The Cutting Edge: COMPUTING / TECHNOLOGY / INNOVATION : What’ll Be Under the Hood in the 2000 Models
Already, you might think, there are plenty of electronics under the hood of your new car. But lots of electronics still reside under the dashboard--a situation that General Motors aims to change beginning with the 2000 model year.
The company hopes to take all the computer equipment that controls fuel economy, air-fuel mixture and exhaust emissions out of the passenger compartment and put it right next to the engine--a change that will improve the effectiveness of the electronics and simplify the cabling that now runs from the engine to the dashboard.
The problem is that a car engine is not a particularly hospitable place for sensitive electronic gear. Temperatures can fluctuate from as low as minus 85 degrees Fahrenheit to as high as 302 degrees.
So General Motors has hooked up with Sandia National Laboratories in a four-year cooperative research and development agreement to design and test an electronics package that would protect the circuitry by using an ahermetic package.
The package is an alumina substrate covered by a cup-shaped, glass-sealed alumina lid, which is sealed using a laser beam. It keeps corrosive liquids and gases in the engine away from the integrated circuits, and it contains pure nitrogen as a stabilizing agent.
*
Attacking Cancer: Sufferers for whom all conventional treatment methods have failed are now being treated with an isotope found in the vast stores of radioactive waste at the Hanford Site in Washington state. Through a process patented by Pacific Northwest Laboratory, which is operated for the Department of Energy by Battelle Memorial Institute, an ultra-pure form of the yttrium-90 isotope can now be extracted from the waste stores of strontium-90.
Yttrium-90 is attached to antibodies that seek out cancer cells in the body. Once contact is made, beta particles emitted from the isotope destroy them. Clinical trials are being conducted at medical centers nationwide, including the M.S. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The center has found that 80% of patients with Hodgkin’s lymphoma have experienced positive results--one of the few good things to emerge lately from Hanford, which is heavily contaminated with radioactive waste.
*
Tank Tough: A Woodstock, Ga.-based company, Advanced Engineered Materials, has begun commercial production of wear-resistant materials using a patented high-energy chemical reaction process originally developed to make armor for Army tanks. The titanium diboride materials might initially be used for cutting tools, dies and electrodes.
Developed by researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology, the chemical reaction used to produce the materials--known as an oxidation-reduction reaction--generates temperatures of up to 5,432 degrees Fahrenheit. It resembles the reaction used to create fireworks displays. A powdered metal--either magnesium or aluminum--titanium oxide and boron oxide are mixed and placed into a high-temperature crucible. The mixture is then ignited and the reaction between the two oxides produces titanium diboride in particles that average half a micron in size.
Because the particles are so small, they do not have to be ground. The high-wear resistance of the material is expected to benefit companies that now use dies and cutting tools made from materials such as hardened steel, tungsten carbine or diamond. The material should allow them to buy significantly fewer parts annually.
