Articles: Automotive
In the last 26 years, various “affordable” small sports cars have come and gone while the Mazda MX-5 Miata remains the unwavering benchmark of the genre. It’s remarkable how the company’s...
Articles: Automotive
The vast, volcanic, and starkly beautiful Highlands interior of Iceland is an ideal place to demonstrate the do-it-all capabilities of Land Rover’s all-new Discovery Sport. Two...
Articles: Transportation
Safety proponents are looking forward to the day when cars can send each other information that can prevent accidents. But cellular technologies may eliminate some benefits of...
Articles: Design
The automotive HVAC system is the primary system responsible for controlling and maintaining thermal comfort of vehicle occupants. Heat transfer with vehicle seats, however, plays a significant role in the...
Articles: Transportation
Human-machine interfaces (HMIs) are evolving in multiple paths — they’re becoming a more important product differentiator while also expanding their control functions outside the vehicle. As connectivity...
Articles: Design
Functional safety has become a watchword in many fields as regulators and product developers attempt to ensure that failures will be minimal, and that safety isn’t impaired when...
Articles: Materials
In many segments of the ground-vehicle industry, lightweighting is a hot topic, and yet the off-highway segment lags behind in terms of more eco-friendly vehicle design. However, legislative...
R&D: Medical
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology designed a low-cost prosthetic knee that mimics normal walking motion. The MIT team's prototype generates a torque profile similar to that of able-bodied knees, using only simple mechanical elements like springs and dampers. The team is testing...
Articles: Transportation
The FPT Industrial range of engines currently achieves a brake thermal efficiency (BTE) of approximately 46%, which is higher than comparable engines on the market today. However, through a series of...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
The deleterious effects of microgravity are undeniable: reduced bone mineral density, muscle atrophy, vascular remodeling, etc. These health issues...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
The primary function of a window is to allow observation of, and protection from, a potentially hazardous environment. Yet, from the window designer’s point of view,...
Original Equipment: RF & Microwave Electronics
Peeking around a semi-trailer truck in an attempt to pass it on a two-lane highway or road can be an unsettling experience for drivers—edging toward the dashed center line only to swerve back behind...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
O-phthalaldehyde (OPA) is a high-level disinfectant commonly used, for example, for sterilization of heat-sensitive medical instruments; it demonstrates effective microbicidal activity against a wide range of microorganisms (including mycobacteria, gramnegative bacteria, and spores). On the International Space...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Fire safety in space vehicles is of utmost importance, especially for manned flight. On the International Space Station (ISS), events that may lead to fires, especially smoldering, must be...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Technology has been developed that provides a way to compute the remaining useful life (RUL) of a component or system. The estimation of the RUL of a degraded or faulty component is at the center of condition-based maintenance, and prognostics and health management. It gives operators a...
Briefs: Test & Measurement
Researchers at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center have developed and tested a new strain gage that makes significant strides in the state of the art, particularly salient given the...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Additive manufacturing (AM, also informally known as 3D printing) is a relatively new process for fabricating net- shaped parts from a...
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
Manufacturing reliable, high-performing parts and components that have extended lifecycles is crucial for the pneumatics and hydraulics industry. From springs to fittings, the performance of each...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Internal electrostatic discharge (IESD) can cause spacecraft failure and anomalies related to the space environment, but it is very hard to predict when IESD might happen. Therefore, assessment of the IESD at a given space environment and a given dielectric geometry is important for spacecraft reliability.
Briefs: Manufacturing & Prototyping
ISAAC (Instrument Shared Artifact for Computing) offers adaptability, computation power, I/O bandwidth, digital interface standards, and data processing capability in a single, common, low-mass/power, and small-form-factor platform with significantly reduced, nonrecurring cost and risk...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Next-generation synthetic aperture radar (SAR) remote sensing platforms utilize new concepts such as the SweepSAR techniques that provide increased swath size, high...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Making electrical connections inside a vacuum chamber to a stack of electron and ion optical components using the conventional approach of...
Technology Report: Power
Engine downsizing can sometimes include a distinct lack of torque at low revs and slow transient response, even when subtle turbocharging techniques are applied. A potential solution to...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
In recent years, electrochemical capacitors, or supercapacitors, have gained the most intense interest as an alternative to traditional energy storage devices such as batteries. The demands of the potential supercapacitor applications range from plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) to...
Briefs: Electronics & Computers
Imaging LiDAR systems such as Goddard’s Reconfigurable Solid-state LiDAR (GRSSLi) must collect and process reflected pulses of light in order to correctly assemble a three-dimensional image of the scene. These pulses of light generally range from 2-5...
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
Every lens has an absolute upper performance limit dictated by the laws of physics. This limitation is controlled by the working f/# of the lens and the wavelength( s) of light that pass through the lens....
Briefs: Photonics/Optics
In recent years, a large number of Lagrangian-based optical velocimetry techniques have been developed that are known, collectively, as either flow tagging velocimetry or molecular tagging velocimetry. In either case, the method is based on the use of an optical resonance to “tag” a pattern into a...
Briefs: Green Design & Manufacturing
A method was developed that allows water recycling, air treatment, thermal control, and solid residuals treatment and recycle to be removed from the usable habitat volume...