Artificial turf gains ground with realistic simulation
The Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), founded in 1904 to promote the sport of soccer, has deemed artificial turf “an acceptable playing surface for football” and cites numerous advantages over natural grass, provided it meets tough design and manufacturing standards. Engineering this faux grass to "grow," though, is filled with material design challenges.
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Sales engineers are still engineers
Not every engineer is cut out to undertake design work, and many spend years of unsatisfied toil in their engineering positions. There are alternatives, though, for those who wish to break free and take the challenge of less routine tasks, a job that still requires significant hard work in an area that demands more human intervention.
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New LED reduces “efficiency droop”
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed and demonstrated a new type of light emitting diode (LED) with significantly improved lighting performance and energy efficiency. The new device achieves a notable reduction in “efficiency droop,” a well-known phenomenon that provokes LEDs to be most efficient when receiving low-density currents of electricity, but then to lose efficiency as higher density currents of electricity are fed into the device.
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Wheels: Heat-seeking performance drives top drag racing team
Fluke Corporation, a global leader in portable electronic test and measurement technology, knows a lot about high performance. So the match was perfect when Cagnazzi Racing, the 2007 and 2008 champs in NHRA Pro Stock racing, chose the Fluke Ti25 Thermal Imager to seek that winning split-second advantage by identifying track hotspots.
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5-Star Product: Thin-film thermoelectric power generators
Highly efficient thermoelectric components have the potential to play a central role in electronic systems in the future by extracting waste heat and converting it to usable energy. The thin-film embedded thermoelectric generator (eTEG) from Nextreme Thermal Solutions generates electricity via the Seebeck effect, where electricity is produced from a temperature differential applied across the device.
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Engineer's Toolbox: Download the future of 3D CAD at SolidWorks Labs
Want to test drive what 3D CAD software might look like in the next decade and beyond? Check out the website for SolidWorks Labs. The "technology sandbox” has added four new free experimental add-ins for you to mess around with that might become the future of SolidWorks.
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