Drag Reduction
Bharat Bhushan, Ph.D., was on sabbatical at Ecole polytechnique federale de Lausanne, Switzerland in 2005 when a transformation began.
After reading an article in a trade magazine on the lotus leaf’s water repellant properties, Bhushan’s industrial research launched down a greener, livelier new path.
Botanical Alternatives
Sometimes numbers can be startling.
For instance, natural rubber is used in 50,000 commercial products, including 400 medical devices, because of its unique properties with regard to resilience, elasticity, abrasion and impact resistance, efficient heat dispersion and malleability at cold temperatures. It’s a critical raw material that developed countries simply can’t live without.
Bioinformatics Tools
In less than 10 years, the way genetic data has been collected has sped up in a major way. Previously, collecting data from a species was done one gene at a time, on an individual-by-individual basis, but new sequencing technologies allow researchers to process hundreds of thousands of genes at a time.
Noise Generation
The noise from jet-engine exhausts can cause substantial hearing loss for crewmen and airport personnel and activate restrictive regulations and/or fees for airlines. The large turbulent eddies within the jet plume—also known as large-scale coherent structures—produce the majority of the noise in the aft angles of the engine.