An ozone-treatment system being installed at the Central Park Wildlife Center in New York will allow this polar bear to eat live fish as in the wild and protect it and other animals from chlorine.

Animals at the Central Park Wildlife Center in New York will be living in healthier environments with the help of a state-of-the-art, electric-based water system. This system, to be installed within the next six months, uses ozone rather than chlorine to purify the center's aquatic exhibits.

Each of the animal exhibits--featuring polar bears, sea lions, penguins, and puffins--has its own treatment area where water is pumped into a recirculating system. An ozone generator pulls air across a dielectric circuit, pulling apart the oxygen molecule and recombining it as ozone. Compressed ozone is pumped into the water, destroying the parasites, viruses, and bacteria present, and it oxidizes any organic material. The water is then sent through a filter to remove any remaining particulates, and the purified water is pumped back into the exhibit.

The ozone systems will replace chlorine, the primary disinfectant used in water treatment. This chemical can cause environmental and health problems, such as destroying the natural oil coating on aquatic birds. The corrosive nature of chlorine can also wear treatment systems.

Additional anticipated benefits of the ozone-treatment systems at the wildlife center are clearer water, which allows greater visibility of the animals, and the capability to stock the exhibits with live fish so the resident animals can hunt for food as they do in the wild.

The installation of the ozone-treatment system is a pilot project sponsored by the Electric Power Research Institute in Palo Alto, Calif., the New York Power Authority, and the Central Park Wildlife Center. This project will also evaluate other methods of water treatment, including ultraviolet light, biofiltration, advanced oxidation, and activated-carbon and membrane systems.

By cleaning surfaces just before deposition, the flow-through ion gun can produce thin films with superior adhesion. It can also deposit thin films two to 10 times faster than other methods. In addition, thin films produced by the new gun are up to 10 times smoother than those produced with other guns. To date, it has deposited thin films of magnesium oxide, indium tin oxide, titanium nitride, and yttria-stabilized zirconium.

Los Alamos' flow-through ion gun has been used to deposit wear-resistant, heat-resistant, and low-friction coatings on mechanical parts as well as improve the conductivity of electrical parts. The gun is expected to find applications in coatings for automotive and aerospace parts as well as in cleaning and coating processes employed in semiconductor fabrication. The gun, which emits a beam of ions, is based in part on the Kaufman ion gun, a tool widely used in research laboratories. The Kaufman gun produces ions by stripping electrons from gas atoms entering the gun chamber through a gas feed.

Engineers at Los Alamos opened the back of a Kaufman gun to allow atoms evaporated from liquids or solids with an electron beam (a plasma) to enter it from the rear. At the rear, metal grids held at high voltages contain the plasma and give the ion beam a single acceleration direction. (In the Kaufman gun, charged metal grids are used to focus the ion beam.) Once inside the gun, the evaporated atoms are ionized and accelerated toward the work surface along with the feed gas atoms. Electron-beam evaporation permits coating with a wide variety of very pure materials.

The Carpoon can be attached to any kind of police car to apprehend runaway vehicles.

James Bond's car may come with a wide array of secret accessories, but even the fictional British spy would envy a recent addition to a police car in Finland: a harpoon.

The Oulu police department is testing its Carpoon, a harpoon that is not launched but rammed into a fleeing vehicle. Developed by Markku Limingoga, a detective sergeant in the city 380 miles north of Helsinki, the tool is currently in the prototype phase on one police car and awaits Finnish government approval.

While in the retracted position, the 3-foot-long harpoon is attached to the front of the law-enforcement vehicle, lying flat along the grille. As the police car approaches the runaway target, the officer inside presses a button to rotate the harpoon 90 degrees so that it sticks straight out in front, ready for impaling. The Carpoon is powered by a 12-volt motor that runs off the car battery.

The equipped car speeds to about 1 to 2 miles per hour more than the runaway to implant the spring-loaded harpoon into the target's bodywork. Once the Carpoon is about 8 inches inside the fleeing vehicle, hooks are released from the harpoon's head to keep the two vehicles together. The police driver then alternates between downshifting (police cars in Finland use manual transmissions) and softly applying brakes to bring the runaway to a stop.

The Carpoon, made of ultrastrong HR 45 steel with a 13,400-pound capacity, comes with other crime-fighting accouterments. Should the fleeing driver need to be subdued, the police officer can release tear gas into the suspect's car through the tubular harpoon. In addition, the detachable harpoon head contains a satellite transmitter to track the runaway if the cars have to be separated.

The WVU-owned Cessna is a dual-fuel aircraft, carrying conventional aviation gas in its right-wing fuel tank and ethanol in its left-wing tank. Fuel-system designer John Loth, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, mounted a fuel injector next to the existing carburetor to provide the extra fuel needed when the pilot switches operation from aviation gas to ethanol. When the plane is operated on aviation gas, only the carburetor is used.

Loth's fuel system allows the pilot to switch fuels in flight by turning the fuel-selector valve from one tank to the other, then activate the fuel-pump switch 1 minute later. This contrasts with other ethanol-fueled aircraft that use either a carburetor or a fuel injector. Such planes cannot safely switch fuel type in flight because the pilot must manually adjust the fuel/air mixture control during fuel changeover, which is difficult to do without engine detonation. The Cessna 150 is used regularly in classes to provide aerospace engineering students at the university with an introductory flight.

Until recently, however, its application to the quantity production of complex castings has been hindered by the lack of reliable foundry procedures. High-quality CGI is stable only over a tiny range of magnesium percentage. Conventional metal treatment and control techniques cannot guarantee that all castings could be produced in the stable magnesium content range.

SinterCast S.A. in Lausanne, Switzerland, has developed and patented a computerized process-control system that permits foundries to make large amounts of CGI with stable properties. In the SinterCast process, a sampling probe is dipped into the ladle of molten iron before casting, and a sample of the melt is withdrawn. After the sample is analyzed by two thermocouples, temperature data are specially processed to determine what additive materials should be added to the melt. A wire feeder system then delivers the precise amount of additives necessary. The entire process takes 3 to 4 minutes.

CGI has at least 70 percent higher tensile strength and 30 to 40 percent greater modulus than conventional gray iron. Gray iron is characterized by randomly oriented, interconnected graphite flakes with sharp edges that serve as crack-initiation sites, and smooth surfaces that act as cleavage planes. This morphology gives gray cast iron its low-strength, brittle nature. In CGI, the graphite takes the form of a corallike structure with the crack-causing details.

For the past few years, SinterCast has shopped its innovative process to the world's auto manufacturers. In Europe, General Motors' Opel subsidiary used CGI for the block of its 2.5-liter V6 DTM racing engine, and the company plans to use it in its future Ecotec ultralow-fuel-consumption engine. Hyundai Motor Co. Ltd. in Seoul, South Korea, recently agreed to conduct practical trials aiming at serial production of engine components. Meanwhile, Mexican iron foundry Cifunsa is installing a SinterCast system in its Saltillo facility.

The concept of displaying 3-D objects in fluorescent glass dates back at least to the mid-1960s, said Elizabeth A. Downing, the developer of the new technique and head of 3D Technology. Current approaches include producing stereo image pairs to provide a slightly different view for each eye, stacking two-dimensional images on adjacent planes, and using holographic film. Downing's prototype 3-D display system consists of a piece of clear glass the size of a sugar cube that sits at the center of a 1-foot-square device containing tunable infrared lasers and video-disk scanners. To date, the system has imaged three-dimensional wire figures, surfaces, and simple solid shapes.

The new technology "doesn't create an image that appears to be three- dimensional--it actually produces an image that is drawn in three dimensions," said Downing, a former mechanical engineering graduate student at Stanford University in Stanford, Calif. "As a result, there are few restrictions on the viewing angle, and a number of people can view the images at the same time. Also, the images are emissive--they glow--rather than reflective, so they can be seen easily in ordinary room light."

"Downing's fluorescent glass display is based on the scientific principle of "upconversion." Certain rare earth elements emit visible light when struck in quick succession by two infrared laser beams with the appropriate (but slightly different) wavelengths. The fluorescence phenomenon is based on a two-step absorption process; neither beam has sufficient energy to cause fluorescence by itself, but the combined energy of the two can illuminate a "voxel" or volumetric pixel.

To make a display, different rare earth elements that can glow red, green, and blue are used to dope closely packed layers of glass. When the two (invisible) infrared laser beams are directed through the glass, visible light is created at the points where they intersect. Downing estimated it would cost about $80,000 to build a prototype 10-inch display unit.

The U.S. Department of Energy is making a $10.25 million investment in a public-private partnership to build a more efficient and commercially viable high-temperature superconducting motor. The government funding will be matched dollar for dollar by Reliance Electric, a Rockwell Automation business located in Cleveland, and its development partners Air Products Corp., American Superconductor Corp., Centerior Energy, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Electric Power Research Institute.

ITT-Barton in City of Industry, Calif., has designed its TEC series of compact thermoelectric generators to supply electrical power to locations where commercial power is not economically available. The generators run on natural gas or propane, and can provide 200 to 600 watt-hours per day in applications that include recharging batteries, backing up solar power systems, and providing remote or temporary power for various electrical devices.

The U.S. and Russian governments have formed the Russian-American Fuel Cell Consortium to further the research and development of fuel cells. The group will draw on the scientific and engineering expertise of both nations to advance the development of commercially viable fuel cell technologies and promote defense conversion goals. American industry is also expected to play a vital role in the consortium's projects. Initial collaborations will include work on all four types of fuel-cell technologies: solid oxide, molten carbonate, phosphoric acid, and polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells.

The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., recently signed cooperative research and development agreements with eight industry partners to help them overcome the technical obstacles associated with bringing promising renewable-energy technologies to the marketplace. The cost-shared agreements are designed to bring industry partners access to NREL's research expertise, technologies, and facilities. One agreement, signed with Amerisen in Brookfield, Wis., will focus on developing a fiber-optic hydrogen sensor to improve the safety of hydrogen-powered vehicles. Another will help Applied CarboChemicals in Santa Monica, Calif., use biomass material to make a valuable acid.

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