EU Aims to Lead in Power Electronics
Guest Blogs 6/13/2013 6 comments The Last Power project aims to make the EU independent from other developed countries on wide band-gap semiconductors.
Protecting Legacy Endpoint Devices With Secure Enclaves
Guest Blogs 6/12/2013 2 comments The legacy endpoint devices that control our critical infrastructure (utility systems, water treatment plants, military networks, industrial control systems, etc.) are some of the most vulnerable devices on the Internet.
Switched-Capacitor Filters: An Introduction
Guest Blogs 6/11/2013 4 comments In a switched-capacitor filter, capacitors and switches take the place of resistors and accurately reproduce the characteristics of continuous-time Bessel, Butterworth, and elliptical filters.
Big Mother Gets Street Smart
Guest Blogs 6/6/2013 11 comments MEMS is enabling smartphones to deliver more personalized and more contextually aware information to the user.
Engineering for Extreme Environments
Guest Blogs 6/4/2013 4 comments Many drilling operators still employ hydraulic steering systems, but some operators have begun exploiting intelligent electric actuators for directional drilling.
Slideshow: An Engineer Goes to Congress
Guest Blogs 5/29/2013 24 comments Many engineers often comment that Congress would make better decisions if it included more engineers. What they didn't know...
Maximizing Lifecycle & Performance of Optically Isolated Relays
Guest Blogs 5/29/2013 3 comments Optically isolated relays inherently have a long lifespan, thanks to their lack of moving parts and the robustness of their solid-state electronics. You can, however, make them last even longer by accounting for LED power losses.
Green Designs for Industrial Cable
Guest Blogs 5/24/2013 7 comments In a world that's going green, industrial operations have a problem: Their processes involve materials that are potentially toxic, flammable, corrosive, or reactive. If improperly managed, this can precipitate dangerous health and environmental consequences.
8 Ways to Design End-of-Life Into Your Products
Guest Blogs 5/16/2013 17 comments An analysis of what’s needed to implement Design for Disassembly and Design for Recycling results in eight strategies engineers can use to design an intentional end-of-life stage into their products.
Datacenter Security: Is Protection at the Building & Room Enough?
Guest Blogs 5/14/2013 3 comments Government regulations, coupled with growing consumer sensitivity about data and identity theft, require that data storage organizations demonstrate proper protection and due diligence in protecting sensitive information stored inside datacenter enclosures.
Monitoring Load-Pin Stresses Cuts Crane Maintenance Costs
Guest Blogs 5/8/2013 5 comments When a crane doesn't have a monitoring system, crane owners schedule service every six months and simply scrap the parts they replace, even if a part has had little use and doesn't need replacing. This can cost thousands.
Design Decisions: Implementing Adsorbent Technology
Guest Blogs 5/2/2013 5 comments It is important to take the necessary precautions when handling, storing, or transporting used or broken lamps to protect against any potential harm from released mercury vapor.
MPPE Insulation & the Incredible, Shrinking Medical Device
Guest Blogs 3/27/2013 14 comments As the demand for portable medical devices increases both in the home and in emerging markets abroad, design engineers find their solution for weight and space savings through innovative, recyclable MPPE insulation for wire and cable.
Time to Market: A Tale of 2 Products
Guest Blogs 3/20/2013 10 comments When getting into a new market, it is important to make the mistakes you are going to make while there is profit to pay for it and lower expectations on product performance.
The Engineering Creativity Challenge
Guest Blogs 3/19/2013 12 comments Brainstorming an idea is a good approach, but it's often not the best. We need to focus our creative energies on the design challenge.
Engineering Plastics for Extreme Applications
Guest Blogs 3/18/2013 4 comments Quadrant's Jim Hebel clarifies a few points about the Dimensional Stability of Duratron PAI and the ability to hold tight tolerances on finished machined components.
Making the Case for Vertical Axis Wind Turbines
Guest Blogs 3/5/2013 13 comments The marketplace is littered with companies that have tried to make a success of vertical axis wind turbines. But not all turbine designs (and sites) are created equal.
A More Natural Way to Learn
Guest Blogs 2/26/2013 11 comments With MapleSim, students can easily connect the analytic models in textbooks to the numeric solutions that result from the simulation. This openness is critical to student learning.
AC-DC Power Supplies Are Shrinking
Guest Blogs 2/21/2013 20 comments Power-supply design trends are clear and dramatic. For the AC-DC supplies, these changes are due to multiple factors combining to yield these more-compact designs. Some of the factors are obvious, but others are not.
Floodlights in the Spotlight
Guest Blogs 2/21/2013 19 comments Floodlights provide the bright conditions necessary for nocturnal leisure or industrial activities and can increase security. However, with some lights powered for up to 10 hours a day, electricity and maintenance costs can really add up.
Sensor Performance Key to Process Improvement
Guest Blogs 2/19/2013 4 comments Eddy current, noncontact displacement sensors are very different from the common inductive proximity sensor and can provide submicron resolution in harsh environments.
Engineering Education Starts at an Early Age
Guest Blogs 2/18/2013 31 comments It's National Engineers Week! As the level of system complexity escalates, and we begin solving some of the world’s biggest problems, our society will grow increasingly dependent upon the talents of generations who are just now beginning to explore their creativity and learn about the way things work.
The European Pump Market, Post Financial Crisis
Guest Blogs 2/12/2013 3 comments What’s the trend that will shape the pump market in Europe’s building services industry in the future? The answer lies in the incorporation of more electronic features in pumps, leading to greater connectivity and integration into the overall system.
For 3D printing to make the jump from rapid prototyping to manufacturing, engineers will need to find easier ways to move products from their CAD screens to their printers.
Gigabit and PoE are two networking technologies moving ahead in tandem as industrial users power remote Ethernet devices such as IP security cameras at 1,000 Mbps over existing CAT5 cable.
New versions of BASF's Ecovio line are both compostable and designed for either injection molding or thermoforming. These combinations are becoming more common for the single-use bioplastics used in food service and food packaging applications, but are still not widely available.
From Dell / Intel® New Paradigms in Design Work Scott Hamilton, vertical market strategist for Dell Precision workstations, 5/2/2013 5
Early in my career, I worked as a draftsman and remember the days of drawing on vellum with numbered pencils and Mylar with plastic lead. This was a fun experience in the sense that I ...
I've been using workstations for more than 10 years and love finding ways to get more performance from my system. With demanding professional applications that require more power each ...
A lasting memory from my first job as an engineer in an auto assembly plant is standing on hard concrete at six in the morning, vending-machine coffee clutched in hand, listening to ...
For industrial control applications, or even a simple assembly line, that machine can go almost 24/7 without a break. But what happens when the task is a little more complex? That’s where the “smart” machine would come in. The smart machine is one that has some simple (or complex in some cases) processing capability to be able to adapt to changing conditions. Such machines are suited for a host of applications, including automotive, aerospace, defense, medical, computers and electronics, telecommunications, consumer goods, and so on. This radio show will show what’s possible with smart machines, and what tradeoffs need to be made to implement such a solution.
To save this item to your list of favorite Design News content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
If you found this interesting or useful, please use the links to the services below to share it with other readers. You will need a free account with each service to share an item via that service.