Water repellency is needed for surfaces to shed condensation buildup. New research by the University of Illinois and North Carolina State University shows that the necessity of water repellency is unclear and that the slipperiness between the droplets and solid surface appears to be more critical to the clearing of condensation.

Common nail polish remover combined with light upgrades it to higher-mass hydrocarbons, creating an additive that can be blended with conventional jet fuel with environmental benefits. Los Alamos National Lab converted bio-derived acetone to isophorone and then used a UV lamp to convert it to a cyclobutane, a type of hydrocarbon with high energy density for fuels applications.

Collins Aerospace Systems, a unit of United Technologies Corp., has signed a contract with Lockheed Martin to provide critical subsystems to support production of NASA’s Orion spacecraft fleet for Artemis missions III through VIII. Valued at $320 million, the systems being provided by Collins Aerospace will play an important role in enabling NASA’s goal of boots on the Moon by 2024, as well as establishing a sustained presence on and around the Moon to prepare for missions to Mars.

Dowty Propellers recently opened a new facility in Brockworth, England to provide a modern operation for the company's development, manufacture and support of state-of-the-art propeller systems with all-composite blades.

Airbus announced that, as part of its plan to produce 63 A320 Family aircraft per month in 2021, the company will expand its industrial footprint in the U.S. by increasing the production rate of A320 family aircraft at its Airbus U.S. Manufacturing Facility in Mobile to seven per month by the beginning of next year. This increase, and continued recruiting for the A220 manufacturing team, will result in a further 275 jobs added at the Alabama-based facility over the next year. The company will also invest another $40 million through construction of an additional support hangar on the site, bringing its total investment to more than $1 billion in the Gulf Coast city.

Taking to the sky is what NASA does best. The agency is offering drone design improvements that can help create the next wave of advanced unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Technologies are available that cut wing weight to keep drones flying longer, components that keep UAV swarms in the air despite a broken drone, shape memory alloys that reconfigure aircraft in flight, and a compact droned that flys for 24 straight hours.

A modern airplane’s fuselage is made from multiple sheets of different composite materials that must be wheeled into warehouse-sized ovens where the layers fuse together to form a resilient, aerodynamic shell.

In today’s world of high-speed A/D converters operating in the gigahertz range, real-time signal recording has become a challenging task that requires specialized hardware and intelligent application software. When designing a real-time recorder capable of streaming sustained data to disk at rates of up to 5 GB/sec and higher, the system developer has to consider the limitations presented by the recorder’s operating and file systems, the limitations of disk drive technology, the hardware interfaces, and the RAID controller technology.

To help define the meaning of “high-speed A/D” used in this handbook, we will be focusing primarily on A/D converters with sampling rates higher than 100 MHz. We will review sampling techniques, FPGA technology and we will present the latest Pentek high-speed A/D products and applications based on them.

Before the advent of OpenVPX, designers of embedded systems took advantage of the extreme connectivity offered by VPX (VITA 46), but were faced with a virtually unlimited number of possible implementations. Specific choices for the control and data channel assignments for each slot, the backplane connectivity, and serial fabrics were often made somewhat arbitrarily to suit the particular needs of the current system. Although following the general framework of VITA 46, each system tended to be so unique, that the boards and backplanes designed for one system were seldom usable in other systems, even from the same vendor.