North Carolina State University
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Media Contact: Tim Lucas, NC State News Services, 919/515-3470 or [email protected]
Nov. 3, 1999
A round-up of NC State University research activities, for use by the media as briefs or as background for stories. For more information or copies of full news releases on these research activities, or for help contacting the researchers, contact Tim Lucas, NC State News Services, at (919) 515-3470 or [email protected]. Texts of news releases are accessible electronically via News Services' Web site at http://www.ncsu.edu/news.
A Better Way to Forecast Hurricane Surge and Flooding
Flooding causes the greatest damage and loss of life in a hurricane and is one of the trickiest parts of the storm to forecast. But now, NC State scientists, working with the National Weather Service, have created a 3-D forecast model that predicts where and when coastal flooding will occur. The model has been used to predict flooding in North Carolina's sounds from hurricanes Floyd, Dennis, Fran, Bertha and Emily, and has been accurate to within 10 percent of actual water levels.
A chief advantage of the model, says co-creator Dr. Lian Xie, is that its sophisticated computer coding allows it to account for the effects of inland rainfall as well as ocean surge. No other model, including the one used at the National Hurricane Center, can do this. Xie, co-creator Dr. Leonard Pietrafesa and their colleagues are now working to expand the model's capabilities so it can be used to forecast flooding all along the coast from Charleston, S.C., to the Virginia border.
Robotic Rescuers
Disaster rescue teams have a new automated partner in the effort to rescue survivors from collapsed buildings. Meeting a challenge put forth by their professors, undergraduate students in NC State's College of Engineering have developed a pipe-crawling robot that can navigate rubble in search of earthquake and bomb victims.
Moccasin II can crawl like an inchworm along pipes as small as six inches in diameter and can navigate 90-degree turns and vertical climbs. (After earthquakes and bombings, a building's pipes sometimes are left intact even if its walls have fallen.) The segmented robot uses pneumatics -- compressed air -- to propel itself. Its tiny video camera and lights are connected to a monitor that lets human rescuers, located a safe distance away, look inside the rubble. Dr. Eddie Grant, visiting professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State, says the robot also can be used to make dangerous repairs to piping in nuclear plants and to detect cracks in water or sewer lines.
A Camera That Sees What You Can't
Digital cameras are increasingly common. But a new one developed by scientists in NC State's Solid State Physics Laboratory has a rare capability: It's the world's first digital camera that senses only ultraviolet (UV) light.
Like other digital cameras, the new UV camera created under the direction of Dr. Jan Schetzina uses an array of solar cells to "capture" images. Light falling on each sensor produces an electrical current that varies with the intensity of the light. Unlike other digital cameras, however, Schetzina's model uses aluminum gallium nitride, not silicon, in its cells. Aluminum gallium nitride is sensitive only to UV light. Once fully developed, the camera will have a wide range of uses, including missile, shellfire and biological agent detection, environmental monitoring and astronomy.
Driving Tips for a Cleaner Planet
Real-world problems require real-world solutions. But until now, the data used by government agencies and others to set vehicle emissions standards and predict emissions levels has been based on laboratory simulations -- simulations that can't take into account all the factors that affect a car's real performance.
NC State environmental engineers Drs. Christopher Frey and Nagui Rouphail are working to solve this problem. Driving vehicles outfitted with the world's first comprehensive on-board emissions measuring system, they're conducting extensive road tests to gather real-world data. Their initial findings have been surprising. Emissions produced by idling, for instance, are lower than expected, as are emissions from high-speed driving, providing the speed is kept constant and the road is level. On the other hand, emissions are much higher than expected when drivers speed up rapidly to change lanes in heavy traffic or to enter a highway from an on-ramp. After several more months of road tests, Frey and Rouphail will use their data to create computer models capable of predicting emissions levels for a wide range of situations and driving conditions.
Rapid Gene Silencing
A new gene-silencing technology developed by an NC State botany professor could lead to crops with increased resistance to drought and disease, soybeans with more protein, and vegetables with more vitamins. The technology is the brainchild of Dr. Dominique Robertson. It allows researchers to inhibit the expression of a selected gene in a plant and then study how the plant grows without it -- ultimately helping them identify what that gene's function is.
Robertson's method represents a big advance over existing gene silencing technologies because it allows for 100 percent silencing in as few as two to four weeks. Other methods provide only 1 percent to 10 percent silencing in three to six months. NC State has applied for a patent on Robertson's technique, and Monsanto has an option to commercialize it.
Physicists' Findings Aid in Creation of New Thin-Film Materials
Polymer thin-films are key ingredients in products we use very day -- from slow-release lawn fertilizer to multicolor photographic printing. But scientists working to create new polymer thin-films often face a perplexing problem: Like oil and water, some polymers simply don't mix.
Now, research by NC State physicists Drs. Harald Ade and Andrew Winesett, in partnership with scientists at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, is helping solve this problem. Their work is shedding new light on what happens to polymer blends as they are shrunk to thin-film dimensions, and how scientists can exploit these changes to create new and better materials. In an article published this summer in Nature, Ade and his colleagues showed for the first time that by exploiting the natural reduction in entropy caused by miniaturization, highly dissimilar polymers can be completely blended. Because the new blending process doesn't depend on chemistry, scientists should be able to use it on nearly any polymer blend, including those used on ultra-thin polymer coatings such as photolithographic printing and magnetic disk coatings.
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