Whether they sit in your kitchen or inside your personal computer, refrigerators and other cooling devices are typically bulky, often noisy and frequently power-hungry. A team at Pennsylvania State University recently found that certain plastics cool off a significant amount — 12 degrees Celsius — when an applied electric field is removed. Should the technique [...]
Low-dimensional boundaries between phases and domains in organic thin films are important in charge transport and recombination. Here, fluctuations of interfacial boundaries in an organic thin film, acridine-9-carboxylic acid on Ag(111), have been visualized in real time and measured quantitatively using scanning tunneling microscopy. The boundaries fluctuate via molecular exchange with exchange time constants of [...]
This paper is focused on soil subsidence of small extend and amplitude caused by tunnel boring or the collapse of underground cavities, whether natural or man-made. The impact of the movements of the ground on existing structures is generally dramatic. It is therefore necessary to accurately predict these movements. Even though it is obvious that [...]
Keith Hjelmstad, dean of the college of technology and innovation at Arizona State University Polytechnic, thinks he has discovered one reason so few women go into engineering, and he learned it from helping his seventh-grade daughter with her homework. “She was questioning whether she should be [in honors math], and she was struggling,” he said. [...]
Highways exist for cars and trucks. But could those vehicles serve highways? Some automotive technology companies think so. These firms, which sell “intelligent” components to car manufacturers like fog-probing radar and anti-skid systems, want to convert fleets of vehicles into sensors for a vast network. Cars could become scouts for snowplows, pothole repair crews, police [...]
The authors study theoretically reflection on the surface of a metamaterial with a hyperbolic dispersion. It is found that reflection is strongly dependent on how the surface is terminated with respect to the asymptote of the hyperbolic dispersion. For a surface terminated normally to the asymptote, zero reflection occurs for all incident angles. It is [...]
Heavy traffic congestion daily occurs at merging sections on highway. For releasing this congestion, possibility of alternative configuration of vehicles on multiple-lane road is discussed in this paper. This is the configuration where no vehicles move aside on the other lane. It has a merit in making smooth merging at an intersection or a junction [...]
On the basis of plastic bounding surface model, the damage theory for structured soils and unsaturated soil mechanics, an elastoplastic model for unsaturated loessic soils under cyclic loading has been elaborated. Firstly, the description of bond degradation in a damage framework is given, linking the damage of soil’s structure to the accumulated strain. The Barcelona [...]
A research team from the School of Engineering is part of a new project to design, manufacture, demonstrate and evaluate a hydrogen-fuel-cell bus that will be operated by the Birmingham-Jefferson County Transit Authority (BJCTA). The Center for Transportation and the Environment is coordinating the research project that is funded in part by the Federal Transit [...]