Innovation Toronto » Cutting-edge Research

3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock

innovation2 — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:35:13 +0000

Imagine a 3-d printer so large that it can spit out entire buildings made from stone.

Sounds science fiction-y, right? But that’s exactly what designer Enrico Dini created with his prototype D-Shape printer. Dini hopes to use the printer to create buildings made of stone and eventually, moon dust.

The printing process starts with a thin layer of sand. The printer then sprays the sand with magnesium-based glue from hundreds of nozzles, which binds the sand into rock. That rock is then built up layer by layer, eventually taking shape of whatever object it is destined to become, be it a curvy sculpture or an entire cathedral. Dini has even been talking with La Scuola Normale Superiore, Alta Space and Norman Foster to design a printer that would work with moon dust, essentially creating a machine that can make an almost-instant moonbase!

Read more . . .

Architectural Technologist – 3D printing the size of a house (konstrukshon.com)
Non-Enclosed 3D Printer Can Build Houses [3D Printing] (gizmodo.com)
3D Ceramic Printer Creates Pottery Bowls and That Perfect Futuristic ‘Ghost’ Parody [3D Printers] (gizmodo.com)

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Energy Generating, Self-Heating Solar Roadway Unveiled

innovation2 — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:27:57 +0000

The makers of the Solar Roadway just got a little closer to their dream of making every road in the United States a high-tech thruway that carries more than just cars.

They’ve completed their first prototype and unveiled the photographs of the revolutionary energy-generating road surface. If installed on a real thoroughfare the Solar Roadway would carry vehicles, generate electricity for messages to drivers, self-heat to melt snow and ice, and deliver high speed phone and internet cables to the front steps of every home.

The makers of the Solar Roadway have high hopes for their product. In addition to creating a revolution in transportation infrastructure, they envision the installation of the Solar Roadway as a quick path to economic recovery. With some quick calculations they’ve estimated that installing the Solar Roadway on every road in the US will employ 2.5 million people full time for 10 years. That’s not to mention the manufacturing jobs that will be created to make the components in the road panels. It will take just over 5 billion panels to cover all the US roads and each panel requires 6192 LED lights, a special glass covering and a circuit board. That’s a lot of manufacturing.

Read more . . .

Solar Roadways Update (forcedgreen.com)
High-Tech Research Moving From US To China (tech.slashdot.org)

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Hidden RFID tags could mean end of bar-codes and lines at the checkout

innovation2 — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 02:49:31 +0000

Newly developed radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology could usher in the era of checkout line-free shopping.

The inexpensive, printable transmitter can be invisibly embedded in packaging offering the possibility of customers walking a cartload of groceries or other goods past a scanner that would read all the items at once, total them up and charge the customer’s account while adjusting the store’s inventory. More advanced versions could even collect all the information about the contents of a store in an instant, letting a retailer know where every package is at any time.

Researchers from Rice University working in collaboration with a team led by Gyou-jin Cho at Sunchon National University in Korea, developed the new technology which is based on a carbon-nanotube-infused ink for ink-jet printers first developed in the Rice lab of James Tour. The ink is used to make thin-film transistors, a key element in radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags that can be printed on paper or plastic.

“We are going to a society where RFID is a key player,” said Cho, a professor of printed electronics engineering at Sunchon, who expects the technology to mature in five years. Cho and his team are developing the electronics as well as the roll-to-roll printing process that, he said, will bring the cost of printing the tags down to a penny apiece and make them ubiquitous.

RFID tags are almost everywhere already. They are being used to identify and track everything from farm animals to shipping containers and passports to library books. But to date RFID tags have been largely silicon-based. Paper or plastic tags printed as part of a package would cut costs dramatically and the roll-to-roll technique, which uses a gravure process rather than inkjet printers, could replace the barcodes that currently appear on just about everything we buy.

Invisibility cloak created in 3-D

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:09:43 +0000

Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.

The “cloak”, described in the journal Science, hid an object from detection using light of wavelengths close to those that are visible to humans.

Previous devices have been able to hide objects from light travelling in only one direction; viewed from any other angle, the object would remain visible.

This is a very early but significant step towards true invisibility cloaks.

Tolga Ergin, a scientist from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany led the study.

He told BBC News that his team’s cloak was based on the concept that you can “transform space” with a material.

He and his colleagues designed a photonic metamaterial, which influenced the behaviour of light rays.

“You can think of any transformation that you would like to have, and tailor your material to mimic this,” he explained.

The basis of the design is known as a “carpet cloak”. This was first proposed by Professor Sir John Pendry from Imperial College London, who also took part in this study.

“He proposed the theoretical design of having an object hidden under a bump and making the bump disappear,” said Mr Ergin.

“It’s like a carpet mirror,” he continued. “If you hide an object under it, there is a bump, so you see a distortion in the reflected image.

“We put the carpet cloak on top of that bump and it bends the light so that the distortions disappear.

“You have the impression that the mirror you’re looking at is flat.”

Read more . . .

Invisibility Cloak Project Becomes More Realistic [Science] (gizmodo.com)
Cloaking device makes objects invisible … to infrared light (guardian.co.uk)
3D invisibility cloak fashioned out of metamaterials (engadget.com)

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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:32:49 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

Take a huge oceanic catamaran, stick a hydroelectric turbine underneath it, and hitch it to a 6.5 million-square-foot parafoil flying nearly a mile in the air. That’s a Korean research team’s new proposal for generating gigawatts of clean energy.

As the parafoil pulls the boat, seawater would be forced through the turbine, which generates electricity. The 800 megawatts of electricity produced would separate seawater into hydrogen and oxygen by electrolysis, and the hydrogen would then be stored on-board the ships.

“The calculation shows that, with a large such ship, a gigawatt order electrical power may be harvested by this system,” wrote Park Chul of the Korea Aerospace Research Institute and Kim Jongchul of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, in the journal Energy in March.“If such ships are deployed at 20-km (12.4-mile) intervals over two temperate zones, one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Northern Hemisphere and the other everywhere in the Southern Hemisphere, the total power produced will be many times that needed by the world,” they wrote.

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Smoothing Out the Wind

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:15:12 +0000

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

THE problem with wind power is that is cannot always be relied upon. The wind—and other transient, environmental energy sources such as solar—must either be used when it is harvested or stored expensively in batteries or specially designed hydroelectric schemes that use the resulting energy to pump water uphill. Alternatives would be extremely welcome. Alexander Slocum, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks he has one. Observing that the fashion among wind-power fans is to build turbines out at sea, where the wind blows strongest, he proposes a pumped-storage system that uses seawater.

Dr Slocum’s scheme involves anchoring a hexagonal array of hollow, 31-metre-diameter concrete spheres to the ocean floor at a depth of approximately 350 metres. Floating turbines would be tethered to these spheres and surplus power from these turbines, generated during periods of high wind and low electrical demand, would be used to pump water out of the spheres, evacuating the central chamber. When the wind faltered or the lights went back on, water forced into the central chamber by the pressure of the surrounding ocean would pass through a turbine and generate electricity. Each sphere would provide a five megawatt turbine with four hours of storage capacity.

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Wind Vs Conventional Electricity Economics (slideshare.net)

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Nose scanner identity verification developed

innovation2 — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 01:36:19 +0000

As identity theft continues to rise, authorities are on the lookout for ways to use a person’s physical characteristics to distinguish between an imposter and the genuine article.

Whereas eyes change shape according to facial expression and ears can be hidden away, researchers from the University of Bath have discovered that the shape of a person’s nose is rarely affected by such things and have developed a technique which shows distinct promise for biometric identify verification.

The research team led by Dr Adrian Evans utilized a 3D photographic system developed by the University of the West of England in Bristol and Imperial College London called Photoface. Volunteers had four flash photographs taken from different angles, the resulting images were then processed by software which analyzes all the shadows, colors, surface orientation and depth of each point on a face to produce a composite image of unparalleled detail.

Instead of using data from the whole of the face, the team concentrated on the characteristics of the ridge profile, the nose tip and the naison (section between the eyes and the top of the nose). Examination of the curvature of the ridge, combined with the measurements of the tip and naison allowed the researchers to divide the results into six main nose groups – Roman, Greek, Nubian, Hawk, Snub and Turn-up. Furthermore, the technique revealed a high rate of accuracy in identifying individuals from the 36 volunteers scanned and showed good potential for use as a biometric.

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Tyndall National Institute create first junctionless transistor

innovation2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 15:18:04 +0000

A team of scientists at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland has created what they claim is the world’s first junctionless transistor.

The invention represents a breakthrough in transistors and nanoelectronics, and has the potential to revolutionize microchip manufacturing.

The approach uses a control gate around a silicon nanowire to control the passage of electrons without the use of junctions.

The Tyndall team, led by Professor Jean-Pierre Colinge, says the transistors are relatively easy to make and could help to extend Moore’s law and reduce manufacturing costs.

The transistor is the fundamental building block in electronic devices. On silicon computing chips, the number of transistors reflects the relative amount of processing power the chip has. Since the 1970s the number of transistors built on a silicon chip has grown from just a few hundred to more than two billion transistors on a single chip. Today’s electronic devices are driving the need for more transistors on each chip, while also requiring semiconductor chips that are smaller, more energy efficient, and more cost effective. The conventional transistor architectures used for the last 40 years can no longer keep up with this demand.

Read more . . .

Single Molecule Turned Into a Functional Transistor [Transistors] (gizmodo.com)
Graphene Transistors 10x Faster Than Silicon (hardware.slashdot.org)
First Functional Molecular Transistor Comes Alive (wired.com)
IBM’s 100Ghz Graphene Transistor Might Replace Silicon Someday [Ibm] (gizmodo.com)

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Backpack Power Plant offers hydroelectricity on the move

innovation2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 14:04:19 +0000

Hydroelectric power specialist Bourne Energy has developed a human-portable hydroelectric generator which can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than four feet.

The “Backpack Power Plant”, which joins the company’s Riverstar, Oceanstar and Tidalstar designs, is aimed at bringing cheap, practical energy technology to remote areas.

Bourne Energy has developed two versions of the BPP; BPP-1 is aimed at civilians, while BPP-2 is designed for the military and was recently unveiled at the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. Both measure three feet in length and weigh less than 30 pounds, though the military version is 10% lighter. Both are self-contained with their own integrated power, control, cooling and sensor systems. They collapse into a backpack-sized module comprising three parts; the generator, hub and folded stored blades.

While the military BPP-2 unit produces 20% more power (600W) of high quality continuous power depending on river current, the civilian BPP-1 unit produces approximately 500 W/unit but was not designed to work with a variety of flow rates and produces optimum energy in streams moving at 2.3 meters per second. Both can be arranged singularly or in arrays of 20-30 kW. The BPP-2 however operates silently with no heat or exhaust emissions, is 40% less visible during operation and can also be bottom-mounted to ensure total invisibility if required.

Read more . . .

Backpack Power Plant: You ARE the Grid [Energy] (gizmodo.com)
Backpack Hydroelectric Plant Gives You 500 Watts on the Move (wired.com)

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MIT developing self-assembling computer chips

innovation2 — Thu, 18 Mar 2010 03:10:12 +0000

The photolithography process used to create the features on computer chips has remained largely unchanged in the last 50 years. But as chip manufacturers continue to cram more and more circuits onto a chip the limitation of this process is rapidly being reached. Potential solutions to keep apace with Moore’s Law include using DNA molecules as scaffolding, replacing copper interconnects with graphene and using plasma beams. Now researchers at MIT are developing a process that could see tiny circuits being created using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns.

Photolithography involves chips being built up layer by layer. A layer of silicon, metal, or some other material is deposited on a chip and coated with a light-sensitive material, called a photoresist. Light shining through a kind of stencil – a “mask” – projects a detailed pattern onto the photoresist, which hardens where it’s exposed. The unhardened photoresist is washed away, and chemicals etch away the bare material underneath.

This process has served chip makers well for the last 50 years but the problem is that chip features are now significantly smaller than the wavelength of the light used to make them. Manufacturers have developed various tricks to get light to produce patterns smaller than its own wavelength, but they won’t work at smaller scales.

The obvious way to continue shrinking chip features would be to use beams of electrons to transfer mask patterns to layers of photoresist. But unlike light, which can shine through a mask and expose an entire chip at once, an electron beam has to move back and forth across the surface of a chip in parallel lines, like a harvester working along rows of wheat. This makes electron-beam lithography significantly more expensive than conventional optical lithography.

MIT researchers led by Caroline Ross, the Toyota Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Karl Berggren, the Emanuel E. Landsman Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, have developed a new approach that uses electron-beam lithography much more sparingly, to create patterns of tiny posts on a silicon chip. They then deposit specially designed polymers — molecules in which smaller, repeating molecular units are linked into long chains — on the chip. The polymers spontaneously hitch up to the posts and arrange themselves into useful patterns.

Read more . . .

MIT building self-assembling computer chips (news.cnet.com)
M.I.T. Researchers Create Molecular Chips (bits.blogs.nytimes.com)
Microprocessor mega-shocker: self-assembling silicon chips could lead to ever smaller circuitry (engadget.com)

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Innovation Toronto » Cutting-edge Research

3-D Printer Creates Entire Buildings From Solid Rock

Imagine a 3-d printer so large that it can spit out entire buildings made from stone.

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Energy Generating, Self-Heating Solar Roadway Unveiled

The makers of the Solar Roadway just got a little closer to their dream of making every road in the United States a high-tech thruway that carries more than just cars.

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Hidden RFID tags could mean end of bar-codes and lines at the checkout

Newly developed radio-frequency identification (RFID) technology could usher in the era of checkout line-free shopping.

Invisibility cloak created in 3-D

Scientists have created the first device to render an object invisible in three dimensions.

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Mile-High Mega Kites Could Pull Giant, Floating Power Plants

Smoothing Out the Wind

A cunning plan to store energy underwater may help fulfil the promise of wind power

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Nose scanner identity verification developed

As identity theft continues to rise, authorities are on the lookout for ways to use a person’s physical characteristics to distinguish between an imposter and the genuine article.

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Tyndall National Institute create first junctionless transistor

A team of scientists at the Tyndall National Institute in Cork, Ireland has created what they claim is the world’s first junctionless transistor.

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Backpack Power Plant offers hydroelectricity on the move

Hydroelectric power specialist Bourne Energy has developed a human-portable hydroelectric generator which can create clean, quiet power from any stream deeper than four feet.

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MIT developing self-assembling computer chips

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