HYPER LOOP

Ben Lippolis flew across the country to take part in a student hyperloop competition hosted by Elon Musk. This was no science fair. At the Space Exploration Technologies Corp. headquarters on the outskirts of Los Angeles, engineers from some of the world’s top universities loaded 2,000-pound hunks of metal onto a tubular track and, one by one, raced their pods to see who could clock the fastest speed.
Lippolis, a recent graduate of Northeastern University, teamed up with some classmates and students from Canada’s Memorial University of Newfoundland to form team Paradigm. They’ve been toiling away to construct a passenger train that can travel at high speeds inside an enclosed tube, as envisioned by Musk. To fund their project, including air travel, accommodations, parts, machinery and transport for the pod, they cobbled together grants from the Canadian government and corporate donors.
In the two years since Musk’s SpaceX started organizing these competitions, the rocket company has found a unique formula for luring talent at little cost. While most companies spend extensively on recruiting, the hyperloop competitions consistently bring in eager, young prospects on their own dime jockeying to show off their abilities. Winners of last month’s contest received no prizes, and all entrants were required to hand over rights for SpaceX to use any of their technology in the future without compensation.

 The real reward: a shot at impressing their hero. “Everyone on our team really looks up to Musk and what he’s been able to do for the world so far,” said Lippolis, 23. “The thought that something you’ve directly worked on and helped develop could one day be incorporated into a system that would vastly improve everyone’s quality of life is truly amazing.”
Hackathons and other technical competitions have been criticized for demanding that participants surrender the right to collect licensing fees from the organizer if that company happens to make use of their creation in the future. But the lack of any award money at SpaceX’s event is particularly unusual. Even so, several contestants said they were happy to participate and offer their work as “open-source” for anyone to use, gratis. Tim Houter, who started a hyperloop company in the Netherlands called Hardt Global Mobility after winning a past SpaceX competition, said his team’s early work was rudimentary and that they’ve come a long way since then. “There are no issues regarding the intellectual property.”
A SpaceX spokeswoman said the company asks for rights to use participants’ technology as a tradeoff for access to the test facilities. She declined to disclose the cost of building the track, which is almost a mile long and simulates near-vacuum conditions. The technology licenses are needed to protect SpaceX from potential litigation in the future, she said. The student teams retain ownership of the technology.

Musk is making plans to build his own underground hyperloop from New York to Washington, D.C., Bloomberg reported last month. The student events provide his companies with valuable insights, said Christian Claudel, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin and adviser to his school’s hyperloop team. “They get to build that facility that they will use anyway, and they let a few teams test their equipment,” he said. “It’s a very good deal for SpaceX.”
Many students said their main hope was to secure a job someday on Musk’s team. The billionaire’s companies recognize the recruiting opportunity. Representatives for SpaceX and Tesla Inc. prowled the staging grounds, where booths ranged from simple tables covered in résumés to an elaborate setup of hammocks and Weber grills, courtesy of Sacramento State. Recruiters made small talk and collected contact details from some contenders. Students also got face time with SpaceX engineers, who helped them prepare for various technical tests before the weekend race.

The effort paid off for the champions of last year’s competition. One member of that team, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), now works as a structures engineer at SpaceX. Another is a robotics engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. Others went to Hyperloop One, a venture-backed company inspired by Musk’s vision and a sponsor of SpaceX’s 2016 event. (The start-up is now holding a competition of its own to identify commercially viable routes and revealed finalists on Thursday.)
MIT didn’t participate last month, in part because so many team members had graduated and gotten jobs, said Douglas Hart, a faculty adviser and professor of mechanical engineering. The events were probably as beneficial to Musk as they were to the students because it showed his engineers what works and what doesn’t with magnetics, brakes and other materials at high speeds, Hart said. “SpaceX was learning at the same time everyone else was.”
Lippolis and his Canadian teammates didn’t win this time, but they plan to do it all over again next summer at SpaceX’s 2018 event, which is taking applications until the end of next week. The Paradigm team hopes to show that its air-bearing levitation technique can reach 200 miles per hour, matching the speed of the winning team’s wheel-based train at the last competition.

SELF HEALING CONCRETE

 

Even the tiniest cracks on the surfaces of concrete structures can lead to big problems if they aren’t immediately repaired. Now researchers have demonstrated a sunlight-induced, self-healing protective coating designed to fix cracks on the surface of concrete structures before they grow into larger ones that compromise structural integrity.

Damage control: Concrete structures could one day be able to fix their own surface cracks.

More resilient concrete structures like bridges and overpasses could save governments billions of dollars in annual expenses on repairs and maintenance. In recent years, a growing field of research has focused on developing self-healing mechanisms for a range of materials, concrete included. Several approaches to self-healing concrete have emerged, including attempts to engineer self-healing mechanisms into concrete itself. But the authors of a new paper published in ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces say their demonstrated technology represents the first example of a self-healing protective coating for concrete.
Previous approaches to self-healing concrete systems have mostly focused on restoring strength to damaged concrete, says Chan-Moon Chung, a professor of polymer chemistry at Yonsei University in South Korea who led the research. His group chose to focus on protecting the surface, where tiny cracks can allow water, chloride ion from deicing salt or seawater, and carbon dioxide to penetrate the structure, which can lead to harmful deterioration.
The new coating contains polymer microcapsules, filled with a solution that, when exposed to light, turns into a water-resistant solid. The idea is that damage to a coated concrete surface would cause the capsules to break open and release the solution, which then would fill the crack and solidify in sunlight.
Researchers have developed a range of microcapsule-based, self-healing systems in recent years. Generally, they consist of a “healing agent,” often a polymer paired with a catalyst. The systems are designed so that damage brings the healing agent, originally in solution, into contact with the catalyst, which causes the healing agent to solidify. But “there are limitations to this system,” says Chung, such as the availability and cost of the catalyst. Since sunlight induces the key reaction in his group’s new coating, it has the advantage of being “catalyst-free” and potentially inexpensive, he says. Chung says the polymer his group chose as a healing agent is attractive because it won’t freeze even in very low temperatures, and is considered environmentally friendly.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of the coating, the researchers sprayed it on the surface of concrete samples, and used razor blades to apply small cracks. Scanning electron microscopy confirmed that the razor blade caused the microcapsules to release their contents, which filled the damaged area. After the researchers exposed samples to sunlight for several hours, further microscopy showed healing, whereas damaged areas in control samples remained unfilled. Finally, the researchers confirmed that samples with the new coating were far less vulnerable to water and chloride ion penetration than were controls.
Chung says his group’s next task is to determine the optimal composition of the coating, and show that it remains stable over an extended time. He says that, so far, the group has shown that the coating can remain stable for a year.

Using electrical signals to train the heart's muscle cells

Columbia Engineering researchers have shown, for the first time, that electrical stimulation of human heart muscle cells (cardiomyocytes) engineered from human stem cells aids their development and function. The team used electrical signals, designed to mimic those in a developing heart, to regulate and synchronize the beating properties of nascent cardiomyocytes, the cells that support the beating function of the heart. The study, led by Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic, The Mikati Foundation Professor of Biomedical Engineering and a professor of medical sciences (in medicine), is published online January 19 in Nature Communications.

Cardiovascular disease is one of the major health problems around the world, especially because the heart cannot repair itself: if cardiomyocytes are lost to injury or disease, they have only a minimal ability to regenerate. Scientists have been trying to develop ways to regenerate hearts by using cardiomyocytes grown from the patient's cells taken from skin or blood.
To be successful, these cardiomyocytes need to respond to and integrate with the surrounding heart muscle. But, currently, the immaturity and resultant irregular beating of human cardiomyocytes derived from stem cells have limited their usefulness for regenerative medicine and biological research.

"We've made an exciting discovery," says Vunjak-Novakovic. "We applied electrical stimulation to mature these cells, regulate their contractile function, and improve their ability to connect with each other. In fact, we trained the cell to adopt the beating pattern of the heart, improved the organization of important cardiac proteins, and helped the cells to become more adult-like. This preconditioning is an important step to generating robust cells that are useful for a wide range of applications including the study of cardiomyocyte biology, drug testing, and stem cell therapy. And we think that our method could lead to the reduction of arrhythmia during cell-based heart regeneration."

Vunjak-Novakovic worked with George Eng and Benjamin Lee, both of whom recently received their PhD from the Department of Biomedical Engineering. They are also MD students and the study's co-leading authors. The team grew human stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes and engineered them into three-dimensional structures. They then exposed these structures to electrical signals that mimicked those in a healthy heart--over just one week. They showed that this electrical stimulation increased cardiomyocyte connectivity and the regularity of muscle contraction.

The researchers plan to conduct fundamental studies of how the immature heart develops its beating function, and to investigate whether the "conditioned" cardiomyocytes will have the ability to seamlessly integrate with the heart muscle and provide a synchronized beating function.

"The heart is an organ of amazing complexity with about 3 billion cells that beat synchronously in response to electrical signals," Vunjak-Novakovic observes. "Our ability to recapitulate biology using bioengineering tools continues to drive our work and to be a source of inspiration. We are frequently reminded that this may be the best time ever to pursue biomedical engineering research!"
Benjamin Lee adds, "As a student in both engineering and medicine, I am particularly interested in how electrically conditioned cardiomyocytes can be used in a clinical context."

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Story Source:
Materials provided by Columbia University School of Engineering and Applied Science. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

First Battery-Free Cellphone

University of Washington researchers have invented a cellphone that requires no batteries -- a major leap forward in moving beyond chargers, cords and dying phones. Instead, the phone harvests the few microwatts of power it requires from either ambient radio signals or light.

The team also made Skype calls using its battery-free phone, demonstrating that the prototype made of commercial, off-the-shelf components can receive and transmit speech and communicate with a base station.

The new technology is detailed in a paper published July 1 in the Proceedings of the Association for Computing Machinery on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies.
"We've built what we believe is the first functioning cellphone that consumes almost zero power," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW. "To achieve the really, really low power consumption that you need to run a phone by harvesting energy from the environment, we had to fundamentally rethink how these devices are designed."

The team of UW computer scientists and electrical engineers eliminated a power-hungry step in most modern cellular transmissions -- converting analog signals that convey sound into digital data that a phone can understand. This process consumes so much energy that it's been impossible to design a phone that can rely on ambient power sources.

Instead, the battery-free cellphone takes advantage of tiny vibrations in a phone's microphone or speaker that occur when a person is talking into a phone or listening to a call.
An antenna connected to those components converts that motion into changes in standard analog radio signal emitted by a cellular base station. This process essentially encodes speech patterns in reflected radio signals in a way that uses almost no power.

To transmit speech, the phone uses vibrations from the device's microphone to encode speech patterns in the reflected signals. To receive speech, it converts encoded radio signals into sound vibrations that that are picked up by the phone's speaker. In the prototype device, the user presses a button to switch between these two "transmitting" and "listening" modes.
Using off-the-shelf components on a printed circuit board, the team demonstrated that the prototype can perform basic phone functions -- transmitting speech and data and receiving user input via buttons. Using Skype, researchers were able to receive incoming calls, dial out and place callers on hold with the battery-free phone.

"The cellphone is the device we depend on most today. So if there were one device you'd want to be able to use without batteries, it is the cellphone," said faculty lead Joshua Smith, professor in both the Allen School and UW's Department of Electrical Engineering. "The proof of concept we've developed is exciting today, and we think it could impact everyday devices in the future."
The team designed a custom base station to transmit and receive the radio signals. But that technology conceivably could be integrated into standard cellular network infrastructure or Wi-Fi routers now commonly used to make calls.

"You could imagine in the future that all cell towers or Wi-Fi routers could come with our base station technology embedded in it," said co-author Vamsi Talla, a former UW electrical engineering doctoral student and Allen School research associate. "And if every house has a Wi-Fi router in it, you could get battery-free cellphone coverage everywhere."
The battery-free phone does still require a small amount of energy to perform some operations. The prototype has a power budget of 3.5 microwatts.

The UW researchers demonstrated how to harvest this small amount of energy from two different sources. The battery-free phone prototype can operate on power gathered from ambient radio signals transmitted by a base station up to 31 feet away.

Using power harvested from ambient light with a tiny solar cell -- roughly the size of a grain of rice -- the device was able to communicate with a base station that was 50 feet away.
Many other battery-free technologies that rely on ambient energy sources, such as temperature sensors or an accelerometer, conserve power with intermittent operations. They take a reading and then "sleep" for a minute or two while they harvest enough energy to perform the next task. By contrast, a phone call requires the device to operate continuously for as long as the conversation lasts.
"You can't say hello and wait for a minute for the phone to go to sleep and harvest enough power to keep transmitting," said co-author Bryce Kellogg, a UW electrical engineering doctoral student.

"That's been the biggest challenge -- the amount of power you can actually gather from ambient radio or light is on the order of 1 or 10 microwatts. So real-time phone operations have been really hard to achieve without developing an entirely new approach to transmitting and receiving speech."

Next, the research team plans to focus on improving the battery-free phone's operating range and encrypting conversations to make them secure. The team is also working to stream video over a battery-free cellphone and add a visual display feature to the phone using low-power E-ink screens.

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Story Source:
Materials provided by University of Washington. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.

Are Mechanical Engineers in Demand?

 

"Yes, Mechanical Engineering is “still in demand”, but there are some things you should understand about economics if you are really concerned about job stability.

We call it the cycle. I have worked through a number of cycles over the last 35 years, here is what happens….

An industry springs up to meet a market demand. For now, imagine wind turbines get popular because other energy sources get expensive. So there is a big demand for Engineers (mechanical, electrical, civil) to design and build wind turbines! Great, right? Right! But soon enough wind turbines have been designed, built, installed… now what happens?

It's called layoffs. Sad but true. But then some of those Engineers go on to develop something that “comes next”. It may be that if you want to go work on that, you might need to get more training, you might need to relocate, you might need to take a pay cut, and… here is the painful part… you are an expert at wind turbines, it is all you have worked on recently, and now it is a field no one has an interest in paying you to do any more…. and new guys fresh out of University cost less, have an easier time of relocating, and so on.

Hurts to be obsolete. So if you really love being in engineering, you need to love change, reinventing yourself, going where ever the work is, stay trained on the latest computer tools and so on.

You will be “in demand”, you just need to be demanding of yourself…. If you can do it, welcome to the team! Now let's go design something cool…" - 

Ned Boff,

Lead Electrical & Controls Engineer

PhD Mechanical Engineering, University of Auckland

MEP IN THRISSUR

 

Core Institute of Technology hopes to be pre-eminent in "Industrial Training" with universal perspective. We provide the most demanding HVAC, MEP, QA/QC, NDT, CSWIP, BGAS, Industrial Electrical Designing and Wiring, Civil QA/QC and QS, Web and Software Technologies & SEO courses at one stop - Core Institute of Technology. We are also an ISO 9001:2008 Certified Institution.

We are committed to be the top and the best institute in imparting quality education in moulding students into competent and confident professionals and inculcating in them a passion to work wisely, relatively, and effectively for a better future for them and for the society.

Mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services (MEP) is a significant component of the construction supply chain. MEP design is critical for design decision-making, accurate documentation, performance and cost-estimating, construction planning, managing and operating the resulting facility. It consists of-

• HVAC
• FIREFIGHTING
• ELECTRICAL
• PLUMBING

MEP is mainly applied in the field of construction. MEP is a must in all the upcoming and ongoing construction projects around the world. Since construction is a field that continues to develop with the passing of years, the scope of MEP is wide and you will find its application in the most remote of places.