Electronics & Software

Electrical/​Electronics

New technologies in power supplies and management, board-level electronics, electronics and computers, and battery systems provide wide-ranging applications essential to military, aviation, medical, and automotive.

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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Internal Short Circuit Testing Device to Improve Battery Designs
Batteries, such as lithium-ion, sold for consumer use in portable electronic devices and other applications such as electrical cars, occasionally fail in the field over time. These cells have typically passed a wide variety of safety tests such as those required by governmental...
Briefs: Nanotechnology
Pulsed laser vaporization (PLV) production of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) on traditional Co/Ni catalyst was explored with respect...
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Briefs: Energy
Composite Material Cools Itself Down Under Extreme Temperatures
A material, inspired by nature, can regulate its own temperature and could be used to treat burns and help space capsules withstand atmospheric forces. The research used a network of multiple microchannels with active flowing fluids (fluidics) as a method and proof-of-concept to...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Lasers play roles in many manufacturing processes, from welding car parts to crafting engine components with 3D printers. To control these tasks, manufacturers must ensure that their lasers fire at the...
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Briefs: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Innovators at NASA's Glenn Research Center have expanded their growing portfolio of aerogels to include a new optically transparent polyimide aerogel. Aerogels — low-density, highly porous, ultralight...
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Briefs: Imaging
A stainless steel alloy — alloy 709 — has potential for elevated-temperature applications such as nuclear reactor structures. It is exceptionally strong and resistant to damage when exposed to high...
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Briefs: Data Acquisition
The ability to fly at supersonic speed without producing unsettling sonic booms would re-open a path to faster commercial aviation. In pursuit of aerodynamics that would...
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5 Ws: Imaging
Who Individuals needing or wanting to examine lead content in their drinking water on-demand and in virtually any environmental setting.
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Articles: Mechanical & Fluid Systems
Ultrashort pulse (USP) lasers for precision micromachining can minimize or avoid undesirable thermal effects that limit feature resolution, edge quality and, ultimately, product functionality. This is because...
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Articles: Photonics/Optics
The SPIE Photonics West 2019 technical conference and exhibition returns to The Moscone Center in San Francisco, February 2 through February 7, offering attendees the opportunity to explore the latest...
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Products: Test & Measurement
VGA Sensor Now available from FRAMOS (Ottawa, Canada), the Sony IMX426 Pregius™ 3rd generation Global Shutter CMOS image sensor provides 9μm pixel size and reaches VGA resolution with 1,449 fps@10-bit for maximized throughput...
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Articles: Electronics & Computers
Machine vision systems have traditionally consisted of stand-alone cameras tethered to PC-based boards or frame grabbers using highspeed interfaces such as Camera Link, CoaXPress and Gigabit...
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Blog: Electronics & Computers
A reader asks: How does an “industrial-grade” lithium-ion battery stack up to the one in your phone?
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INSIDER: Electronics & Computers
Imagine a world where cell phones and laptops can be charged in a matter of minutes instead of hours, rolled up and stored in your pocket, or dropped without sustaining any damage. It is possible, but the...
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INSIDER: Materials
Fuel cells generate electricity directly from hydrogen and oxygen and produce only water vapor as emissions. But most fuel cells are too expensive, inefficient,...
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Products: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Yokogawa Corporation of America, Newnan, GA, released the WT5000 power analyzer that achieves accuracy of ±0.03% at 50/60 Hz, allowing precision evaluation of power consumption, loss, and efficiency of electrical and...
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Articles: Sensors/Data Acquisition
With the computational power and software available today, numerical simulation is a real option to quickly get answers to complicated technical, scientific, and engineering questions. Not only has the hardware doubled...
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Briefs: Imaging
Active Pointing Monitor for a 2-Axis Optical Control System
NASA Goddard Space Flight Center has developed a pointing measurement detection and control system that monitors the real-time optical axis motions (such as tip and tilt) that affect image quality in aerial platforms. To date, there is no known real-time optical image alignment and control...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
A New Twist Makes Rotating Machinery More Efficient and Quieter
Derived from a design approach for a new wing known as PRANDTL-D, this technology achieves similar improvements for propellers and other rotating machinery.
Briefs: Materials
Gas turbine blades of conventional rotorcraft turboshaft engines are optimized to operate at nearly a fixed speed and a fixed incidence angle. If the operating condition of the engine changes, then the flow through...
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Facility Focus: Software
Ames Laboratory is a government-owned, contractor-operated national laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), operated by and located on the campus of Iowa State University in Ames, IA. For more than 70...
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Products: Sensors/Data Acquisition
Data Acquisition Devices The USB-1808 Series simultaneous-sampling data acquisition devices from Measurement Computing Corp., Norton, MA, provides synchronous and concurrent voltage I/O, waveform output,...
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Articles: Medical
The Create the Future Design Contest was launched in 2002 to help stimulate and reward engineering innovation. In the past 16 years, the annual contest has drawn more than 13,000 product...
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NASA Spinoff: Automotive
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...
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Briefs: Transportation
NASA's Glenn Research Center has developed a novel solid oxide fuel cell (SOFC) with five times the specific power density of currently available SOFCs. This highly efficient SOFC can operate on a wide...
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Briefs: Test & Measurement
Gated Chopper Integrator (GCI)
Microvolt-level signals require gains of at least a thousand. Offsets and noise in the amplifier chain will be amplified by the same amount, which can saturate the amplifier or swamp the signal so it is not resolvable. Other methods use chopping and/or autozero techniques to lower the offset and noise. The key...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
The first laser based on the wave physics phenomenon called bound states in the continuum (BIC) has been developed. The technology could revolutionize the development of surface lasers,...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Heat treatment, also known as annealing, is a common step in the semiconductor fabrication process. A buildup of radiation-induced localized charge within the semiconductor...
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Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Ionization-Based Multidirectional Flow Sensor
One significant area of research in fuel cell technology includes systems in which a fuel cell is combined with another power generation device (a turbine, for example) to create a hybrid system that combines the advantages of the two standalone systems, resulting in a high fuel-to-electricity...

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