December - Engineers Birthdays

28  Linus Torvalds - linux system
KARRY Banks Mullis - Chemistry N W
William Draper Harkins - predicted existence of neutrons

29 Henry Gaston Busignirs - invented HF/DF system
Alexander Parkes - produced plastic first
Charles Goodyear - inventor of vulvanisation process
Charles MACINTOSH - invented rubberized water proof cloth. Patented steel making process

30 RodneyAllen Brookes - Aautonomous robots

John Milnr - Seismograph

31 

Toyota Motor's remodeled Prius hybrid 2015

Toyota Motor's remodeled Prius hybrid. The car is available for sale in Japan in Decemer 2015. It will be available in other markets in January 2016.


The car is 25% more fuel-efficient than its predecessor.  It is due to  a revamped gasoline engine and a design that reduces air resistance. The company claims mileage of 40.8km per liter of gas

The new Prius prices in Japan range  from 2.42 million to 3.39 million yen ($19,500 to $27,300). In Japan, the sales estimate is  monthly sales of 12,000 units.


http://asia.nikkei.com/Japan-Update/Revamped-Prius-goes-on-sale

SkyDeck, A Bubble-style Window in Air Planes

http://fortune.com/2015/12/15/skydeck/


The company says SkyDeck will transform in-flight entertainment.

Windspeed Technologies, a private aerospace engineering services company, has come out with this new in-flight entertainment.

The company’s website describes SkyDeck as a “semi-external location” that gives passengers a more fuller view of the space around  than they’d get from a regular window seat.

Diamond Foundry to Manufacture Synthetic Diamonds More Quickly and Cheaply - 2015

The founders of Nanosolar, a large start-up that raised about half a billion dollars in its first six years, began exploring ways to use  their expertise to new technologies.

A group of engineers and scientists, led by R. Martin Roscheisen, a founder of Nanosolar, announced on 11 November 2015  that they had developed an advanced approach to making diamonds, using technology developed using processes used in making silicon chips and solar cells.

The technology will be used  a new company,  Diamond Foundry.  It  claims to have made proprietary breakthroughs  and it will be able to  manufacture high-quality diamonds more quickly and cost-effectively than with existing technologies..

The first synthetic diamonds appeared in the early 1950s.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/12/science/borrowing-from-solar-and-chip-tech-to-make-diamonds-faster-and-cheaper.html

Fully Transparent Solar Panel cum Solar Cell

Researchers at Michigan State University have created a fully transparent solar concentrator, which could turn any window  into a photovoltaic solar cell.

Richard Lunt, who led the research, and the team are confident that the transparent solar panels can be efficiently deployed in a wide range of settings, from “tall buildings with lots of windows or any kind of mobile device


The technololgy used is a transparent luminescent solar concentrator (TLSC). The TLSC consists of organic salts that absorb specific non-visible wavelengths of ultraviolet and infrared light, which they then luminesce (glow) as another wavelength of infrared light (also non-visible). This emitted infrared light is guided to the edge of plastic, where thin strips of conventional photovoltaic solar cell convert it into electricity. [Research paper: DOI: 10.1002/adom.201400103 - "Near-Infrared Harvesting Transparent Luminescent Solar Concentrators"]


http://www.offgridquest.com/extra/a-fully-transparent-solar-cell-that-coul

Model X SUV - Tesla

http://www.teslamotors.com/modelx




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6 vehicles delivered.
Order bookings are now taking place for late 2016 delivery.

Page-turning Scanners

Google engineer builds $1,500 page-turning scanner out of sheet metal and a vacuum
By Jeff Blagdon  on November 13, 2012
http://www.theverge.com/2012/11/13/3639016/google-books-scanner-vacuum-diy