October 1999
News about Science, Technology and Engineering at Iowa State University
Musicians take note
It soon could be curtains for that annoying page turning during musical performances. A musician's assistant being designed and built at Iowa State University will use existing computer technology to download, display, recognize and follow a piece of music.
Arun Somani, Nicholas Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, says the electronic device will read pages of written music, then display them on a screen, which has been sized to the musician's specifications. When the performing musician approaches the end of a page of music, the assistant will display the next page. Because the actual point of "page turning" must be programmable, the musician's assistant will include a sound sensor, an analog amplifier and an analog-to-digital sampler and converter. The digital input will be used to identify the note being played, which will be matched with the displayed music, Somani said. A prototype will be ready next spring. Contact Somani at (515) 294-0442, or Teddi Barron, Engineering Communications, (515) 294-0262.
Back to basics
Ames Laboratory is helping to answer the fundamental question of how much energy it takes to ionize or dissociate specific molecules. If chemists can obtain accurate energetics for various molecular species, they can use the data to better predict reaction rates for the chemicals they want to combine -- an essential step in modeling problems in atmospheric, plasma and combustion chemistry.
Cheuk Ng, an Ames Laboratory senior chemist and an ISU distinguished professor of chemistry, looks for this type of basic energy data, doing much of his research at the Vacuum Ultraviolet facility, which he designed. The facility is a component of the Advanced Light Source at Lawrence Berkeley (Calif.) National Laboratory. Providing a resolution 10 times better than what was available in previous synchrotron-based studies, the VUV facility is considered one of the best in the world for doing ion chemistry.
Some of Ng's work includes looking at radicals (unstable molecules) to explore the energetics of combustion species for the U. S. Department of Energy. In addition, his research is helping advance knowledge in the field of atmospheric chemistry. The ionosphere, the outermost shield of Earth's atmosphere, is ionized and dissociated by solar ultraviolet and VUV radiation. In order to understand and model the chain reactions that follow the ionization and dissociation processes and cause such phenomena as the aurora borealis, Ng says scientists must first measure the reaction rates and determine how the ions are initially formed. Contact Ng at (515) 294-4225, or Saren Johnston, Ames Lab Public Affairs, (515) 294-3474.
Trigger happy
On Oct. 4, physicists gained access to a new particle accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Long Island, N.Y., that will help them recreate what happened in that first microsecond of our universe. Physicists will use the $600-million Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) to recreate matter that only existed at the moment of creation. They are most interested in a bizarre concoction called a quark-gluon plasma, from which more common forms of matter evolved. To do this, they'll collide high-energy beams of gold nuclei moving at 99.995 percent of the speed of light head on into each other.
"We want to find out what happened at the birth of the universe," said Iowa State University physics and astronomy professor John Hill. Hill is a senior member of an Iowa State/Ames Laboratory team that developed the first-level trigger for the Phenix detector, the largest of four detectors at RHIC. The trigger will help scientists determine which collisions are best candidates for generating the quark-gluon plasma. The trigger will have to sort through up to 100,000 collisions per second and will have all of 4 microseconds to determine whether a specific collision warrants additional study. The trigger will process data at the rate of 1,000 gigabits per second, a rate equivalent to processing all of the information in the Library of Congress every minute. Furthermore, each collision lasts only 10-23 (10 to negative 23) second and will emit thousands of nuclear particles from which physicists will be looking for the subtle signatures of a quark-gluon plasma.
Without the trigger, Hill says, "serious data taking with Phenix is not possible." Contact Hill at (515) 294-6580, or Skip Derra, News Service, (515) 294-4917.
Crash location tool will improve traveler safety
The days of Iowa law enforcement agencies recording on paper all their traffic citations, crash reports and other traffic incidents may be over soon. Iowa State University's Center for Transportation Research and Education (CTRE) has developed an incident location tool. The tool is one part of a larger data collection and management technology system that the Iowa departments of transportation and public safety are using to share safety information.
Developed for the Iowa DOT by CTRE's Dan Gieseman, a transportation systems analyst, the tool uses geographic information systems (GIS) software to provide users with a map-based computer screen. Law enforcement officers will be able to locate precisely on a digital map car crashes and other incidents and have that information recorded in their computer-generated reports. The location information will be transmitted to a database at the Iowa DOT for analysis and storage. Analyzing precise location information of crashes in conjunction with information about the condition of a road, for example, will help the Iowa DOT determine why certain crashes occur. The data will help the DOT design safer roads. The incident location tool will be ready for use within six months. For more information, contact Gieseman, (515) 296-0796; Mary Jensen, Iowa DOT, (515) 237-3235; or Michele Regenold, CTRE, (515) 294-8103.
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