Imagine a car windshield that displays a map to your destination, military goggles with targets and instructions displayed right at a soldier's eyes, or a window that doubles as a billboard.

Northwestern University researchers report that by combining organic and inorganic materials they have produced transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled inexpensively on both glass and plastics.

Researchers have long worked on developing new types of displays powered by electronics without visible wires. But they've had a hard time developing material that could be transparent—to act as a window—while still acting as a display, said Tobin Marks, professor of materials science and engineering at the school in Evanston, Ill. He led the research.

"Our development provides new strategies for creating transparent electronics," Marks said. "You can imagine a variety of applications for new electronics that haven't been possible previously—imagine displays of text or images that would seem to be floating in space."

Transistors are used for all of the switching and computing necessary in electronics. In displays, they power and switch the light sources.

High-performance, transparent transistors could be combined with existing kinds of light display technologies, such as organic light-emitting diodes, liquid crystal displays, and electroluminescent displays, which are already used in televisions, desktop and laptop computers, and cell phones, Marks said.

To create their thin-film transistors, Marks's group combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties.

The indium oxide films can be fabricated at room temperature, allowing the transistors to be produced at a low cost. And, in addition to being transparent, the transistors outperform the silicon transistors currently used in LCD screens and perform nearly as well as high-end polysilicon transistors.

Prototype displays using the transistors developed at Northwestern could be available by the end of 2008, Marks said. He has formed a start-up company, Polyera, to bring his thin-film transistors to market.

While the rest of the world is spending at a rate of more than $3 billion a year to add new main battle tanks, the United States is investing almost as much to make over its fleet, according to a report by Forecast International, the market research firm in Newtown, Conn.

In its annual analysis "The Market for Tanks," the Forecast International Weapons Group predicts that the international market will produce more than 7,600 main battle tanks, worth in excess of $31.5 billion, through 2016. In 2006, world markets spent almost $3.2 billion for new-production main battle tanks.

According to Dean Lockwood, Forecast International's weapons systems analyst, in the same year, the U.S. Department of Defense awarded more than $2.5 billion worth of contracts for the maintenance, reset, and upgrade of its M1 Abrams inventories. The total is almost 80 percent of what the rest of the world was spending for new vehicles.

Lockwood said that the U.S. is "basically rebuilding the tank." Often little more than the hull, turret, and gun are original after an overhaul.

According to Forecast International, the largest national program in the world to buy new main battle tanks last year was in China, which spent $375.32 million for 110 new-production tanks in its Type 98 program. Chinese expenditures equaled less than 15 percent what the U.S. DOD spent on the M1 Abrams in 2006.

The United States bought no new Abrams tanks during the period. The research firm said that modernization and retrofit of the Abrams tanks costs far less than the prospect of buying new ones. Thus, it believes that new production of tanks priced over $5 million will remain relatively low, accounting for 14 percent of all production, worth 20 percent of the market, through the forecast period.

Forecast International said it believes that, in terms of sheer numbers, Pakistan's Al Khalid, the Type 98 of the People's Republic of China, and the Russian Federation's T-90 will maintain their combined market share, accounting for 45 percent of all new tanks rolling out worldwide, worth 40 percent of the market, through 2016.

Researchers in England are perfecting a technique that allows silicon wafers to be stacked accurately and cheaply.

According to one of the researchers, Michael Kraft, a senior lecturer at the University of Southampton School of Electronics and Computer Science in Southampton, England, the major challenge when stacking silicon wafers is to align them to match all the features.

"The alignment needs to be accurate," Kraft said. "At the moment, big chunky machines are used and the process is carried out optically. The optical path is long and this introduces errors."

"But we've demonstrated that we don't need expensive machines to create alignment," Kraft said. "Our system will automatically fit the wafers together like Lego."

Kraft and his colleague, Mark Spearing, and Lliudi Jiang of the School of Engineering Sciences have developed a stacking approach that fabricates and aligns convex pyramids and concave pits. Chips are bonded in a microfabrication process. They've achieved an alignment precision of 200 nanometers, Kraft said.

To meet the soaring demand for solar energy systems across Europe, Sharp Electronics is doubling the size of its photovoltaic solar panel plant in Wrexham, Wales. The company is investing approximately $18.2 million in the facility.

"The existing 110 megawatts capacity will be expanded to 220 MW. This expansion will make the facility one of the largest PV solar module plants in the world," Sharp said in a prepared statement. The Wrexham plant was opened in 2004 with an annual capacity of 20 MW.

Denise Marsden, general manager for Sharp Manufacturing at the Wales site, said, "As the search for greater renewable energy resources continues, the expansion will give us the capacity to meet the increasing needs of the market."

Sharp is one of the world's largest producers of photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight into electricity.

Wales' Enterprise Minister, Andrew Davies, said Sharp's investment in increased production capacity at Wrexham was "a milestone for Wales."

The Sharp Corp. said it began its research and development in solar energy in 1959 and started mass production of solar cells in 1963.

Aviation is increasingly being seen as a problem area in the effort to reduce petroleum consumption. Jet fuel is such a potent energy source—and aircraft require so much of it per flight—that the idea of a battery-powered airplane seems laughable.

But mechanical engineers at North Carolina State University in Raleigh may have a new approach. Instead of removing the jet fuel from the airplane, they hope to remove the petroleum from the jet fuel.

The process developed at N.C. State's Applied Energy Research Laboratory promises to turn any source of fat into jet fuel, biodiesel, or even fuel for conventional gasoline-burning cars. The fats are first subjected to high temperatures and water pressure to strip away free fatty acids from the feedstock. Next, these acids are placed in a reactor, where some carbon and oxygen atoms are removed, leaving alkanes—strips of hydrocarbons more than a dozen atoms long.

Later, these alkanes are cracked to make the desired fuel. Some of the residue from the process, including glycerol, can be burned to power the process.

By using waste animal or vegetable fats from cooking grease, the engineers hope that the fuels can be produced more cheaply than petroleum-based fuel. What's more, by using waste rather than food-grade material such as corn, the production of fuel won't inadvertently drive up the price of foodstuffs, an outcome that has been seen in the recent ethanol boom.

The process, which has received provisional patents, was recently licensed to Diversified Energy Corp. of Gilbert, Ariz.

General Electric has awarded Goodrich Corp. a contract to supply ceramic composite nozzle seals for use in afterburners on GE's F414 engine, which powers the U.S. Navy's F-18 E/F Super Hornet fleet. The contract, which signifies a continuation of production that began in 1998, is expected to generate up to $21 million in original equipment revenues through 2009.

According to Paul Walsh, vice president of Goodrich's high temperature composites team, "There are very few ceramic composite parts flying today. We believe this is the start of a trend toward greater use of these materials in gas turbine engines."

Goodrich has manufactured the ceramic composite nozzle seals for GE's F414 engines for the past eight years at its facility in Santa Fe Springs, Calif.

Sumitomo Bakelite Group has acquired Neopreg AG, a Swiss producer of thermoset composites marketed under the trade names Kinel and Neonite. The acquisition gives Sumitomo new capabilities in long-fiber composites. Neopreg will be integrated into Sumitomo's European unit, Vyncolit N.V.

BorgWarner of Auburn Hills, Mich., is providing its secondary air pump systems to Toyota light trucks in North America and Japan. According to the company, they will "significantly reduce hydrocarbons and provide flexibility in engine and catalyst packaging."

DCP Midstream Partners of Denver will acquire natural gas gathering and compression assets in Oklahoma from Anadarko Petroleum Corp. for $180.25 million. The gathering system consists of approximately 225 miles of pipeline and 9,500 horsepower of compression.

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