Geothermal cooling via a closed-loop thermal heat sink system shows promise in improving solar performance in hot regions.

Geothermal cooling via a closed-loop thermal heat sink system shows promise in improving solar performance in hot regions. 
 
Finding ways to enhance and improve the efficacy of photovoltaic (PV) systems is critical as the use of green power solutions continues to grow around the world. The concept behind one such solution to improve the performance of photovoltaic solar modules came to Ignacio Valiente-Blanco, a mechanical engineering professor in the Department of Signal Theory and Communications at the University of Alcalá (UAH) in Madrid, when he was hiking in the mountains near his home in Spain.

Cool Water Boosts Solar Efficiency

Conductive flakes enable an economical additive manufacturing method to yield results.

Conductive flakes enable an economical additive manufacturing method to yield results. 
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The standard manufacturing and assembly processes for heat exchangers can be expensive and time-consuming. They also limit the geometric configurations that can be considered during the design process. 
Additive manufacturing (AM), when viable, can be a more efficient manufacturing process and gives engineers much more design freedom, often allowing them to create features that standard machining cannot. 
Researchers are looking for ways to build high-performance heat exchangers using AM. However, most metal-based AM processes are so expensive that commercial production is not viable. 
Looking to see if another approach might work, a research team led by Gregory F. Nellis, a professor at the University of Wisconsin (UW), designed and built an efficient and cost-effective heat exchanger using lower-cost, deposition-based AM processes. The team successfully printed a heat exchanger using fused deposition modeling that has sufficient thermal conductivity to outperform standard heat exchangers, at a more affordable cost.

Printing Better, Cheaper Heat Exchangers

Using Smart Trains to Find Defective Rails

Francesco Lanza di Scalea, professor of experimental mechanics, NDE and SHM Laboratory, Department of Structural Engineering, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif., discusses the use of ultrasonic high-speed inspection of train track rails to detect internal defects and potentially avoid costly damages.

Better Grip for Laparoscopy

To pull objects from the tightest spaces, researchers devise a clever little claw.

April-June 2023

New research from the University of Salerno provides methods on how to detect and protect connected vehicles from cyberattacks.

<var>What if your car was as vulnerable to hack into as your laptop? The reality is cars today are basically a computer on wheels. According to Car and Driver, 40 percent of a new car&rsquo;s cost is driven by electronic components. The New York Times reported that a modern vehicle could contain more than 3,000 computer chips. Electronics are such an essential part of a car&rsquo;s design that the shortage of semiconductors due to supply chain disruption from the pandemic has impacted auto assembly lines worldwide, creating a lack of new vehicles on the market.</var> 
 
By introducing computer systems into vehicles, hackers have found ways to exploit their vulnerabilities. In 2015, Black Hat security researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek hacked a Jeep Cherokee via its infotainment system. Miller and Valasek exploited how the vehicle autogenerated its Wi-Fi password based on the time when the car&rsquo;s multimedia system would turn on. Through the infotainment system, the hackers could manipulate the air conditioner, the radio, the windshield wipers, and even the transmission. On a road test with Wired magazine, the hackers cut the transmission as the vehicle was driving 70 mph on the highway. This past February, German teenager David Colombo identified a vulnerability in the TeslaMate, a third-party application used by Tesla owners to analyze car performance. By hacking the app, Colombo was able to unlock doors, turn on and off the headlights, and control the radio. He was even able to track in real-time the location of the car.

Advancing Cybersecurity in Connected Vehicles

Explore how adverse weather conditions can impact autonomous vehicles&rsquo; lidar cameras.

<var>Lidar, or light detection and ranging, is a popular remote sensing method used for measuring the exact distance to an object. These imaging systems are increasingly used in the development of autonomous vehicles (AVs). However, final technology implementation cannot yet be achieved because major AV manufacturers are only now starting to select providers for data collection units that can be introduced in commercial vehicles.</var> 
One of the biggest unknowns in the development of AVs is how adverse weather conditions challenge the development of safe and reliable advanced autonomous systems for sensing and perception. How does the diffraction of light through rain, fog, and snow limit lidar performance?

How Self-Driving Cars See in Extreme Weather

Interview with Luca Capriotti

Luca Capriotti, former president of the International Youth Nuclear Congress, shares his passion for nuclear energy and beliefs that it can become a viable, safe power source to be used globally and responsibly in the future.

The Future of Power is Nuclear

Infographic: Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor

<var>Most nuclear reactors in operation today use water as a coolant, but one promising alternative looks to replace water with liquid sodium. Sodium can be heated to high temperatures before boiling, which means that a sodium-cooled reactor can operate at atmospheric pressure and can use a thinner reactor vessel. These reactors also will produce less radioactive waste. Explore the diagram of a sodium-cooled fast reactor below.</var>

Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor

July-September 2022

Using 3D scanning, 3D simulation, and CAD, engineers at the Queensland University of Technology have created a patient-specific contoured mattress that successively supports patients in the operating room.

<var>Using 3D scanning, 3D simulation, and CAD, engineers at the Queensland University of Technology have created a patient-specific contoured mattress that successively supports patients in the operating room.</var>

Paige Little is an expert on using state-of-the-art imaging technology to understand ideal body position and support for enhancing the quality of sleep. It&rsquo;s the kind of research used to improve beds for the home. But in 2018, Little was contacted by a consultant who asked for something more serious. Could she design a customized, patient-specific surgical mattress for a 10-year-old about to undergo spinal surgery?

The patient had Morquio syndrome, a disorder that causes skeletal abnormalities and neuromuscular scoliosis. She would need to lie safely on her stomach and the front of her body for the duration of the surgery.

&ldquo;Intraoperative patient position is always a critical factor in spinal surgery, particularly in the case of prone patient positioning, where the anatomy and physiology of the torso is such that additional pressure may have adverse effects on the cardiopulmonary system as well as causing skin and muscle necrosis,&rdquo; Little said. &ldquo;Optimal patient positioning for spine surgery is vital for surgical success and the minimization of complications intra and postoperatively.&rdquo;
Little, an associate professor at the school of mechanical, medical, and process engineering at Queensland University of Technology, is up to the challenge. Using an innovative digital workflow involving 3D surface scanning, 3D simulation and computer-aided design (CAD), she successfully created a customized theater mattress with the patient&rsquo;s specific body-contour requirements. The operation was a success, and the surgical team praised the mattress and its positive impact on patient outcome.

Patient Support Via Customized Surgical Mattresses

Hydrogen seems like an ideal fuel, but a feasibility analysis reveals the factors that will determine its success.

<var>Hydrogen seems like an ideal fuel, but a feasibility analysis reveals the factors that will determine its success.</var>
Hydrogen has the highest energy density by weight of any fuel. So it only makes sense that compressed hydrogen gas is being considered as a carbon-free replacement for diesel in heavy-duty trucks. A hydrogen-fueled truck fleet would substantially reduce greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from the freight industry.

Before that can happen, engineers need to work out the optimum technology to make hydrogen economical as well as clean.

Putting Hydrogen to the Economic Test

Interview with Moncef Krarti

Moncef Krarti, head of the Building System Program at the University of Colorado, Boulder, discusses ways to turn down the temperature on hot, overcrowded urban areas.

Cooling Cities by Combating Heat Islands

Infographic: Pneumatic Help for Grasping

Researchers hope this pneumatic grip glove could soon help relieve industrial workers of some pain.

Workers who must repeat forceful actions with their hands&mdash;whether operating industrial hand tools or typing on a keyboard&mdash;are often subject to carpal tunnel syndrome and other cumulative trauma disorders, which not only are painful but also diminish grip strength. Naveen Chandrashekar, a professor of mechanical and mechatronics engineering at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, and graduate student Daniel Loewen, now chief technology officer at ioAirFlow in Winnipeg, looked for a way to reduce the force needed by workers operating hand tools, which would lean to less wear and tear on the hands and wrists.

Pneumatic Help for Grasping

October-December 2022

Through a complete review of published research over the last 60 years, researchers aim to propel development of new head injury metrics forward.

<var>Through a complete review of published research over the last 60 years, researchers aim to propel development of new head injury metrics forward.</var>

Metrics that help engineers design safer helmets and vehicles to prevent fatalities went mostly unchanged for about 50 years. Now, researchers are looking for better metrics to help prevent brain injuries&mdash;from mild concussions to traumatic damage.

In &ldquo;A Review of Head Injury Metrics Used in Automotive Safety and Sports Protective Equipment,&rdquo; published in the ASME Journal of Biomedical Engineering, authors Stefan Duma and Bethany Rowson examined every major metric that has been published over the past 60 years, including some of the original work done at Wayne State University in the 1960s and 1970s that examined skull fractures and were used for early football helmet and vehicle design standards. This effort summarizes existing head injury metrics and their applications for head and brain injuries.

Duma is Harry C. Wyatt Professor of Engineering and director of the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science (ICTAS) at Virginia Tech and Rowson is a former Virginia Tech research assistant professor. The team defined a metric as any variable or combination of variables that is &ldquo;used to assess injury severity, while a criterion is any quantitative value that is considered a threshold for injury or is assigned a predicted risk of injury.&rdquo;

The Virginia Tech team has about 30 years of history in automobile safety. About 20 years ago, they started working more in the sports and football area. Today, about 40 faculty and students at Virginia Tech work on brain-related research.

Advancing Head Injury Metrics Research

Researchers at Vanderbilt University have invented a nitrogen gas-powered thruster that is worn on the back that can correct falls as they start, restoring balance and averting potential injury.

<var>Researchers at Vanderbilt University have invented a nitrogen gas-powered thruster that is worn on the back that can correct falls as they start, restoring balance and averting potential injury.</var>

Falls can lead to severe and fatal injuries, particularly for elderly people. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, millions of people fall each year, with one in five suffering serious injury.

Michael Goldfarb, a professor of mechanical engineering at Vanderbilt University, has first-hand experience dealing with this health risk. &ldquo;As my parents grew older, both had experiences with fall risk that really limited their quality of life,&rdquo; he said. &ldquo;My father, in particular, had Parkinson&rsquo;s disease.&rdquo;

Goldfarb began thinking about new ways to correct occasional states of imbalance. Robotic exoskeletons can offer balance assistance, but have design challenges, such as having to coordinate a recovery response with the user. To avoid requiring a large frame or other structure (which would impede independence), he decided to focus on building a backpack-worn system that can apply forces directly to a person&rsquo;s body using a thruster.

&ldquo;This research challenge seemingly has not received much attention and therefore there were a lot of unknowns,&rdquo; Goldfarb said. &ldquo;Correcting a fall is a shared task between the person falling and the device helping to arrest the fall. What is the distribution of shared effort? How much force is appropriate to correct an impending fall? For how long is the force required? Can the magnitude of assistance required be provided by a compact cold-gas thruster?&rdquo;

Goldfarb and fellow researchers Almaskhan Baimyshev and Michael Finn-Henry then set out to create a lightweight, cold-gas thruster (CGT) jetpack that senses when a fall has been initiated and can provide a restoring force to help the person recover his or her balance.

Backpack Could Reduce the Risk of Fall

Paul P. Palies, director of the Combustion and Propulsion for Aviation Research Center at the University of Tennessee Space Institute, discusses the prospects for fueling aircraft with hydrogen.

Flying with Hydrogen

Ro-Bats, Bat-Bots, and Other Bat-like Robots

For these engineers, the allure of biologically inspired flight still remains strong.

January-March 2023

Using pneumatic pressure inside of the tube to keep it open, researchers develop a new way to manufacture glass components.

Silicate-based glasses have several physical and chemical properties that make them preferred manufacturing materials, such as high thermal and chemical stability, stiffness, and high optical transparency. They are also relatively low cost. 
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However, glasses can also be hard to work with; For example, there are difficulties in precisely controlling heat and pressure. The standard methods for making glass objects tend to be slow and expensive, especially for more complex pieces and shapes that take more time and require greater precision. 
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These challenges might compel engineers to try established additive manufacturing (AM) technologies instead for creating transparent glass pieces; however, these methods also have material challenges (for example, the high molten viscosity of glass limits bubble consolidation and release in powder bed processes).

3D Printing with Glass Tubes

The efficiency of wind turbines depends on how smoothly they can slice through the air. Can combining new blade shapes produce superior results?

Over the past two decades, wind power has become an increasingly important source of electricity worldwide, and large, three-bladed turbines are a familiar sight. While most of those blades are formed as a simple airfoil, researchers have been studying whether new shapes could yield great performance.

Cutting Through the Wind

Miguel Hoffmann and Alaa Elwany of Texas A&amp;M University discuss the prospect of manufacturing in orbit and beyond.

Use of additive manufacturing (AM) has exploded since its conception over 40 years ago. With more and more eyes looking skyward, from space tourism to NASA&rsquo;s return to the moon, the potential AM holds for use in orbit and beyond is notable.

Manufacturing Among the Stars

Mouthpieces Measure Movement with Precision

NASCAR drivers help Wake Forest researchers collect better data to measure drivers&#39; exposure to acceleration and vibration.

Stock car racing fans like to listen to &ldquo;mic&rsquo;d up&rdquo; drivers. But how about when NASCAR drivers sport custom-made mouthpieces to pick up more than action reactions? 
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To collect real-time data on exposure to acceleration and vibrations, about half of all NASCAR drivers &ldquo;put instrumented, custom-fit mouthpieces inside their mouths,&rdquo; explained Joel Stitzel, a professor of biomedical engineering at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, N.C. 
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This helps researchers collect kinematics of drivers&rsquo; experience when performing practice laps or on race day. The results were released in the paper, &ldquo;Pilot Collection and Evaluation of Head Kinematics in Stock Car Racing,&rdquo; published in the March 2023 issue of Journal of Biomechanical Engineering.

NASCAR drivers help Wake Forest researchers collect better data to measure drivers&#39; exposure to acceleration and vibration.

July-September 2023

Can hydrogen reduce the carbon footprint of power plants? Researcher have found that conventional gas turbines can operate safely with a 30 percent hydrogen mix.

Many experts believe burning hydrogen with natural gas can reduce carbon emissions without negatively impacting operational efficiency and performance. Hydrogen co-firing in a gas turbine ought to lower the carbon footprint of existing thermal power generation or co-generation plants by injecting hydrogen into the existing natural gas grid. At the moment, however, the scientific data on the co-combustion of hydrogen and natural gas in gas turbines in an industrial environment is sparse. 
 
To fill in the knowledge gaps, a team of researchers co-fired hydrogen and conventional natural gas in an ENGIE-owned Siemens SGT-600 (Alstom legacy GT10B) 24-MW industrial gas turbine in Antwerp. Their results were revealed in the paper, &ldquo;Demonstration of Natural Gas and Hydrogen Cocombustion in an Industrial Gas Turbine,&rdquo; published in the April 2023 Journal of Engineering for Gas Turbines and Power. 
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Hydrogen-Natural Gas Co-Combustion Reduces Carbon Emissions 

NIOSH scientists develop model confirming rates of fresh air flow needed to help trapped miners survive.

Underground miners work in dangerous conditions, threatened by tunnel collapse, fires, and explosions. In 2006, three major coal mining accidents occurred, either from explosions or fire, and 19 miners died. As a result, Congress passed the Mine Improvement and New Emergency Response Act of 2006, more commonly known as the MINER Act. That law tasked the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) with researching and testing refuge alternatives in mines in the event of another disaster. 
 
One of the main charges investigated by NIOSH&rsquo;s Office of Mine Safety and Health Research was investigating the practicality, survivability, and cost of refuge alternatives, basically a secure area where miners can flee in the event of life-threatening accidents. The researchers found that built-in-place (BIP) and portable refuge alternatives were practical in most underground coal mines as a refuge of last resort, with BIP refuges a better option.

Keeping Trapped Miners Safe

Predictive Model Forecasts Hurricane Impacts to Refineries

Jamie E. Padgett and Kendall M. Capshaw of Rice University discuss ways to better understand how weather impacts the oil industry.

The U.S. Gulf Coast is home to more than half of total U.S. refining capacity. But given the area&rsquo;s vulnerability to hurricanes, weather-related stoppages and slowdowns weigh heavily on the nation&rsquo;s supply of petroleum products.

Researchers at Rice University in Houston have proposed development of a predictive model for the likelihood and expected duration of refinery shutdowns under hurricane hazards. Their work is described in &ldquo;Development and Application of a Predictive Model for Estimating Refinery Shutdown Duration and Resilience Impacts Due to Hurricane Hazards,&rdquo; published in the September 2023 issue of the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems, Part B: Mechanical Engineering.

Origami Inchworm

A new soft robot design relies on the folding and unfolding of origami cylinders to move reliably across surfaces.

October-December 2023

Air Force engineers 3D print turbine blades suitable for a drone engine.

Engineers are always trying to squeeze more power out of engines, and those in the military have added incentive. Military researchers looking to increase the power and thrust of a commercial compact jet engine turned to ceramics to meet the increased turbine inlet temperature that prevented them from using metals. Using finite element analysis and 3D printing, they showed that a turbine rotor made of silicon nitride could handle the higher temperatures and still provide increased power and thrust. 
 
&ldquo;We wanted to take something that was a small-scale engine that was already fairly power-dense to begin with and try to make it more power dense,&rdquo; said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Brian Bohan. &ldquo;There&rsquo;s a big gap in the commercial sector for this scale. We were trying to come up with ways to make an engine as powerful as some of the more expensive military engines, but at a more cost-effective price point.&rdquo;

Ceramic Boost for Small Jet Engines

To the annoyance of parents everywhere, children love playing with tape measures. They will lock the extended tape in place and notice how a slight curve keeps the metal strip rigid. Then they will release the lock and delight in how a spring retracts the tape with a satisfying thwack. 
 
Roboticists at the University of California, Los Angeles have been playing with tape measures, too. They have discovered that the rigid but bendy tape can be used as a new type of limb that acts something like a spider monkey&rsquo;s arm or an octopus&rsquo;s tentacle.

A new type of robotic arm takes its inspiration from the toolbox favorite.

Made to Measure

Scarlett Miller of Penn State discusses how engineering teams can build psychological safety in their members.

Members of teams with high levels of psychological safety feel free to express ideas and opinions. This feeling of safety promotes creativity and innovation. However, little evidence exists that shows how best to facilitate or build psychological safety within teams, especially in an educational context. Scarlett Miller, professor of engineering design and industrial engineering and director of the Center for Research in Design and Innovation at The Pennsylvania State University, recently led a team of researchers that published a study on this topic in the ASME Journal of Mechanical Design. She discusses the impact of interventions aimed at improving psychological safety in engineering design student teams.

Comfortable Enough to Innovate

Frigid temperatures can be lethal. New research sets a baseline for manufacturers developing insulated fabrics.

Extremely cold, sub-zero weather conditions can kill, even after only a short time. Poorly insulated clothing can result in life-threatening respiratory and cardiovascular problems, as well as frostbite and hypothermia. 
 
People survive longer in severe cold if they wear clothing and outerwear that are specially designed for cold-weather conditions. Knowing the amount of a time a person can survive for a set of environmental conditions is critical for developing new fabrics and clothing that extend survival time. 
 
To improve the design of advanced, cold-weather fabrics, researchers at the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi undertook a series of experiments to evaluate how three key factors&mdash;ambient temperature, fabric insulation, and metabolic heat (heat generated by a person as a function of the physical work performed)&mdash;impact survival time. Their research is described in a paper published by the Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer in July 2023.

Surviving the Cold

January-March 2024

Energy output of vertical bifacial solar panel arrays can be vastly improved with the help of specific design considerations.

Most large-scale solar power facilities are huge fixed-tilt installations, with rows upon rows of them covering acres of land. But a newer concept is agrivoltaics, which involves installing solar panels on land already in use for agriculture or livestock. Making the most of such space has led to the development of a novel solar installation geometry, called the vertical bifacial (VBF) array, which was pioneered by German company Next2Sun. 
 
Unlike the massive fixed-tilt installations that require large steel canopies to hold photovoltaic panels above the ground, as their name suggests, VBF panels have an upright orientation and are installed closer to the surface. These walls of panels allow for easier passage of machinery, animals, and people without the need to worry about clearance height, effectively increasing both the land&rsquo;s usage and the owner&rsquo;s return on investment.

Two-Sided Panel Optimizes Agrivoltaics

Researchers find that a blow to the side of the head causes more potential brain injury that one that hits straight-on.

Due to its visibility in athletes and returned service members, traumatic brain injury (TBI) has received widespread attention. But it&rsquo;s an injury that is still poorly understood. While studies suggest that some people are more vulnerable to TBI than others or that the direction of head motion and the nature of the impact affects the chances of injury, these ideas have not yet been confirmed by studying human brain motion. 
 
Now, engineers at Washington University in St. Louis have designed an experiment using magnetic resonance elastography (MRE) that directly assesses how skull motion direction impacts in vivo human brain deformation.

Direct Impact

Tools that act like ChatGPT could help engineers digest large stacks of information.

Chatbots that are trained on a set of human-generated writing samples and can reply to prompts with sentences and even paragraphs that mimic their training, have become familiar to most users of the internet. One of these models, ChatGPT, is familiar enough that it&rsquo;s how most people understand large language models (LLM) that seemingly learn, comprehend, and then generate language. But these models also may carry great promise for the physical sciences, including applied mechanics. 
 
That&rsquo;s the premise of a paper written by a team of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara; University of New Hampshire; and Northwestern University. &ldquo;These emergent capabilities are exciting for science because they vastly lower the barrier to effective scientific data mining,&rdquo; they wrote in &ldquo;Perspective: Large Language Models in Applied Mechanics.&rdquo; The article appeared in the October 2023 issue of the ASME Journal of Applied Mechanics.

How Language Models May Shape Engineering

Engineers studied which types of falls caused the most serious injuries for riders.

April-June 2023

In This Issue

article

Cool Water Boosts Solar Efficiency

article

Printing Better, Cheaper Heat Exchangers

Get exclusive news from the engineering world

Q & A

Using Smart Trains to Find Defective Rails

infographic

Better Grip for Laparoscopy

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