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Category: engineering – Page 105

Scientists report on a quasiparticle that can transfer heat under electrical control

Scientists have found the secret behind a property of solid materials known as ferroelectrics, showing that quasiparticles moving in wave-like patterns among vibrating atoms carry enough heat to turn the material into a thermal switch when an electrical field is applied externally.

A key finding of the study is that this control of thermal conductivity is attributable to the structure of the material rather than any random collisions among atoms. Specifically, the researchers describe quasiparticles called ferrons whose polarization changes as they “wiggle” in between vibrating atoms—and it’s that ordered wiggling and polarization, receptive to the externally applied , that dictates the material’s ability to transfer the heat at a different rate.

“We figured out that this change in position of these atoms, and the change of the nature of the vibrations, must carry heat, and therefore the external field which changes this vibration must affect the thermal conductivity,” said senior author Joseph Heremans, professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and engineering, and physics at The Ohio State University.

Self-cooling tent runs using just water and sunshine

For many avid outdoorspeople, summertime and camping go hand in hand. But as climate change continues to drive summer temperatures higher, outdoor recreation could become less relaxing—and cooling technologies like fans and portable air conditioners require electricity that is seldom available at the average campsite.

Seeing an unmet need, UConn researcher Al Kasani, working with Technology Commercialization Services (TCS) and the university’s Center for Clean Energy Engineering (C2E2), has developed a new off-grid technology that allows a ’s internal to cool up to 20°F below the ambient temperature.

The tent requires just one external element to function, one that is typically found in abundance around campsites: water. A single gallon of water can power the tent’s technology for up to 24 hours.

The Death of Death during the coming #DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at #i24

José Cordeiro, PhD, talking about his international bestseller “The Death of Death” during the coming DLD Tel Aviv Innovation Festival in Israel. Top news at i24 news discussing about aging as the “mother” of all chronic diseases!

José Cordeiro is an international fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science, vicechair of HumanityPlus, director of The Millennium Project, founding faculty at Singularity University in NASA Research Park, Silicon Valley, and former director of the Club of Rome (Venezuela Chapter), the World Transhumanist Association and the Extropy Institute.

Has also been invited faculty at the Institute of Developing Economies IDE – JETRO in Tokyo, Japan, the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT) and the Higher School of Economics (HSE) in Russia.

Founder in #TransVision Madrid 2021: engineer, economist, futurist, visionary, transhumanist, singularitarian, immortalist. MIT engineer working to transcend biology and travel to Mars and beyond.

José studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, economics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, management at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and science at Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela.

He is a leading expert on technological change, future trends and economic forecasting. He has published more than 10 books in 5 languages, including his current bestseller “La muerte de la muerte” in Spanish, Portuguese, French, Russian, Chinese and Turkish.

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Margaret Hamilton: Pioneering Software Engineer Who Saved the Moon Landing

We might all have been in a situation where we had to put our trust in our work to hold up and do what it needed to do, but Margaret Hamilton’s work was particularly important — it was responsible for putting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon in July 1969.

When warning lights started going off in the middle of the Eagle module’s descent toward the lunar surface, NASA faced a tough decision: continue with the landing or abort.

Margaret offered the world a great deal with her prowess, and I am glad Obama recognized her before her death, thank God she’s still with us today. #GodBlessHer

When Margaret Hamilton was put in charge of writing the software that would fly the Apollo astronauts to the moon, no one had ever done anything like this before, so she invented software engineering to get it done.

Researchers derive a unified topological speed limit for the evolution of physical states

Physical systems evolve at a particular speed, which depends on various factors including the system’s so-called topological structure (i.e., spatial properties that are preserved over time despite any physical changes that occur). Existing methods for determining the speed at which physical systems change over time, however, do not account for these structural properties.

Two researchers at Keio University in Japan have recently derived a speed limit for the evolution of physical states that also accounts for the topological structure of a system and of its underlying dynamics. This speed limit, outlined in a paper published in Physical Review Letters, could have numerous valuable applications for the study and development of different , including quantum technologies.

“Figuring out how fast a system state can change is a central topic in classical and , which has attracted the great interest of scientists,” Tan Van Vu and Keiji Saito, the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. “Understanding the mechanism of controlling time is relevant to engineering fast devices such as quantum computers.”

A new way to remove contaminants from nuclear wastewater

I posted about Japan releasing radioactive water, and thought it was a bad idea, because of this MIT revelation.

Nuclear power continues to expand globally, propelled, in part, by the fact that it produces few greenhouse gas emissions while providing steady power output. But along with that expansion comes an increased need for dealing with the large volumes of water used for cooling these plants, which becomes contaminated with radioactive isotopes that require special long-term disposal.

Now, a method developed at MIT provides a way of substantially reducing the volume of contaminated water that needs to be disposed of, instead concentrating the contaminants and allowing the rest of the water to be recycled through the plant’s cooling system. The proposed system is described in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, in a paper by graduate student Mohammad Alkhadra, professor of chemical engineering Martin Bazant, and three others.

The method makes use of a process called shock electrodialysis, which uses an electric field to generate a deionization shockwave in the water. The shockwave pushes the electrically charged particles, or ions, to one side of a tube filled with charged porous material, so that concentrated stream of contaminants can be separated out from the rest of the water. The group discovered that two radionuclide contaminants — isotopes of cobalt and cesium — can be selectively removed from water that also contains boric acid and lithium. After the water stream is cleansed of its cobalt and cesium contaminants, it can be reused in the reactor.

The Floquet engineering of quantum materials

Quantum materials are materials with unique electronic, magnetic or optical properties, which are underpinned by the behavior of electrons at a quantum mechanical level. Studies have showed that interactions between these materials and strong laser fields can elicit exotic electronic states.

In recent years, many physicists have been trying to elicit and better understand these exotic states, using different material platforms. A class of materials that was found to be particularly promising for studying some of these states are transition metal dichalcogenides.

Monolayer transition metal dichalcogenides are 2D materials that consist in single layers of atoms from a transition metal (e.g., tungsten or molybdenum) and a chalcogen (e.g., sulfur or selenium), which are arranged into a . These materials have been found to offer exciting opportunities for Floquet engineering (a technique to manipulate the properties of materials using lasers) of excitons (quasiparticle electron-hole correlated states).

The problems with Helion Energy — a response to Real Engineering

I still like Helion… but not for a power plant. Instead, this is an interesting route to a fusion drive.

This is also a very good channel. It is worth watching his other fusion videos first.

A short humorous analysis of challenges with the fusion approach of Helion Energy.

00:00 — Introduction.
01:03 — Low reactivity.
02:55 — Neutrons.
05:33 — Bremsstrahlung.
06:17 — Diagnostics.
06:57 — Conclusion.

References.

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