Power and Electrical Engineering

A team of first-year engineering students at Elizabethtown College have created a proximity sensor system that will help a disabled woman better maneuver her power wheelchair.

The Audible Warning Sonic Sensor System, which is mounted to and powered by Melissa Sneath’s wheelchair, produces a warning sound when she is approaching an object or wall. The sound changes as she gets closer to the object, allowing her to correct her course and avoid a collision.

“As a result of h

Students from Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering are partnering with Carnegie Mellon University’s “Red Team” in an effort to win a $2 million prize from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). All they have to do is complete the toughest ground course ever devised for a self-guided robotic vehicle.

The contest, called the DARPA Grand Challenge, is a race between fully self-guided ground vehicles to be conducted in the Southwestern United States on Oct. 8,

The engineers who built the massive external fuel tank that will power the shuttle Discovery into orbit this spring used sophisticated X-ray detectors developed by UF researchers to reduce the chance of a defect in the foam insulation covering the tank. The detectors, first invented as a new technology to find land mines, can identify tiny gaps, or air-filled voids, in the insulating foam without causing any damage. It is believed that such a gap – possibly located between the foam and the ta

A new integrated facility designed to give scientists unprecedented insights into the chemical and biological reactions which can transform renewable plant and waste materials into useful sources of energy was dedicated yesterday at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Called the Biomass Surface Characterization Laboratory (BSCL), the $2.85 million facility features an array of electron and optical microscopes, and other advanced res

Flawed Hardware Can Function Well in Many Applications, USC Researchers Find

Computer chip manufacturers traditionally have had a single, simple standard for their product: perfection. But a USC engineer who has spent his career devising ways to have chips test themselves has found that less than perfect is sometimes good enough — possibly good enough to save billions of dollars. “Chips with any flaws at all have always been discarded,” said Melvin A. Breuer, a professor in the

British company Instrumentel has developed a revolutionary communications technology that enables two-way command and control for battery-less remote sensing and actuation.

The company originated from the University of Leeds, where ground-breaking research by Dr Greg Horler of the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering has produced an inductively coupled wireless telemetry system based on miniaturised electronics that can both sense and actuate.

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