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Manufacturing & Prototyping

Systems-engineering a New 4x4 Benchmark

"We set a high target for this program: Create the industry’s most fuel-efficient four-wheel-drive system, with the greatest off-road capability and functionality,” said Mike Kirk, Chrysler’s...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Preparing Carbon-Coated Current Collectors for High-Power Lithium-Ion Secondary Batteries

Achieving high-power capability of a battery requires minimizing the overall resistance of the electrochemical system. For lithium-ion batteries, much...

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Briefs
Photonics/Optics

Design and Fabrication of a Radio Frequency Grin Lens Using 3D Printing

Engineered electromagnetic materials and meta-materials have been researched to explore devices that enable access to electromagnetic properties that are not available in nature. This new class of devices can not only open the door to new functionality, but also be effectively...

Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Manufacturing Robotic Tools for Piping Inspection and Repair

Fleet piping systems are complex, space-constrained systems that are difficult to inspect using standard external inspection techniques. Pipe lagging, as well as limited space, makes...

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Manufacturing & Prototyping

Sikorsky Awarded Contract to Replace ‘Marine One’ Helicopter Fleet

The U.S. Navy selected Sikorsky Aircraft to build the next fleet of Marine One helicopters for the Office of the President.

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News
Manufacturing & Prototyping

ATK to Build Composite Launch Vehicle Structures

ATK reached agreement on a $178 million contract award as part of the U.S. Air Force's Phase 1 Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) buy from United Launch Alliance (ULA). The order value...

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Manufacturing & Prototyping

3-D Printing in Aerospace: Not Just Winging It

The demand for innovative manufacturing technology that produces lighter parts with stronger material grows each day in the competitive aerospace industry. 3-D printing, also known as...

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News
Defense

Nylon Shapes and Custom Parts

TECAST cast nylon stock shapes and custom parts from Ensinger offer a combination of physical and wear properties, along with inherently lighter weight, to provide users with a cost-effective alternative to metal...

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INSIDER
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Army Secures Critical Component for Artillery, Mortar Ammunition

The U.S. Army is nearing completion on a project to eliminate its dependency on foreign countries for a critical energetic component in artillery and mortar ammunition, officials...

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News
Defense

GKN Aerospace-Led Project Automates Assembly of Aircraft Wing Structures

GKN Aerospace is leading a project under the Structures Technology Maturity (STeM) program that aims to automate the assembly of aircraft structures with the goal of...

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News
Defense

Ball Aerospace Awarded Contract for Ion Velocity Meter

Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. has been awarded a $5.8 million contract from the Defense Weather System Directorate at the Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles, CA,...

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Manufacturing & Prototyping

Boeing Selects Site for New 777X Composite Wing Center

Boeing has selected its Everett, WA, site as the location for a new composite wing center for the 777X program. Boeing evaluated criteria that were designed to find the wing fabrication...

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News
Defense

Tata Sikorsky JV Producing Fully Indigenous S-92 Cabins

The India joint venture established between Tata Advanced Systems and Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. has announced that its S-92 helicopter cabin production in India has become 100%...

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News
Motion Control

Thermal Management for Fuel-Cell Systems Studied

Reducing the environmental impact of aircraft in terms of carbon dioxide, noise, and pollutant emissions is an important objective. Fuel-cell systems deliver electrical energy with high...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Stencil Mask Methodology for Parallelized Production of Microscale Mechanical Test Samples

Over the past decade, there has been considerable progress in the development of new mechanical testing methods to characterize the properties of...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Tin-Based IV-IV Heterostructures Fabricated Using Molecular Beam Epitaxy

The indirect nature of the fundamental energy gap in the elemental semiconductors Si and Ge prevents the use of these materials and their alloys in laser devices. The...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Micro-Composite Fabrication via Field-Aided Laminar Composite Processing

Much work has been accomplished since the discovery that particles in a dielectric fluid experience forces when placed in an electric field, including mathematical...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Three-Dimensional Plastic Part Extrusion and Conductive Ink Printing for Flexible Electronics

Structural electronics, or structronics, seeks to build wiring and electrical interconnects directly into component structures to diminish the need...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Operation and On-Chip Integration of Cavity-QED-Based Detectors for Single Atoms and Molecules

A new experimental platform for studies of transport and quantumlimited measurements of cold, trapped atomic gases was constructed. Using microfabrication processes, a silicon wafer was micromachined to allow for deposition of micrometer-scale...

Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Direct-Write Polymer Nanolithography in Ultra-High Vacuum

The deposition of materials in vacuum is the foundational technology for creating modern electronic circuits; a vacuum being essential both to preserve the cleanliness of the substrate...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Fabrication of Carbon Nanotube Channels on Three- Dimensional Building Blocks

Single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) are the most attractive material in the fields of nanoscience and nanotechnology due to their chemical, physical, and electrical...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Fabrication of Novel Transparent PMMA Composites for Optical Tagging

The emerging threats caused by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) have drastically increased concerns about soldier survivability. The ability to identify “friend vs....

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Fabrication of Transparent Carbon Nanotube Films for OLED Applications

The process to prepare single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) solutions with a good degree of dispersion of individually isolated SWCNTs and very thin SWCNT bundles was...

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Products
Photonics/Optics

Borosilicate Glass

SCHOTT North America, Inc. (Louisville, KY) presents SUPREMAX® 33 rolled borosilicate glass for telescope applications. SUPREMAX 33, which has the properties of SCHOTT’s BOROFLOAT® 33, provides low thermal expansion, high...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Development of Soldier Conformable Antennas Using Conducting Polymers

Soldiers performing dismounted operations in the field use radios that have antennas with a distinct visible signature and can become easy targets. These antennas also tend...

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Briefs
Materials

Functionalized Silk Materials

T he goal of this work was to exploit the novel structural, physical, and biological features of silk proteins towards functionalization of materials systems generated from this family of protein. A new generation of functional silk systems is sought to provide novel materials with precise control of material features....

Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Surface-Plasmon-Enhanced Organic Thin-Film Solar Cells

Fabrication of two-dimensional metal nanoparticle arrays was achieved both by thermal annealing and nanosphere lithography techniques, which are both very fast and economic. The surface plasmon resonance of the fabricated nanostructure was analyzed experimentally by optical absorption...

Briefs
Materials

Shape Memory Polymer Process Development

This work introduces a simple technique of separately fabricating electrospun short fibers. This technique employs a paper mesh, which is placed between the needle tip and counter electrode of the...

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Briefs
Manufacturing & Prototyping

Micro-Propulsion Devices Made of Low-Temperature Co-Fired Ceramics

In the satellite industry, the trend is towards decreasing the size of satellites and clustering of small satellites. Technological advancements in microelectronics have made it more economical to launch a cluster of satellites with a single vehicle rather than the traditional one...