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Conductive Brush Ring overcomes current leakage in EV powertrains

SKF's new Conductive Brush Ring paves the way to greater reliability and longer life in high-performance electric vehicle powertrain systems. Using pure carbon fiber bristles, it provides a reliable electrical connection between an EV eAxle rotor shaft and its housing. When used in combination with SKF Hybrid ceramic ball bearings, it helps to alleviate parasitic current effects that can lead to premature failure in bearings and other components. Available in different configurations for wet (oil-lubricated) motor designs -- and soon for dry (sealed) applications.
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Intro to reed switches, magnets, magnetic fields

This brief introductory video on the DigiKey site offers tips for engineers designing with reed switches. Dr. Stephen Day, Ph.D. from Coto Technology gives a solid overview on reed switches -- complete with real-world application examples -- and a detailed explanation of how they react to magnetic fields.
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Bi-color LEDs to light up your designs

Created with engineers and OEMs in mind, SpectraBright Series SMD RGB and Bi-Color LEDs from Visual Communi-cations Company (VCC) deliver efficiency, design flexibility, and control for devices in a range of industries, including mil-aero, automated guided vehicles, EV charging stations, industrial, telecom, IoT/smart home, and medical. These 50,000-hr bi-color and RGB options save money and space on the HMI, communicating two or three operating modes in a single component.
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All about slip rings: How they work and their uses

Rotary Systems has put together a really nice basic primer on slip rings -- electrical collectors that carry a current from a stationary wire into a rotating device. Common uses are for power, proximity switches, strain gauges, video, and Ethernet signal transmission. This introduction also covers how to specify, assembly types, and interface requirements. Rotary Systems also manufactures rotary unions for fluid applications.
Read the overview.

Seifert thermoelectric coolers from AutomationDirect

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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EMI shielding honeycomb air vent panel design

Learn from the engineering experts at Parker how honeycomb air vent panels are used to help cool electronics with airflow while maintaining electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding. Topics include: design features, cell size and thickness, platings and coatings, and a stacked design called OMNI CELL construction. These vents can be incorporated into enclosures where EMI radiation and susceptibility is a concern or where heat dissipation is necessary. Lots of good info.
Read the Parker blog.

What is 3D-MID? Molded parts with integrated electronics from HARTING

3D-MID (three-dimensional mechatronic integrated devices) technology combines electronic and mechanical functionalities into a single, 3D component. It replaces the traditional printed circuit board and opens up many new opportunities. It takes injection-molded parts and uses laser-direct structuring to etch areas of conductor structures, which are filled with a copper plating process to create very precise electronic circuits. HARTING, the technology's developer, says it's "Like a PCB, but 3D." Tons of possibilities.
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Loss-free conversion of 3D/CAD data

CT CoreTech-nologie has further developed its state-of-the-art CAD converter 3D_Evolution and is now introducing native interfaces for reading Solidedge and writing Nx and Solidworks files. It supports a wide range of formats such as Catia, Nx, Creo, Solidworks, Solidedge, Inventor, Step, and Jt, facilitating smooth interoperability between different systems and collaboration for engineers and designers in development environments with different CAD systems.
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Top 5 reasons for solder joint failure

Solder joint reliability is often a pain point in the design of an electronic system. According to Tyler Ferris at ANSYS, a wide variety of factors affect joint reliability, and any one of them can drastically reduce joint lifetime. Properly identifying and mitigating potential causes during the design and manufacturing process can prevent costly and difficult-to-solve problems later in a product lifecycle.
Read this informative ANSYS blog.

Advanced overtemp detection for EV battery packs

Littelfuse has introduced TTape, a ground-breaking over-temperature detection platform designed to transform the management of Li-ion battery systems. TTape helps vehicle systems monitor and manage premature cell aging effectively while reducing the risks associated with thermal runaway incidents. This solution is ideally suited for a wide range of applications, including automotive EV/HEVs, commercial vehicles, and energy storage systems.
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Benchtop ionizer for hands-free static elimination

EXAIR's Varistat Benchtop Ionizer is the latest solution for neutralizing static on charged surfaces in industrial settings. Using ionizing technology, the Varistat provides a hands-free solution that requires no compressed air. Easily mounted on benchtops or machines, it is manually adjustable and perfect for processes needing comprehensive coverage such as part assembly, web cleaning, printing, and more.
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LED light bars from AutomationDirect

Automation-Direct adds CCEA TRACK-ALPHA-PRO series LED light bars to expand their offering of industrial LED fixtures. Their rugged industrial-grade anodized aluminum construction makes TRACKALPHA-PRO ideal for use with medium to large-size industrial machine tools and for use in wet environments. These 120 VAC-rated, high-power LED lights provide intense, uniform lighting, with up to a 4,600-lumen output (100 lumens per watt). They come with a standard bracket mount that allows for angle adjustments. Optional TACLIP mounts (sold separately) provide for extra sturdy, vibration-resistant installations.
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World's first metalens fisheye camera

2Pi Optics has begun commercial-ization of the first fisheye camera based on the company's proprietary metalens technology -- a breakthrough for electronics design engineers and product managers striving to miniaturize the tiny digital cameras used in advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), AR/VR, UAVs, robotics, and other industrial applications. This camera can operate at different wavelengths -- from visible, to near IR, to longer IR -- and is claimed to "outperform conventional refractive, wide-FOV optics in all areas: size, weight, performance, and cost."
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Orbex offers two fiber optic rotary joint solutions

Orbex Group announces its 700 Series of fiber optic rotary joint (FORJ) assemblies, supporting either single or multi-mode operation ideal for high-speed digital transmission over long distances. Wavelengths available are 1,310 or 1,550 nm. Applications include marine cable reels, wind turbines, robotics, and high-def video transmission. Both options feature an outer diameter of 7 mm for installation in tight spaces. Construction includes a stainless steel housing.
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Mini tunnel magneto-resistance effect sensors

Littelfuse has released its highly anticipated 54100 and 54140 mini Tunnel Magneto-Resistance (TMR) effect sensors, offering unmatched sensitivity and power efficiency. The key differentiator is their remarkable sensitivity and 100x improvement in power efficiency compared to Hall Effect sensors. They are well suited for applications in position and limit sensing, RPM measurement, brushless DC motor commutation, and more in various markets including appliances, home and building automation, and the industrial sectors.
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Jet Propulsion Laboratory creates world's largest PDF archive to aid malware research

As part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) SafeDocs program, data scientists at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have amassed 8 million PDFs that can now be used for further study in order to make the internet more secure.

JPL is well known for landing rovers on Mars, exploring the solar system with robotic probes, and developing sensitive science instruments that observe Earth and other planets, but less well-known is the lab's cutting-edge work in the digital world.

In support of a wider effort to make the internet more secure, JPL data scientists have created the largest single publicly available open-source archive, or corpus, of PDFs. Short for portable document format, a PDF is a complex type of file that looks like a printed document and can contain images, movie files, interactive forms, 3D models, and much more.

The new PDF corpus is part of a DARPA program called Safe Documents (SafeDocs) that aims to deal with online threats while anticipating the security needs of PDF users. By working with the nonprofit PDF Association, which seeks to establish open specifications and standards for the technology, JPL is helping to develop several tools to confront these challenges.

When building the corpus, the team didn't evaluate the actual subject matter of the PDFs. Their goal was to gather a large representative sample of PDFs that exist on the internet so experts can search for malicious software that could be hidden in the files' code. That work will then be used to help anticipate emerging online threats and improve PDF technology.

"PDFs are used everywhere and are important for contracts, legal documents, 3D engineering designs, and many other purposes. Unfortunately, they are complex and can be compromised to hide malicious code or render different information for different users in a malicious way," said Tim Allison, a data scientist at JPL in Southern California. "To confront these and other challenges from PDFs, a large sample of real-world PDFs needs to be collected from the internet to create a shared, freely available resource for software experts."

A digital feat
Building the corpus was no easy task. As a starting point, Allison's team used Common Crawl, an open-source public repository of web-crawl data, to identify a wide variety of PDFs to be included in the corpus -- files that are publicly available and not behind firewalls or in private networks. Conducted between July and August 2021, the crawl identified roughly 8 million PDFs.

Common Crawl limits downloaded data to 1 megabyte per file, meaning larger files were incomplete. But researchers need the entire PDF, not a truncated version, in order to conduct meaningful research on them. The file-size limit reduced the number of complete, untruncated files extracted directly from Common Crawl to 6 million. To get the other 2 million PDFs and ensure the corpus was complete, the JPL team re-fetched the truncated files using specialized software that downloaded the whole files from the incomplete PDFs' web addresses.

Various metadata, such as the software used to create each PDF, was extracted and is included with the corpus. The JPL team also relied on free, publicly available geolocation software to identify the server location of the source website for each PDF. The complete data set totals about 8 terabytes, making it the largest publicly available corpus of its kind.

The corpus will do more than help researchers identify threats. Privacy researchers, for example, could study these files to determine how file-creation and editing software can be improved to better protect personal information. Software developers could use the files to find bugs in their code and to check if old versions of software are still compatible with newer versions of PDFs.

"This is open and repeatable science. Researchers need to have a common data set to work with so that they can compare results of different analysis techniques and experiments," said Simson Garfinkel, who created a corpus of 1 million files, including thousands of PDFs, called GOVDOCS1 in 2008 when he was an associate professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA. "PDF is one of the most important file types on the internet today, and this contribution of roughly 8 terabytes of data provides faculty, students, and corporations with up-to-date reference data that will power research for years to come."

The Digital Corpora project hosts the huge data archive as part of Amazon Web Services' Open Data Sponsorship Program, and the files have been packaged in easily downloadable zip files.

Source: JPL

Published July 2023

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