Children from local schools were invited to Freescale’s East Kilbride technology centre to build their own rocket cars as part of Freescale’s support of science technology engineering and mathematics (STEM) activities.
World land speed record supremo Richard Noble was there to help inspire the children.
“In the 1960s and 1970s children were inspired by the Apollo projects heading off to the moon but since then there has not been a similar level of adventure to inspire,” said Freescale. “Richard made a presentation to the children showing videos featuring land speed record challenges which were truly inspirational, and he also described the challenge of encouraging young people to undertake careers in engineering.”
The event was one of Freescale’s ‘Technical Enrichment Matrix’ activities, which are “intended to provide a platform for sharing the technical achievements within Freescale facilities around the world,” said the firm. It was run with participation from Germany and the Czech Republic, and included tours of the test lab.
A rocket car competition on the day was won by the St Andrews and St Brides school, based in East Kilbride.
Richard Noble drove Thrust 2 to the 1983 world land speed record of 633.468mph (1,019km/h). He went on to be team director for Andy Green’s 1997 763.035mph (1,221km/h, mach1.02) Thrust SSC record.
A supercapacitor with high stretchability has been developed by wrapping two layers of sheets built of aligned carbon nanotubes, which serve as two electrodes, on an elastic fiber. The use of these sheets offers high flexibility, tensile strength, electrical conductivity, and mechanical and thermal stability. The supercapacitor shows and maintains a high specific capacitance after stretching for many cycles.For electronic devices to be incorporated into textiles or plastic films, their components must be stretchable. This is true for LEDS, solar cells, transistors, circuits, and batteries—as well as for the supercapacitors often used for static random access memory (SRAM). SRAM is often used as a cache in processors or for local storage on chips, as well as in devices that must maintain their data over several years with no source of power.Previous stretchable electronic components have generally been produced in a conventional planar format, which has been an obstacle to their further development for use in small, lightweight, wearable electronics. Initial attempts to produce supercapacitors in the form of wires or fibers produced flexible—but not stretchable—components. However, stretchability is a required feature for a number of applications. For example, electronic textiles would easily tear if they were not stretchable.A team led by Huisheng Peng at Fudan University has now developed a new family of highly stretchable, fiber-shaped, high-performance supercapacitors. The devices are made by a winding process with an elastic fiber at the core. The fiber is coated with an electrolyte gel and a thin layer of carbon nanotubes is wound around it like a sheet of paper. This is followed by a second layer of electrolyte gel, another layer of carbon nanotube wrap, and a final layer of electrolyte gel.The delicate “sheets” of carbon nanotubes are produced by chemical vapor deposition and a spinning process. In the sheets this method produces, the tiny tubes are aligned in parallel. These types of layers display a remarkable combination of properties: They are highly flexible, tear-resistant, conductive, and thermally and mechanically stable. In the wound fibers, the two layers of carbon nanotubes act as electrodes. The electrolyte gel separates the electrodes from each other while stabilizing the nanotubes during stretching so that their alignment is maintained. This results in supercapacitor fibers with a high capacity that is maintained after many stretching cycles.
