#Architectural Applications

[techninja]

Unveiling the Lucrative Realm of Porcelain Enamel Coatings Market

Introduction

The Porcelain Enamel Coatings Market is experiencing a significant surge owing to its versatility, durability, and aesthetic appeal across various industries. This article delves into the dynamics, trends, and future prospects of this thriving market segment.

Understanding Porcelain Enamel Coatings

Porcelain enamel coatings, also known as vitreous enamel coatings, are glass-like coatings applied to metals such as steel and cast iron. These coatings offer exceptional durability, corrosion resistance, and thermal stability, making them ideal for a wide range of applications.

Market Trends and Dynamics

1. Growing Demand in Architectural Applications: Porcelain enamel coatings find extensive usage in architectural applications such as building facades, cladding, and signage due to their weather resistance and aesthetic appeal.

2. Rising Adoption in Cookware Industry: The cookware industry is witnessing a surge in demand for porcelain enamel-coated products due to their non-stick properties, easy cleaning, and scratch resistance.

3. Expansion in Automotive Sector: The automotive industry is increasingly utilizing porcelain enamel coatings for components such as exhaust systems, mufflers, and grilles to enhance durability and withstand harsh environmental conditions.

4. Emergence of Environmentally Friendly Formulations: With growing environmental concerns, manufacturers are developing eco-friendly porcelain enamel coatings, leveraging sustainable materials and production processes.

Market Challenges

1. High Initial Investment: Setting up facilities for manufacturing porcelain enamel coatings requires substantial investment in specialized equipment and infrastructure.

2. Intense Competition: The market faces stiff competition from alternative coatings such as powder coatings and liquid paints, challenging the growth prospects of porcelain enamel coatings.

3. Regulatory Compliance: Stringent regulations regarding emissions and hazardous substances pose challenges for manufacturers in ensuring compliance while maintaining product performance and quality.

Download Sample Copy: https://shorturl.at/bwUZ1

Future Outlook

1. Technological Advancements: Ongoing research and development efforts are focused on enhancing the performance characteristics of porcelain enamel coatings, including improved adhesion, color retention, and resistance to abrasion.

2. Expanding Applications: The market is poised to witness increased adoption in emerging applications such as renewable energy systems, electrical components, and industrial machinery.

3. Regional Expansion: Manufacturers are exploring untapped markets in Asia Pacific and Latin America, driven by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and infrastructure development.

[ofswordsandpens]

I'm sincerely very happy for anyone who is enjoying the show but every time I see takes that the show has improved the book characterizations or that the book characters are underdeveloped in comparison to the show...

[e77y]

It's just me and my plush carrot against the world

[thebotanicalarcade]

[jcmarchi]

Translating MIT research into real-world results

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/translating-mit-research-into-real-world-results/

Translating MIT research into real-world results

Inventive solutions to some of the world’s most critical problems are being discovered in labs, classrooms, and centers across MIT every day. Many of these solutions move from the lab to the commercial world with the help of over 85 Institute resources that comprise MIT’s robust innovation and entrepreneurship (I&E) ecosystem. The Abdul Latif Jameel Water and Food Systems Lab (J-WAFS) draws on MIT’s wealth of I&E knowledge and experience to help researchers commercialize their breakthrough technologies through the J-WAFS Solutions grant program. By collaborating with I&E programs on campus, J-WAFS prepares MIT researchers for the commercial world, where their novel innovations aim to improve productivity, accessibility, and sustainability of water and food systems, creating economic, environmental, and societal benefits along the way.

The J-WAFS Solutions program launched in 2015 with support from Community Jameel, an international organization that advances science and learning for communities to thrive. Since 2015, J-WAFS Solutions has supported 19 projects with one-year grants of up to $150,000, with some projects receiving renewal grants for a second year of support. Solutions projects all address challenges related to water or food. Modeled after the esteemed grant program of MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, and initially administered by Deshpande Center staff, the J-WAFS Solutions program follows a similar approach by supporting projects that have already completed the basic research and proof-of-concept phases. With technologies that are one to three years away from commercialization, grantees work on identifying their potential markets and learn to focus on how their technology can meet the needs of future customers.

“Ingenuity thrives at MIT, driving inventions that can be translated into real-world applications for widespread adoption, implantation, and use,” says J-WAFS Director Professor John H. Lienhard V. “But successful commercialization of MIT technology requires engineers to focus on many challenges beyond making the technology work. MIT’s I&E network offers a variety of programs that help researchers develop technology readiness, investigate markets, conduct customer discovery, and initiate product design and development,” Lienhard adds. “With this strong I&E framework, many J-WAFS Solutions teams have established startup companies by the completion of the grant. J-WAFS-supported technologies have had powerful, positive effects on human welfare. Together, the J-WAFS Solutions program and MIT’s I&E ecosystem demonstrate how academic research can evolve into business innovations that make a better world,” Lienhard says.

Creating I&E collaborations

In addition to support for furthering research, J-WAFS Solutions grants allow faculty, students, postdocs, and research staff to learn the fundamentals of how to transform their work into commercial products and companies. As part of the grant requirements, researchers must interact with mentors through MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). VMS connects MIT entrepreneurs with teams of carefully selected professionals who provide free and confidential mentorship, guidance, and other services to help advance ideas into for-profit, for-benefit, or nonprofit ventures. Since 2000, VMS has mentored over 4,600 MIT entrepreneurs across all industries, through a dynamic and accomplished group of nearly 200 mentors who volunteer their time so that others may succeed. The mentors provide impartial and unbiased advice to members of the MIT community, including MIT alumni in the Boston area. J-WAFS Solutions teams have been guided by 21 mentors from numerous companies and nonprofits. Mentors often attend project events and progress meetings throughout the grant period.

“Working with VMS has provided me and my organization with a valuable sounding board for a range of topics, big and small,” says Eric Verploegen PhD ’08, former research engineer in MIT’s D-Lab and founder of J-WAFS spinout CoolVeg. Along with professors Leon Glicksman and Daniel Frey, Verploegen received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 to commercialize cold-storage chambers that use evaporative cooling to help farmers preserve fruits and vegetables in rural off-grid communities. Verploegen started CoolVeg in 2022 to increase access and adoption of open-source, evaporative cooling technologies through collaborations with businesses, research institutions, nongovernmental organizations, and government agencies. “Working as a solo founder at my nonprofit venture, it is always great to have avenues to get feedback on communications approaches, overall strategy, and operational issues that my mentors have experience with,” Verploegen says. Three years after the initial Solutions grant, one of the VMS mentors assigned to the evaporative cooling team still acts as a mentor to Verploegen today.

Another Solutions grant requirement is for teams to participate in the Spark program — a free, three-week course that provides an entry point for researchers to explore the potential value of their innovation. Spark is part of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps), which is an “immersive, entrepreneurial training program that facilitates the transformation of invention to impact.” In 2018, MIT received an award from the NSF, establishing the New England Regional Innovation Corps Node (NE I-Corps) to deliver I-Corps training to participants across New England. Trainings are open to researchers, engineers, scientists, and others who want to engage in a customer discovery process for their technology. Offered regularly throughout the year, the Spark course helps participants identify markets and explore customer needs in order to understand how their technologies can be positioned competitively in their target markets. They learn to assess barriers to adoption, as well as potential regulatory issues or other challenges to commercialization. NE-I-Corps reports that since its start, over 1,200 researchers from MIT have completed the program and have gone on to launch 175 ventures, raising over $3.3 billion in funding from grants and investors, and creating over 1,800 jobs.

Constantinos Katsimpouras, a research scientist in the Department of Chemical Engineering, went through the NE I-Corps Spark program to better understand the customer base for a technology he developed with professors Gregory Stephanopoulos and Anthony Sinskey. The group received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2021 for their microbial platform that converts food waste from the dairy industry into valuable products. “As a scientist with no prior experience in entrepreneurship, the program introduced me to important concepts and tools for conducting customer interviews and adopting a new mindset,” notes Katsimpouras. “Most importantly, it encouraged me to get out of the building and engage in interviews with potential customers and stakeholders, providing me with invaluable insights and a deeper understanding of my industry,” he adds. These interviews also helped connect the team with companies willing to provide resources to test and improve their technology — a critical step to the scale-up of any lab invention.

In the case of Professor Cem Tasan’s research group in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering, the I-Corps program led them to the J-WAFS Solutions grant, instead of the other way around. Tasan is currently working with postdoc Onur Guvenc on a J-WAFS Solutions project to manufacture formable sheet metal by consolidating steel scrap without melting, thereby reducing water use compared to traditional steel processing. Before applying for the Solutions grant, Guvenc took part in NE I-Corps. Like Katsimpouras, Guvenc benefited from the interaction with industry. “This program required me to step out of the lab and engage with potential customers, allowing me to learn about their immediate challenges and test my initial assumptions about the market,” Guvenc recalls. “My interviews with industry professionals also made me aware of the connection between water consumption and steelmaking processes, which ultimately led to the J-WAFS 2023 Solutions Grant,” says Guvenc.

After completing the Spark program, participants may be eligible to apply for the Fusion program, which provides microgrants of up to $1,500 to conduct further customer discovery. The Fusion program is self-paced, requiring teams to conduct 12 additional customer interviews and craft a final presentation summarizing their key learnings. Professor Patrick Doyle’s J-WAFS Solutions team completed the Spark and Fusion programs at MIT. Most recently, their team was accepted to join the NSF I-Corps National program with a $50,000 award. The intensive program requires teams to complete an additional 100 customer discovery interviews over seven weeks. Located in the Department of Chemical Engineering, the Doyle lab is working on a sustainable microparticle hydrogel system to rapidly remove micropollutants from water. The team’s focus has expanded to higher value purifications in amino acid and biopharmaceutical manufacturing applications. Devashish Gokhale PhD ’24 worked with Doyle on much of the underlying science.

“Our platform technology could potentially be used for selective separations in very diverse market segments, ranging from individual consumers to large industries and government bodies with varied use-cases,” Gokhale explains. He goes on to say, “The I-Corps Spark program added significant value by providing me with an effective framework to approach this problem … I was assigned a mentor who provided critical feedback, teaching me how to formulate effective questions and identify promising opportunities.” Gokhale says that by the end of Spark, the team was able to identify the best target markets for their products. He also says that the program provided valuable seminars on topics like intellectual property, which was helpful in subsequent discussions the team had with MIT’s Technology Licensing Office.

Another member of Doyle’s team, Arjav Shah, a recent PhD from MIT’s Department of Chemical Engineering and a current MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management, is spearheading the team’s commercialization plans. Shah attended Fusion last fall and hopes to lead efforts to incorporate a startup company called hydroGel.  “I admire the hypothesis-driven approach of the I-Corps program,” says Shah. “It has enabled us to identify our customers’ biggest pain points, which will hopefully lead us to finding a product-market fit.” He adds “based on our learnings from the program, we have been able to pivot to impact-driven, higher-value applications in the food processing and biopharmaceutical industries.” Postdoc Luca Mazzaferro will lead the technical team at hydroGel alongside Shah.

In a different project, Qinmin Zheng, a postdoc in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, is working with Professor Andrew Whittle and Lecturer Fábio Duarte. Zheng plans to take the Fusion course this fall to advance their J-WAFS Solutions project that aims to commercialize a novel sensor to quantify the relative abundance of major algal species and provide early detection of harmful algal blooms. After completing Spark, Zheng says he’s “excited to participate in the Fusion program, and potentially the National I-Corps program, to further explore market opportunities and minimize risks in our future product development.”

Economic and societal benefits

Commercializing technologies developed at MIT is one of the ways J-WAFS helps ensure that MIT research advances will have real-world impacts in water and food systems. Since its inception, the J-WAFS Solutions program has awarded 28 grants (including renewals), which have supported 19 projects that address a wide range of global water and food challenges. The program has distributed over $4 million to 24 professors, 11 research staff, 15 postdocs, and 30 students across MIT. Nearly half of all J-WAFS Solutions projects have resulted in spinout companies or commercialized products, including eight companies to date plus two open-source technologies.

Nona Technologies is an example of a J-WAFS spinout that is helping the world by developing new approaches to produce freshwater for drinking. Desalination — the process of removing salts from seawater — typically requires a large-scale technology called reverse osmosis. But Nona created a desalination device that can work in remote off-grid locations. By separating salt and bacteria from water using electric current through a process called ion concentration polarization (ICP), their technology also reduces overall energy consumption. The novel method was developed by Jongyoon Han, professor of electrical engineering and biological engineering, and research scientist Junghyo Yoon. Along with Bruce Crawford, a Sloan MBA alum, Han and Yoon created Nona Technologies to bring their lightweight, energy-efficient desalination technology to the market.

“My feeling early on was that once you have technology, commercialization will take care of itself,” admits Crawford. The team completed both the Spark and Fusion programs and quickly realized that much more work would be required. “Even in our first 24 interviews, we learned that the two first markets we envisioned would not be viable in the near term, and we also got our first hints at the beachhead we ultimately selected,” says Crawford. Nona Technologies has since won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, received media attention from outlets like Newsweek and Fortune, and hired a team that continues to further the technology for deployment in resource-limited areas where clean drinking water may be scarce. 

Food-borne diseases sicken millions of people worldwide each year, but J-WAFS researchers are addressing this issue by integrating molecular engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize food pathogen testing. Professors Tim Swager and Alexander Klibanov, of the Department of Chemistry, were awarded one of the first J-WAFS Solutions grants for their sensor that targets food safety pathogens. The sensor uses specialized droplets that behave like a dynamic lens, changing in the presence of target bacteria in order to detect dangerous bacterial contamination in food. In 2018, Swager launched Xibus Systems Inc. to bring the sensor to market and advance food safety for greater public health, sustainability, and economic security.

“Our involvement with the J-WAFS Solutions Program has been vital,” says Swager. “It has provided us with a bridge between the academic world and the business world and allowed us to perform more detailed work to create a usable application,” he adds. In 2022, Xibus developed a product called XiSafe, which enables the detection of contaminants like salmonella and listeria faster and with higher sensitivity than other food testing products. The innovation could save food processors billions of dollars worldwide and prevent thousands of food-borne fatalities annually.

J-WAFS Solutions companies have raised nearly $66 million in venture capital and other funding. Just this past June, J-WAFS spinout SiTration announced that it raised an $11.8 million seed round. Jeffrey Grossman, a professor in MIT’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, was another early J-WAFS Solutions grantee for his work on low-cost energy-efficient filters for desalination. The project enabled the development of nanoporous membranes and resulted in two spinout companies, Via Separations and SiTration. SiTration was co-founded by Brendan Smith PhD ’18, who was a part of the original J-WAFS team. Smith is CEO of the company and has overseen the advancement of the membrane technology, which has gone on to reduce cost and resource consumption in industrial wastewater treatment, advanced manufacturing, and resource extraction of materials such as lithium, cobalt, and nickel from recycled electric vehicle batteries. The company also recently announced that it is working with the mining company Rio Tinto to handle harmful wastewater generated at mines.

But it’s not just J-WAFS spinout companies that are producing real-world results. Products like the ECC Vial — a portable, low-cost method for E. coli detection in water — have been brought to the market and helped thousands of people. The test kit was developed by MIT D-Lab Lecturer Susan Murcott and Professor Jeffrey Ravel of the MIT History Section. The duo received a J-WAFS Solutions grant in 2018 to promote safely managed drinking water and improved public health in Nepal, where it is difficult to identify which wells are contaminated by E. coli. By the end of their grant period, the team had manufactured approximately 3,200 units, of which 2,350 were distributed — enough to help 12,000 people in Nepal. The researchers also trained local Nepalese on best manufacturing practices.

“It’s very important, in my life experience, to follow your dream and to serve others,” says Murcott. Economic success is important to the health of any venture, whether it’s a company or a product, but equally important is the social impact — a philosophy that J-WAFS research strives to uphold. “Do something because it’s worth doing and because it changes people’s lives and saves lives,” Murcott adds.

As J-WAFS prepares to celebrate its 10th anniversary this year, we look forward to continued collaboration with MIT’s many I&E programs to advance knowledge and develop solutions that will have tangible effects on the world’s water and food systems.

Learn more about the J-WAFS Solutions program and about innovation and entrepreneurship at MIT.

[monumentracker]

Discover History with Monument Tracker! 🏛️📲

Hello, History Lovers and Adventurers! 🌍

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Location Search: Find monuments based on your location or chosen destination.

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🌟 Start Your Adventure! Download Monument Tracker now and transform the way you explore the world. Click the link below to start your adventure! 🌐 #MonumentTracker #ExploreHistory #AdventureApp

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[theemperorsfeather]

Every time I hear someone talk about literally anything as being better because it's ~modern~ I think about grey-and-white interior design, and soulless bland blank garbage that's easier to mass produce, and think uncharitable thoughts at how easily so many people just go the fuck along with whatever is ~trendy~ so they won't look ~out of touch~ or whateverthefuck.

Yes I do have some strong and not entirely friendly* opinions about Modern design, too.

[cuntrytaylor]

i'm rereading some of my college writing and this part kind of rocks

[fraddit]

Just found a new tiktok guy (on youtube because I am not about actually going to tiktok) who does floorplan design stuff blended with fengshui and I'm unreasonably excited.

[dionysus-complex]

strong feelings about university campuses that are surrounded by fences with gates that are guarded by campus security and only open at certain times of day

[porciaenjoyer]

oh my godddd i am going to. post about my province . there are two top universities here and one of them is considered better than the other one for ??? unknown reasons. there are reasons why i should go to the one with the slightly lesser reputation (campus is way closer, i went there and it seems nice!) but my cousins go to the other one and i have a need to prove that i can do whatever those people do WHATever.

[aquablues-archive]

completely folded on my 2nd choice application .. im so blown that was a waste of $70

[helyeahmangocheese]

hotter take: annabeth would love being an NAAB/NCARB Licensed Architect and would fucking EAT up the construction & evaluation, programming & analysis, project management sections, and actually would give little to no shits about the european history of architecture taught in school

miss "at least with the gods there are rules" would love memorizing building codes, miss "omg is that celestial bronze" would love materials science, building construction, environmental science part of studies, and miss "build something that lasts" would be such a troublemaker about urban design and the systemic change that is required to be able to build good buildings to begin with

I know it’s controversial but I think Annabeth geeking out over the Hephaestus contraptions was adorable

[enterprise-cloud-services]

Discover how composable analytics enables rapid, real-time insights through a modular approach that connects and analyzes diverse data streams.

[rubylogan15]

Discover how composable analytics enables rapid, real-time insights through a modular approach that connects and analyzes diverse data streams.

[jcmarchi]

Highest-Resolution Single-Photon Superconducting Camera - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/highest-resolution-single-photon-superconducting-camera-technology-org/

Highest-Resolution Single-Photon Superconducting Camera - Technology Org

Having more pixels in a superconducting camera could advance everything from biomedical imaging to astronomical observations.

Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and their colleagues have built a superconducting camera containing 400,000 pixels — 400 times more than any other device of its type.

With planned improvements, NIST’s new 400,000 single-wire superconducting camera, the highest resolution camera of its type, will have the capability to capture astronomical images under extremely low-light-level conditions. Credit: Image incorporates elements from Pixabay and S. Kelley/NIST.

Superconducting cameras allow scientists to capture very weak light signals, whether from distant objects in space or parts of the human brain. Having more pixels could open up many new applications in science and biomedical research.

The NIST camera is made up of grids of ultrathin electrical wires, cooled to near absolute zero, in which current moves with no resistance until a wire is struck by a photon. In these superconducting-nanowire cameras, the energy imparted by even a single photon can be detected because it shuts down the superconductivity at a particular location (pixel) on the grid. Combining all the locations and intensities of all the photons makes up an image.

The first superconducting cameras capable of detecting single photons were developed more than 20 years ago. Since then, the devices have contained no more than a few thousand pixels — too limited for most applications.

Creating a superconducting camera with a much greater number of pixels has posed a serious challenge because it would become all but impossible to connect every single chilled pixel among many thousands to its own readout wire. The challenge stems from the fact that each of the camera’s superconducting components must be cooled to ultralow temperatures to function properly, and individually connecting every pixel among hundreds of thousands to the cooling system would be virtually impossible.

NIST researchers Adam McCaughan and Bakhrom Oripov and their collaborators at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, and the University of Colorado Boulder overcame that obstacle by combining the signals from many pixels onto just a few room-temperature readout wires.

A general property of any superconducting wire is that it allows current to flow freely up to a certain maximum “critical” current. To take advantage of that behavior, the researchers applied a current just below the maximum to the sensors.

Under that condition, if even a single photon strikes a pixel, it destroys the superconductivity. The current is no longer able to flow without resistance through the nanowire and is instead shunted to a small resistive heating element connected to each pixel. The shunted current creates an electrical signal that can rapidly be detected.

Borrowing from existing technology, the NIST team constructed the camera to have intersecting arrays of superconducting nanowires that form multiple rows and columns, like those in a tic-tac-toe game. Each pixel — a tiny region centered on the point where individual vertical and horizontal nanowires cross — is uniquely defined by the row and column in which it lies.

That arrangement enabled the team to measure the signals coming from an entire row or column of pixels at a time rather than recording data from each individual pixel, drastically reducing the number of readout wires. To do so, the researchers placed a superconducting readout wire parallel to but not touching the rows of pixels, and another wire parallel to but not touching the columns.

Consider just the superconducting readout wire parallel to the rows. When a photon strikes a pixel, the current shunted into the resistive heating element warms a small part of the readout wire, creating a tiny hotspot. The hotspot, in turn, generates two voltage pulses traveling in opposite directions along the readout wire, which are recorded by detectors at either end.

The difference in time it takes for the pulses to arrive at the end detectors reveals the column in which the pixel resides. A second superconducting readout wire that lies parallel to the columns serves a similar function.

The detectors can discern differences in arrival time of signals as short as 50 trillionths of a second. They can also count up to 100,000 photons a second striking the grid.

Once the team adopted the new readout architecture, Oripov made rapid progress in increasing the number of pixels. Over a matter of weeks, the number jumped from 20,000 to 400,000 pixels. The readout technology can easily be scaled up for even larger cameras, said McCaughan, and a superconducting single-photon camera with tens or hundreds of millions of pixels could soon be available.

Over the next year, the team plans to improve the sensitivity of the prototype camera so that it can capture virtually every incoming photon. That will enable the camera to tackle such low-light endeavors as imaging faint galaxies or planets that lie beyond the solar system, measuring light in photon-based quantum computers, and contributing to biomedical studies that use near-infrared light to peer into human tissue.

The researchers reported their work in the Oct. 26 edition of Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06550-2).

Paper: B.G. Oripov, D.S. Rampini, B. Korzh, J. Allmaras, M.D. Shaw, S.W. Nam and A.N. McCaughan. A superconducting-nanowire single-photon camera with 400,000 pixels. Nature. Oct. 26, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06550-2

Source: NIST

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