Antenna evolution

These aren’t your grandad’s — or dad’s for that matter — antennae.

The release:

The antenna consists of liquid metal injected into elastomeric microchannels. The antennas can be deformed (twisted and bent) since the mechanical properties are dictated by the elastomer and not the metal.

Antennas aren’t just for listening to the radio anymore. They’re used in everything from cell phones to GPS devices. Research from North Carolina State University is revolutionizing the field of antenna design – creating shape-shifting antennas that open the door to a host of new uses in fields ranging from public safety to military deployment.

Modern antennas are made from copper or other metals, but there are limitations to how far they can be bent – and how often – before they break completely. NC State scientists have created antennas using an alloy that “can be bent, stretched, cut and twisted – and will return to its original shape,” says Dr. Michael Dickey, assistant professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering at NC State and co-author of the research.

The researchers make the new antennas by injecting an alloy made up of the metals gallium and indium, which remains in liquid form at room temperature, into very small channels the width of a human hair. The channels are hollow, like a straw, with openings at either end – but can be any shape. Once the alloy has filled the channel, the surface of the alloy oxidizes, creating a “skin” that holds the alloy in place while allowing it to retain its liquid properties.

“Because the alloy remains a liquid,” Dickey says, “it takes on the mechanical properties of the material encasing it.” For example, the researchers injected the alloy into elastic silicone channels, creating wirelike antennas that are incredibly resilient and that can be manipulated into a variety of shapes. “This flexibility is particularly attractive for antennas because the frequency of an antenna is determined by its shape,” says Dickey. “So you can tune these antennas by stretching them.”

While the alloy makes an effective antenna that could be used in a variety of existing electronic devices, its durability and flexibility also open the door to a host of new applications. For example, an antenna in a flexible silicone shell could be used to monitor civil construction, such as bridges. As the bridge expands and contracts, it would stretch the antenna – changing the frequency of the antenna, and providing civil engineers information wirelessly about the condition of the bridge.

Flexibility and durability are also ideal characteristics for military equipment, since the antenna could be folded or rolled up into a small package for deployment and then unfolded again without any impact on its function. Dickey thinks these new applications are the most likely uses for the new antennas, since the alloy is more expensive than the copper typically used in most consumer electronics that contain antennas.

Dickey’s lab is performing further research under a National Science Foundation grant to better understand the alloy’s properties and means of utilizing it to create useful devices.

The research is co-authored by Dickey, NC State doctoral students Ju-Hee So, Amit Qusba and Gerard Hayes, NC State undergraduate student Jacob Thelen, and University of Utah professor Dr. Gianluca Lazzi, who participated in the research while a professor at NC State. The research, “Reversibly Deformable and Mechanically Tunable Fluidic Antennas,” is published in Advanced Functional Materials.

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“Reversibly Deformable and Mechanically Tunable Fluidic Antennas”

Authors: Ju-Hee So, Jacob Thelen, Amit Qusba, Gerard J. Hayes and Michael D. Dickey, North Carolina State University; Gianluca Lazzi, University of Utah

Published: November 2009, Advanced Functional Materials

Abstract: This paper describes the fabrication and characterization of fluidic dipole antennas that are reconfigurable, reversibly deformable, and mechanically tunable. The antennas consist of a fluid metal alloy injected into microfluidic channels comprising a silicone elastomer. By employing soft lithographic, rapid prototyping methods, the fluidic antennas are easier to fabricate than conventional copper antennas. The fluidic dipole radiates with ~90% efficiency over a broad frequency range (1910–1990 MHz), which is equivalent to the expected efficiency for a similar dipole with solid metallic elements such as copper. The metal, eutectic gallium indium (EGaIn), is a low-viscosity liquid at room temperature and possesses a thin oxide skin that provides mechanical stability to the fluid within the elastomeric channels. Because the conductive element of the antenna is a fluid, the mechanical properties and shape of the antenna are defined by the elastomeric channels, which are composed of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS). The antennas can withstand mechanical deformation (stretching, bending, rolling, and twisting) and return to their original state after removal of an applied stress. The ability of the fluid metal to flow during deformation of the PDMS ensures electrical continuity. The shape and thus, the function of the antenna, is reconfigurable. The resonant frequency can be tuned mechanically by elongating the antenna via stretching without any hysteresis during strain relaxation, and the measured resonant frequency as a function of strain shows excellent agreement (+/- 0.1–0.3% error) with that predicted by theoretical finite element modeling. The antennas are therefore sensors of strain. The fluid metal also facilitates self-healing in response to sharp cuts through the antenna.

Cyber Monday shopping was big

Big as in over four million visitors a minute at more than 270 retailing websites tracked by internet monitoring firm Akamai.

Deloitte’s Shift Index finds return-on-assets woes

Received mail from Deloitte today on the sequel to its Shift Index report from June. What is the Shift Index you ask? I’ll let boilerplate from Deloitte do the explaining:

Deloitte’s Shift Index pushes beyond cyclical measurement and looks at the long-term rate of change and its impact on economic performance. The Shift Index tracks 25 metrics across three sets of main indicators: foundations, which set the stage for major change; flows of knowledge, which provide more powerful ways to drive productivity; and impacts, which help gauge progress for firms, customers and creative talent. The Shift Index will continue to be updated to track changes over time and compare performance trends across countries.

For a deeper look at the Shift Index methodology and findings, please go towww.deloitte.com/us/shiftindex.

The key thing to focus on up there is “long-term.” This report is looking at and creating a much more broad picture than a lot of the economic news out there starting with the media’s obsession with the daily Dow numbers and moving on to corporate policy that emphasizes stock valuation over sustained business success.

With that in mind, the Shift Index is finding a lot of business sectors wanting when looking at the big operational trends, particularly in return-on-assets.

Here’s an overview of the sequel to the Shift Index from John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Center for the Edge:

The sequel to the original Shift Index report breaks apart the data for the US economy into fourteen different industry segments and includes an in-depth analysis of nine of these industries.  The results are eye-opening and contradict much conventional wisdom about management practices:

• We found that the long-term erosion in return on assets is widespread across virtually all industry segments.  The four industries that have experienced the most severe erosion in return on assets are technology, telecommunications, media and automobiles. The fact that three of these four industries are so intimately linked to the development and deployment of digital technology infrastructures reinforces our view that these infrastructures are a key driver of performance pressures.  Only two industries escaped this erosion in return on assets – Aerospace & Defense and Healthcare.  We do not think it is accidental that these are two of the most regulated industries in the US, reinforcing our view that public policy is the other key driver of performance pressures.
• Our analysis indicates that there is no correlation between labor productivity improvement and return on assets performance across industries.  In fact, some of the industries with the most significant improvement in labor productivity also experienced the most substantial erosion in return on assets. This finding challenges conventional management views that labor productivity is a key factor in driving profitability improvement.  While improvements in labor productivity are certainly necessary when facing increasing economic pressure, these improvements are clearly not sufficient.
• Here’s another counter-intuitive finding.  Many executives believe that innovation – conventionally defined as product innovation – is the key to escaping profit pressures.  Yet, the technology industry, widely viewed as one of the most innovative industries, in the US, has also experienced some of the most severe profit erosion of any industry.  Again, product innovation may be necessary, but it certainly does not appear to be sufficient to sustain profitability.
• Not all participants are suffering.  While firms face increasing economic pressure, customers appear to be benefiting from increasing market power and flexibility in moving from one brand to another across many industries.  Creative talent also benefits – total cash compensation to creative talent is rising substantially in most industries.
• Intensifying competition appears to be driving much of the erosion in profitability for firms, but traditional measures of competitive intensity, especially measures of industry concentration, appear to significantly understate the growing economic pressure coming from outside traditional industry boundaries and from both customers and creative talent.
• This intensifying competition is shifting the focus of value creation from protection of proprietary knowledge stocks to more effective participation in a broader and more diverse range of knowledge flows that will help firms to more rapidly refresh their knowledge stocks.  The problem is that our institutions are optimized for protection of knowledge stocks at the expense of participation in knowledge flows.  As a result, the most powerful form of innovation may be institutional innovation – re-thinking the rationale of firms and re-defining roles and relationships across large numbers of institutions.

These findings reinforce our belief that the increasing focus of executives and policy-makers on short-term, cyclical results and trends has blinded them to more fundamental, long-term trends that are re-shaping our business landscape.  In particular, their understandable concentration on the current economic downturn has lulled many participants into a false sense of complacency.  No matter how bad the current environment is, many are reassured that these conditions are only temporarily and that we will sooner or later return to the conditions that prevailed before the downturn.  The Shift Index suggests that such hopes are misguided and dangerous – they obscure the long-term growth of economic pressures that will continue well beyond the current economic downturn.  Until and unless executives begin to focus on these longer-term pressures, we are likely to see continuing deterioration in performance.

Hit this link for Deloitte’s press release on the Shift Index.

Large Hadron Collider ramping up

And has already set the energy record for particle accelerators.

From the link:

CERN’s Large Hadron Collider has today become the world’s highest energy particle accelerator, having accelerated its twin beams of protons to an energy of 1.18 TeV in the early hours of the morning. This exceeds the previous world record of 0.98 TeV, which had been held by the US Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory’s Tevatron collider since 2001. It marks another important milestone on the road to first physics at the LHC in 2010.

Wikileaks publishing 9/11 pager messages

This should provide context and raw emotion from a tragic and historic day in US history. I always find this sort of window into people’s lives and thoughts interesting. (The Wednesday referenced in the blockquote is last Wednesday — 11/25/09.)

From the link:

It’s one of more than half a million Sept. 11 pager messages obtained by secret document publisher Wikileaks, all of which are gradually being published on the Internet Wednesday. Wikileaks hopes that they will shed some light on the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, an incident that continues to arouse heated debate in the U.S.

“This is a historic day … and a day that has a lot of historic questions,” said Daniel Schmitt, a Wikileaks spokesman. “So whatever helps to understand what happened on that day is important for everyone.”

“It’s a precise second-by-second record of how the event unfolded,” he said.

Wikileaks began publishing the messages at 3 a.m. Eastern Time on Wednesday and will release them in small batches for about 24 hours, Schmitt said. The group hopes that posting them in increments will make the messages easier to analyze.

Little Green Footballs’ Charles Johnson renounces the right

Not really too surprising given the overall tone of LGF the last year or so, but in a sense the right wing blogosphere lost something of a rock star with this announcement and ten part list of exactly why Johnson is no longer affiliated with right wing politics.

From the link:

And much, much more. The American right wing has gone off the rails, into the bushes, and off the cliff.

I won’t be going over the cliff with them.

Carbon nanotubes capture CO2

Nanotech provides a solution to yet another vexing problem.

From the link:

Membranes made with carbon nanotubes could reduce the amount of energy needed to capture carbon-dioxide emissions from smokestacks, and therefore cut costs, according to a company that will receive $1 million from the new advanced-research projects agency for energy, Arpa-e, to develop the technology.

The company, Hayward, CA-based Porifera, claims that its carbon-nanotube membranes could capture one billion to three billion tons of carbon dioxide a year and save $10 billion a year compared to existing CO₂ capture technology. At this point, however, the work is at an early stage, says Olgica Bakajin, Porifera’s chief technology officer. She expects that it will be another year before the first prototype is ready.