This section was written by Associate Editor Jean Thilmany.

HIGH SIGHTS

The Herschel Space Observatory, which was launched in May by the European Space Agency, should soon be sending back unique glimpses of the universe.

Herschel, which relies on infrared light to peer into the universe, should reach its final orbit in November around a point in space known as the second Lagrangian point, which astronomers generally refer to as L2.

The Herschel Observatory as it will appear in orbit (above)
and as it was packed for flight through the atmosphere
(below). Mechanical and digital modeling played key roles
in designing the spacecraft and its instruments to survive
the vibrations they would experience during launch.

From this distant point in space—1.5 million kilometers from Earth, in an orbit far more distant than the Hubble telescope has reached, Herschel will have an unprecedented view of the cosmos. That’s because infrared radiation can penetrate the gas and dust clouds that hide objects from optical telescopes and will give Herschel a look into star-forming regions, galactic centers, and planetary systems, said Alexander Kübler, marketing and sales manager for the European Test Services at the European Space Research and Space Technology Center’s test center in Noordwijk, The Netherlands. ETS helped with the design of Herschel.

Cooler objects, such as tiny stars and molecular clouds, even galaxies enshrouded in dust and barely emitting optical light, are visible in the infrared, he said.

But getting the telescope—a complex system that was subject to high vibration during launch—off the ground was no easy matter.

Not only does Herschel have to withstand the aggressive environment of space during its voyage to L2, but it also had to survive the launch itself. During launch, the telescope was violently shaken and subjected to extremely high noise levels caused by the rocket engine and aerodynamic effects on the launcher, Kübler said.

To ensure the telescope survived its launch on an Ariane-5 rocket, a team of vibration and acoustic specialists from ETS stepped into the picture, Kübler said.

The mechanical test facilities at the center include a series of electrodynamic shakers, a six-degree-of-freedom hydraulic shaker, an acoustic facility, and a number of physical property measurement machines—all designed to verify the integrity and launch survivability of the structural design of spacecraft and their subsystems, Kübler said.

It was at the center that the Herschel spacecraft underwent a series of mechanical tests, including acoustic noise tests, and more than a week of vibration tests.

To help ensure the tests were as accurate as possible, the test center recently upgraded its signal conditioning, data acquisition, and vibration control software to products from LMS International of Leuven, Belgium.

The upgrade brought many improvements to the testing process, said Jean-Sébastien Servaye, ETS data handling manager.

Because the testing system is online, it delivers the frequency-domain results right after the test. The data are ready without any additional post-processing. For backup, the time-domain data is available as well, he said.

“After a large test, we can usually deliver the data on a USB stick in about 30 minutes for 500 channels. This of course includes the quality control we perform before handing it over to the customer,” Servaye added.

QUANTUM COMPUTER CLOSER

A team led by Yale University researchers has created the first rudimentary solid-state quantum processor, taking another step toward the ultimate goal of building a quantum computer.

They used a two-qubit superconducting chip to successfully run elementary algorithms—such as a simple search—to demonstrate quantum information processing with a solid-state device.

Their findings appeared in the online publication of the journal Nature on June 28.

“Our processor can perform only a few very simple quantum tasks, which have been demonstrated before with single nuclei, atoms, and photons,” said Robert Schoelkopf, a professor of physics and applied physics at Yale in New Haven, Conn. “But this is the first time they’ve been possible in an all-electronic device that looks and feels much more like a regular microprocessor.”

Working with a group of theoretical physicists led by Steven Girvin, a professor of physics and applied physics, the team manufactured two artificial atoms, or quantum bits (known as qubits). While each qubit is actually made up of a billion aluminum atoms, it acts like a single atom that can occupy two different energy states. These states are akin to the 1 and 0 bits (or on and off states) in transistors employed by conventional computers.

Because of the counterintuitive laws of quantum mechanics, scientists can effectively place qubits in multiple states at the same time, allowing for greater information storage and processing power.

For example, say you have four phone numbers, including one for a friend, but you don’t know which number belongs to that friend. You would typically have to try two to three numbers before you dialed the right one. A quantum processor, on the other hand, can find the right number in only one try.

“It’s like being able to place one phone call that simultaneously tests all four numbers, but only goes through to the right one,” Schoel-kopf said.

These sorts of computations, though simple, have not been possible using solid-state qubits until now, in part because scientists could not get the qubits to last long enough, he added.

While the first qubits of a decade ago were able to maintain specific quantum states for about a nanosecond, Schoelkopf and his team are now able to maintain theirs for a microsecond—a thousand times longer, which is enough to run the simple algorithms, he said.

To perform their operations, the qubits communicate with one another using a quantum bus—photons that transmit information through wires connecting the qubits—previously developed by the Yale group.

The key that made the two-qubit processor possible was getting the qubits to switch on and off abruptly, so that they exchanged information quickly and only when the researchers wanted them to, said Leonardo DiCarlo, a postdoctoral associate in applied physics at Yale’s School of Engineering and Applied Science.

COOL RUNNING

It’s no secret that air conditioners can be energy hogs. They eat up their owners’ funds in other ways too, in repair or replacement costs.

Engineers at Purdue University of West Lafayette, Ind., have come up with a way to keep air conditioners from working overtime. They said their sensor-based technique saves energy and servicing costs by indicating when air conditioners are low on refrigerant.


James Braun, a Purdue mechanical engineering professor, and doctoral student Haorong Li have created a device that relies on software, hardware, and sensors to indicate when air conditioners are low on refrigerant.

Maintaining the proper amount of refrigerant in a system saves energy because air conditioners low on refrigerant must operate longer to achieve the same degree of cooling as properly charged units, said James Braun, a professor of mechanical engineering at the university who helped develop the device.

“When refrigerant is low, not only does the energy efficiency go down, but you also reduce the lifetime of the unit because it has to work harder, causing parts to wear out faster,” Braun said. “To accurately learn how much charge is in the system, you have to remove all of the refrigerant and weigh it, a procedure that requires a vacuum pump and is quite time consuming.”

The Purdue engineers have devised an alternative. Their device uses sensors attached to the tubing in an air conditioner to monitor the temperature of refrigerant at various points in the system, Braun said.

Braun and former mechanical engineering doctoral student Haorong Li created a software algorithm that interprets temperature-sensor data to estimate the amount of refrigerant in the system.

The sensors are particularly useful for automotive air conditioners, which tend to leak refrigerant more than other types of units, and also for household central air conditioning units, Braun said.

Automotive air conditioning units equipped with the new refrigerant-charge system could activate a warning light on a car’s dashboard. Technicians servicing home air conditioners might simply plug a personal digital assistant into the unit to read the refrigerant-charge information, Braun said.

CONTINUOUS FLOW 

Controlling road traffic in congested areas is no piece of cake.

But a more organic approach to traffic lights than typically used today might help solve the problem and avoid traffic jams and gridlock, according to research published in June in the International Journal of Autonomous and Adaptive Communications Systems.

The so-called organic computing method can model even very complex systems, according to Holger Prothmann of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology of Karlsruhe, Germany, and colleagues there and at Leibniz Universität of Hanover, Germany.

Organic computing involves the creation of an autonomous technical system that adapts dynamically to the current conditions of its environment by use of sensors, controllers and attendant software. In recent years, organic computing has emerged as a possible solution to a wide range of problems, Prothmann said.

In the case of an urban traffic system, the sensors would be closed-circuit TV cameras mounted on road gantries and other places, and the controllers, or actuators, would be traffic lights, which can effectively start and stop the flow of traffic, he explained. The sensors would communicate via a software algorithm with the actuators, sending messages about traffic flow and position that the actuators could act on.

Currently, traffic lights either have fixed timer controls or a centralized control system. Fixed timers—as the name implies—don’t respond to changing traffic patterns. Nor can centralized systems respond to changes in traffic movements on roads.

Prothmann and his colleagues’ organic computing approach to traffic uses industry-standard traffic light controllers, which the team adapted so that they had what Prothmann called an observer-controller architecture. This allows the traffic light to respond to traffic flow and to pass on information to the other traffic lights on neighboring roads.

Tests at busy junctions in Hamburg demonstrated that the average number of vehicle stops can be cut significantly, Prothmann said.

QUICK TO MARKET

One medical-device maker was recently able to significantly cut its time to market by using three-dimensional computer-aided design software.

Carl Zeiss Meditec of Jena, Germany, which makes systems to diagnose and treat eye disorders, recently released the Cirrus HD-OCT, a high-definition retinal scanner. The scanner creates 3-D line scans that are used to analyze the eyes of patients with retinal degenerations, uncommon macular disorders, and glaucoma.

The Cirrus launched five months ahead of schedule as a result of Carl Zeiss Meditec’s design process, said Chris Baker, director of mechanical engineering at Carl Zeiss Meditec.

The company used CoCreate CAD software from PTC of Needham, Mass., to help create the retinal scanner. The software helped the company’s designers make quick changes to scanner design and to adapt to the unpredictable product and design requirements common in the fast-paced medical technology industry, Baker said.

BRIEFLY NOTED

Field Precision LLC of Albuquerque, N.M., now includes a versatile viewer for STL models in all its Field Precision 3-D finite-element software packages. /// Roland DGA Corp. of Irvine, Calif., is shipping its newest 3-D desktop milling machine, the MDX-40A. /// TEDCF Publishing of Springville, Calif., an authorized Autodesk publisher of interactive courses for Autodesk Inventor, announced the availability of Autodesk Inventor 2010: 2D Drafting and Customization, the third in a series of certified courses for Autodesk Inventor 2010. /// A provider of CAD and product lifecycle management solutions, Magnacad Design Inc. of Commack, N.Y., has enhanced its IronCAD native model repository site to include on-demand and faster downloads. /// TriStar Inc. of Phoenix has launched TriStar Commons, a user-directed professional networking site that collects hard-to-find expert blogs, forums, user groups, and industry news. Users can interact with other professionals on the site. /// Exa Corp. of Burlington, Mass., which makes fluids simulation software for product engineering, has released PowerDELTA, which streamlines and automates the creation of  simulation models. /// A developer of digital manufacturing applications using the XVL format, Lattice Technology of San Francisco, is extending its application to include Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended software, which allows 3-D CAD data contained within PDF documents to be enhanced with additional data. /// The CAM software developer Delcam of Birmingham, England, has launched an online TV channel, www.delcam.tv. /// Autodesk of San Rafael, Calif., has launched an India user community Web site that allows product users to network with each other and with Autodesk employees. The site can be found via http://communities.autodesk.com.  /// ESI Group of Paris, a supplier of digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes, has released Pam-Diemaker for rapid stamping tool design.