25May2016

Investigation of compressive properties of 3D fiber reinforced polymeric (FRP) composites through combined end and shear loadingPosted by SATISH

The failure mechanisms and failure stress states of 2D and 3D FRP composite is investigated through experimental work, SEM, finite element analysis and failure theories. In this research work, feasibility of ASTM standard D6641 is investigated for testing of 3D FRP composite. A 3D finite element model is developed in ABAQUS with homogeneous orthotropic laminate to investigate the failure stress state in the gage section of the test specimens. Two failure theories are considered for failure investigation that is fully interactive three dimensional Tasi Wu failure criteria and limit criteria (maximum stress criteria). SEM is carried out to investigate the failure mechanisms and failure location in the specimens. Experimental results shows that the compressive strength of 3D FRP composite is less as compared to 2D FRP composite, also standard deviation (SD) and coefficient of variance (COV) of 3D FRP composite is high. This paper highlights the problems associated with the use of ASTM D6641 for 3D FRP composite, and internal failure mechanisms in 3D FRP composite using compression through combine end and shear loading.

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8Apr2016

Six core activities in the commissioning of the earthing system.Posted by Deepak

Testing of the earthing system

Commissioning of new earthing system is essential as a validation step for the design andinstallation process and for the design inputs. In most cases commissioning should measure the outputs of the earthing system in terms of produced voltages and current distributions rather than solely resistance.Rajesh

The commissioning should consider closely the key performance criteria identified in the hazard identification and treatment analysis phases.

Commissioning will determine the earthing system initial compliance and set a benchmark or baseline for ongoing supervision.

As it is not always possible to foresee all hazard mechanisms at the design stage commissioning testing should also determine the need for any localised secondary mitigation and any additional requirements for telecommunication coordination and pipeline interference coordination or mitigation.

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8Apr2016

What Is The Energy, But For Real?Posted by Deepak

The basics of energy

Energy is best defined as “the capacity for doing work”. Electricity is but one of many forms of energy. Other familiar forms of or descriptions of energy are thermal or heat, light, mechanical, and so on. Energy is also described as kinetic, that energy associated with a moving body, and potential energy, that energy associated with an object’s position.

For centuries mankind has used energy in its various forms to enhance its standard of living. In many cases, ways have been devised to change energy from one form to another to increase its usefulness. An example as old as mankind is the burning of a fuel to produce heat and light.

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8Apr2016

Strides in Atomic Force Microscope Design.Posted by Sudhir

Atomic force microscopes may have a big impact on the medical and semiconductor fields in the future but for that to happen, speed will likely have to be less of an issue. Kamal Yousef-Toumi, a professor of mechanical engineering at MIT, says his team has been making strides in this area.

“Basically, atomic force resolution systems, meaning resolutions down to the atomic level, have been worked on for maybe almost 25 years,” he explains. “We started with funding from Samsung and they do semiconductor manufacturing. Wafers needed to be looked at and inspected so the company wanted an instrument that could look at them in a very fast way because existing commercial instruments didn’t have the speed. That was one of the reasons for designing and making these microscopes, to have high-speed imaging.”

The result was his team’s atomic force microscope, which can scan images 2,000 times faster than existing commercial models.

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8Apr2016

Anaerobic Digesters Reduce Fossil-Fuel DependencePosted by Sudhir

Engineers have experimented with anaerobic digestion as a way to create energy since the 1800s. For example, some British communities were using biogas captured from sewage treatment operations to power street lamps over 100 years ago. However, throughout the twentieth century, the abundance and relatively low cost of gas, oil, and coal has made it economically impractical to develop more advanced and larger-scale anaerobic digester technologies, especially in the U.S.

This is starting to change, however. Anaerobic digestion a straightforward, well-understood process that can now be cost-effective compared to fossil fuels. Its positive impacts on the environment are also desirable. Small-scale digesters have been used successfully for years to provide energy and heat in developing countries (more than 8 million small-scale digester systems are estimated to be in use in China). This overall increased awareness is leading to the establishment of larger-scale anaerobic digestion systems in Europe and North America that produce thousands of kWh of renewable electricity on a daily basis.

Straightforward Technology

Anaerobic digestion is a natural process by which bacteria break down organic matter in an oxygen-free environment to form biogas and a digestate. Feedstock can be food waste, manure, sewage, or other organic matter. Depending on the type of bacteria used, operating temperatures are typically 35° C (95° F) or 55° C (131° F). Precise temperature control is required to optimize the bacteria’s rate of activity. The final product is a biogas mixture of methane and carbon dioxide that can be used as a fuel for generating electricity; the digestate is usually spread on agricultural fields as a fertilizer.

Environmental benefits of anaerobic digestion include the capture and use of greenhouse gas emissions, reduced reliance on fossil fuels, and reduced volumes of stored waste, which lessens the environmental risks of manure run-off and groundwater contamination. Being able to process waste organic matter through anaerobic digestion also relieves disposal burden on municipal landfills.

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8Apr2016

New institute will accelerate innovations in fibers and fabricsPosted by Rajesh

An independent nonprofit founded by MIT has been selected to run a new, $317 million public-private partnership announced today by Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter.

The partnership, named the Advanced Functional Fibers of America (AFFOA) Institute, has won a national competition for federal funding to create the latest Manufacturing Innovation Institute. It is designed to accelerate innovation in high-tech, U.S.-based manufacturing involving fibers and textiles.

The proposal for the institute was led by Professor Yoel Fink, director of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE). The partnership includes 32 universities, 16 industry members, 72 manufacturing entities, and 26 startup incubators, spread across 27 states and Puerto Rico.

This is the eighth Manufacturing Innovation Institute established to date, and the first to be headquartered in New England. The headquarters will be established in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in proximity to the MIT campus and its U.S. Army-funded Institute for Soldier Nanotechnology, as well as the Natick Soldier Research Development and Engineering Center.

This unique partnership, Fink says, has the potential to create a whole new industry, based on breakthroughs in fiber materials and manufacturing. These new fibers and the fabrics made from them will have the ability to see, hear, and sense their surroundings; communicate; store and convert energy; monitor health; control temperature; and change their color.

The new initiative will receive $75 million in federal funding out of a total of $317 million through cost sharing among the Department of Defense, industrial partners, venture capitalists, universities, nonprofits, and states including the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The initial funding will cover a five-year period and will be administered through the new, independent, nonprofit organization set up for the purpose. The partnership, which will focus on both developing new technologies and training the workforce needed to operate and maintain these production systems, also includes a network of community colleges and experts in career and technical education for manufacturing.

“Massachusetts’s innovation ecosystem is reshaping the way that people interact with the world around them,” says Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker. “This manufacturing innovation institute will be the national leader in developing and commercializing textiles with extraordinary properties. It will extend to an exciting new field our ongoing efforts to nurture emerging industries, and grow them to scale in Massachusetts. And it will serve as a vital piece of innovation infrastructure, to support the development of the next generation of manufacturing technology, and the development of a highly skilled workforce.”

“Through this manufacturing innovation institute, Massachusetts researchers and Massachusetts employers will collaborate to unlock new advances in military technology, medical care, wearable technology, and fashion,” adds Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Karyn Polito. “This, in turn, will help drive business expansion, support the competitiveness of local manufacturers, and create new employment opportunities for residents across the Commonwealth.”

Announcing the new institute at an event at MIT, Carter stressed the importance of technology and innovation to the mission of the Department of Defense and to national security broadly: “The intersection of the two is truly an opportunity-rich environment. These issues matter. They have to do with our protection and our security, and creating a world where our fellow citizens can go to school and live their lives, and dream their dreams, and one day give their children a better future. Helping defend your country and making a better world is one of the noblest things that a business leader, a technologist, an entrepreneur, or a young person can do, and we’re all grateful to all of you for doing that with us.”

A new age of fabrics

For thousands of years, humans have used fabrics in much the same way, to provide basic warmth and aesthetics. Clothing represents “one of the most ancient forms of human expression,” Fink says, but one that is now, for the first time, poised to undergo a profound transformation — the dawn of a “fabric revolution.”

“What makes this point in time different? The answer is research,” Fink says: Objects that serve many complex functions are always made of multiple materials, whereas single-material objects, such as a drinking glass, usually have just a single, simple function. But now, new technology — some of it developed in Fink’s own laboratory — is changing all that, making it possible to integrate many materials and complex functional structures into a fabric’s very fibers, and to create fiber-based devices and functional fabric systems.

The semiconductor industry has shown how to combine millions of transistors into an integrated circuit that functions as a system; as described by “Moore’s law,” the number of devices and functions has doubled in computer chips every couple of years. Fink says the team envisions that the number of functions in a fiber will grow with similar speed, paving the way for highly functional fabrics.

The challenge now is to execute this vision, Fink says. While many textile and apparel companies and universities have figured out pieces of this puzzle, no single one has figured it all out.

“It turns out there is no company or university in the world that knows how to do all of this,” Fink says. “Instead of creating a single brick-and-mortar center, we set out to assemble and organize companies and universities that have manufacturing and ‘making’ capabilities into a network — a ‘distributed foundry’ capable of addressing the manufacturing challenges. To date, 72 manufacturing entities have signed up to be part of our network.”

“With a capable manufacturing network in place,” Fink adds, “the question becomes: How do we encourage and foster product innovation in this new area?” The answer, he says, lies at the core of AFFOA’s activities: Innovators across the country will be invited to execute “advanced fabric” products on prototyping and pilot scales. Moreover, the center will link these innovators with funding from large companies and venture capital investors, to execute their ideas through the manufacturing stage. The center will thus lower the barrier to innovation and unleash product creativity in this new domain, he says.

Promoting leadership in manufacturing

The federal selection process for the new institute was administered by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Manufacturing Technology Program and the U.S. Army’s Natick Soldier Research, Development and Engineering Center and Contracting Command in New Jersey. Retired Gen. Paul J. Kern will serve as chairman of the AFFOA Institute.

As explained in the original call for proposals to create this institute, the aim is to ensure “that America leads in the manufacturing of new products from leading edge innovations in fiber science, commercializing fibers and textiles with extraordinary properties. Known as technical textiles, these modern day fabrics and fibers boast novel properties ranging from being incredibly lightweight and flame resistant, to having exceptional strength. Technical textiles have wide-ranging applications, from advancing capabilities of protective gear allowing fire fighters to battle the hottest flames, to ensuring that a wounded soldier is effectively treated with an antimicrobial compression bandage and returned safely.”

In addition to Fink, the new partnership will include Tom Kochan, the George Maverick Bunker Professor of Management at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, who will serve as chief workforce officer coordinating the nationwide education and workforce development (EWD) plan. Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering Alexander Slocum will be the EWD deputy for education innovation. Other key MIT participants will include professors Krystyn Van Vliet from the Materials Science and Engineering and Biological Engineering departments; Peko Hosoi and Kripa Varanasi from the Department of Mechanical Engineering; and Gregory Rutledge from the Department of Chemical Engineering.

Among the industry partners who will be members of the partnership are companies such as Warwick Mills, DuPont, Steelcase, Nike, and Corning. Among the academic partners are Drexel University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, the University of Georgia, the University of Tennessee, and the University of Texas at Austin.

In a presentation last fall about the proposed partnership, MIT President L. Rafael Reif said, “We believe that partnerships — with industry and government and across academia — are critical to our capacity to create positive change.” He added, “Our nation has no shortage of smart, ambitious people with brilliant new ideas. But if we want a thriving economy, producing more and better jobs, we need more of those ideas to get to market faster.” Accelerating such implementation is at the heart of the new partnership’s goals.

Connecting skills, workers, and jobs

This partnership, Reif said, will be “a system that connects universities and colleges with motivated companies and with far-sighted government agencies, so we can learn from each other and work with each other. A system that connects workers with skills, and skilled workers with jobs. And a system that connects advanced technology ideas to the marketplace or to those who can get them to market.”

Part of the power of this new collaboration, Fink says, is combining the particular skills and resources of the different partners so that they “add up to something that’s more than the sum of the parts.” Existing large companies can contribute both funding and expertise, smaller startup companies can provide their creative new ideas, and the academic institutions can push the research boundaries to open up new technological possibilities.

“MIT recognizes that advancing manufacturing is vital to our innovation process, as we explored in our Production in the Innovation Economy (PIE) study,” says MIT Provost Martin Schmidt. “AFFOA will connect our campus even more closely with industries (large and small), with educational organizations that will develop the skilled workers, and with government at the state and federal level — all of whom are necessary to advance this new technology. AFFOA is an exciting example of the public-private partnerships that were envisioned in the recommendation of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership.”

“Since MIT’s start, there has always been an emphasis on ‘mens et manus,’ using our minds and hands to make inventions useful at scales that impact the nation and the world,” adds Van Vliet, the director of manufacturing innovation for MIT’s Innovation Initiative, who has served as the faculty lead in coordinating MIT’s response to manufacturing initiatives that result from the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership. “What makes this new partnership very exciting is, this is for the first time a manufacturing institute headquartered in our region that connects our students and our faculty with local and national industrial partners, to really scale up production of many new fiber and textile technologies.”

“Participating in this group of visionaries from government, academia, and industry — who are all motivated by the goal of advancing a new model of American textile manufacturing and helping to develop new products for the public and defense sectors — has been an exciting process,” says Aleister Saunders, Drexel University’s senior vice provost for research and a leader of its functional fabrics center. “Seeing the success we’ve already had in recruiting partners at the local level leads me to believe that on a national level, these centers of innovation will be able to leverage intellectual capital and regional manufacturing expertise to drive forward new ideas and new applications that will revolutionize textile manufacturing across the nation.”

“Revolutionary fabrics and fibers are modernizing everything from battlefield communication to medical care,” says U.S. Congressmen Joe Kennedy III (D-Mass.). “That the Commonwealth would be chosen to lead the way is no surprise. From Lowell to Fall River, our ability to merge cutting-edge technology with age-old ingenuity has sparked a new day for the textile industry. With its unparalleled commitment to innovation, MIT is the perfect epicenter for scaling these efforts. I applaud President Reif, Professor Fink, and all of the partners involved for this tremendous success.”

The innovations that led to the “internet of things” and the widespread incorporation of digital technology into manufacturing have brought about a revolution whose potential is unlimited and will generate “brilliant ideas that people will be able to bring to this task of making sure that America stays number one in each and every one of these fields,” said Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) at the MIT event. “The new institute we are announcing today will help ensure that both Massachusetts and the United States can expand our technological edge in a new generation of fiber science.”

A wide range of industries are expected to benefit from these revolutionary fibers and textiles, including apparel, consumer products, automotive, medical devices, and consumer electronics. “Fibers and fabrics are ubiquitous,” Fink says. “Our institute will go everywhere a fiber and fabric goes.”

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8Apr2016

Scientists store digital images in DNA, and retrieves them perfectlyPosted by Rajesh

Researchers have developed one of the first complete systems to store digital data in DNA -- allowing companies to store data that today would fill a big box store supercenter in a space the size of a sugar cube.

 

Technology companies routinely build sprawling data centers to store all the baby pictures, financial transactions, funny cat videos and email messages its users hoard.

But a new technique developed by University of Washington and Microsoft researchers could shrink the space needed to store digital data that today would fill a Walmart supercenter down to the size of a sugar cube.

The team of computer scientists and electrical engineers has detailed one of the first complete systems to encode, store and retrieve digital data using DNA molecules, which can store information millions of times more compactly than current archival technologies.

In one experiment outlined in a paper presented in April at the ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, the team successfully encoded digital data from four image files into the nucleotide sequences of synthetic DNA snippets.

More significantly, they were also able to reverse that process -- retrieving the correct sequences from a larger pool of DNA and reconstructing the images without losing a single byte of information.

The team has also encoded and retrieved data that authenticates archival video files from the UW's Voices from the Rwanda Tribunal project that contain interviews with judges, lawyers and other personnel from the Rwandan war crime tribunal.

"Life has produced this fantastic molecule called DNA that efficiently stores all kinds of information about your genes and how a living system works -- it's very, very compact and very durable," said co-author Luis Ceze, UW associate professor of computer science and engineering.

"We're essentially repurposing it to store digital data -- pictures, videos, documents -- in a manageable way for hundreds or thousands of years."

The digital universe -- all the data contained in our computer files, historic archives, movies, photo collections and the exploding volume of digital information collected by businesses and devices worldwide -- is expected to hit 44 trillion gigabytes by 2020.

That's a tenfold increase compared to 2013, and will represent enough data to fill more than six stacks of computer tablets stretching to the moon. While not all of that information needs to be saved, the world is producing data faster than the capacity to store it.

DNA molecules can store information many millions of times more densely than existing technologies for digital storage -- flash drives, hard drives, magnetic and optical media. Those systems also degrade after a few years or decades, while DNA can reliably preserve information for centuries. DNA is best suited for archival applications, rather than instances where files need to be accessed immediately.

The team from the Molecular Information Systems Lab housed in the UW Electrical Engineering Building, in close collaboration with Microsoft Research, is developing a DNA-based storage system that it expects could address the world's needs for archival storage.

First, the researchers developed a novel approach to convert the long strings of ones and zeroes in digital data into the four basic building blocks of DNA sequences -- adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine.

"How you go from ones and zeroes to As, Gs, Cs and Ts really matters because if you use a smart approach, you can make it very dense and you don't get a lot of errors," said co-author Georg Seelig, a UW associate professor of electrical engineering and of computer science and engineering. "If you do it wrong, you get a lot of mistakes."

The digital data is chopped into pieces and stored by synthesizing a massive number of tiny DNA molecules, which can be dehydrated or otherwise preserved for long-term storage.

The UW and Microsoft researchers are one of two teams nationwide that have also demonstrated the ability to perform "random access" -- to identify and retrieve the correct sequences from this large pool of random DNA molecules, which is a task similar to reassembling one chapter of a story from a library of torn books.

To access the stored data later, the researchers also encode the equivalent of zip codes and street addresses into the DNA sequences. Using Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) techniques -- commonly used in molecular biology -- helps them more easily identify the zip codes they are looking for. Using DNA sequencing techniques, the researchers can then "read" the data and convert them back to a video, image or document file by using the street addresses to reorder the data.

Currently, the largest barrier to viable DNA storage is the cost and efficiency with which DNA can be synthesized (or manufactured) and sequenced (or read) on a large scale. But researchers say there's no technical barrier to achieving those gains if the right incentives are in place.

Advances in DNA storage rely on techniques pioneered by the biotechnology industry, but also incorporate new expertise. The team's encoding approach, for instance, borrows from error correction schemes commonly used in computer memory -- which hadn't been applied to DNA.

"This is an example where we're borrowing something from nature -- DNA -- to store information. But we're using something we know from computers -- how to correct memory errors -- and applying that back to nature," said Ceze.

"This multidisciplinary approach is what makes this project exciting. We are drawing from a diverse set of disciplines to push the boundaries of what can be done with DNA. And, as a result, creating a storage system with unprecedented density and durability," said Karin Strauss, a researcher at Microsoft and UW affiliate associate professor of computer science and engineering.

The research was funded by Microsoft Research, the National Science Foundation, and the David Notkin Endowed Graduate Fellowship.

Co-authors include UW computer science and engineering doctoral student James Bornholt, UW bioengineering doctoral student Randolph Lopez and Douglas Carmean, a partner architect at Microsoft Research and a UW affiliate professor of computer science and engineering.

 

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8Apr2016

India aims to capture 20% market share in IoT: NasscomPosted by Prabhash

OIMBATORE: India aims to capture 20 per cent market share in Internet of Things (IoT), an emerging sector which would be worth $300 billion by 2020, a top Nasscom official said today.

The IoT is driving the fourth wave of industrial revolution dramatically alerting manufacturing, energy, transportation, medical and other industrial sectors while emerging worldwide, Vice President of Nasscom (Industrial Initiative)K S Vishwanathan told reporters here.

As the global IoT business is expected to touch $300 billion by 2020, India aims to capture 20 per cent market share in another five years, he said.

Vishwanathan was here to launch Nasscom IoT Centre of Excellence, a joint initiative of Government of India, Department of Electronics and Information Technology ( DEITY) along with TCS, Intel, Amazon Web Services and FORGE Accelerator.

Depending on the success of Coimbatore hub, it was proposed to launch such centres in Pune, Baroda and Hyderabad, even as a pilot project was underway in Bengaluru, he said.

To a query on the pace of setting up startups in view of additional tax being levied on them, Vishwanathan said, "nearly 1,000 startups are being added every year in India, which stands third in the world in terms of numbers and will continue to grow."

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8Apr2016

IT to get Rs 600 crore more in UID projectPosted by Prabhash

NEW DELHI: The Prime Minister's prime projec, the Unique ID rollout, is likely to be allocated almost Rs 1,300 crore for distribution among states under its current budgetary provision.

But information technology, which will form a key component of the Unique ID project, is likely to get an allocation of Rs 500-600 crore, over and above the current budgetary allocation to Unique ID Authority of India, sources close to the development told ET.

he total budgetary provision for UIDAI is Rs 1,900 crore under the Union Budget for this year. However, a detailed titlewise allocation of the Rs 1,900 crore shows 'information technology' to be allotted Rs 130 crore under the planned allocation.

"We plan to go about technology rollout in a phased manner. The technology behind UID project will include new data centres, and also cloud computing technologies. We plan to concentrate on the technology. Right processes will automatically follow," an official involved in the rollout said. The UIDAI may get more allocation as it rolls out more IT tenders.

The UIDAI has also invited the open source and global developer community to participate in the project. Currently the Authority is seeking client software developed for any of the operating systems in Java, C++ or C# (pronounced C sharp).

It is seeking specific modules that can be integrated with the client software through well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs). UIDAI will release the API and system design for developers shortly.

Ernst and Young has been appointed as a consultant for advising on how to set up the Central Identities Data Repository (CIDR) and selection of Managed Service Provider (MSP).

The recent IT tender for application software development and maintenance and support services agency (ASDMSA) received a whopping 19 bids.

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