Model Airplanes

Stephanie Kwolek may have been short in height, but when it came to making a contribution to science, she was a giant. The former DuPont chemist who recently passed away was responsible for the introduction of the super-strong material Kevlar. Not only did Kevlar prove to be an excellent replacement for steel in steel-belted tires, it ended up saving numerous lives with its use in body armour and military helmets.

Fibres made of Kevlar, chemically known as a “polyaramid,” can be woven into fabrics that are stronger and lighter than steel. A jacket made of seven layers weighs only two and a half pounds but can deflect a knife blade and stop a .38 calibre bullet from 10 feet. Sails, skis, hockey sticks, canoes, airplane and spacecraft parts, armoured limousines, bomb-resistant building materials, motorcycle safety clothing, cut-resistant gloves, suspension bridge cables, optical fibres and brake pads have all benefited from the discovery made by Kwolek back in 1965.

Kwolek had been bent on going to medical school, but, after studying chemistry in college, needed to earn some money for tuition. She applied for a job at DuPont and was interviewed by William Hale Charch, one of the company’s star scientists for having developed a process to make cellophane waterproof.

Charch told Kwolek that she would hear about her application in a few weeks, whereupon she retorted that she had other offers. Charch liked her gumption and offered her a position right then and there. At the time she joined

Article source: http://montrealgazette.com/technology/science/the-right-chemistry-stephanie-kwolek-was-as-tough-as-kevlar-the-material-she-invented

Abu Dhabi

To drill the importance of innovation into its class of 30 flight attendants from five continents, an Etihad Airways employee flashed a picture of Steve Jobs on the screen in a conference room at the company’s training academy here.

The message was that the iPhone “won its market” and Etihad can do the same with innovation and…

Article source: http://online.wsj.com/articles/persian-gulf-airlines-groom-new-global-flight-crews-1417646586

Stephanie Kwolek may have been short in height, but when it came to making a contribution to science, she was a giant. The former DuPont chemist who recently passed away was responsible for the introduction of the super-strong material Kevlar. Not only did Kevlar prove to be an excellent replacement for steel in steel-belted tires, it ended up saving numerous lives with its use in body armour and military helmets.

Fibres made of Kevlar, chemically known as a “polyaramid,” can be woven into fabrics that are stronger and lighter than steel. A jacket made of seven layers weighs only two and a half pounds but can deflect a knife blade and stop a .38 calibre bullet from 10 feet. Sails, skis, hockey sticks, canoes, airplane and spacecraft parts, armoured limousines, bomb-resistant building materials, motorcycle safety clothing, cut-resistant gloves, suspension bridge cables, optical fibres and brake pads have all benefited from the discovery made by Kwolek back in 1965.

Kwolek had been bent on going to medical school, but, after studying chemistry in college, needed to earn some money for tuition. She applied for a job at DuPont and was interviewed by William Hale Charch, one of the company’s star scientists for having developed a process to make cellophane waterproof.

Charch told Kwolek that she would hear about her application in a few weeks, whereupon she retorted that she had other offers. Charch liked her gumption and offered her a position right then and there. At the time she joined

Article source: http://montrealgazette.com/technology/science/the-right-chemistry-stephanie-kwolek-was-as-tough-as-kevlar-the-material-she-invented

Pretty soon, powering your tablet could be as simple as wrapping it in cling wrap.

That’s Illan Kramer’s hope. Kramer and colleagues have just invented a new way to spray solar cells onto flexible surfaces using miniscule light-sensitive materials known as colloidal quantum dots (CQDs)–a major step toward making spray-on solar cells easy and cheap to manufacture.

“My dream is that one day you’ll have two technicians with Ghostbusters backpacks come to your house and spray your roof,” says Kramer, a post-doctoral fellow with The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto and IBM Canada’s Research and Development Centre.

Solar-sensitive CQDs printed onto a flexible film could be used to coat all kinds of weirdly shaped surfaces, from patio furniture to an airplane’s wing. A surface the size of your car’s roof wrapped with CQD-coated film would produce enough energy to power three 100-Watt light bulbs–or 24 compact fluorescents.

He calls his system sprayLD, a play on the manufacturing process called ALD, short for atomic layer deposition, in which materials are laid down on a surface one atom-thickness at a time.

Until now, it was only possible to incorporate light-sensitive CQDs onto surfaces through batch processing–an inefficient, slow and expensive assembly-line approach to chemical coating. SprayLD blasts a liquid containing CQDs directly onto flexible surfaces, such as film or plastic, like printing a newspaper by applying ink onto a roll of paper. This roll-to-roll coating method makes incorporating solar cells into existing manufacturing processes much simpler.

Article source: http://www.sciencecodex.com/new_technique_offers_sprayon_solar_power-146933