Bench Talk

Discover how advanced materials like ceramics, refractory metals, and graphene protect space robots from extreme heat, radiation, and terrain.

Each IndyCar race has its unique challenges, but harsh environment problems are present throughout the season. This is a look at some of the harsh environmental conditions teams must overcome to have a safe and successful race.

High sulfur environments play havoc with everything from IT industry server farms and data/storage centers and telecommunication base stations to industrial control equipment and rubber, paper, and oil manufacturing plants. In standard film resistors, their internal silver (Ag) or silver palladium (AgPd) terminal is only protected by the epoxy passivation layer making the device very susceptible to sulfur-based gases. Realizing how sulfur gases can affect the reliability of its film resistors, Bourns developed a specialized Palladium (Pd) layer that removes the chance for corrosion and the formation of silver sulfide.

The tragedy that befell Southwest Flight 1380 in April 2018 is thankfully a rare event in modern air travel. Digital twining is a promising new technological concept that could soon help the transportation industry hone safety measures.

Have you ever had the urge to boil your iPhone SE in water, torch your iPhone 6 at a temperature of 6,000° F, or bake your iPhone 5S inside of a cake at 350° F? In case you needed me to tell you, don’t do it.

For a good while now we’ve thought of our phones as fairly drop proof (how many times have you dropped yours?), relying on the solder joints to keep the semiconductor components tightly mounted to their circuit cards. Before flash memory became widely available and cheap, (enabling smartphones enough storage space for personal data, music videos and pictures) cell phone manufacturers like Nokia wrestled with the possibility of using micro-miniature disk drives. Too fragile for smartphones or portable media players, smartphone makers concluded, too many moving parts, a strong possibility for damage if the phone were dropped, and an almost universal assumption that, many times during its life time, the phone would be dropped.