Typically, leaks are found using aboveground acoustic sensors, which listen for faint sounds and vibrations caused by leakage,
or in-pipe detectors, which sometimes use video cameras to look for signs of pipe breaks. But all such systems are very slow
and can miss small leaks altogether. Now researchers at MIT and King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals (KFUPM) in Saudi arabia have devised a robotic system that can detect leaks at a rapid pace and with high accuracy by sensing a large pressure
That distortion can be detected by force-resistive sensors via a carefully designed mechanical system (similar to the sensors used in computer trackpads),
At present, the 3 mph top speed of the device is imposed by the propulsion motors, not the detector itself,
gathered through various sensors, actuators, and meters attached to equipment that measure functionality. Clockworks sifts through that massive store of data, measuring temperatures, pressures, flows, set points,
Liberating data By bringing all this data about building equipment to the cloud, the technology has plugged into the nternet of thingsa concept where objects would be connected, via embedded chips and other methods, to the Internet for inventory and other purposes.
as technology to monitor houses such as automated thermostats and other sensors begins to nlock the data in the residential scale,
Gayeski says, GS could adapt over time into that space, as well. o
#The incredible shrinking power brick While laptops continue to shrink in size and weight, the ower bricksthat charge them remain heavy and bulky.
you can reduce the amount of energy that you have to store temporarily in the inductors and capacitors
This could shrink the AC-DC power converters for products such as LED LIGHTS flat-screen TVS, gaming consoles, laptops, electric bikes,
the company set its sights on shrinking power converters for LED LIGHTS. About a year later,
where it then stored in inductors and capacitors and converted to DC voltage. The switches then flip to another state to deliver small chunks of the DC voltage to the battery,
before returning to their original state. Think of the electricity as water being transferred via bucket from a full tank to an empty tank
So the circuit uses resonance techniques (modifying how energy oscillates between inductors and capacitors) to minimize energy loss,
meaning the switches turn on and off more efficiently at higher frequencies. MIT: boon to us-Today, FINSIX which has raised more than $7 million in funding
which are like tiny liquid-crystal displays (LCDS) positioned between the light source and the lens. Patterns of light and dark on the first modulator effectively turn it into a bank of slightly angled light emitters that is,
One of the problems with LCD screens is that they don enable rue black A little light always leaks through even the darkest regions of the display. ormally you have contrast of,
which protects the system s electronics from lightning strikes will self-dock. Because the BAT is advanced an aerostat platform Glass says customers can use it to lift additional payloads such as weather monitoring and surveillance equipment.
and built a composite nacelle to hold our custom electronics and control systems Rein says. In 2012 Altaeros after just two years of refining proved the BAT s efficiency at 300 feet above ground at a former Air force base in Maine where the company still assembles
and design build electronics and circuit boards develop algorithms and test winches and cables Looking back Glass credits his undergraduate years on MIT s Solar Electrical Vehicle Team a student organization that builds and races solar
Like sonar or radar terahertz imaging produces an image by comparing measurements across an array of sensors.
since the distance between sensors is proportional to wavelength. In the latest issue of IEEE Transactions on Antennas and Propagation researchers in MIT s Research Laboratory for Electronics describe a new technique that could reduce the number of sensors required for terahertz
or millimeter-wave imaging by a factor of 10 or even 100 making them more practical.
so that light reflected by a small patch of the visual scene strikes a correspondingly small patch of the sensor array.
In lower-frequency imaging systems by contrast an incoming wave whether electromagnetic or in the case of sonar acoustic strikes all of the sensors in the array.
and intensity of the wave by comparing its phase the alignment of its troughs and crests when it arrives at each of the sensors.
As long as the distance between sensors is no more than half the wavelength of the incoming wave that calculation is fairly straightforward a matter of inverting the sensors measurements.
But if the sensors are spaced farther than half a wavelength apart the inversion will yield more than one possible solution.
Those solutions will be spaced at regular angles around the sensor array a phenomenon known as spatial aliasing.
however any given circumference around the detector is populated usually sparsely. That s the phenomenon that the new system exploits.
Keeping every tenth sensor won t work: It s the regularity of the distances between sensors that leads to aliasing.
Arbitrarily varying the distances between sensors would solve that problem but it would also make inverting the sensors measurements calculating the wave s source and intensity prohibitively complicated.
Regular irregularityso Wornell and his co-authors James Krieger a former student of Wornell s who is now at MIT s Lincoln Laboratory
and Yuval Kochman a former postdoc who is now an assistant professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
instead prescribe a detector along which the sensors are distributed in pairs. The regular spacing between pairs of sensors ensures that the scene reconstruction can be calculated efficiently but the distance from each sensor to the next remains irregular.
The researchers also developed an algorithm that determines the optimal pattern for the sensors distribution.
In essence the algorithm maximizes the number of different distances between arbitrary pairs of sensors. With his new colleagues at Lincoln Lab Krieger has performed experiments at radar frequencies using a one-dimensional array of sensors deployed in a parking lot
which verified the predictions of the theory. Moreover Wornell s description of the sparsity assumptions of the theory 10 percent occupation at a given distance means one-tenth the sensors applies to one-dimensional arrays.
Many applications such as submarines sonar systems instead use two-dimensional arrays and in that case the savings compound:
One-tenth the sensors in each of two dimensions translates to one-hundredth the sensors in the complete array.
James Preisig a researcher at the Woods hole oceanographic institution and principal at JP Analytics says that he s most interested in the new technique s ability to reduce the computational burden of high-resolution sonar imaging.
This technique helps significantly with the computational complexity of using signals from very large arrays Preisig says.
using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) along with a specialized molecular sensor. This is the first time anyone has been able to map neural signals with high precision over large brain regions in living animals,
the researchers used an MRI sensor they had designed previously, consisting of an iron-containing protein that acts as a weak magnet.
When the sensor binds to dopamine, its magnetic interactions with the surrounding tissue weaken, which dims the tissue MRI signal.
After delivering the MRI sensor to the ventral striatum of rats, Jasanoff team electrically stimulated the mesolimbic pathway
Jasanoff lab is also working on sensors to track other neurotransmitters, allowing them to study interactions between neurotransmitters during different tasks.
such as capacitors and inductors. Failing to account for the strength or weakness of each individual PV cell,
and earned a best technical presentation award at the 2014 Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, cosponsored by IEEE and the Power Sources Manufacturers Association.
and routing device that plugs into solar panels to power electronic devices, enabling a pay-as-you-go electricity system for people off the grid.
an EECS Phd student studying power electronics, said during the team pitch. t empowers users to build their own grid, from the ground up,
and its Mulciber Stove a woodstove equipped with sensors and a control system that automates burning.
which reclaims rare earth elements from recycled electronics to create other resources, and MIT team Belleds Technologies,
which is developing smart LED LIGHTS that can wirelessly connect to the Internet and change colors to match people moods p
and provides real-time data thanks to using exoelectrogens as sensors. hese bugs are generating electricity,
explains Buck, who invented Cambrian sensor technologies. With Ecovolt, Silver says, Cambrian aims to make treating
However a new sensor developed at MIT could change that: A research team led by professor Michael Cima has invented an injectable device that reveals oxygen levels over several weeks
Using this kind of sensor doctors may be able to better determine radiation doses and to monitor whether treatments are having the desired effect according to the researchers who describe the device in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of April 21.
This is the first MRI sensor of any kind that can be left in the body for extended periods of time so far up to four weeks in testing with rats.
With the new MIT sensor doctors could track the state of the tumor and predict how it might respond to radiation treatment according to the researchers.
The new MRI sensor combines two forms of silicone a solid called PDMS and a substance known as DDMPS which has an oily consistency.
The researchers shaped this polymer into a 1. 5-millimeter sensor that could be implanted in tissue during a biopsy;
After injection these particles clump together to form a solid sensor. DDMPS absorbs molecular oxygen
To test the sensors the researchers implanted them in the hind legs of rats and then measured how the signal changed as the rats breathed pure oxygen regular air and pure oxygen again.
The sensors detected changes in oxygen pressure as small as 15 millimeters of mercury and it took less than 10 minutes to see the effects of a change in inhaled gas.
When the experiment was repeated four weeks later the sensors yielded the same results. Ralph Weissleder a professor at Harvard Medical school and director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Molecular Imaging Research says this type of sensor is a novel way to potentially track how cancer patients
respond to treatment. The cancer field certainly needs something like this says Weissleder who was not part of the research team.
What s happening in a tumor This type of sensor could also be useful for monitoring blood flow in diabetic patients who often experience restricted circulation in their extremities
The researchers are now working on sensors that could be used to monitor other biological properties such as ph. We hope this is the first of many types of solid-state contrast agents where the material responds to its chemical environment in such a way that we can detect it by MRI Cima says.
Using battery-powered bionic propulsion two microprocessors and six environmental sensors adjust ankle stiffness power position
and damping thousands of times per second at two major positions: First at heel strike the system controls the ankle s stiffness to absorb shock
#Excitons observed in action for the first time A quasiparticle called an exciton responsible for the transfer of energy within devices such as solar cells LEDS
and semiconductor circuits has been understood theoretically for decades. But exciton movement within materials has never been observed directly.
This could enable research leading to significant advances in electronics they say as well as a better understanding of natural energy transfer processes such as photosynthesis. The research is described this week in the journal Nature Communications in a paper co-authored by MIT postdocs Gleb
The efficiency of devices such as photovoltaics and LEDS depends on how well excitons move within the material he adds.
For some applications such as LEDS Deotare says it is desirable to maximize this trapping so that energy is lost not to leakage;
and LEDS Baldo says. While these experiments were carried out using a material called tetracene a well-studied archetype of a molecular crystal the researchers say that the method should be applicable to almost any crystalline or thin-film material.
These illicit products which include electronics, automotive and aircraft parts, pharmaceuticals, and food can pose safety risks and cost governments and private companies hundreds of billions of dollars annually.
They could also be equipped with sensors that can ecordtheir environments noting for example, if a refrigerated vaccine has ever been exposed to temperatures too high or low.
This new approach could ultimately lead to advances in solar photovoltaics, detectors for telescopes and microscopes,
or diagnostic sensors says Timothy Lu an assistant professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering. Lu is the senior author of a paper describing the living functional materials in the March 23 issue of Nature Materials.
which gets you really rapid sensors, he says. A diagnostic pivot The assay is used today strictly for detection of bacteria.
Strano and the paper lead author, postdoc and plant biologist Juan Pablo Giraldo, envision turning plants into self-powered, photonic devices such as detectors for explosives or chemical weapons.
The researchers are also working on incorporating electronic devices into plants. he potential is really endless Strano says.
Lean green machines The researchers also showed that they could turn Arabidopsis thaliana plants into chemical sensors by delivering carbon nanotubes that detect the gas nitric oxide,
it alters the tube fluorescence. e could someday use these carbon nanotubes to make sensors that detect in real time, at the single-particle level,
By adapting the sensors to different targets, the researchers hope to develop plants that could be used to monitor environmental pollution,
and the polymer ring that protects the electronics in the fish s guts. The long haulthe fish can perform 20
Last month Fast Company ranked the startup No. 35 on its list of the world s 50 most innovative companies and third in energy-specific companies trailing only Tesla motors and General electric.
With rising innovations in batteries and advanced power inverters and motors Hynes backed into a technological solution with retrofitted electric powertrains.
however, require that a disk-shaped transmitter about an inch in diameter be affixed to the skull,
with a wire snaking down to a joint microphone and power source that looks like an oversized hearing aid around the patient ear.
Adaptive reuse Existing cochlear implants use an external microphone to gather sound, but the new implant would
instead use the natural microphone of the middle ear, which is almost always intact in cochlear-implant patients.
A middle-ear implant consists of a tiny sensor that detects the ossiclesvibrations and an actuator that helps drive the stapes accordingly.
The new device would use the same type of sensor but the signal it generates would travel to a microchip implanted in the ear,
which would convert it to an electrical signal and pass it on to an electrode in the cochlea.
Lowering the power requirements of the converter chip was the key to dispensing with the skull-mounted hardware.
Chandrakasan lab at MTL specializes in low-power chips, and the new converter deploys several of the tricks that the lab has developed over the years,
such as tailoring the arrangement of low-power filters and amplifiers to the precise acoustic properties of the incoming signal.
But Chandrakasan and his colleagues also developed a new signal-generating circuit that reduces the chip power consumption by an additional 20 to 30 percent.
The key was to specify a new waveform the basic electrical signal emitted by the chip,
Heidi Nakajima, the researchers have demonstrated also that the chip and sensor are able to pick up
and process speech played into a the middle ear of a human cadaver. t very cool,
Another imaging technique, known as magnetoencephalography (MEG), uses an array of hundreds of sensors encircling the head to measure magnetic fields produced by neuronal activity in the brain.
These sensors offer a dynamic portrait of brain activity over time, down to the millisecond, but do not tell the precise location of the signals.
The research was funded by grants from Xerox Google Facebook and the Office of Naval Research h
In this week s issue of the journal Science researchers from MIT s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) describe a new lidar-like system that can gauge depth
and therefore accumulate less charge in the detector while brighter regions would reflect more light
The technique known as raster scanning is how old cathode ray tube-tube televisions produced images illuminating one phosphor dot on the screen at a time.
Filtering out noisethe photon registered by the detector could however be a stray photodetection generated by background light.
could be used in medical imaging and collision-avoidance detectors for cars, and to improve the accuracy of motion tracking
which the location of objects is calculated by how long it takes a light signal to reflect off a surface and return to the sensor.
This allows the team to use inexpensive hardware off-the-shelf light-emitting diodes (LEDS) can strobe at nanosecond periods,
Conventional cameras see an average of the light arriving at the sensor, much like the human eye, says James Davis, an associate professor of computer science at the University of California at Santa cruz. In contrast,
#Creating synthetic antibodies MIT chemical engineers have developed a novel way to generate nanoparticles that can recognize specific molecules, opening up a new approach to building durable sensors for many different compounds
In the past, researchers have exploited this phenomenon to create sensors by coating the nanotubes with molecules, such as natural antibodies, that bind to a particular target.
The MIT team found that they could create novel sensors by coating the nanotubes with specifically designed amphiphilic polymers polymers that are drawn to both oil and water, like soap.
and could be used to create sensors to monitor diseases such as cancer, inflammation, or diabetes in living systems. his new technique gives us an unprecedented ability to recognize any target molecule by screening nanotube-polymer complexes to create synthetic analogs to antibody function,
says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical engineering at MIT and senior author of the study,
Synthetic antibodies The new polymer-based sensors offer a synthetic design approach to the production of molecular recognition sites enabling, among other applications, the detection of a potentially infinite library of targets.
Moreover, this approach can provide a more durable alternative to coating sensors such as carbon nanotubes with actual antibodies,
In the new paper, the researchers describe molecular recognition sites that enable the creation of sensors specific to riboflavin, estradiol (a form of estrogen),
and his colleagues is electronics cooling. he heat fluxes in electronics cooling are skyrocketing, Varanasi says.
It might be a job for efficient spray cooling f we can figure out how to fit a system into the small space inside electronic devices.
These devices consist of microfluidic channels engraved on tiny chips, but current versions usually require a great deal of extra instrumentation attached to the chip,
limiting their portability. Much of that extra instrumentation is needed to keep the particles flowing single file through the center of the channel,
The beam-stabilization system on the space terminal is based on inertial sensors which can be scaled to work even at the most distant planets.
And the ground receiver is based on arrays of small inexpensive telescopes that are coupled fiber to highly efficient superconducting nanowires a photon counting technology that was brought to its high state of maturity by joint MIT and Lincoln Lab teams.
It has been known for years that laser communications have the potential to deliver much higher data rates and use smaller space terminals than radio-based systems.
Then the Laboratory did the more detailed full-system design the detailed design of the three modules that make up the space terminal and the detailed design of the primary ground terminal.
changing it from a conductor to a semiconductor just by changing the laser beam polarization. Normally, to produce such dramatic changes in a material properties,
Electrodes record the angular displacement and torque at the joint, which researchers use to calculate the ankle stiffness.
as well as surface electrodes attached to the ankle four major muscles. The robot was connected to a video display with a pixelated bar that moved up and down
and made it a thrombin sensor. The system consists of iron oxide nanoparticles which the Food and Drug Administration has approved for human use coated with peptides (short proteins) that are specialized to interact with thrombin.
as well as microelectronics devices. Such devices have many potential applications in research and diagnostics but they could be even more useful
through a silicon wafer similar to those used in most electronics labs. As red blood cells flow through the body,
are made of metals, semiconductors, and glass, and can damage nearby tissues during ordinary movement. t a big problem in neural prosthetics,
and conductive electrodes to carry electrical signals. These polymer templates, which can have dimensions on the scale of inches,
of which could then be monitored with embedded electrodes. At the same time, one or more drugs could be injected into the brain through the hollow channels,
Electrodes recorded the activity of these identified neurons during animal behaviors. Mice naturally love sucrose similar to humans loving sugar-rich sodas
Activating the projections led to compulsive sucrose-eating and increased overeating in mice that were full.
HVAC system efficiency is affected by the system itself, by household behavioral factors such as thermostat and window usage and
Many researchers see improved interconnection of optical and electronic components as a path to more efficient computation and imaging systems.
about 20 nanometers in size the same size range as the smallest features that can now be produced in microchips.
This could lead to chips that combine optical and electronic components in a single device, with far lower losses than when such devices are made separately and then interconnected,
The work is retty criticalfor providing the understanding needed to develop optoelectronic or photonic devices based on graphene and hbn,
#Toward tiny, solar-powered sensors The latest buzz in the information technology industry regards he Internet of thingsthe idea that vehicles, appliances, civil-engineering structures, manufacturing equipment,
and even livestock would have embedded their own sensors that report information directly to networked servers,
however, will require extremely low-power sensors that can run for months without battery changes or, even better,
this new chip can do both, and it can power the device directly from the battery.
All of those operations also share a single inductor the chip main electrical component which saves on circuit board space
the chip power consumption remains low. e still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,
and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best.
The prototype chip was manufactured through the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's University Shuttle Program. Ups and downs The circuit chief function is to regulate the voltages between the solar cell, the battery,
To control the current flow across their chip, El-Damak and her advisor, Anantha Chandrakasan,
the Joseph F. and Nancy P. Keithley Professor in Electrical engineering, use an inductor, which is a wire wound into a coil.
When a current passes through an inductor, it generates a magnetic field which in turn resists any change in the current.
Throwing switches in the inductor path causes it to alternately charge and discharge, so that the current flowing through it continuously ramps up
however, the switches in the inductor path need to be thrown immediately; otherwise, current could begin to flow through the circuit in the wrong direction,
El-Damak and Chandrakasan use an electrical component called a capacitor, which can store electrical charge.
The higher the current, the more rapidly the capacitor fills. When it full, the circuit stops charging the inductor.
The rate at which the current drops off however, depends on the output voltage, whose regulation is the very purpose of the chip.
Since that voltage is fixed, the variation in timing has to come from variation in capacitance.
El-Damak and Chandrakasan thus equip their chip with a bank of capacitors of different sizes.
As the current drops, it charges a subset of those capacitors, whose selection is determined by the solar cell voltage.
Once again, when the capacitor fills, the switches in the inductor path are flipped. n this technology space,
there usually a trend to lower efficiency as the power gets lower, because there a fixed amount of energy that consumed by doing the work,
who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at the chip manufacturer Maxim Integrated. f youe only coming in with a small amount,
he adds. t really kind of a full system-on-a chip for power management. And that makes it a little more complicated
In this so-called low battery, the electrodes are suspensions of tiny particles carried by a liquid
while the electrode material does not flow, it is composed of a similar semisolid, colloidal suspension of particles.
e realized that a better way to make use of this flowable electrode technology was to reinvent the lithium ion manufacturing process. nstead of the standard method of applying liquid coatings to a roll of backing material,
the new process keeps the electrode material in a liquid state and requires no drying stage at all.
thicker electrodes, the system reduces the conventional battery architecture number of distinct layers, as well as the amount of nonfunctional material in the structure, by 80 percent.
Having the electrode in the form of tiny suspended particles instead of consolidated slabs greatly reduces the path length for charged particles as they move through the material a property known as ortuosity.
A less tortuous path makes it possible to use thicker electrodes, which, in turn, simplifies production
While conventional lithium-ion batteries are composed of brittle electrodes that can crack under stress the new formulation produces battery cells that can be bent,
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