INNOVATION THROUGH INSPIRATION

Associate Editor Jeffrey Winters last summer visited Las Vegas to get a firsthand look at a new U.S. installation by the Australian solar power company Ausra that is far from run of the mill. The plant challenges the notion of how to generate electricity.

It is composed of galvanized steel and silvered glass, and uses garden-variety steam pipes. The project’s vice president of product engineering, David DeGraaff, calls it as pure a mechanical engineering challenge as we’ll ever see. Our cover story on this project begins on page 24.

A pioneer on another front, Peter H. Diamandis, the chairman and CEO of the X Prize Foundation, and the keynote speaker at last month’s ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition, said that he has become inspired by the word “no.” When someone says “no,” it becomes a test to find a way to make that person say “yes,” he said. The X Prize Foundation is an educational non-profit prize institute with a mission to create radical breakthroughs for the benefit of humanity. This mission is met by driving and awarding innovators to solve some of the world’s grand challenges.

The foundation is well known for offering the $10 million Ansari X Prize for private-sector manned spaceflight, a prize won in 2004 by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and aviation designer Burt Rutan with SpaceShipOne, the world’s first non-government piloted spacecraft.

All of this brings me to the matter of inspiration, the fundamental theme behind the Ausra project, and Diamandis’s organization. It is also at the heart of ASME’s second Innovation Showcase, a competition held last month at the ASME Congress in Boston, among some of the brightest young engineers in the United States.

Nine finalists representing eight prestigious universities competed for a $10,000 first prize. The team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the winner with its image-guided medical robotics product called Robopsy, which was designed to improve biopsies primarily in lung cancer patients. The device is a disposable telerobot that sits atop the body of a patient during a CAT scan. As the patient goes through the scan, an interventional radiologist manipulates and inserts the probe remotely and accurately. The team demonstrated to the judges how this device could enable earlier diagnosis, improve long-term survival rates of patients, and reduce the complication rate, radiation exposure, and time of the procedure.

Second prize went to the team from the University of California, San Francisco, for Nano Precision Medical, an implantable drug delivery system. Third prize was awarded to the team from Johns Hopkins University for SurgyPack, a medical device that improves the process of bowel packing during abdominal surgeries. A review of the nine projects is on Mechanical Engineering Magazine Online (www.memagazine.org).

As it has always done, inspiration continues to drive innovation. And it remains a hallmark of engineering. For this, we celebrate those who strive to make a difference in our world.