Category Archives: Products

MIT Hosts Student Vehicle Design Summit

Solar concept car drawing

Student summit set on vehicle design by Deborah Halbe

Seventy-three students from 21 universities around the world will gather at MIT this summer to design and build between five and 10 commuter vehicles that exploit human power, biofuels, solar technologies and fuel cells to travel at least 500 miles per gallon of fuel.
…
An added goal for the June 13-Aug. 13 program is to lay a foundation for ongoing multidisciplinary transportation research involving all five MIT schools. “We hope to create a project-based, socially conscious engineering curriculum for the ’06-’07 academic year,” said Anna S. Jaffe, a junior in civil and environmental engineering and one of the summit student organizers.

Image by Mitchell Joachim and William Lark, sketch of a concept solar car was created for the MIT Vehicle Design Summit.

Lego Learning

Lego Mindstorms

Lego Mindstorms (via Amazon.com) are a great example of the learning opportunities available today. It seems true that the extracurricular learning options are much greater today than 50 years ago.

I Hear Rumors That Our Education Institutions Are In Trouble by Tom Hill:

We have living proof in my 60 short years that the education construction toy has progressed from the 20th century Erector Set® to 21st century programmable LEGO Mindstorms™ robots.

We don’t have to worry about the future of education. Today’s youth will demand a superior local education system or they will go to any Internet institution that can satisfy their needs. All we have to do as the adults is make sure the local school systems and Internet institutions are capable of living up to our children’s expanding expectations.

I think the educational institutions may not be keeping pace with those advancements. But I agree that we need to see to it that those schools do keep pace with a changing world and changing expectations.

More posts on k-12 science and engineering education.

Ventless Clothes Dryers

Ventless Washer Dryer

Ventless Clothes Dryers

Engineers have provided an alternative to the normal cloths dryer that requires venting. This can come in handy in some apartments that don’t offer a good location for a dryer that also provide an easy venting option. How does such a dryer work:

Ordinary dryers suck in cool, dry air from the room, heat it, blow it through the clothes, and then discharge the damp, hot air outside through a vent. This dryer, on the other hand, runs the exhaust through a heat-exchange system to cool it. Cold water flows through the heat exchanger, absorbing heat from the air. As the air cools, the moisture in it condenses and runs down the drain (along with the used cooling water); the dry air is then heated again, sent back through the clothes, and the cycle continues.

There are even dryers that dry clothes in the same compartment they are washed in, photo: EdgeStar Ventless 110 Volt Combo Washer Dryer.

More details from: What is a ‘condenser’ dryer?

Re-engineered Wheelchair

photo of new wheelchair

Wheelchairs given design makeover by Geoff Adams-Spink, BBC News

Five years later – a development phase that Mr Spindle describes as “extremely difficult” – Trekinetic chose the Mobility Roadshow to unveil a radical new design.

The K2 has three wheels – two large ones at the front that can take mountain bike tyres – and a smaller one at the back.

The company says it is ideally suited for off-road use but can be just as useful in towns and cities too.

Manufacturers of the wheelchair: Trekinetic. They seem to be getting a bit too much publicity, when I visited I received the following: “This account has exceeded it’s bandwidth quota and has been temporarily disabled.” I would imagine it will be available again shortly.

Recharge Batteries in Seconds

MIT researchers are working on battery technology based on capacitor technology and nanotechnology.

Super Battery (video also available):

Rechargable and disposable batteries use a chemical reaction to produce energy. “That’s an effective way to store a large amount of energy,” he says, “but the problem is that after many charges and discharges … the battery loses capacity to the point where the user has to discard it.”

But capacitors contain energy as an electric field of charged particles created by two metal electrodes. Capacitors charge faster and last longer than normal batteries. The problem is that storage capacity is proportional to the surface area of the battery’s electrodes, so even today’s most powerful capacitors hold 25 times less energy than similarly sized standard chemical batteries.

The researchers solved this by covering the electrodes with millions of tiny filaments called nanotubes.
…
This technology has broad practical possibilities, affecting any device that requires a battery. Schindall says, “Small devices such as hearing aids that could be more quickly recharged where the batteries wouldn’t wear out; up to larger devices such as automobiles where you could regeneratively re-use the energy of motion and therefore improve the energy efficiency and fuel economy.”

Previous post: MIT Energy Storage Using Carbon Nanotubes

Strawjet: Invention of the Year, 2006

Invent Now 2006 Modern Marvel of the Year (links all broken by History Channel, so links were removed, – when will we finally have people in charge of websites that understand basic usability fundamentals?):

The Strawjet is a farm implement that processes straw (wheat, flax, sunflower, tobacco, hemp, etc.) in the field (after the plant has been harvested) into a mat, similar to a large bamboo window blind. This is used to construct composite building panels in much the same way as fiberglass or carbon fiber; however, the Strawjet uses a binder made from paper pulp, clay and cement rather than plastic resin.

Update, 2013: strawjet.com. Also I added this webcast from 2009

Read (except they broke all the links so you can’t) about more finalists in the History Channel and Invent Now Inventor contest:

  • Dr. David L. Cull, Hemoaccess Valve System
  • Kristin A. Hrabar, Illuminated Nutdriver
  • Dr. Sundaresan Jayaraman, Wearable Motherboard (Smart Shirt)
  • Robert C. Kelly, Resc-hue Lite Line

Related: Pay as You Go Solar in India – Appropriate Technology: Solar Water in Poor Cairo Neighborhoods – Lemelson-MIT 2010 Award for Sustainability – Play pumps had the idea of putting a merry-go-round on the site and letting children playing on it provide the energy… The solution does not appear to have been executed well.

Balloon Molecules

Cuban cluster molecule

Photo: “The example of the Cuban cluster [Fe4(n5-C 5H5)4 (µ3-CO)4] shows that you can build any molecule with some consideration: The iron atoms are located at the corners of the green tetrahedron, the orange-coloured Cyclopentadienyl-circles are penta-haptolinked to the iron atoms with the help of transparent balloons and the three-times-linking, black-red carbonyls are complexed through transparent balloons as well.”

Read more on Balloon Molecules.

$100 Laptops for the World

$100 Laptop from MIT OLPC project

The MIT Media Lab is developing a $100 laptop to provide affordable and appropriate technology to all parts of the world. One Laptop per Child is a non-profit created to pursue this project (which is independent of MIT).

What is the $100 Laptop, really?
The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, with a dual-mode display—both a full-color, transmissive DVD mode, and a second display option that is black and white reflective and sunlight-readable at 3× the resolution. The laptop will have a 500MHz processor and 128MB of DRAM, with 500MB of Flash memory; it will not have a hard disk, but it will have four USB ports. The laptops will have wireless broadband that, among other things, allows them to work as a mesh network; each laptop will be able to talk to its nearest neighbors, creating an ad hoc, local area network. The laptops will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data.

This is another wonderful example of engineering a better world. The challenges are still large. Making such an audacious plan work will not be easy but if they pull it off the potential benefits are enormous.

UN debut for $100 laptop for poor by Jo Twist, BBC News

Our $100 laptops will run on human power, Rediff

Seeing Machine from MIT

View from photo: an image (of a staircase) created to approximate the view through a seeing machine

MIT poet develops ‘seeing machine’ by Elizabeth A. Thomson

The work is led by Elizabeth Goldring, a senior fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies. She developed the machine over the last 10 years, in collaboration with more than 30 MIT students and some of her personal eye doctors. The new device costs about $4,000, low compared to the $100,000 price tag of its inspiration, a machine Goldring discovered through her eye doctor.
…
The pilot clinical trial of the seeing machine involved visually impaired people recruited from the Beetham Eye Institute. All participants had a visual acuity of 20/70 or less in the better-seeing eye. A person with 20/70 vision can see nothing smaller than the third line from the top of most eye charts. Most participants, however, had vision that was considered legally blind, meaning they could see nothing smaller than the “big E” on a standard eye chart.
…
Goldring and colleagues are now working toward a large-scale clinical trial of a color seeing machine (the device tested in the pilot trial was black and white).

Sports Engineering

Wind Tunnel at MIT for sports testing

MIT is not the first school to come to mind when discussing athletics. However, the MIT Center for Sports Innovation (CSI) is making news. The CSI mission is to expand the students’ learning experience by involving them in the development of sports technology and products.

One project at the Center is a wind tunnel used for bicycle testing:

The design and construction of the bike test stand was Brian Hoying’s senior thesis project. The data acquisition software upgrade was Mark Cote’s freshman term project. The resulting test system was deemed “the best cycling test system I’ve ever seen” by Phil White, owner of Cervélo Cycles, and sponsor of the CSC professional cycling team.

It is great to see student projects with such success.

Mark Cote, a researcher at the MIT Center for Sports Innovation, has an impressive list of clients — from Tour de France stage winners to some of North America’s leading bicycle manufacturers. Now the wind tunnel specialist plans to use his expertise in fluid dynamics to develop and, he hopes, patent his own advances in aerodynamic cycling gear.

Not bad, considering that Cote, 21, is still an undergraduate.