An Irvine, Calif., company marketing a high-capacity electricity cable has been trying to break into the transmission and distribution field for some time. It reports that lately it has been making some headway, including an order for about 40 miles of line, which will likely be shipped to China this month.

So far, cable from the company, Composite Technology Corp., has been installed in more than a dozen places across the United States, from Phoenix to Niagara Falls. The most recently electrified installation is a section of the electrical system in Salt Lake City.

Composite Technology calls the cable ACCC, for "aluminum conductor composite core."

New wiring: Cables running in this stretch of grid in Salt Lake City benefit from a lightweight composite core; they are rated for twice the current that steel-reinforced power lines of the same diameter can carry. A Chinese company has ordered 60 km of it.

According to the company, its cable makes use of a glass and carbon composite core to reinforce an aluminum conductor, unlike conventional power line cable in which the aluminum conductor is reinforced with steel. The composite core is lighter and smaller than the steel reinforcement in conventional power lines, Composite Technology said. As a result, ACCC resists sagging better than steel-reinforced lines, and can carry twice the current through the same-diameter cable.

For instance, its 1.108-inch-diameter, or Drake, cable has an aluminum area of 1,020,000 circular mills, or 1,020 kcmil, compared with 795 kcmil in a steel-reinforced cable of the same diameter. A circular mill is a standard unit for measuring the cross-section of wire and is equivalent to the area of a circle 0.001 inch across.

ACCC is rated for 1,905 amperes and the steel-reinforced line for 905 amps.

One of the manufacturer's talking points is that its product will increase capacity in established systems. Although the cable can carry more electricity, it is the same size as the wires it is intended to replace. The company admits that its cable costs significantly more per linear foot, 2.5 to 3 times as much as various steel-reinforced alternatives, but argues that an installation of its product avoids the cost of new towers or poles because it can use the ones already in place on established rights of way.

Utah Power, a unit of PacifiCorp, earlier this year began to deliver power to customers over a new 6.7-mile section of line in Salt Lake City. The section contains 150 structures to carry the lines, and Utah Power said that it needed to replace seven structures when it rewired.

Using a modeling program provided by Composite Technology, Utah Power estimated that the new installation will accommodate projected usage demands for the next 15 years.

The order from China for cable and related hardware is valued at $1.1 million. The cable will be used in two regional high-voltage transmission projects, Composite Technology said. Some of the conductor will be used in a new transmission line, and the rest as an upgrade to an established line. The order was placed by Jiangsu Far East Group, a Chinese cable manufacturer, for delivery to the Xiamen and Fuzhou Power Bureaus.

The ASME B46 Surface Metrology Committee is developing a new feature to be added to its published standard, an executive summary.

According to the committee's chairman, Don Cohen, who is also the principal of Michigan Metrology in Livonia, Mich., the summary will serve as an introduction to the standard and include "the key things you need to know" to perform surface measurements. A draft version is available on the ASME Codes and Standards Web site at http://cstools.asme.org/csconnect/pdf/CommitteeFiles/18009.pdf.

Meanwhile, the committee has widened the scope of a project that had originally focused on the repeatability and reproducibility of surface gauges. The project will address surface texture gauge capability analysis. It is being led by Torbjorn Bergstrom, associate director of the Surface Metrology Lab at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts.

The project team is inviting public comment and can be reached by e-mail at torbjorn@wpi.edu, or in person at committee meetings.

The next meeting of the main B46 committee will be held on June 9, at a site still to be determined in the Detroit area.

It's a trick straight out of elementary school: make a cube from six linked squares. But if it's hard to get the sides lined up when working with scissors and a two-inch square of paper, imagine the difficulty in making a cube that's a mere 100 micrometers on a side.

But that's just what engineers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore have reported doing. The cubes are more than just a puzzle, however. Similar microstructures may one day deliver disease-fighting medicines directly to afflicted organs.

The sides of the cubes are fabricated in much the way that MEMS and integrated circuits are made, through photolithography and thin-film deposition. The end result was a six-square cross made of copper or nickel; heat-sensitive metallic solder holds adjoining squares together. When the crosses are immersed in a solution and then heated, the solder hinges melt and surface tension in the solder swings the neighboring squares together much like swinging gates. When the solder cools and rehardens, a flat cross has become a cube.

Because the research team, led by engineer David Gracias, is interested in biomedical applications, the boxes are coated in gold to reduce the likelihood of toxic reactions. The researchers have determined that human cells inserted in the cubes have remained alive for some time. They also have discovered that microbeads encapsulated within the cubes can be released through gentle agitation, and that the motion of cubes made of material such as nickel can be controlled by magnetic fields. All these results are important for the potential use of the boxes for medical treatments.

The researchers are now working to make minuscule pores in the surfaces of the boxes. Such cubes could contain cells that release chemicals like hormones directly where they are needed.

Women in remote areas don't usually have the greatest health-care options. But even if the doctor is located across the globe, they may someday get potentially lifesaving breast exams with help from robotic technology being developed at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

Here's how it is expected work: A physician or other health-care provider would slip a hand into a glove-like instrument to move a robotic arm that can examine a distant patient.

"That arm, which actually looks like a hand, is equipped with sensors," said Carol Slomski, chairperson of the university's Department of Surgery and co-director of the project. "As the hand touches the patient, the sensation from this touch comes back into my hand. When the robotic fingers feel a lump or some other abnormality, I also feel it."

Physicians from the school's Department of Surgery and College of Engineering are perfecting the robotic device, which can check for lumps and other abnormalities in a woman's breast.

The arm comes equipped with an ultrasound transducer that collects and transmits an image of the breast, so doctors can correlate what they feel with what they see.

Video and audio capabilities enable patient and physician to communicate directly.

The ability to feel and see the breast simultaneously is a real breakthrough, said Ranjan Mukherjee, an associate professor of mechanical engineering who leads the team building the device.

"Often the ultrasound and exam are done separately. But if the physician can look at the image and feel what he or she is seeing, it's a huge advantage," he said.

Computers at the two sites are linked through an Internet connection, Mukherjee said. Built-in safeguards prevent the robotic arm from pushing too hard or otherwise harming the patient.

With a potential shortage of surgeons looming, especially in remote areas, the technology should make life easier for both patient and health-care provider, Slomski said.

"Just because you're located in the Upper Peninsula or even Botswana, it doesn't mean you can't have a sophisticated diagnostic or therapeutic procedure," she said.

An automaker from Hangzhou, China, which took part in the Detroit Auto Show for the first time this year, says it can introduce a car to the U.S. market in 2008.

Geely Automobile Co.'s chairman, Shufu Li, said that the company intends "to present to the American people another choice for the family sedan, a vehicle that possesses the highest quality but is available at the lowest price."

Li said a car to be offered in the U.S. will likely be an improved version of a five-passenger sedan shown in Detroit. The car, called the 7151 CK, will probably be renamed for sale in the United States, Li said.

It's been a staple of future babble for more than a decade: Nanotubes will someday revolutionize the materials industry, thanks to their great strength and light weight. But two recent reports suggest that nanotubes might well make great contributions to the energy industry as well.

A research team at Cambridge University in England has developed nanoscale capacitors made from multiwalled carbon nanotubes sandwiched between thin layers of metal. Capacitors store electrical charge in plates separated by an insulator rather than electrochemically as batteries do. Without an electrolyte to wear out, capacitors have the potential to go through many thousands of recharge cycles without losing storage capacity.

As a rule of thumb, the greater the surface area of the plates, the more charge the capacitor can hold. The researchers drizzled an insulating layer of silicon nitride over a "forest" of upright nanotubes—and then a conducting layer of aluminum over that—making a convoluted surface with much more area than that of a flat plate.

Capacitors made this way can store about seven times as much energy as conventional capacitors found in electronics and may soon rival batteries for energy density.

That's great for storing energy, but how about producing it? Researchers at Pennsylvania State University recently published results of experiments using nanotube arrays made up of titania that harness solar energy to produce hydrogen. The researchers measured the rate of conversion of incoming solar energy into energy used to split oxygen and hydrogen atoms in water. Highly ordered arrays of titania nanotubes illuminated with ultraviolet light can convert as much as 13 percent of that energy. The researchers are working to find a way to make this process practical in the visible part of the spectrum, which is more abundant than UV light.

Sandia National Laboratories and Sharp Corp. have signed a cooperative research and development agreement to work together on renewable and alternative energy technologies, including advanced fuel cells.

Sarnatech BNL Ltd., a manufacturer of plastic bearings, has been acquired by Plastics Capital Ltd. of the U.K. Formerly owned by the Swiss Sarna Group, the company will now be known as BNL (UK) Ltd. Its U.S. subsidiary, in Foxboro, Mass., will become BNL (USA) Inc.

InnovMetric Software of Quebec City, Canada, has released PolyWorks 9.1. for reverse engineering, virtual assembly, pilot assembly, and first-article inspection applications.

CIRCOR International Inc. of Burlington, Mass., a leading provider of valves and other fluid control devices for the instrumentation, aerospace, thermal fluid, and energy markets, has acquired Sagebrush Pipeline Equipment Co. for approximately $12 million in cash and assumption of debt. Sagebrush, based in Tulsa, Okla., provides pipeline flow control and measurement equipment to the North American oil and gas markets.

General Dynamics Land Systems, a business unit of General Dynamics in Sterling Heights, Mich., has been awarded a $257 million contract for 130 new eight-wheeled light armored vehicles in various configurations for the U.S. Marine Corps. The contract has a total potential value of $307 million if a $50 million option for electric turret drives is exercised.

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