SMOOTH MICROSCOPE MIRROR
by Jean Thilmany

The mirror you check each day is filled with lumps. Even the finest mirrors have them.

Now, a team of physicists has created a quantum stabilized atom mirror, the smoothest surface ever, they write in a September edition of Advanced Materials magazine, published by Wiley-VCH.

The researchers—from the Autonomous University of Madrid and the Madrid Institute of Advanced Studies in Nanoscience—are now at work on an atomic microscope that uses the quantum-stabilized mirrors. The first images obtained with them should be ready next year, said researcher Rodolfo Miranda. He’s a professor of condensed matter physics at UAM.

A mirror capable of reflecting a beam of helium atoms would finally make an atomic microscope possible. An atomic microscope has several benefits over the electron microscopes in current use. The high-speed electrons used in the electron microscope damage or destroy delicate biological samples, making it difficult to get accurate results and impossible to repeat tests.

“With atomic microscopes we hope to achieve the same resolution, but without damaging samples,” Miranda said.

However, before the atomic microscope must come the mirror and now these researchers say it’s all but ready. The mirror created by the researchers resembles a curved wafer and is composed of a thin silicon crystal covered with a very fine layer of lead. The mirror reflects up to 67 percent of helium atoms bounced at its surface rather than the 1 percent reflected by previous efforts to create an atomic mirror, Miranda said.

Because the layer of lead—only one or two nanometers thick—is deposited on the silicon at very high temperatures, the material’s quantum properties come to the surface, and that evens out bumps to create a super-flat layer, Miranda said.

The layer of lead allows the mirror to reflect most of the
atoms that affect it, Miranda said. 

A FLYWHEEL RECORD
by Harry Hutchinson

A customer described as “one of the world’s largest Internet search engine providers” has placed the largest single order—12 systems—for the flywheel-based uninterruptible power supplies made by Active Power Inc.

According to Active Power, the multimillion-dollar order is for twelve 1,200 kVA CleanSource UPS systems, which store energy in flywheels and use no batteries. The systems will store energy in a total of 48 flywheels, which will be deployed at one of the customer’s newest data centers to protect equipment from power outages.

The company did not disclose the full value of the contract, which includes installation and service. The units themselves are priced around $320,000 each, a spokesman said. They are scheduled for delivery in fourth quarter 2008. 

An uninterruptible power supply provides electricity if the main supply of power fails. In some applications, the UPS serves to bridge the time between a power outage and the start of backup generators. The supply of electricity also can be used to power down equipment that would otherwise stall abruptly in an outage.
Jim Clishem, Active Power’s president and CEO, said the CleanSource systems are compact and their power efficiencies offer substantial economic savings.

Active Power’s systems use the kinetic energy stored in the flywheels to generate electricity. The company claims that the systems are 98 percent efficient. It estimates that the dozen systems may save as much as $1 million per year in electrical and operational costs, compared to a conventional UPS system of equivalent capacity.

In a separate announcement in late September, Active Power said that it had sold its 2,000th flywheel, which was purchased by an OEM customer, Caterpillar Inc.  

ECO-MINDED PLASTICS
by Harry Hutchinson

The operator of a Web site containing product information for the plastics industry has added a module to search for so-called “green plastics,” which are biodegradable, include recycled content, or are derived from renewable resources.

The company, IDES Inc., operates The Plastics Web, which is built on a database of product information from about 700 plastics suppliers around the world. IDES said the new feature in its Prospector search engine turns up technical product information on more than 170 ecologically friendly plastic materials from suppliers including BASF, Dow Plastics, DuPont Engineering Polymers, Eastman Chemical Group, Ecoplast, NatureWorks LLC, and SABIC Innovative Plastics.

More information about the Green Plastics Search from IDES can be found at www.ides.com/green.

IDES has also teamed with Firehole Technologies Inc., a supplier of computer-aided simulation software and services for composite materials, to develop a searchable composite materials database. More information is available at the Firehole Web site, www.fireholetech.com.       

CASH FOR WIND
by Peter Easton

The Wind Energy Technology Department at Sandia National Laboratories has received additional funding from the Department of Energy to conduct research on three projects.

Sandia, based in Albuquerque, N.M., is sharing a $4 million award with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Livermore, Argonne, and Los Alamos national laboratories. The multilaboratory research agenda is focused on delivering the results needed to continue to integrate high penetrations of wind energy into the electric grid.

Of the three awards Sandia received, one involves joint research with NREL. The other two are solely Sandia projects.

“This funding gives us the opportunity to support a new mission space in areas that we have wanted to pursue, but for which we didn’t have the budget in the past,” said Jose Zayas, manager of Sandia’s wind energy department.

The first-year funding comes through the DOE Wind Energy Program FY08 Renewable Systems Interconnection Support Laboratory Call. More funding for selected projects will be considered later.

The project allows researchers to expand on work to determine the feasibility of building a multimegawatt wind power plant on Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque.

In partnership with NREL, Sandia researchers will evaluate Sandia-owned sonic detection and ranging instrumentation systems near Texas Tech University’s heavily instrumented 200-meter meteorological tower. The instrumentation remotely measures the vertical turbulence structure and the wind profile of the lower layer of the atmosphere.

In the third research project, Sandia researchers will further develop a framework for applying complex adaptive system-of-systems approaches for modeling renewable energy integration and advanced grid
concepts.     

EXTREME REDESIGN
by Harry Hutchinson

A design competition based on 3-D printing for high school and college students is entering its fifth year. The contest, Extreme Redesign: The Ultimate 3D Printing Challenge, is sponsored by The Dimension 3D Printing Group, a business unit of Stratasys Inc.

Dimension will award student winners $2,500 or $1,000 scholarships based on their design’s creativity, usefulness, part integrity, and aesthetics. Dimension also will award laptop computers to teachers of the three first-place student winners. Over the past four years, more than 2,500 entries have been judged and 27 students have been awarded a total of $40,000 in scholarships.

To enter, students need to identify an existing product and redesign it. Students send an .stl file, a completed submission form, and a written or video-recorded description of the object.

Submissions must be postmarked by Feb. 1, 2009. Winners will be selected in April 2009. Contest rules and submission information are available at www.dimensionprinting.com/education/extremeredesign.shtml. 

NATO TO BUY CARGO JETS
by Peter Easton

An international consortium of 10 NATO members—joined by Partnership for Peace nations Sweden and Finland—has signed a memorandum of understanding to acquire three Boeing C-17 Globemaster III long-range cargo jets. The agreement sets the stage for NATO’s first major defense purchase in 30 years.

Under the agreement with the U.S. Department of Defense and the NATO Airlift Management Agency, two of the advanced airlifters would be purchased from Boeing, while a third would be provided by the U.S. Air Force. The aircraft would be assigned to NATO’s Heavy Airlift Wing and jointly operated by the nations from Papa Air Base in Hungary. Delivery of the first aircraft could take place as early as spring 2009.

Each participating nation would pay for a portion of a C-17 rather than an entire aircraft, allowing them to share a pooled fleet. The 12 countries participating in NATO’s Strategic Airlift Capability program are Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Slovenia, Sweden, and the United States.

The C-17 fleet will allow each nation to meet its airlift requirements to support sovereign and multinational mission requirements. NATO does not currently have heavy airlift capability and frequently contracts with nations such as the United States and Russia for assistance with its heavy airlift requirements.    

ANOTHER EQUATOR
by Jean Thilmany

Scientists at the University of York in England have discovered a chemical equator that divides the polluted air of the Earth’s Northern Hemisphere from that of the largely uncontaminated atmosphere of its Southern Hemisphere.

The discovery will help scientists accurately simulate how pollution moves in the atmosphere and assess the impact of pollution on climate, said Jacqueline Hamilton, one of the researchers.

The research team, members of the university’s department of chemistry, found evidence of a chemical equator about 30 miles wide in the cloudless skies of the western Pacific.

Previously, scientists believed that a region called the Intertropical Convergence Zone formed the boundary between the hemispheres. The ITCZ is a cloudy region circling the globe where the trade winds from each hemisphere meet. It’s characterized by rapid vertical uplift and heavy rainfall, and acts as a meteorological barrier to pollutant transport between north and south.

But the new findings show that the chemical and meteorological boundaries between the two air masses are not necessarily the same, Hamilton said.

According to Hamilton, the scientists discovered evidence of the chemical equator using sensors on a specially equipped airplane during a series of flights near what came to be defined as the chemical equator. 

BRIEFLY NOTED

Algor Inc. of Pittsburgh announced its finite element analysis software is a 32- and 64-bit certified application for Autodesk Inventor 2009. The designation is for products that operate with Autodesk Inventor software. /// Zenergy Power plc has entered into a five-year joint development agreement with Honeywell Specialty Products to develop a range of chemical precursors for volume production of second-generation high-temperature superconductive wire. /// Curtiss-Wright Corp. of Roseland, N.J., has acquired Mechetronics Ltd. for $2.8 million. Mechetronics, which makes solenoids and solenoid valves for industrial markets, will become part of Curtiss-Wright’s Motion Control segment. Mechetronics is based in Bishop Auckland, U.K. /// Visteon Corp., a Michigan supplier of automotive interiors, climate, electronics and lighting systems, has opened an office in St. Petersburg, Russia. The office, based on Nevsky Prospect, provides an expanded level of service to Visteon’s customers operating in the rapidly growing Russian market. /// Gerber Technology of Tolland, Conn., which makes CAD, CAM, and PLM software for the flexible materials industry, has released an upgrade to its product data management software, WebPDM Version 5.3.