Category Physics

Combustion engines, propellers, and hydraulic pumps are examples of fluidic devices—instruments that utilize fluids to perform certain functions, such as generating power or transporting water.

Because fluidic devices are so complex, they are typically developed by experienced engineers who manually design, prototype, and test each apparatus through an iterative process that is expensive, time-consuming, and labor-intensive. But with a new system, users only need to specify the locations and speeds at which fluid enters and exits the device. The computational pipeline then automatically generates an optimal design that achieves those objectives.

The system could make it faster and cheaper to design fluidic devices for all sorts of applications, such as microfluidic labs-on-a-c...

One key objective of electronics engineering research is to develop computing devices that are both highly performing and energy-efficient, meaning that they can compute information quickly while consuming little power...

Different light spectra serve different needs for agrivoltaics. People are increasingly trying to grow both food and clean energy on the same land to help meet the challenges of climate change, drought and a growing global population that just topped 8 billion. This effort includes agrivoltaics, in which crops are grown under the shade of solar panels, ideally with less water.

Now scientists from the University of California, Davis, are investigating how to better harvest ...

Contactless manipulation method could be used in industries such as robotics and manufacturing,where devices wouldn’t need a built-in power source in order to move.

University of Minnesota Twin Cities researchers have discovered a new method to move objects using ultrasound waves. The study is published in Nature Communications, a peer-reviewed, open-access scientific journal.

While it’s bee...