
Increasing the temperature at which jet aircraft engines operate would significantly improve thrust and fuel efficiency with reduced emissions. However, current engines operate...
Briefs: Software
Keuka Studios designs and manufactures custom architectural iron work and cable railings for commercial and home use. Keuka Studios first designs a product in CAD, CNC machines it to shape, and then...
Briefs: Software
Displaying CFD Solution Parameters on Arbitrary Cut Planes
USMC6 is a Fortran 90 computer program for post-processing in support of visualization of flows simulated by computational fluid dynamics (CFD). The name "USMC6" is partly an abbreviation of "TetrUSS — USM3D Solution Cutter," reflecting its origin as a post-processor for use with USM3D...
Briefs: Software
Flow Solver for Incompressible 2-D Drive Cavity
This software solves the Navier- Stokes equations for the incompressible driven cavity flow problem. The code uses second-order finite differencing on a staggered grid using the Chorin projection method. The resulting intermediate Poisson equation is efficiently solved using the fast Fourier...
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