Recent Warfare Technologies

[a_majoor]

OTOH the only other alternative to laser and GPS guided artillery is long range Fiber Optic Guided Missiles (FOG-M), which carry day/night or thermal imagers in their seekers. This isn't a far out there idea, several nations like Israel and Brazil offer FOG-M's with ranges out to 60 km (using small jet engines for power). Even rocket powered LR FOG-M's have ranges from 15 to 25 Km.

The big advantage of having both laser and GPS is it makes it more complicated for the enemy to execute countermeasures; smoke will work against the laser designator but not the GPS, and jamming the GPS signals does not ensure a SoF spotter with a laser isn't nearby. Using smoke and jamming all the time will turn Excalibur into a "dumb" round, but is pretty resource intensive for you as well.

As an aside, Israel now has a version of Spike offered as a Precision Guided Anti-Personnel round (how bad would that suck....)

 

[a_majoor]

A 3D printed car, with only 64 parts. This sort of manufacturing technology could revolutionize the entire supply chain:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/cars/news/industry/the-first-3d-printed-car-breakthrough-awards-2014

The 3D-Printed Car
The average car is made of 25,000 parts. With its 3D-printed shell, Local Motors' Strati has just 64.

BY EZRA DYER
October 7, 2014 6:30 AM


BREAKTHROUGH
WHO Local Motors, Phoenix
FIELD Automotive Manufacturing
ACHIEVEMENT Designing the first 3D-printed car.

Jay Rogers has the keys to a 3D-printed car—in fact, the first-ever 3D- printed car. It's a humble machine, an overgrown go-kart built around a 3D- printed tub. The 48-volt electric drivetrain is bolted to an aluminum subframe in back, and the seats are printed into the tub and covered with scraps of padding. The contraption looks like a misbegotten extraterrestrial rover, but Rogers, cofounder and CEO of small-batch car company Local Motors, thinks the prototype represents a revolutionary kind of transportation: simple, light, inexpensive, and highly personalized. "There are 25,000 parts in a normal production car," Rogers says. Local's first production 3D-printed car, a sporty two-seater named Strati, will use, by his count, about 64.

The tub for Rogers' prototype vehicle was made in four interlocking sections because no 3D printer was large enough to spit out a whole car. But that's about to change now that Local has partnered with Cincinnati Incorporated, a machine-tool manufacturer, and the U.S. Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, a science and technology research center near Knoxville, Tennessee. Together they created a larger printer—a car-size printer. And in the process devised a new approach to direct digital manufacturing.

"People were using 3D to mimic steel or parts we have now," Rogers says. "They're trying to print things that look perfect. The way we're thinking is, stop trying to make the 3D printer do everything." Instead, the new printer quickly generates a shape that approximates the final product, and a milling machine finishes the job. The idea is to print a single piece of carbon-reinforced plastic with no separate chassis or body. Peripheral parts—suspension, wheels, the motor and battery—are bolted on.

Local selected the Strati's design through a crowdsourcing competition, but cars could eventually take any shape, with designers turning CAD files into reality with a turnaround time—and price—unheard of in traditional manufacturing. Rogers figures the raw material to print a two-seater in carbon-reinforced plastic costs about $2,200.

Every car on the road contains tens of thousands of individual parts, each of them a supply-chain, inventory, and assembly challenge. Rogers thinks the 3D alternative could take root faster than anyone expects. "My vision is that this is disruptive innovation," he says. "This is something we have to pay attention to." When the first Strati hits the street, it'll mark a simple but profound change in vehicle manufacturing: Forget the parts. Just make the car.

 

[a_majoor]

SMA had posted LockMart's announcement that they were developing a fusion energy concept. Here is a roundup of commercial fusion energy projects from NextBigFuture. Canada has an entry with a company called General Fusion working out of BC. The reality is the fundamental physiscs problems of containing the reaction have not been overcome, hence the long timelines for some of these projects:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/10/updated-prospects-for-commercial.html

Commercialization Targets for Nuclear Fusion Projects

LPP Fusion (Lawrenceville Plasma Physics) - the target is to make LPP Fusion with a commercial system 4 years after net energy gain is proved. The hop is two years to prove net energy gain. Then 2019-2022 for a commercial reactor (2022 if we allow for 3 years of slippage). They could lower energy costs by ten times.

Lockheed Compact Fusion has a target date of 2024 and made big news recently with some technical details and an effort to get partners.

Helion Energy 2023 (about 5 cents per kwh and able to burn nuclear fission waste)

Tri-Alpha Energy (previously talked about 2015-2020, but now likely 2020-2025)

General Fusion 2023 (targeting 4 cents per kwh)

EMC2 Fusion (Released some proven physics results, raising $30 million)

Dynomak Fusion claims that they will be able generate energy cheaper than coal. They are not targeting commercialization until about 2040.

MagLIF is another fusion project with good funding but without a specific target date for commercialization.

There is Muon Fusion research in Japan and at Star Scientific in Australia.
There is the well funded National Ignition facility with large laser fusion and there is the International Tokomak project (ITER).

General Fusion in Vancouver has its funding with Jeff Bezos and the Canadian Government. (As of 2013, General Fusion had received $45 million in venture capital and $10 million in government funding)

IEC Fusion (EMC2 fusion) has its Navy funding (about $2-4 million per year)

As of August 15, 2012, the Navy had agreed to fund EMC2 with an additional $5.3 million over 2 years to work on the problem of pumping electrons into the whiffleball. They plan to integrate a pulsed power supply to support the electron guns (100+A, 10kV). WB-8 has been operating at 0.8 Tesla

Tri-alpha energy has good funding.
As of 2014, Tri Alpha Energy is said to have hired more than 150 employees and raised over $140 million, way more than any other private fusion power research company. Main financement came from Goldman Sachs and venture capitals such as Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's Vulcan Inc., Rockefeller's Venrock, Richard Kramlich's New Enterprise Associates, and from various people like former NASA software engineer Dale Prouty who succeeded George P. Sealy after his death as the CEO of Tri Alpha Energy. Hollywood actor Harry Hamlin, astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Nobel Prize Arno Allan Penzias figure among the board members. It is also worth noting that the Government of Russia, through the joint-stock company Rusnano, also invested in Tri Alpha Energy in February 2013, and that Anatoly Chubais, CEO of Rusnano, became a member of the Tri Alpha board of directors

Helion Energy/MSNW has some University funding ( a couple of million or more per year) and NASA has funded one of their experiments


(Interpolation: these last two are not commercial projects, but show where government funded research mony is going)
ITER is very well funded but their goal of making massive football stadium sized reactors that have commercial systems in 2050-2070 will not get to low cost, high impact energy.
National Ignition facility is also very well funded but again I do not them achieving an interesting and high impact, lowcost form of energy.

 

[a_majoor]

"Heating or cooling a person" has other uses besides reducing energy use in buildings.

http://www.wired.com/2013/10/an-ingenious-wristband-that-keeps-your-body-at-the-perfect-temperature-no-ac-required/

MIT Wristband Could Make AC Obsolete
By Kyle VanHemert 
10.30.13  | 
9:30 am  | 

The Wristify prototype is a personal climate-controlling wearable. Image: Wristify

Here’s a scary statistic: In 2007, 87 percent of households in the U.S. used air conditioning, compared to just 11 percent of households in Brazil and a mere 2 percent in India. Another one: By 2025, booming nations like those are projected to account for a billion new consumers worldwide, with a corresponding explosion in demand for air conditioning expected to arrive along with them. Keeping indoor spaces at comfortable temperatures requires a huge amount of electricity–especially in sweltering climates like India and Brazil–and in the U.S. alone it accounts for a full 16.5 percent of energy use.

All of that adds up to a big problem. At a point when humans need to take a sober look at our energy use, we’re poised to use a devastating amount of it keeping our homes and offices at the right temperatures in years to come. A team of students at MIT, however, is busy working on a prototype device that could eliminate much of that demand, and they’re doing it by asking one compelling question: Why not just heat and cool our bodies instead?

Shames runs hot. His mom runs cold. He figured there must be a way for them to coexist.

Wristify, as they call their device, is a thermoelectric bracelet that regulates the temperature of the person wearing it by subjecting their skin to alternating pulses of hot or cold, depending on what’s needed. The prototype recently won first place at this year’s MADMEC, an annual competition put on by the school’s Materials Science and Engineering program, netting the group a $10,000 prize, which they’ll use to continue its development. It’s a promising start to a clever approach that could help alleviate a serious energy crisis. But as Sam Shames, the MIT senior who helped invent the technology, explains, the team was motivated by a more prosaic problem: keeping everyone happy in a room where no one can agree where to set the thermostat.

Shames runs hot. His mom runs cold. He figured there must be a way for them to coexist peacefully. So he started researching, digging into physiology journals to get a better understanding of how we experience temperature. One paper held the key to the Wristify concept. It detailed how locally heating and cooling different parts of the body has all sorts of effects on how hot or cold we are–or, more accurately, how hot or cold we think we are. “There’s a big perceptual component to it,” Shames says.

“The human body and human skin is not like a thermometer. If I put something cold directly on your body at a constant temperature, the body acclimates and no longer perceives it as cold.” Think of what happens when you jump in a lake. At first, it’s bracingly cold, but after a while, you get used to it. By continually introducing that sudden jolt of cold, Shames discovered, you could essentially trick the body into feeling cold. Wristify basically makes you feel like you’re continually jumping into the lake–or submerging into a hot bath.

The team’s now turning to refining the design. Shames says the same effect could be produced with half the surface area. Photo: Franklin Hobbs

In building the prototype, Shames and his co-inventors–Mike Gibson, a second-year Ph.D. student; David Cohen-Tanugi, a fourth-year Ph.D. student, and Matt Smith, a postdoctoral researcher–had the challenge of figuring out how to best exploit that perceptual tick. The research suggested that anything with a temperature change greater than 0.1 degree Celsius per second would produce the effect. Their wristband, which harnesses thermoelectrics to both heat and cool a patch of skin, is capable of changing that surface at a rate of 0.4 degrees Celsius per second.

“The most common reaction you get is that you see someone smile.”

They’re still refining the cycles used to deliver that temperature change–right now, Shames says, they’ve settled on roughly 5 seconds on, 10 seconds off. Along the way they had the chance to test it on all sorts of friends, family and classmates, and Shames says that people could definitely feel the technology at work. “The most common reaction you get is that you see someone smile,” he says.

The group is keen to push the product forward. In its current state, the device is very much a prototype–a crude mess of electronics strapped to a cheap, fake Rolex band. But none of the components are prohibitively expensive–the prototype works with about $50 worth of off-the-shelf parts–and Shames says they could produce the same effect with about half the on-the-skin surface area used by the current version. “The focus on our development thus far has been technical proof of concept,” Shames says, but they’re committed to turning Wristify into a real product. “We’ve been thinking long and hard about the next best steps to pursue,” he says. “One thing we’re really conscious about is the aesthetics of our device. It has to look good and it has to be comfortable.”

If it comes together, though, it would be a compelling sell–a wearable that offered personalized, dynamic climate control. It might not solve the AC energy problem in one fell swoop, but it could nudge us away from the central-heating-and-cooling mindset that is taking us there–more of a next-gen fan or handwarmer than a full heating and cooling replacement. It’s certainly an intriguing approach. As Shames says, “Why heat or cool a building when you could heat or cool a person?”

 

[a_majoor]

Climbing walls like a lizard...

http://nextbigfuture.com/2014/11/human-wall-crawling-has-arrived-with.html

Human Wall Crawling has arrived with scaling of gecko like synthetic adhesion

In a practical demonstration, a synthetic adhesion system enabled a 70 kg human to climb vertical glass with 140 square centimeters of adhesive per hand. They have developed a synthetic adhesion system that allows efficient scaling over four orders of magnitude of area. The synthetic adhesion system creates a nearly-uniform load distribution across the whole adhesive area, improving upon the adhesive-bearing structures of a gecko's toe and enabling a human to climb vertical glass using an area of adhesive no larger than the area of a human hand. These results show that gecko-inspired adhesives can be scaled from laboratory-scale tests to human-scale applications with little decrease in performance.

The surface you're climbing needs to be relatively smooth; like glass, varnished wood, polished stone, or metal.

In 2006, I had predicted gecko mimicing wallcrawling suits for military and enthusiasts by 2012. This appears to be several months overdue for my prediction. The paper was submitted June 2014. The cutoff for me was Dec 31, 2012. They were working the research for many years. The paper was being written in 2013 through early 2014.

Three frames from a video (electronic supplementary material, movie S1) showing a 70 kg climber ascending a 3.7 m vertical glass surface using a synthetic adhesion system with degressive load-sharing and gecko-inspired adhesives. The time between (a) and (c) is about 90 s and includes six steps.

Design of the climbing device and the synthetic adhesion system. (a) Climbing device: the load is transferred from the synthetic adhesion system through the load tendon into the rigid load member, which lies along the surface out of the way of the climber and supports the climber at the foot pivot. A rubberized roller prevents sideslip, and the foot pivot allows the ankle joint to be used. The foot pivot is located away from the wall, which allows the climber to move his or her centre of mass closer to the wall than the foot pivot, negating any tendency to fall backwards. (b,c) Synthetic adhesion system: the load is transferred from the adhesive tiles, through the tile tendons, into the degressive elastic elements, through the load plate and into the load tendon. The soft foam supports hold the adhesive tiles in place while in the swing phase, but are of negligible stiffness during the stance phase. The total area of the adhesive is 140 cm2 on each hand, divided into 24 independent tiles of dimensions 2.5 × 2.5 cm.

Follow the link for a video

 

[a_majoor]

Having full duplex capability for radio would go a long way to revolutionizing the ability to transfer and handle data and other information networks on the battlefield:

http://www.technologyreview.com/news/532616/simple-circuit-could-double-cell-phone-data-speeds/

Simple Circuit Could Double Cell-Phone Data Speeds
A circuit that lets a radio send and receive data simultaneously over the same frequency could supercharge wireless data transfer.

By Tom Simonite on November 24, 2014

WHY IT MATTERS
Demand for wireless bandwidth is growing rapidly.

This circuit could allow cell phones and other devices to double their data bandwidth.

A relatively simple circuit invented by researchers at the University of Texas could let smartphones and other wireless devices send and receive data twice as fast as they do now.

The circuit makes it possible for a radio to send and receive signals on the same channel simultaneously – something known as “full-duplex” communications. That should translate to a doubling of the rate at which information can be moved around wirelessly.

Today’s radios must send and receive at different times to avoid drowning out incoming signals with their own transmissions. As a smartphone accesses the Internet via a cell tower, for example, its radio flips back and forth between sending and receiving, similar way to the way two people having a conversation take turns to speak and listen.

The new circuit, known as a circulator, can isolate signals coming into a device from those it is sending out, acting as a kind of selective filter in between a device’s antenna and its radio circuitry. Circulators are already a crucial part of radar systems, but until now they have always been built using strong magnets made from rare earth metals, making them bulky and unsuited to the circuit boards inside devices such as laptops and smartphones.

The new circuit design avoids magnets, and uses only conventional circuit components. “It’s very cheap, compact, and light,” says Andrea Alù, the associate professor who led the work. “It’s ideal for a cell phone.”

The two-centimeter-wide device could easily be miniaturized and added to existing devices with little modification to the design. “This is just a standalone piece of hardware you put behind your antenna.”

Alù’s circulator design looks, and functions, like a traffic circle with three “roads,” in the form of wires, leading into it. Signals can travel into, or out of, the circle via any of those wires. But components called resonators spaced around that circle force signals to travel around it only in a clockwise direction.

When a wireless device’s antenna is connected to one of the wires leading into the circle, it isolates signals that have just been received from those the device has generated for transmission itself. The new design is described by Alù and colleagues in a paper in the journal Nature Physics.

“This is definitely a significant research development,” says Philip Levis, an associate professor at Stanford. “It’s a very new way to look at a very old problem, and has some very good results.” However Levis notes that work remains to be done to convert the lab-bench breakthrough into something practical for the crucial frequency bands used for Wi-Fi, cellular, and other communications.

Alù says that his circulator can easily be adjusted to work at a wide range of frequencies, and that he is exploring options for commercializing the design. The circuit could, for instance, help simplify and improve technology being tested by some U.S. and European cellular carriers that uses a combination of software and hardware to allow full-duplex radio links (see “The Clever Circuit That Doubles Bandwidth”).

Joel Brand, vice president for product management at startup Kumu Networks, which developed that technology, says the new device could indeed be useful. “We would be happy to take advantage of it,” he says.

 

[a_majoor]

Graphene body armour? It would be great if it works, but I suspect that there will be a lot of issues in scaling:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26626-bulletproof-graphene-makes-ultrastrong-body-armour.html#.VH56Or5BBIB

Bulletproof graphene makes ultra-strong body armour

19:00 27 November 2014 by Rebecca Boyle

Layers of carbon one-atom thick can absorb blows that would punch through steel. Recent tests suggest that pure graphene performs twice as well as the fabric currently used in bulletproof vests, making it an ideal armour for soldiers and police.

Graphene is a sheet of single carbon atoms bonded together in a honeycomb shape. Because it is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity, graphene is already used in computers and electronics. But it's also incredibly strong for its slight weight, potentially making it an ideal material for body armour.

However, it's tricky to fire high-speed shots through such a thin material to test its toughness because atom-thick material is completely destroyed by such an impact. Previous work used nano-pokers to push into graphene at walking speed (less than 1 meter per second), or a shotgun approach using several laser pulses. But these methods couldn't provide evidence of graphene's real strength in the face of a high-speed projectile, says Jae-Hwang Lee at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Lee and colleagues devised a new miniature ballistics test to test graphene's mettle. They used a laser pulse to superheat gold filaments until they vaporised, acting like gunpowder to fire a micrometre-size glass bullet into 10 to 100 sheets of graphene at 3 kilometres per second – about three times the speed of a bullet fired from an M16 rifle.

The team found that graphene sheets dissipate this kinetic energy by stretching into a cone shape at the bullet's impact point, and then by cracking outward radially. The cracks are one weakness of single-layer graphene, Lee says, but it nevertheless performs twice as well as Kevlar and withstands 10 times the kinetic energy that steel can. Using multiple layers of graphene or incorporating it into a composite structure could keep the cracks from spreading, too.

Researchers have been studying graphene as armour for some time, but Lee's is the first paper to describe just how the material absorbs kinetic energy. Sound waves travel three times faster through graphene than they do through steel, which means material far beyond the impact point can quickly absorb and dissipate its energy – effectively slowing the projectile down and helping prevent its penetration. What's more, the microbullet methods Lee developed could be used to study other high-performance materials in extreme conditions.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1258544

Correction, 1 December 2014: When this article was first published, it misstated the comparison of the experimental projectile speed with that of a an M16 rifle.

 

[CougarKing]

Speaking of hypersonic weapons...and a defence against them.

Defense Update

US considers Extended Range THAAD, enhanced BMS to defend against attacking hypersonic gliders
Jan 9, 2015

THAAD ER is currently in a company funded concept phase. The Missile Defense Agency has supported the study with approximately $2 million in FY14 funding to study the potential concept of operations.

The US Missile defense Agency (MDA) is seeking future missile defense measures that will be able to defeat hypersonic glide vehicles, similar to those being developed by China, Russia and India. A Chinese hypersonic glide vehicle (HGV) tested in January 2014 demonstrated China’s technological ability to fly such vehicles at a speed 10 times the speed of sound (Mach 10). While interceptors can deal with targets flying at such speed, the less predicted flight path and the friction with upper atmosphere make it more difficult for intercept, at least from the ground, analysts suggest.

Experts believe the Chinese hypersonic glide test vehicle was clearly designed as a weapon delivery vehicle meant to break through U.S. defenses. Analysts suggest the HGV is more suitable for delivering a conventional weapon rather a nuclear one, given the high precision and extended range it can achieve over ballistic missile delivery system.

Among the possible solutions, Lockheed Martin is evaluating an extended range variant of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD ER) that could be used to intercept such ultra-fast gliding warheads. THAAD ER is a concept that Lockheed Martin is recommending to the Missile Defense Agency as a way to evolve the THAAD program. Similar effects could also be achieved with other exo-atmospheric interceptors designed with high divert capability.

Current missile defense systems are designed to defeat ballistic missiles flying in predictable, high trajectories. More advanced interceptors currently in development are designed to deal with maneuvering targets, but hypersonic gliders flying just above the edge of earth’s atmosphere would pose extremely difficult targets to beat, due to the combination of flat trajectory and high speed (8-10 Mach) which would challenge the limited maneuverability interceptors can develop in that boundary layer, where aerodynamic maneuvering (in the atmosphere) is limited and reaction control thrusters, used to divert the interceptor toward its target in space are not brought to their full effect.

 

[a_majoor]

Israel demonstrates more economical reverse osmosis water desalinization. It would be interesting to see if this approach could be scaled to ROWPU sized units. In the comments section, a person posting as "Goat Guy" suggests another possibility for economical large scale water purification:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/isreal-scales-up-reverse-osmosis.html

Israel scales up Reverse Osmosis Desalination to slash costs with a fourth of the piping

The traditional criticism of reverse-osmosis technology is that it costs too much. The process uses a great deal of energy to force salt water against polymer membranes that have pores small enough to let fresh water through while holding salt ions back. However, Sorek desalination plant in Israel will profitably sell water to the Israeli water authority for 58 U.S. cents per cubic meter (1,000 liters, or about what one person in Israel uses per week), which is a lower price than today’s conventional desalination plants can manage. What’s more, its energy consumption is among the lowest in the world for large-scale desalination plants.

Sorek sets significant new industry benchmarks in desalination technology, capacity and water cost. It provides clean, potable water for over 1.5 million people, comprising 20% of the municipal water demand in Israel

Sorek Overview

Capacity: 624,000 m³/day (26,000 m³/hour)
Technology: Reverse Osmosis (RO)
Project Type: Build-Operate-Transfer (BOT)
Location: Sorek, Israel
Footprint: 100,000 m² (10 ha)
Commission Date: 2013

Technological leadership - innovative design incorporating vertical arrangement of 16” membranes in a large-scale facility, resulting in a reduced footprint hence saving costs. Also utilizes IDE’s proprietary Pressure Center Design, Double Line Intake and ERS (Energy Recovery System) for increased efficiency and reduced energy consumption

The Sorek plant incorporates a number of engineering improvements that make it more efficient than previous RO facilities. It is the first large desalination plant to use pressure tubes that are 16 inches in diameter rather than eight inches. The payoff is that it needs only a fourth as much piping and other hardware, slashing costs. The plant also has highly efficient pumps and energy recovery devices. “This is indeed the cheapest water from seawater desalination produced in the world,” says Raphael Semiat, a chemical engineer and desalination expert at the Israel Institute of Technology, or Technion, in Haifa. “We don’t have to fight over water, like we did in the past.” Australia, Singapore, and several countries in the Persian Gulf are already heavy users of seawater desalination, and California is also starting to embrace the technology. Smaller-scale RO technologies that are energy-efficient and relatively cheap could also be deployed widely in regions with particularly acute water problems—even far from the sea, where brackish underground water could be tapped.

Earlier in development are advanced membranes made of atom-thick sheets of carbon, which hold the promise of further cutting the energy needs of desalination plants.

Haaretz reports that since 2005, Israel has opened four desalination plants, with a fifth set to go online later this year. Isreal is getting an increasing Over 40 percent by this year, 50% by 2016 and hit 70 percent in 2050.

Sorek can provide a typical families water needs for about $300 to $500 a year.

GoatGuyNBF Moderator 3 hour(s) ago

Its one of those things that makes me just kind of bang my head on the countertop: we invent magnificent technologies such as reverse osmosis which through the magic of membrane science, wicked-cool engineering, aggressive cost-savings and straight necessity, can have a 25 acre (10 ha) setup producing domestic water for 1.5 million people, at a cost of about $150,000,000 a year, or a hundreds smackeroos-a-head. Understand tho: the people of Israel have becomes hyper vigilant in efficiently using and re-using and re-re-using water.

In any case, it works.

Now, not too many years back, there was a lot of talk (Hey Bri! More articles on this!) about the efficiency and obvious opportunity in using waste process heat to be the essentially free energy input to vacuum-distilled multi-stage water purification. The big breakthru on it was found to be atomization using piezoelectric supersonic surface-tension atomizers (like the kind used to make theatre smoke), and a bit of electric charge to keep the droplets aloft. Takes an additional 1% of input energy, but results in a 700% decrease in surface-tension depressed water-to-gas evaporation.

So the idea was, suck in brackish-to-salty water from a source. Heat it with waste process heat (pre-heat it with heat-exchanger waste supersaturated water), then in stages, atomize it, vacuum away the H₂O, condense it (releasing heat, to feed back), and drain away the high-salt effluent either to artificial salt-recovery ponds, or back to the sea.

I think about the number of waste process heat sources, and I'm struck by the fact that there are plenty of them! Just about every coal fired power plant. Just about every nuclear power plant. Just about every cannery. Actually, just about every industry that has a smokestack that is ejecting copious amounts of steam along with their stripped and cleaned up effluent gas. Heck … even just about every smokestack that isn't emitting visible steam, but is emitting hot CO₂ + N₂ (burned hydrocarbons). Perhaps even refineries?

The proposal here isn't to think of an either / or situation … either reverse osmosis or vacuum distillation. No: think of them as complimentary and perhaps more suited for different environments. R.O. for areas far removed from industry or power plants. MSVD for waste process heat recovery.

__

One of the things commented on also was "make it solar!" … yes, this isn't a bad idea, actually. There's even an opportunity to do both at the same site. Use the waste process heat of those many km² of solar cells to heat water for the vacuum-distillation side. Use excess power to pump sea-water up a big hill (if available), to drive the reverse-osmosis pressure input side. (Works at night!) Who knows, maybe do the same with the heated water… underground is a pretty good insulator, once the first 10 meters of rock is heated up. Or just sell the power. There clearly is a calculus that could optimize the output.

 

[a_majoor]

DARPA studies how robotic systems could enhance squad level operations. Given that our enemies already know how to operate in complex terrain that masks them from sensors and long range fire, I'm not really clear if this is the way to go. Having a robot with a Coyote mast to sense what is going on around you will be useful in some circumstances (but then again so will having a robot that is carrying a .50 HMG and 1000 rounds of ammunition), but patrolling through a city street, crowded marketplace, dense woodland and so on will strain robotic sensor systems just as much as it strains the actual soldiers:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/02/darpa-developing-squad-level-robotics.html

DARPA Developing Squad level Robotics and sensing technology

DARPA’s new Squad X Core Technologies (SXCT) program aims to address the challenge and ensure that dismounted infantry squads maintain uncontested tactical superiority over potential adversaries without being overburdened by cumbersome hardware. The goal is to speed the development of new, lightweight, integrated systems that provide infantry squads unprecedented awareness, adaptability and flexibility in complex environments, and enable dismounted Soldiers and Marines to more intuitively understand and control their complex mission environments.

SXCT plans to explore four key technical areas:

1. Precision Engagement: Precisely engage threats out to 0.6 mile (1,000 meters), while maintaining compatibility with infantry weapon systems and without imposing weight or operational burdens that would negatively affect mission effectiveness

2. Non-Kinetic Engagement: Disrupt enemy command and control, communications and use of unmanned assets at a squad-relevant operational pace (walking with occasional bursts of speed)

3. Squad Sensing: Detect potential threats out to 0.6 mile (1,000 meters) at a squad-relevant operational pace

4. Squad Autonomy: Increase squad members’ real-time knowledge of their own and teammates’ locations to less than 20 feet (6 meters) in GPS-denied environments through collaboration with embedded unmanned air and ground systems

 

[cupper]

A new natural material that could well be the strongest stuff on the planet. Materials Engineers have some work ahead of them.

Limpet teeth are strongest natural material known

Vegetarian sea snail makes material stronger than spider silk

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/limpet-teeth-are-strongest-natural-material-known-1.2965059

Scientists have discovered a natural material stronger than titanium, Kevlar and even spider silk. In fact, measurements suggest it's the strongest biological material known.

The remarkable material was discovered in a place you might not have expected — in the teeth of a tiny, vegetarian sea snail called the limpet, reports a team of scientists led by Asa Barber, a professor in the school of engineering at  the University of Portsmouth in England.

Limpets are marine creatures with conical shells about five centimetres in diameter. Like garden snails, they use a foot to glide along under the shell.

They eat algae on the surface of rocks and have found "an ingenious way of feeding," Barber told CBC's As It Happens.

Instead of moving their bodies as they graze, they extend a tongue-like appendage called a radula. The underside of the radula is covered in rows of teeth used to scrape food toward the limpet's mouth.

Barber saw a photo of the limpet's teeth in a textbook, and was struck by their appearance – they were made of tiny fibres of the mineral goethite embedded in a natural plastic material.

"I thought, 'Wow, this is … like the structures we use in aerospace structures, but it's on a much smaller scale," he said.

Such materials tend to be strong and light, so are often used in high-performance cars and aircraft.

That inspired Barber to test their strength using a device called an atomic force microscope. Tests in the lab showed that the teeth were significantly stronger than spider silk.

While most structures become less strong as you make them bigger, due to a larger number of flaws in the structure, that was not the case for the limpet teeth – different sizes were equally strong.

The results were published this week in the journal Interface.

Barber said the key to the material's strength is that the fibres in the teeth are much thinner than those found in man-made composites.

He and his colleagues hope to build a synthetic version of the limpet tooth material to construct items like cars and planes.

Link to the Article / Paper in the Journal Interface.

http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/12/105/20141326

 

[a_majoor]

NextBigFuture on the rapid growth of exoskeleton technology. Some of this seems very appropriate for support troops (carrying heavy stuff in a warehouse, repairing machinery etc.), but the key limiting factor is the low energy density of batteries. For practical use, some form of fuel cell or IC engine may have to be developed to power these things:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/lower-body-exoskeleton-audi-chairless.html

Lower Body Exoskeleton - Audi Chairless Chair part of exoskeleton for worker trend

Audi is testing a new technology that eases many assembly activities: the so-called “chairless chair.” This high-tech carbon-fiber construction allows employees to sit without a chair. At the same time, it improves their posture and reduces the strain on their legs.

* Three prototypes in use on assembly lines in Neckarsulm

* Carbon-fiber construction supports employees in assembly work

Audi AG is a German automobile manufacturer that designs, engineers, produces, markets and distributes luxury automobiles. They produced about 1.75 million luxury cars in 2014. They have 11 production facilities in 9 countries.

The chairless chair eases many assembly activities. This high-tech carbon-fiber construction allows Audi employees to sit without a chair. At the same time, it improves their posture and reduces the strain on their legs.

The chairless chair, which Audi has further developed together with a Swiss start‑up company, is an exoskeleton that is worn on the back of the legs. It is fastened with belts to the hips, knees and ankles. Two leather‑covered surfaces support the buttocks and thighs while two struts made of carbon‑fiber‑reinforced plastic (CFRP) adapt to the contours of the leg. They are jointed behind the knee and can be hydraulically adjusted to the wearer’s body size and the desired sitting position. Body weight is transferred into the floor through these adjustable elements. The chairless chair itself weighs just 2.4 kilograms. Dr. Stephan Weiler, the doctor responsible for ergonomic workplace design in Audi’s health department: “The chairless chair is a clear demonstration that Audi places priority on attractive and well‑designed workplaces. This construction reduces the stress and strain on our employees’ knees and ankles in an ideal manner.”

While working, employees wear the chairless chair like a second pair of legs to provide support whenever needed. For many assembly operations, it allows employees to sit in an ergonomically favorable position instead of standing – even with short working intervals. At the same time, this high‑tech supporting structure improves posture and reduces strain on the legs. Chairs and stools, which are currently used in some assembly operations as temporary aids, become unnecessary. At the same time, Audi hopes that use of the exoskeleton will reduce employee absenteeism for physical reasons. “With the use of the chairless chair, we are continuously improving ergonomics in assembly operations. We also anticipate new applications for colleagues with reduced physical capabilities,” stated Dr. Mathias Keil, Head of Industrial Engineering Methods at AUDI AG.

Starting this week, Audi employees are gaining experience with three pilot prototypes of the chairless chair on A4* and A6* assembly lines at the Neckarsulm plant – with cockpit pre-assembly for example. Until now, the employees there worked only while standing. They now have significantly less physical stress due to the supportive carbon-fiber device, which allows them to alternate between sitting and standing while working. Audi will start a test phase also at the Ingolstadt plant in May. After that, the company will deploy the chairless chair in series production.

This is part of a trend to boost the productivity of factory and dock workers by an estimated 30% over the next ten years

Exoskeletons are being adapted for heavy manufacturing work to boost productivity and reduce injury.

Human Augmentation System (HAS)
– Increases productivity and quality of work, with reduced injury

Lockheed's Mantis (industrial exoskeleton adapted from the military HULC exoskeleton), which the Bethesda, Md.-based company envisions as finding a home in any industry in which workers must hold heavy equipment that can cause fatigue and back injuries.

Mantis has a mechanical extension for a wearer's arm and absorbs the strain from hefting a grinder or sander, Maxwell said. Tests found productivity gains of more than 30 percent, he said, and wearers showed their Macarena footwork to demonstrate the suits' flexibility.

Lockheed Martin's (LMT) HULC and MANTIS prototypes, which look like leg braces and a large backpack, can significantly increase an individual's strength. The MANTIS is slated for sale later this year and can make wielding heavy equipment in a factory or shipyard nearly effortless. California-based Ekso Bionics, meanwhile, employs exoskeleton technology to make suits for paraplegics that allow some disabled people to walk for the first time. It says it has sold 29 of the $130,000 devices worldwide so far. The market for such technology is pegged at some $10 billion over the next 10 years.

The biggest problem? Power. Most exoskeletons are battery operated, so they don't have much range yet. Still, MIT professor Hugh Herr is convinced. "The era that we're now entering is the bionic age," he says.

zeroG - Exoskeletal Arm Systems:

– Allows operators to use heavy tools as if weightless
– Supports the tool through a wide range of motion
– Requires no power
– Can reduce vibration transmission to operator
– Single arm stabilize tools up to 40 lbs

MANTIS - Lower Body Exoskeleton

– Provides critical mobility platform
– Transfers loads through structure to the ground
– Anthropomorphic design maintains operator flexibility
– No power, electronics, actuation required
– Simple to operate and minimal training required

Initial Heavy Tool Application Targets:

– Grinding
– Sawzalls
– Heat Induction tools
– Blasting / Hydrolancing
– Needle Guns
– Impact Wrenches
– Torque Wrenches
– Painting

Wave of human augmentation is coming

Ekso Bionics' device for spinal patients looks like the lower half of a black metal skeleton able to stand by itself on foot pads. Parker Hannifin's medical model breaks into five pieces and resembles elongated, plastic football thigh pads worn on the sides of users' legs.

Electric motors amplify the strength in their wearers' limbs or, in the case of the wheelchair-bound, to supply motive power. Computers and sensors help provide balance and guidance.

"There's a huge wave of human augmentation coming," said Ekso Bionics Chief Executive Officer Nathan Harding, whose Richmond, Calif.-based company has devices in operation at New York's Mount Sinai Hospital, the Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in New Jersey and other spinal-cord injury centers. "It's in its infancy."

HULC 2.0 exoskeleton will be worn under a uniform

Lockheed envisions a leap forward in battlefield mobility with its Human Universal Load Carrier — whose HULC acronym evokes images of Marvel Comics' Incredible Hulk, a green, super- strong mutant and sometime-ally of Iron Man. HULC is intended to let a soldier lug a 200-pound pack with minimal effort over a 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) hike, Maxwell said.

Back strain is the most common non-combat injury because of the heavy packs soldiers carry, Maxwell said. Lockheed licensed some technology from Ekso Bionics to produce the HULC, which is set to enter a second development phase this year as the system is refined so it can be worn under a uniform.

The Experiments of Wearable Robot for Carrying Heavy-Weight Objects of Shipbuilding Works was presented at an IEEE conference

Workers building the world’s biggest ships could soon don robotic exoskeletons to lug around 100-kilogram hunks of metal. The exoskeleton fits anyone between 160 and 185 centimetres tall. Workers do not feel the weight of its 28-kilogram frame of carbon, aluminium alloy and steel, as the suit supports itself and is engineered to follow the wearer's movements. With a 3-hour battery life, the exoskeleton allows users to walk at a normal pace and, in its prototype form, it can lift objects with a mass of up to 30 kilograms.

To don the exoskeleton, workers start by strapping their feet on to foot pads at the base of the robot. Padded straps at the thigh, waist and across the chest connect the user to the suit, allowing the robot to move with their bodies as it bears loads for them. A system of hydraulic joints and electric motors running up the outside of the legs links to a backpack, which powers and controls the rig.

The Lockheed Human Universal Load Carrier (HULC) is based on a design from Berkeley Bionics of California and have been around since 2009. Lockheed enhanced the basic HULC.

* Soldiers wearing HULC are able to carry loads up to 200 pounds with minimal effort
* HULC uses four pounds of lithium polymer batteries will run the exoskeleton for an hour walking at 3mph, according to Lockheed. Speed marching at up to 7mph reduces this somewhat; a battery-draining "burst" at 10mph is the maximum speed

Panasonic talked about making 1000 factory worker exoskeletons for 2015

Yahoo Japan via Japancrush reports that the first affordable, mass-produced robotic exoskeleton will be on sale next year from Panasonic. For 500,000 yen, or slightly under $5,000, this full-body power garment will let you hoist 100-kilo (220-pound) objects and move at speeds up to 8 kph (5 mph).

Activelink, the Panasonic subsidiary responsible for the suit, plans to begin rollout of the first batch of 1000 starting in 2015. At its heart will be a lithium-ion battery pack that can provide for several hours of general purpose activity.

The Battery singularity is something that would improve the performance and lower the cost of exoskeletons.

 

[a_majoor]

More details on the Google Loon project. The military implications of having hundreds or thousands of super cheap high bandwidth communications relays in and over the AO should be fairly obvious (although balloons drifting in and out of range will be an issue), and it isn't a big step to consider adding at least wide angle sensors to provide a layer of coverage on the ground as well:

http://nextbigfuture.com/2015/03/cnes-partners-with-google-to-deploy.html

CNES Partners with Google to deploy Global 100,000 Internet Loon Ballon Networks

The French space agency, CNES, on Dec. 11 said it is partnering with Google on the Google X Project Loon to deploy more than 100,000 balloons in the stratosphere to provide high-speed Internet to regions without it.

CNES has maintained an active balloon launch program for studies of upper-atmospheric air currents, the chemical composition of the atmosphere at specific altitudes and other purposes, launching as many as 20 balloons a month.

Google Vice President Mike Cassidy, in charge of the Loon project, said the company is evaluating multiple designs for Loon, with CNES and others.

“No single solution can solve such a big, complex problem,” Cassidy said. “That’s why we’re working with experts from all over the world, such as CNES, to invest in new technologies like Project Loon that can use the winds to provide Internet to rural and remote areas.”

The balloons provide wireless Internet using the same LTE protocol used by cellular devices. Google has said that the balloons can serve data at rates of 22 megabits per second to fixed antennas, and five megabits per second to mobile handsets.

Vincent Dubourg, deputy director for balloons, said the Loon project was an easy sell for CNES given the Loon project’s ambition.

“To get a constellation of more than 100,000 balloons to operate for months at a time — it’s an impressive project,” Dubourg said in a statement. “We put up a maximum of 20 or so balloons a month, which fly for maybe three months. So the scale [of Loon] is impressive.”

Early Loon designs show a pumpkin-shaped structure about 15 meters in diameter — larger than the 10-meter balloons often used by CNES. The CNES stratospheric balloons are carried by winds alone and their trajectory is not managed from the ground.

One design being considered involves housing an air-filled balloon inside a larger helium-filled balloon, Cocquerez said. The air has the effect of lowering the balloon’s altitude by as much as a couple of kilometers. When the air is released, the balloon rises to its previous altitude of around 20 kilometers — above most weather and commercial air traffic.

In a Dec. 12 interview, Pircher said Google is paying CNES “a very small sum” related to intellectual property related to balloon design developed over the years of CNES experiments with stratospheric balloons.

“When they approached us I have to admit that given our experience in stratospheric balloons – their cost of development, of maintenance, the need to recover them after the mission, the regulatory issues with civil-aviation authorities – I really didn’t think it was realistic,” Pircher said.

“And of course it may never be developed. But what our team saw in working with the Google team in New Zealand was instructive for us. They have ideas that will reduce the cost of the balloons by 10 times or so. This is something that will be useful to use for our science missions, regardless of what happens with Loon.”

This is related; a broadband net that can be set up virtually anywhere, and can be powered off a car battery. Small mash nets like this may be the future of tactical communications, using suitably militarized equipment:

http://www.broadband-hamnet.org

Broadband-Hamnet
Welcome to the Broadband-Hamnet™ web site PDF Print E-mail
Written by Jim Kinter, K5KTF  
Monday, 18 January 2010 23:34

Broadband-Hamnet™ (formerly called HSMM-Mesh™)  is a high speed, self discovering, self configuring, fault tolerant, wireless computer network that can run for days from a fully charged car battery, or indefinitely with the addition of a modest solar array or other supplemental power source. The focus is on emergency communications.

In its current form it is built using the Linksys WRT54G/GL/GS wireless routers and operates on channels 1-6 of the 2.4GHz ISM band, which overlaps with the upper portion of the 13cm amateur radio band. Other platforms and bands include several types of Ubiquiti equipment in the 900MHz, 2.4GHz and 5.7GHz band. Adidtional features let signals come in on one band and leave on another without additional configuration. All mesh nodes on all bands exchange data so long as they are within range. We will be adding support for Ubiquiti 3.4GHz gear as well.

OLSR is used for auto linking of the mesh node radios.
OpenWRT firmware tools are used for firmware development.

Broadband-Hamnet™ is currently being designed, developed and deployed as an amateur radio broadband communications system. It originated in Austin, Texas but has spread all across the USA and many other countries around the world.
Glenn KD5MFW, David AD5OO, Bob WB5AOH and Rick NG5V are the gents spearheading the efforts, while yours truly, Jim K5KTF keeps the website up and running to provide information about the project.  There is a distributed development community with users in a number of areas of the USA and other continents.

If you have questions, our forums would be a great place to research and ask questions. You will need to register and login to post to them but reading online is available without an account. Expanded search abilities are now available to find topics and keywords. Just use the search option at the top of most pages.

Last Updated on Monday, 02 March 2015 22:44

This technology is amazingly popular, having a true Worked all Continents, (including Antarctica) thousands of users overseas, and a huge number of users in the USA. Anyone can read from the site. If you want to see how many users have registered to post on the forums, click the forums link in the main menu and scroll all the way to the bottom. As of 3/1/2015, there are over 5100 registered users for the site. In the upper left corner of the home page, logged in users and guests are shown. These numbers regularly run between 50 and many hundreds of concurrent guests.

Regardless of your experience level, please take a moment to learn a bit about how our firmware works. The biggest source of confusion is the notion that our project is application software. It is not an application, but rather a network. As a network, it can transport data or use application software residing at another location just like your home or office network The page linked above contains a significant list of what it is/is not and will give you a good overview of Broadband-Hamnet™ operations. Mesh networks are different than normal WiFi. Microwave networks are different than UHF/VHF or HF networks. Different rules apply concerning propagation and RF safety. Adding an amplifier rarely improves communications and is never your first choice. You may want to read the linked page completely, do some exploring around the web site and then go back to re-read info on the link above to lock in your understanding. As you begin to think about how a network can be used, your options for employing Broadband-Hamnet™ will continue to expand.

 

[a_majoor]

Using origami to manipulate the properties of objects. While this demonstration is using a piece of paper to deform in a controlled way to protect whatever is in the center, you could imagine a radar dish or satellite antenna unfolding from this pattern. More generally, controlled "folding" could be used to make things like crash barriers which bring a vehicle to a stop under control, or other energy absorbing structures and features.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22530123.200

Origami doughnut squashes up to protect what's inside
11 March 2015
Magazine issue 3012. Subscribe and save

A SUIT of armour made from paper sounds about as useful as a chocolate teapot, but it all depends on how you build it. Bin Liu of the University of California, Merced, and his colleagues have created a precision-folded origami shield that can keep anything inside it safe.

The shield is a paper doughnut with a hole in the centre, and has been scored with an exact pattern of perforation lines by a laser. The pattern consists of smaller and smaller concentric circles, with each circular strip further divided into triangles. The triangles in adjacent strips lean in opposite directions, creating a network of zigzags from the rim to the centre.

Apply pressure to the edge of the shield and it begins to fold up along these zigzags. But because the folds' sizes shrink incrementally, the hole in the centre never changes size, protecting anything inside.

It's not the first time researchers have been inspired by origami – NASA is investigating folded solar panels to pack large power arrays on board rockets, for instance.

Liu, who presented the shields at the American Physical Society meeting in San Antonio, Texas, on 2 March, says because the protection doesn't rely on the strength of the material, it should find a number of uses. "We can bring robust structure into light and soft materials."

 

[CougarKing]

Related to this topic: 3d printers for every home one day? Much like the replicators from Star Trek?

Washington Post

This mind-blowing new 3-D printing technique is inspired by ‘Terminator 2​’

(...SNIPPED)

"We think that popular 3-D printing is actually misnamed — it's really just 2-D printing over and over again," said Joseph DeSimone, a professor of chemistry at University of North Carolina and North Carolina State as well as one of Carbon3D's co-founders. "The strides in that area have mostly been driven by mechanical engineers figuring our how to make things layer by layer to precisely create an object. We're two chemists and a physicist, so we came in with a different perspective."

Just as the evil T-1000 rises from its puddle of metal alloys, objects created by the new printer seem to ooze into existence from the ether. They come out fast, too: 25 to 100 times faster than anything on the market now, according to the study published in Science.

(...SNIPPED)

 

[cupper]

May the force-field be with you: Boeing granted patent for 'shock wave attenuation'

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/23/tech/boeing-shock-wave-attenuation-patent/

Boeing has been granted a patent for a force field-like defense system, leading excited sci-fi fans to herald the advent of something previously seen only in the realms of "Star Wars" or "Star Trek."

Filed in 2012, the USPTO has granted the aerospace giant a patent for a "method and system for shockwave attenuation via electromagnetic arc."

On first look, it seems that they're onto something similar to "Star Wars'" deflector shields. The patent describes a system that would detect the shockwave from a nearby explosion and create an area of ionized air -- a plasma field -- between the oncoming blast and the vehicle it was protecting.

The method works, says the patent, "by heating a selected region of the first fluid medium rapidly to create a second, transient medium that intercepts the shockwave and attenuates its energy density before it reaches a protected asset."

By creating a temporary, superheated parcel of air with a laser, microwave or electrical arc, researchers believe that the shockwave would, in theory -- it hasn't been determined how far along Boeing's research into this has got -- dissipate once it hit the plasma field, leaving whatever was on the other side unaffected, or for the blast to at least be mitigated.

"Explosive devices are being used increasingly in asymmetric warfare to cause damage and destruction to equipment and loss of life. The majority of the damage caused by explosive devices results from shrapnel and shock waves," the patent says.

However, at this stage, Boeing's force field would be powerless to protect against shrapnel or other debris flung out by an explosion, so the troops of the future would still need to keep their body armor firmly strapped on.

The plasma field would also be temporary -- hence the need for sensors to activate it when a blast is detected -- so the sort of all-encompassing force field we're familiar with from the movies seems to be a while off.

Researchers keep going back to the rich seam of innovation that is science fiction, with truck-mounted lasers and working tractor beams among recent inventions that wouldn't look out of place in a galaxy far, far away.

Link to the patent.

http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=8981261.PN.&OS=PN/8981261&RS=PN/8981261

 

[a_majoor]

An interesting aside; Liek Myrabo proposed using a similar system focusing microwave energy in front of an aircraft or spacecraft (he called it an airspike) to deflect air and shockwaves away from hypersonic vehicles in 1995. This would reduce the heat build up and drag on the moving vehicle.

If this is related it is an interesting repurposing of an earlier technology.

 

[cupper]

Graphene produces a working 3D holographic display

A wide viewing angle, full-colour, floating 3D display has been built using graphene-based materials.

http://www.cnet.com/news/graphene-produces-a-working-3d-holographic-display/

Since "Help me, Obi Wan, you're my only hope" hit the big screens in 1977's "Star Wars," we've been dreaming of a full-3D holographic display. Mastering the technology isn't easy, though. We've seen multiple attempts that approximate a 3D display, like a 2D image visible from all directions, but the tech world wasn't quite up to the challenge of true 3D yet.

A new effort from Australian universities looks like it could be the real deal, with materials made from the versatile carbon-based graphene as the key.

"While there is still work to be done, the prospect is of 3D images seemingly leaping out of the screens...without the need for cumbersome accessories such as 3D glasses," said Dr Qin Li from Griffith University's School of Engineering, who conducted carbon-structure analysis for the research.

The graphene-enabled floating display created by a team of researchers from Griffith University and Swinburne University of Technology is based on Dennis Gabor's holographic method, which was developed in the 1940s and won Gabor the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1971.

The team has created a high-definition 3D holographic display with a wide viewing angle of up to 52 degrees, based on a digital holographic screen composed of small pixels that bend the light.

The technical details are a bit complicated. (Here they are explained in full by study co-authors Xianping Li and Min Gu of Swinburne University of Technology.)

Essentially, the smaller the pixels used, the better the viewing angle of the resulting hologram created when light is bent by passing through the pixel.

To create the hologram, graphene oxide (a form of graphene mixed with oxygen) is treated with a process called photoreduction, using a rapidly pulsed laser to heat the graphene oxide. This creates the pixel that is capable of bending the light to produce a hologram.

This, the team says, could one day revolutionise displays -- with the most obvious implications in mobile technology and wearable technology. It could also be used for holographic anti-counterfeit tags, security labels, and personal identification.

This makes sense for a first practical application, too: currently, the technology has only been used to produce holographic images up to one centimetre in size. Li and Gu note, however, that there is no limit to its scalability, thanks to graphene's mechanical strength.

Photoreduced graphene-oxide based displays could also theoretically be produced easily, given that the ability to modulate the refractive index of graphene oxides on multiple levels doesn't require solvents or post-processing, Dr Li said.

"The use of graphene also relieves pressure on the world's dwindling supplies of indium, the metallic element that has been commonly used for electronic devices. Other technologies are being developed in this area, but photoreduced graphene oxide looks by far the most promising and most practical, particularly for wearable devices," she added.

 

[cupper]

Interesting concept. Article seems to have an anti-military bias.

Meet the Man Building Autonomous Kamikaze Swarm Drones for the US Military

http://www.vice.com/read/we-spoke-to-the-guy-behind-the-new-self-flying-killer-drone-swarm-333

A few days ago the US Navy released a video unveiling a new weapons project called LOCUST. In the space of a minute the system fires up to 30 drones out of a cannon. Once they've left the launching tube they come together autonomously in a "swarm" designed to attack and overwhelm their target through sheer numbers.

The video shows the drones flying in formation before cutting to a CGI animation of them destroying a small settlement that looks like it could be somewhere in the Middle East or Central Asia. From the ground you might expect an attack to look a bit like a colony of seagulls descending on your bag of chips, if all the birds were packed with explosives and detonated on impact.

The LOCUST project—which stands for Low Cost UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) Swarm Technology—is still in development, but the idea of armed drones with a mind of their own thundering directly into someone's home sounds pretty terrifying. Last week the UN held a conference on how to regulate "killer robots" (autonomous weapons) in Geneva, but it's yet to set up any sort of legal framework to control them.

I wanted to find out whether we need be worried about projects, like LOCUST, that seem to allow armed robots to operate with less and less human input. Is it a dangerous escalation of Obama's extremely controversial and allegedly illegal drone war, or a PR stunt designed to intimidate US adversaries and help justify huge defense budgets?

I got in touch with Lee Mastroianni at the Office of Naval Research in Virginia, who acts as Technical Manager on the LOCUST project.

VICE: What are the program objectives?
Lee Mastroianni: A lot of people talk about swarming UAVs—we wanted to show we are actually doing this. We are able to create the swarm, which involves the rapid launch of large numbers of UAVs, and then control the swarm in a way that is useful for military operations. You can spit 'em out very, very rapidly.

Are the drones designed to carry weapons or for reconnaissance?
They could be for reconnaissance; they could be weaponized. If you look at the LOCUST video we put online, I used a sample mission... you have a simultaneous strike where weaponized UAVs take [all their targets] out at the same time.

And do they operate in a kamikaze sort of way? They fly into the target and explode?
The UAVs would be the weapon as opposed to a Predator [UAV], which launches other weapons. These are one-way missions.

Once they're in the air, how are they controlled?
That's the second big piece of the demonstration—autonomous control. Once launched, I don't need to talk to the UAVs. They understand what the mission is. They're talking to one another. You want to know what's it up to. You want to control it. You need to. But it isn't a UAV pilot flying it like a remote control aircraft.

I spoke to an individual from a military think tank after watching your video. She was skeptical that LOCUST would make it past the necessary trials to be used in the field, especially because of its autonomy.
I'm very confident that I'm addressing the risk adequately so that it will have success. In terms of the next steps to field such a capability there's quite a bit more work that needs to be done.

When I read the press release, the word that really jumped out was autonomous. The idea of autonomous, weaponized UAVs does seem like a departure from the UAVs we see at the moment.
I'm not sure I see as broad a distinction as you do. Safety, in terms of our sailors, our Marines, [is] paramount. This is a major first demonstration in this regard to take it from the idea of just cartoon sketches and people talking about it to, hey, there's a reality associated with this. If it drives the discussion on exactly the kind of things you're bringing up [around autonomy], then that's a good thing.

Is the kind of research going on at the ONR at the moment moving in the direction of more autonomy for UAVs?
Well, the Office of Naval Research is a leader in autonomy science technology and development. The future is manned platforms working with unmanned platforms on the battlefield.

Link to the video:  https://youtu.be/Tsj5VX093MY

 

[Colin Parkinson]

ambulance drone

http://www.dronethusiast.com/flying-defibrillator-delivers-help-minutes/


The Flying Defibrillator Drone

Alec Momont of TU Delft’s Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering designed his prototype for an ambulance drone together with the Living Tomorrow innovation platform as part of his graduation programme. When the emergency services receive a cardiac arrest call, this unmanned, autonomously navigating aeroplane can quickly deliver a defibrillator to the emergency scene. Via a livestream video and audio connection, the drone can also provide direct feedback to the emergency services and the persons on site can be instructed how to treat the patient. The drone finds the patient’s location via the caller’s mobile phone signal and makes its way there using GPS. The drone can fly at around 100 km/h, weighs 4 kg and can carry another 4 kg.