Advanced Invention

The team at Terrafugia is about to fulfill the fantasy of every driver pilot: a consumer vehicle that can take to the highways and the skies. All they have to do is finish the first one

The Transition is not a flying car. The vehicle, set to go on sale next year, will cruise smoothly on the road and through the sky. It will have four wheels, Formula One–style suspension, and a pair of 10-foot-wide wings that fold up when it switches from air to asphalt. And when the engineers at Terrafugia in Woburn, Massachusetts, let me sit inside their just-finished proof-of-concept vehicle and grab the steering wheel, it’s easy to imagine piloting this thing up and out of traffic, into the open skies.

This illustration by Danielle Zawoy for the University of Florida depicts what a wingless electromagnetic air vehicle might look like as it flies in the atmosphere above Mars.

Subrata Roy, an aerospace engineer from the University of Florida, recently submitted a patent application for an aircraft that just happens to come in the shape of a flying saucer. Dubbed a “winged electromagnetic air vehicle,” or WEAV, the battery-powered prototype is designed at less than 6 in. across. Even so, Roy insists that the mini sci-fi mobile could be built full-scale for missions like atmospheric surveillance—and that’s got NASA and the Air Force interested.

This Magni Gyro M-22 Voyager looks like a helicopter, but it’s not. This gyroplane has a rotor up top, but there’s very little power going to that spinning blade. When this baby takes off, it’s pushed along by its single propeller behind the pilot, and as the takeoff roll gets faster, the rotor starts spinning on its own. It acts like a wing, giving the aircraft such stability that it’s impossible to stall it. It can’t hover, but if you lose an engine, it gently floats back to earth.

Not just a gyroplane concept, the $98,000 M-22 is the latest craft from Magni, offering seating for two and plenty of room for their luggage. While it’s easy to fly, the company won’t sell you one unless you agree to its training program, a necessity with a craft that’ll be taking you 13,000 feet into the wild blue at a speed of 115 mph. Even though it’s not perfectly safe, it still looks a whole lot safer than some of the crazy personal helicopters we’ve shown you. Click Continue for video of the Magni Gyro M-22 in action.

Imagine a plane that has wings made out of glass. Thanks to a major breakthrough in understanding the nature of glass by scientists at the University of Bristol, this has just become a possibility.

[ Colloidal particles, that mimic atoms, form a gel with the structure of glass. (Credit: Paddy Royall, University of Bristol, UK) ]

Despite its solid appearance, glass is actually a ‘jammed’ state of matter that moves very slowly. Like cars in a traffic jam, atoms in a glass can’t reach their destination because the route is blocked by their neighbours, so it never quite becomes a ‘proper’ solid.

For more than 50 years most scientists have tried to understand just what glass is. Work so far has concentrated on trying to understand the traffic jam, but now Dr Paddy Royall from the University of Bristol, with colleagues in Canberra and Tokyo, has shown that the problem really lies with the destination, not with the traffic jam.

Publishing June 22, 2008, in Nature Materials, the team has revealed that glass ‘fails’ to be a solid due to the special atomic structures that form in a glass when it cools (ie, when the atoms arrive at their destination).

Royall explained: “Some materials crystallize as they cool, arranging their atoms into a highly regular pattern called a lattice. But although glass ‘wants’ to be a crystal, as it cools the atoms become jammed in a nearly random arrangement, preventing it from forming a regular lattice.

“Back in the 1950s, Sir Charles Frank in the Physics Department at Bristol University suggested that the arrangement of the ‘jam’ should form what is known as an icosahedron, but at the time he was unable to provide experimental proof. We set out to see if he was right.”

The problem is you can’t watch what happens to atoms as they cool because they are just too small. So using special particles called colloids that mimic atoms, but are just large enough to be visible using state-of-the-art microscopy, Royall cooled some down and watched what happened.

What he found was that the gel these particles formed also ‘wants’ to be a crystal, but it fails to become one due to the formation of icosahedra-like structures — exactly as Frank had predicted 50 years ago. It is the formation of these structures that underlie jammed materials and explains why a glass is a glass and not a liquid — or a solid.

Knowing the structure formed by atoms as a glass cools represents a major breakthrough in our understanding of meta-stable materials and will allow further development of new materials such as metallic glasses.

Metals normally crystallize when they cool, unfortunately stress builds up along the boundaries between crystals, which leads to metal failure. For example, the world’s first jetliner, the British built De Havilland Comet, fell out of the sky due to metal failure. If a metal could be made to cool with the same internal structure as a glass and without crystal grain boundaries, it would be less likely to fail.

Metallic glasses could be suitable for a whole range of products that need to be flexible such as aircraft wings, golf clubs and engine parts.

Via Science Daily