News by Subject Technology & Engineering

In a new approach to storm surge protection, a Princeton team has created a preliminary design for dual-purpose kinetic umbrellas that would provide shade during fair weather and could be tilted in advance of a storm to form a flood barrier. The researchers used computational modeling to begin evaluating the umbrellas' ability to withstand an acute storm surge.

A joint research team from Toyohashi University of Technology has established a method to represent driving behaviors and their changes that differ among drivers in a single statistical model, taking into account the effect of various external factors such as road structure. This method was applied to measure the effectiveness of Intelligent Speed Adaptation (ISA), which controls excessive speed violations.

A University of Hong Kong research team has developed a novel wastewater treatment system that can effectively remove conventional pollutants, and recover valuable resources such as phosphorus and organic materials. This novel system combines chemically enhanced primary sedimentation of sewage with acidogenic fermentation of sludge in tandem, can effectively remove trace emerging chemical contaminants from wastewater and is more cost effective compared with conventional wastewater treatment systems.

The modules that the major space agencies plan to erect on the Moon could incorporate an element contributed by the human colonizers themselves: the urea in their pee. European researchers have found that it could be used as a plasticizer in the concrete of the structures.

Scientists at The University of Tokyo developed a new computer simulation model that includes microbubble nucleation to explain the flow slippage of fluids inside pipes. This work may help improve the flow rate of viscous fluids in commercial applications, as in the energy industry.

NIST researchers spent months meticulously recreating the long concrete floors supported by steel beams commonly found in high-rise office buildings, only to set the structures ablaze. These experiments indicate that structures built to code are not always equipped to survive the forces induced by extreme shifts in temperature, but the data gained here could help researchers develop and validate new design tools and building codes that bolster fire safety.