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SOLIDWORKS Tips: 3 easy ways to focus on your model

SOLIDWORKS Elite Applications Engineer Alin Vargatu demonstrates his top tips for focusing on your model: finding planes the easy way inside your assembly with the Q key, breadcrumbs, and a better way to use the component preview window. Very helpful. Lots more tips on the SOLIDWORKS YouTube channel.
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Push-pull transformer drivers for automotive power supplies

Nexperia's AEC-Q100 qualified, push-pull transformer drivers (NXF6501-Q100, NXF6505A-Q100, and NXF6505B-Q100) enable the design of small, low-noise, and low-EMI isolated power supplies for a range of automotive applications such as traction inverters and motor control, DC-DC converters, battery management systems, and on-board chargers in EVs. Also suitable for industrial applications such as telecommunications, medical, instrumentation, and automation equipment.
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Mini linear position sensor for drones, robots, aero, more

H. G. Schaevitz LLC, Alliance Sensors Group is now offering a miniature, lightweight LZ SERIES linear position sensor product line utilizing LVIT Technology™. These sensors are designed for tight spaces that require excellent stroke-to-length ratio. They are contactless devices for use by drones, OEMs, aerospace, robotics, factory automation, or assembly machinery applications where precision in position sensing is crucial.
Learn all the specs.

What is a Heatric Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger?

According to Parker Hannifin, "A Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger is a robust, corrosion-resistant, high-integrity plate-type heat exchanger manufactured using diffusion bonding." Learn about the technology and why Heatric, a Parker brand, "can manufacture a unit up to 85% smaller and lighter than traditional technologies such as shell and tube heat exchangers."
Read this informative Parker blog.

Tech Tip: Mastering sheet metal bend calculations in Onshape

Mastering bend calculations in sheet metal design is a key skill that can impact the accuracy and manufactur-ability of your designs significantly. Explore the various options available to become a pro in this Onshape Tech Tip: K Factor, bend allowance, and bend deduction, with guidance on when each should be used. You may learn something even if you don't use this software.
Read the Onshape blog.

Seifert thermoelectric enclosure coolers from AutomationDirect beat the heat

Automation-Direct has added new high-quality and efficient stainless steel Seifert 340 BTU/H thermoelectric coolers with 120-V and 230-V power options. Thermoelectric coolers from Seifert use the Peltier Effect to create a temperature difference between the internal and ambient heat sinks, making internal air cooler while dissipating heat into the external environment. Fans assist the convective heat transfer from the heat sinks, which are optimized for maximum flow.
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Raspberry Pi Pico 2: Microcontroller board with 2x flash memory

Raspberry Pi's Pico low-cost, high-performance microcontroller board with flexible digital interfaces is now being offered as a full second-generation product, complete with twice the on-board flash memory, higher performance, lower power consumption, and greater security.
Read the full article.

Free-Core vs. Spring-Loaded LVDT position sensors

Linear Variable Differential Transformers are electro-mechanical devices used in many industrial applications to measure the displacement or position of an object. They convert the linear position or motion of a measured object into an electrical output that is displayed on a local readout or input into a programmable logic controller as part of an automated process control system. LVDTs come in two core configurations -- free-core and spring-loaded -- but do you know what the differences are?
Read the full NewTek Sensor Solutions article.

New sensor listens to fuel for optimum marine diesel engine performance

Condition monitoring expert CM Technologies has added a fuel injection acoustic emission sensor to its proprietary PREMET X range of two- and four-stroke diesel engine performance indicators for marine use. The device allows engineers to monitor the acoustic signature of a diesel engine's fuel injection system to detect any problems with fuel injectors, nozzles, and pumps.
Read the full article.

Application Note: Quadcopter propeller torque/thrust testing

The quadcopter's four propellers are designed to work in conjunction with each other to ensure there are no torque imbalances that could send the vehicle spinning out of control. But just how would a professional developer or hobbyist perform accurate propeller torque and thrust testing? Advanced sensor expert FUTEK has the answer.
Read the full article.

New enclosure heat exchanger options

Automation-Direct has added new Saginaw Enviro-Therm^® air-to-air heat exchangers that use an enclosure's ambient air and either heat pipes or aluminum plate to transfer heat from inside the enclosure to the external environment. Since the ambient air is the cooling medium, the need for refrigerant is eliminated. Features include corrosion-resistant internal components, a filterless design for maximum cooling and reduced clogging, simple installation, and a programmable digital controller.
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World's smallest-width floating connector simplifies automotive installation

Hirose has developed a space-saving, board-to-board connector that combines floating functionality and miniature size to meet automotive specifications. The BM54 Series boasts the world's smallest-width class for its category, a 0.4-mm pitch, and a stacking height of 3.0 to 4.5 mm. This connector is ideal for PCBs with multiple connector sets and offers a wide floating range of +/- 0.4 mm in the XY direction. By absorbing board misalignment errors, floating simplifies assembly and improves assembly work efficiency. Applications include cameras, displays, millimeter wave radar, and LiDAR systems.
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Test equipment advancing to meet rapidly changing market needs

Although the rise of the IoT, 5G, and advanced automotive electronics markets is instigating rapid changes in technology, test equipment is keeping pace, and not just in extensions to bandwidth specifications or signal resolution. Maureen Lipps, Multicomp Pro Private Label Product Segment Leader, Test and Tools, Newark Electronics, runs through important advances in the industry and its tools.
Read the full article.

Smallest rugged AI supercomputer for avionics

Aitech Systems has released the A178-AV, the latest iteration of its smallest rugged GPGPU AI super-computers available with the powerful NVIDIA Jetson AGX Xavier System-on-Module. With its compact size, the A178-AV is the most advanced solution for artificial intelligence (AI), deep learning, and video and signal processing for next-gen avionic platforms.
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Touchless angle sensors get CAN SAE J1939 interface

Novotechnik has added the CAN J1939 interface (developed for heavy-duty vehicles) to its RFC4800 Series of touchless angle sensors measuring angular position up to 360°, turn direction, turns, speed, and operational status. It can provide one or two output channels. It has a longer life and robustness than an optical encoder. It can signal if a sensor needs replacing or average a programmable number of values to output to reduce external noise if present. This is wear-free angle measurement made easy.
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Army-funded research paves way for improved lasers and communications

Army-funded researchers designed and built two-dimensional arrays of closely packed micro-lasers that have the stability of a single micro-laser but can collectively achieve power density orders of magnitude higher. [Courtesy University of Pennsylvania]

 

 

 

 

Photonics has the potential to transform all manners of electronic devices by storing and transmitting information in the form of light, rather than electricity. Using light's speed and the way information can be layered in its various physical properties can increase the speed of communication while reducing wasted energy; however, light sources such as lasers need to be smaller, stronger, and more stable to achieve that.

"Single-mode, high-power lasing is used in a wide range of applications that are important to the Army and help support the warfighter including optical communications, optical sensing, and LIDAR ranging," said Dr. James Joseph, program manager, ARO, an element of the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command, known as DEVCOM, Army Research Laboratory. "The research results out of UPenn mark a significant step towards creating more efficient and fieldable laser sources."

The way information can be layered with this technology could also have important implications for photonic computers and communication systems.

In order to preserve the information manipulated by a photonic device, its lasers must be exceptionally stable and coherent. So-called single-mode lasers eliminate noisy variations within their beams and improve their coherence but, as a result, are dimmer and less powerful than lasers that contain multiple simultaneous modes.

Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Duke University, with Army funding, designed and built two-dimensional arrays of closely packed micro-lasers that have the stability of a single micro-laser but can collectively achieve power density orders of magnitude higher. They published a study in the peer-reviewed journal Science demonstrating the super-symmetric micro-laser array.

Robots and autonomous vehicles that use LiDAR for optical sensing and ranging, manufacturing, and material-processing techniques that use lasers are some of many other potential applications of this research.

"One seemingly straightforward method to achieve a high-power, single-mode laser is to couple multiple identical single-mode lasers together to form a laser array," said Dr. Liang Feng, associate professor in the departments of Materials Science and Engineering and Electrical and Systems Engineering at University of Pennsylvania. "Intuitively, this laser array would have an enhanced emission power, but because of the nature of complexity associated with a coupled system, it will also have multiple super-modes. Unfortunately, the competition between modes makes the laser array less coherent."

Coupling two lasers produces two super-modes, but that number increases quadratically as lasers are arrayed in the two-dimensional grids eyed for photonic sensing and LiDAR applications.

"Single-mode operation is critical, because the radiance and brightness of the laser array increase with the number of lasers only if they are all phase-locked into a single super-mode," said Xingdu Qiao, doctoral candidate at University of Pennsylvania. "Inspired by the concept of supersymmetry from physics, we can achieve this kind of phase-locked single-mode lasing in a laser array by adding a dissipative super-partner."

In particle physics, super-symmetry is the theory that all elementary particles of the two main classes, bosons and fermions, have a yet undiscovered super-partner in the other class. The mathematical tools that predict the properties of each particle's hypothetical super-partner can also be applied to the properties of lasers.

Compared to elementary particles, fabricating a single micro-laser's super-partner is relatively simple. The complexity lies in adapting super-symmetry's mathematical transformations to produce an entire super-partner array that has the correct energy levels to cancel out all but the desired single mode of the original.

Prior to this research, super-partner laser arrays could only have been one-dimensional, with each of the laser elements aligned in a row. By solving the mathematical relationships that govern the directions in which the individual elements couple to one another, this new study demonstrates an array with five rows and five columns of micro-lasers.

"When the lossy super-symmetric partner array and the original laser array are coupled together, all the super-modes except for the fundamental mode are dissipated, resulting in single-mode lasing with 25 times the power and more than 100 times the power density of the original array," said Dr. Zihe Gao, a post-doctoral fellow in Feng's program, "We envision a much more dramatic power scaling by applying our generic scheme for a much larger array -- even in three dimensions. The engineering behind it is the same."

The study also shows that the technique is compatible with the team's earlier research on vortex lasers, which can precisely control orbital angular momentum, or how a laser beam spirals around its axis of travel. The ability to manipulate this property of light could enable photonic systems encoded at even higher densities than previously imagined.

"Bringing super-symmetry to two-dimensional laser arrays constitutes a powerful toolbox for potential large-scale integrated photonic systems," Feng said.

In addition to the Army, the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Research Fellowship supported this research.

Source: U.S. Army DEVCOM Army Research Laboratory

Published May 2021

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