Category Archives: Technology

From Defense Tech

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20120218-215324.jpg
This reminder of fun times past, though one wonders about the prayers of the C5 pilot prior to ignition. I remember seeing this as one of the options explored for the Peacekeeper ICBM follow on to The Minuteman. Must admit that it seems pretty crazy cost wise and if you kept them on the ground most of the time little different from the bomber force. Maybe it made some sense, fly as close to the border as you want then toss in at a shallow angle, mixing up the attack as it were. Of course by the time this was really feasible, there was no point…and history seems to say that much of this kind of thinking was wasted time and energy, the BOOGEYMAN, was only ever a boogeyman, and probably more worried about what we might do to him than what he could do to us.

3D printer builds a Lower Jawbone Replacement

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This piece of news popped up all over earlier this week, but the Technology Review piece though short gives it some context.  The rapid advances in imaging, tissue creation, stem cell technology, bio compatible materials, low impact surgery and 3D fabrication are being brought together to make things possible that were once fantasy and to eventually overtake transplants in the traditional sense.

While this is fascinating from a sci-fi writer’s viewpoint, the reality is something close to awe-inspiring.

A few chemicals and a microwave and see what you get

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Zapping raw materials in a microwave oven and drying the resulting solution produces a black powder (top) made of hexagonal bismuth telluride nanoplates (bottom).
Technology Review| New Process Makes Heat-Harvesting Materials Cheaply: Such materials could be used to cool computers and buildings, and harvest waste heat in cars.

High-efficiency thermoelectric materials could lead to new types of cooling systems, and new ways to scavenge waste heat for electricity. Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, have now developed an easy, inexpensive process to make such materials.

The materials made by the RPI team already perform as well as those on the market, and the new process, which involves zapping chemicals in a microwave oven, offers room for improvement. “We haven’t even optimized the process yet,” says Ganpati Ramanath, a materials science and engineering professor at RPI. “We’re confident that we can increase the efficiency further.”

What caught my eye here is that the material is a form of nano particulate, its produced in an evidently very simple process and it has a very high efficiency.  This type of technology as the article notes could have a great number of applications.  In a car one could conceive of replacing the mechanically driven alternator with something like this or supplementing it, this would essentially be using waste heat to provide electricity and would increase gas mileage.  There are many other places where heat scavenging would make sense and have an impact if the materials and system were cheap enough.  This goes back to a fundamental issue, energy efficiency costs money and if the cost of burning a tiny fraction more fuel over the life of the system (which can add up to biggish $) is less than the energy scavenging equipment then the equipment will not be installed unless the added cost is passed on to someone. 

 

Algae to the rescue

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Green tea: Joule Energy's SolarConverter turns carbon dioxide and sunlight into ethanol fuel at a pilot plant in Leander, Texas.

 Technology Review| Photosynthesis Fuel Company Gets a Large Investment:  Joule Unlimited will build a production plant for turning sunlight and CO2 into liquid fuels.

The company is combining many technologies to move to direct creation of biofuel precursor liquids.  The algae is similar to that others are experimenting with but excrete the molecules into the water instead of retaining inside the cells.  This way the harvesting ‘only’ entails fractionating the liquid from the flow.  The bioreactors are essentially double panel windows with the algae filled liquid flowing inside.  The water gets CO2 from a power plant which scrubs it out of the plant effluents and one guesses that in cooler climates the water could be warmed in the cooling cycle of the same power plant so the system could operate year round.

The company calculates that their system can produce a great deal more, more easily refined biofuel precursor liquids than the alternates. Which mostly involve growing various kinds of plants and then converting them to biofuels in either chemical or bio reactors.

Skynet it’s not yet, but one has to wonder…

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Police Drone...
Skynet’s distant ancestor

The fact of the matter is that this, like so many other things, is coming.  I used to laugh at some ‘SciFi-ish’ cartoons for their depiction of flying drone/droid/robo cops, but then I’ve never been any better at predicting the future than most other engineers, we always dive way too deep into the details far too quickly unless we have something keeping our head out of the water long enough to figure out if we are in the ocean, sea, lake, pond, swamp or whirlpool. 

But there is the issue of privacy and the increasing ability of ‘the system’ to keep track of citizens 24/7/365.  Save a few puppies and a kid or so and we’re all for giving up a little bit of something for increased safety.  But at what cost, and have ‘we’ ever considered that we may be being manipulated?…..Anyway….

This post by Babbage at the Economist covers the ground pretty thoroughly, at least for the near term.  I think the killer app here is the comment about replacing choppers which cost a couple of million up to operate along with expensive maintenance and aircrew tails. Smaller police forces will be able to have an air contingent and big forces will have a lot of these things (hopefully replacing most if not all the choppers, which are IMO a waste of taxpayer money.)
 
UAV’s , particularly like the one in the picture have a lot of advantages they :
  • can fly in a wider weather window than crewed craft.
  • are harder to see and hear
  • can land and sit/monitor for long periods
  • could operate 24 hours with rotating crews or units
  • can travel ‘as the crow flies’ instead of around buildings, fences, traffic etc
That’s in the near term, 2-3 years, what about the middle Future (4-7 years)?:
  • Wide area surveillance from solar powered (maybe a SolarSaurs?) high altitude platforms.
  • Add ‘Gorgon’s Stare’ technology, constant surveilance with roll back capability.
  • UAV’s the size of a bird it could follow a perp under cover.
  • UAV’s that can launch a smaller pursuit drone with a TAZER ?…a bit like this
  • What about a humingbird UAV?

And as you add those capabilities my libertarian hackles go up more and more.  None of the above should be given by a free citizenry to a gov’t that is actively growing and actively misusing its powers or taking advantage of congressional stupidity.

…Maybe I’d be happier if…..I had the right to pot one of the little puckers if it was over my property without my permission?  Hey it would create a new market, for home ultra short range anti aircraft systems!  Maybe these guys would have a head start?

Creative destruction in it’s meme’s

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20120110-232657.jpg Steve Jobs, our Guttenburg, RIP

VodkaPundit, via Instapundit, has a very good point to bear in mind in this the season of CES(RIP?)

When jobs came back to Apple he brought a self operational version of Creative Destruction, the dynamic heart of real capitalism we saw at work in the late eighties to early oughts, the idea that products, product lines even companies do not, should not, live forever but be overtaken by better solutions.

The iPhones 5 years old, it seems reasonable to think there is something next and no reason for it not to be targeted at eventually gobbling the iPhone as we know it.

What set of features would you build into a new personal product that might change the world?