The students have designed a headset that shows promise of reducing the extremely loud, repetitive, industrial-like noises that accompany magnetic resonance image examinations. The noises, which range from beeping to whirring to grinding and can often be as loud as a jet engine, stem from the workings of the powerful magnets at the heart of the machines’ ability to produce sharply defined internal images of the body or body parts.

The headset would not only make the experience less off-putting, it might also reduce the number of needed exams, freeing up the machine for access by more patients, said Stephen Forguson, a senior majoring in electrical engineering.

“The sound often makes patients move or wriggle a bit,” he said. “Unfortunately, that can blur the image, which means the operators have to redo the exam.”

Forguson and Chad Dailey, Paul Norris and Christopher Ruesga, all also engineering seniors, designed the headset as part of the College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Process Design Program. The program pairs student teams with corporate or government sponsors for yearlong design projects of products or processes intended to be useful to the sponsor. The sponsor of the headset project was Invivo Corporation, a Gainesville manufacturer of magnetic coils, monitors and other MRI accessories.

With battery-operated headphones that cancel internal airplane noise or other loud noises already commercially available, muffling the noise a patient hears when inserted into the cylinder-like MRI machines might seem a small challenge.

But the problem is that no electronics are permitted within the MRI chamber because the electronics can distort or disrupt the images scanned by the machines’ magnets. So the difficulty for the UF students was figuring out how to reduce noise without the use of any wires, switches or other electronics with the patient in the chamber.

“Passive” systems that use foam or other sound-deadening materials are insufficient to combat the noise. So the team attempted to solve the problem using existing “air phones,” or headphones attached to small tubes, connected via the tubes to specially crafted electronics and software located outside the MRI machine.

The air phones, which are similar to the headphones once distributed on commercial airplanes, pipe the sound via two tubes to tiny microphones connected to an amplifier and a signal processor several feet away.

That processor taps an algorithm, or set of computer instructions, to produce a sound signal that is the opposite of the signal just received. That opposite signal then gets piped back through a third tube to each of the patient’s ears.

Because the MRI sounds are repetitive and the piped-in sounds are timed to occur on top of the repetitions, the result is that the patient hears the same sound as he or she would have without any intervention — but at a lower volume.

Trials of the system using a loud beeping sound similar to some MRI noises showed it could reduce the noise by as much as 15 decibels. Ambient noise is about 60 decibels, with jet engines and other extremely loud noises reaching 120 decibels. The students were only able to reduce actual MRI sounds by a smaller level, but they said further tweaks of the system and algorithm are likely to improve that result.

The team’s results are “significant and make a difference,” said Gijs Bosman, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and the team’s faculty adviser. “Based on experiments and further testing of the prototype, the team has come up with several recommendations for further improvements.”

Sam Coons, a project manager with Invivo who worked with the UF team, said reducing the MRI noises is also challenging in part because as clinicians develop new scans, new noises emerge. But he said that improving the algorithm at the heart of the headset project should make it more effective against the variety of noises.

The noise-muffling technology is “a big piece” of Invivo’s entertainment system, he said. “We hopefully at some point will incorporate this into all of our systems because noise is such a problem,” he said. “If we can achieve our goals, we will ship this to everyone.”

A group of engineering students at the University of Florida has come up with a method for using an airbrush to make microelectrodes — tiny conductors used in an increasing range of consumer, research and medical products. The technique is simpler than the standard one, at least for small projects that require production of only a few electrodes.

“The idea was to try to find something cheap and quick, that we could do in our own lab without much expense,” said student Corey Walker.

Walker was one of four UF engineering students who worked on the project. Now a doctoral student in biomedical engineering at the University of California, Irvine, he is the lead author of a paper appearing this month in the online edition of the journal Electroanalysis.

Microelectrodes are highly sensitive, fingernail-sized devices used, for example, in off-the-shelf glucose monitors for diabetics. They are also vital to “lab on a chip” devices under development to identify substances in air, blood or other samples.

The industry standard for manufacturing microelectrodes is screen printing, a technique that, oddly, is also borrowed from the visual arts. But it requires a screen printer, and the students, who were trying to craft a hydrogen sensor, didn’t have one.

So a student who used airbrushes to build model airplanes suggested they try that tool. Trials and tests perfected the approach, with the students eventually using fully airbrushed electrodes to craft a working sensor. The technique works best for small projects because it requires each electrode to be made individually or in small batches.

“A screen-printing machine useful for fabricating microelectrodes might cost $10,000, whereas you can buy an airbrush for less than $200,” said Hugh Fan, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering who oversaw the project. “So this is a useful technique for small, custom projects.”

The breakthrough was presented by University of Florida and Texas Instruments engineers today at the International Solid State Circuits Conference in San Francisco.

Ken O, a UF professor of electrical and computer engineering and the lead researcher on the project, said his team had demonstrated a 410-gigahertz circuit using complementary metal oxide silicon, or CMOS, technology — the technology used to make many of the components in personal computers, cell phones and handheld electronic devices.

Measured in a UF laboratory using a circuit equipped with an on-circuit antenna the size of a pen tip, 410 gigahertz eclipses the previous record for CMOS circuits set in February 2006 by 200 gigahertz. More important, it is about 60 gigahertz higher than the previous record set using alternative but more expensive indium phosphide technology. Texas Instruments’ advanced manufacturing technology, known as the 45-nanometer CMOS process, serves as the foundation for the new circuit.

“This is probably the first time in 30 years that a silicon-based circuit has been shown to have a higher operating frequency than one based on indium phosphide and similar compounds,” O said. “This is exciting because if you can build these circuits, then you can build inexpensive detection and imaging systems for a range of applications. The result could reduce the cost for these systems by a factor of 100 or more.”

Ultra-high-frequency circuits have been created in the past, but only with exotic materials that are costly to manufacture. CMOS, by contrast, is the standard process used to make the majority of the circuits in the integrated circuit industry. That opens the door to widespread manufacture and distribution of the high-frequency circuits.

“There is a very rich applications space that is available, but nobody has been able to get there in the high-volume sense,” O said. “By leveraging Texas Instruments’ advanced process technology for manufacturing this circuit, the University of Florida and Texas Instruments demonstrate that through CMOS there is real possibility we will be able to do it in the next five years.”

These applications include, for example, always-on environmental monitoring equipment acutely sensitive to pollution, noxious gases or bioterrorism agents. In imaging, high-frequency circuits make possible techniques that can penetrate clothing to ”see” hidden weapons or plastic explosives. The circuit also can be used in medical equipment designed to facilitate early detection of skin and other cancers, and in industrial systems that monitor the coatings on pills to ensure they have the proper thickness and uniformity.

The other authors of the paper that is the source of Wednesday’s announcement are Eun-Young Seok, Changhua Cao, Dongha Shim, Daniel Arenas, and David Tanner, all of the University of Florida, and Chih-Ming Hung of Texas Instruments.

“University research is critical for moving the technology industry forward, and Texas Instruments is proud to be part of University of Florida’s ground-breaking work,” said Bill Krenik, chief technology officer of TI’s wireless terminals business unit. “By leveraging the high performance and low-power consumption that CMOS process technology delivers, the circuit demonstrates very compelling results that hold great potential for future safety, medical and environmental applications.”

The circuit was demonstrated on Texas Instruments’ low-power 45-nanometer process technology. The process includes a number of techniques to deliver cost-effective multimillion transistor, system-on-circuit processors with the performance and lower power consumption required for processing advanced applications. While designed to extend battery life in portable products, the technology also offers the performance to handle advanced multimedia functionality in a tightly integrated design.

Rizwan Bashirullah, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has designed a tiny circuit that contains all the electronics necessary to recharge so-called “miniaturized medical systems” via a wireless charger. The circuit, which is slightly smaller than a penny, is another step toward the development of miniature cousins of traditional pacemakers expected to become widely available in coming decades.

“Anything that is implanted chronically that requires battery charging has to be done wirelessly, so that’s the focus of this work,” Bashirullah said.

A paper about the circuit appeared recently in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Transactions on Circuits and Systems II.

Bashirullah said cochlear implants, placed in the inner ear to improve patients’ hearing, are at the crest of a wave of coming miniaturized medical implants. Researchers are at work on artificial retinas, neuromuscular simulators, even tiny injectors that would administer drugs in response to bodily conditions. Further into the future, there is discussion of implantable machines that would scour fat deposits from veins or arteries.

Pacemakers, among the oldest implanted medical electronics, have a long-life battery that enables them to function for years at a time within the body. But the batteries in newer, more miniature devices may require recharging.

Bashirullah’s chip contains a wireless transceiver and several other elements needed to receive energy transmitted from a charging wand. The research was funded in part with a $1.6 million grant from the National Institutes of Health awarded to UF’s department of electrical and computer engineering, in collaboration with the department of pediatric neurology.

Other collaborators on the grant include engineering researchers John Harris, Jose Principe, Toshi Nishida and neuroscience researcher Dr. Justin Sanchez.

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Good news about that annoying jumble of electronic device charger power cords — it may soon be history.

University of Florida engineering researchers have built and successfully tested a pad that can charge cell phones, PDAs, laptops and other electronic devices via wireless technology. Rather than plug in the electronics to different cords and outlets, users simply place them anywhere atop the flat, thin pad, where they begin charging automatically.

The researchers are not the first to design a wireless charging device — in fact, at least four small companies, including one based around the UF research — are competing to bring a charger to market. Some products are expected to reach store shelves as soon as next year.

But the UF team says its device is unusually efficient, transmitting an average of about 70 percent of the power flowing from the outlet to the devices’ batteries. The team has filed paperwork for seven patents on the technology in the past three months.

“Our advantage is that thanks to a new transmitter design, we can achieve high power charging with high efficiency,” said Jenshan Lin, a UF professor of electrical engineering.

With today’s electronic devices requiring separate cords, consumers are all too familiar with confronting a tangled mess of wires, not to mention the inconvenience that comes with forgetting one cord or another while traveling. That’s why researchers and companies are working so hard to design and market a universal charging device that requires only one plug — for its own power. It’s anticipated that companies could sell as many as 1.9 billion chargers each year, according to one company official.

But the technical challenges are significant.

Electrical engineers have to figure out how to transmit power uniformly to a broad range of devices that operate at different power levels. They also have to design receivers that are cheap, small and uniform enough to be added on — and eventually fit into — everything from the tiniest cell phone to the most powerful laptop.

The UF researchers began working on the problem in 2006, when Ryan Tseng, a former electrical and computer engineering undergraduate, made it a senior design project and his honors thesis research. Lin was Tseng’s adviser on his research.

Tseng, now an MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management, later founded a company, Florida-based WiPower Inc., to sell a charge pad device. WiPower has provided funds to sponsor the continued UF research, with the Florida High Tech Corridor contributing matching funds.

Lin said his research team, led by UF doctoral student Zhen Ning Low, have made rapid progress on the charge pad, broadening its charging ability from cell phones to laptops while also making it considerably more efficient.

Key steps have included a redesign of the internal electronic architecture of the transmitter, as well as an adaptive power control mechanism that varies charging power based on the type of device and distance from the pad, Lin said.

The researchers demonstrated the device using a digital picture frame that displays photos stored in a memory stick. A video showed how the frame — which usually has to be plugged in to turn on — began displaying pictures and videos once it was moved to within an inch or so above the pad. The researchers also demonstrated the pad charging a standard cell phone and a receiver-equipped light bulb that turned on when placed near the pad

Lin said the UF charger differs from others because it transmits nearly as much power as its standard wired counterparts. The most efficient wired transmitter sends about 90 percent of the power tapped from the wall, while the UF wireless transmitter can average 70 percent. Lin said he thinks he will be able to boost that average, even eclipsing the wired level. The more efficient the devices, the less consumers will pay for electricity.

Hurdles include making the pads — and the needed receivers — hardier and useful in a bigger variety of devices. The chargers and receivers must be standardized, a difficult problem because it will require cooperation among scores of electronic-device manufacturers. To sell their chargers, companies will have to persuade manufacturers to include receivers.

“The biggest problem is standardization,” Tseng said. “If you can standardize, the chicken-and-egg issues should be minimized. Look at Bluetooth and WiFi.”

Those challenges aside, Lin said he envisions a day when charge pads could be included in, for example, desk furniture or seat back tray tables in airliners. “Hopefully in the future we can create something like WiFi,” he said, “except it becomes wireless power.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Soil-moisture sensors hooked to sprinkler systems could put a huge dent in homeowners’ utility bills—and help conserve much-needed water, a new University of Florida study says.

Researcher Michael Dukes found that for three of four rain sensors tested, water savings ranged from 69 percent to 92 percent, compared to grass watered without the help of sensors.

“The savings turnaround could be pretty rapid,” said Dukes, an associate professor in the agricultural and biological engineering department, part of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

That’s partly because in recent years, soil-moisture sensors have become less expensive, smaller and more accurate, he said.

“The cost is changing rapidly. A few years back, a $400 list price and about $100 to install was common, but now we’re seeing products in the $100 to $200 range,” he said. A typical Florida yard would require one sensor, though larger landscapes would likely need more.
To get the biggest savings, the irrigation system and the sensors must be in good repair, well designed and properly installed, Dukes said.

The sensor, buried ideally in the driest part of the lawn, overrides the automatic irrigation system if the lawn doesn’t need water.

In the study, accepted for publication in the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, IFAS researchers tested four types of rain sensors. The more recent study dovetails with an
earlier one by the same researchers—published in the journal’s September-October issue—that showed homeowners could reduce water consumption by a third simply by setting their lawn-watering systems to more closely match plant needs, according to the season. (See related release.)

In the most recent study, each sensor was tested at irrigation frequencies of one, two or seven days a week. The one- and two-day watering frequencies most closely resemble typical watering restrictions in Florida.

Data was collected from July 20 to Dec. 14 of 2004 and March 25 to Aug. 31 in 2005.

On average, studies have shown that U.S. homeowners use about 50 percent more water outdoors than indoors. And water officials say lawn irrigation accounts for nearly half the potable water used in South Florida.

Taking the human component out of the watering process certainly seems to help reduce overwatering, said Kathy Scott, section manager for conservation projects with the Southwest Florida Water Management District, which sets water policy for some 4.5 million residents.

But Scott said her agency remains cautious and not quite ready to urge homeowners to run out and buy a soil-moisture sensor just yet. That may happen, though, after more study of homeowners’ watering habits.

“We are going to end up with a whole list of best management practices, so that we’ll be able to tell people exactly how to use the sensors,” she said. “We know they save water, we know that. But what we don’t know is what happens when the dial is in the homeowner’s hands.”

Many residents don’t realize how little irrigation most lawns need, she said. Often, those trying to start a new lawn take advantage of less-restrictive watering rules—unwittingly giving their new lawn a poor start.

“If you water too much, the roots don’t have any incentive to grow deep, so you end up with a lawn that’s weak, susceptible to pests, disease and has shallow roots,” Scott said.

It just seems to be human nature to overdo it, she said.

“My sense, from talking to people about this, is that they think if a little water’s good, a lot is better.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — With drought persisting across the Southeast, homeowners can slash water consumption by simply readjusting irrigation systems – with no harm to lawns or landscaping plants, a new University of Florida study finds.

UF agricultural and biological engineering researchers spent more than two years monitoring 27 homes in Florida whose automatic irrigation systems had been set to different schedules. Their conclusion: Homeowners can cut water consumption by a third simply by readjusting the system to more closely coincide with soil moisture levels — a step made increasingly easy by more readily available moisture sensors and other technology.

“We set out to ask, if homeowners adjusted their systems, would they see a savings compared to homeowners who made no changes?” said Michael Dukes, an associate professor of agricultural and biological engineering. “The answer was ‘yes.’”

The study appears in the September-October issue of the Journal of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering.

With Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama in the grips of a severe drought and Florida continuing to suffer from drought as well, the region’s dwindling water supply has become a prominent and controversial topic in recent months.

Many advocates argue that stepped-up conservation would solve or go a long way toward addressing what appears to be a chronic shortage. Residential irrigation is an obvious target: Nationwide, according to Dukes, at least 50 percent of household water gets dumped on lawns and plants. In the homes he studied, irrigation accounted for 64 percent of total water use, a common percentage, he said.

Dukes said the new study appears to be the first to quantify how adjusting residential irrigation systems could reduce water use in homes in the Southeast.

Researchers installed meters on 27 homes with automatic sprinkler-based irrigation systems in three Central Florida counties starting in January 2003. Although automatic irrigation systems are uncommon in older homes, most homes built today come equipped with the systems, Dukes said.

On nine homes, graduate student Melissa Haley reset the irrigation controllers monthly to account for historical rainfall and rates of evapotranspiration. Evapotransipiration is the process by which plants transpire water and soils shed it via evaporation. The goal of the resets: to apply only as much water as the lawn and plants needed.

With nine more homes, the researchers replaced sprinklers with precise micro- or drip- irrigation systems on ornamental plants in a substantial portion of the landscape. They left the last nine homes untouched.

Two and one-half years later, the results were clear. Homeowners whose controls were reset monthly slashed water use 30 percent, saving an average of 13,000 gallons per month — enough to fill up approximately six swimming pools each year — compared with homeowners with unaltered systems. Homeowners whose controls were reset, and whose sprinkler irrigation systems were replaced with drip irrigation, used half the water.

Equally important, there were no problems with brown lawns or dying plants on either of the more water-saving yards. “We did monthly to bi-monthly quality ratings of the turf grass, and there weren’t any differences on any of the homes,” Dukes said.

Homeowners with both automatic systems and traditional sprinklers can take advantage of the findings, Dukes said.

He said that most homeowners seemed to vary the amount of water they apply with only a few adjustments during the year. While that may appear to make sense, an immediate change in the weather can easily be missed.

Homeowners instead can copy the approach used in the study, setting up controllers based on guidelines developed from historical rainfall and plant water use rates. For help, Florida residents can consult the Florida Automated Weather Network site as the “Urban Irrigation Scheduler” (http://fawn.ifas.ufl.edu/tools/urban_irrigation/).

But another approach is to purchase soil moisture sensor and evapotranspiration controllers. Related research by Dukes shows that the moisture sensor controllers can reduce watering by as much as 69 to 92 percent, he said. (See related release.)

The St. John’s River Water Management District funded the research at a cost of $220,000. John Fitzgerald, project manager, said “reducing the amount of water…also tends to help condition your landscape for periods of lower rainfall. In other words, training your landscape…helps prepare it for Florida’s inevitable drought conditions.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Designing better solar cells might seem a question of electronics or chemistry, but for one University of Florida engineer, it starts with bugs.

Peng Jiang, an assistant professor of chemical engineering, is drawing inspiration from the eyes of moths and the wings of cicadas to create unusual new anti-reflective and water-repellant coatings — coatings that appear to have potential to make solar cells both more efficient and self-cleaning. Windows in cars and homes, computer screens and other consumer products also could improve thanks to the super-transparent coatings.

“Nature is an amazing innovator,” Jiang said. “What I’m interested in doing is mimicking the structure of some remarkable biological systems for real-world use.”

Jiang’s research, most recently reported in a September paper in the journal Applied Physics Letters, focuses on a new technique to manufacture a coating whose microscopic structure closely resembles that of moth eyes.

Most moth eyes are made up of adjacent hexagonal sectors. Each sector is filled with thousands of orderly rows of miniscule bumps, or nipple-like protrusions. Though formed so perfectly they appear almost manufactured, each protrusion measures less than 300 nanometers, or 300 billionths of a meter — a size that renders them invisible to all but the most powerful electron microscopes.

When moths encounter light, these orderly arrays of protrusions interfere with its transmission and reflection, rendering the light all but invisible. Biologists believe this trait evolved in moths, which are often nocturnal, because it prevents their eyes from reflecting moon or starlight, which would make them easier targets for predators.

Jiang said engineers have sought to replicate the eyes’ microscopic structure using a printing technique called lithography, but it is expensive and ill-suited to creating the extremely tiny rows of protrusions that make the moth eyes so effective. To get around this problem, Jiang developed a non-lithographic technique, called spin coating. Unlike lithography, which attempts to carve out the nipple-like pattern on the target surface, spin coating seeks to build the pattern up from scratch on the target.

Jiang places a liquid suspension of nanoparticles on a circular silicon wafer, such as that used in photovoltaic cells. A motor spins the wafer, with centrifugal force distributing the liquid. When it dries, it leaves behind the ordered particles in place.

The Applied Physics Letters paper reports that Jiang successfully used this comparatively low-tech technique to create a moth eye-like anti-reflective coating on glass and plastic substrates. But the researcher said he has since gone further, applying the same technique to silicon wafer surfaces to add a unique property of cicada wings.

Cicada wings are amazingly effective at rapidly shedding water and dirt, apparently because the insects often need to fly in humid environments, Jiang said. At the particle level, the wings have a structure very similar to that of the moth eyes — except that rather than deflecting light, tiny pockets of air around each nipple-like protrusion buoy water droplets.

Jiang said he and his two doctoral students, Chih-Hung Sun and Nicholas Linn, as well as a collaborator, Professor Bin Jiang at Portland State University in Oregon, have now replicated this structure using the spin coating process, also on a silicon wafer.

He demonstrated the achievement in his laboratory, placing a drop of water on a postage stamp-sized wafer coated with the cicada wing-like coating. As if electrified, the drop danced across the surface of the wafer until it reached the edge.

His research could have a number of applications, Jiang said.

The anti-reflective coating may improve the performance of solar cells because it would increase the amount of light the cells receive, he said. Current production coatings reflect more than 10 percent of the light at certain wavelengths, whereas Jiang says his coating reflects less than 2 percent at those wavelengths. The water-repelling element would be useful for keeping the cells clean – a necessity because dirt or dust easily dulls their performance. Rain or simply hosing the coated cells down would clean them adequately, he said.

Jiang added the coatings could also improve the performance of ordinary windows on cars or homes, increasing visibility and reducing the need for cleaning. That said, numerous challenges remain, including learning how to “scale up” the spin coating process so that it could be used for industrial production, he said.

Yadong Yin, an assistant chemistry professor at the University of California, Riverside, said Jiang’s research is important in part because it suggests that there is a low-cost alternative to current anti-reflection production techniques. “Importantly,” he said, “the low cost in this case did not lead to low performance.”

Research supported by the University of Florida helped prompt the treated wood industry to abandon a once common but potentially harmful wood preservative from lumber in residential construction. New statistics show that since this change in 2004, imports of arsenic, a toxic metal used in the wood-treating chemical chromated copper arsenate, have plunged.

Now, the challenge is to figure out what to do with millions of board feet of CCA lumber still in service nationwide. Some structures pose a potential hazard now, while others will face demolition as they age, with all CCA-treated wood waste requiring special care, said John Schert, director of the Bill Hinkley Center for Solid and Hazardous Waste Management at the UF College of Engineering.

“Over 35,000 metric tons of arsenic has been imported into Florida from places like China, Chile and Mexico to be used as an ingredient in pressure treating CCA-treated wood since it first became available in the 1970s,” Schert said. “Our focus now is figuring out how to deal with all that wood as it comes out of service in the form of old decks, docks, fences and homes.”

Statistics appearing next year in a book by a University of British Columbia scholar show U.S. imports of arsenic used in treated lumber have dropped from 19,200 metric tons in 2003 to 4,450 in 2004 and 5,760 in 2005. The statistics were obtained from the U.S. Geological Survey, said Bill Cullen, a UBC professor emeritus of chemistry and the book’s author.

The decline coincides with the wood industry’s decision to swap the CCA preservative with a “greener,” arsenic-free preservative in 2004 for all residential construction. That decision occurred after nearly a decade of research supported by the Hinkley Center that showed the propensity for CCA-treated lumber to shed its arsenic into underlying soils — where the arsenic could accumulate in concentrations that might be hazardous to people.

Much of that research was funded with about $600,000 obtained through a National Science Foundation Partnerships For Innovation grant. Among other efforts, the NSF grants helped fund several CCA-related projects by UF and University of Miami environmental engineering researchers Tim Townsend and Helena Solo-Gabriel.

Townsend and Solo-Gabriele discovered that aging decks made of CCA-treated wood are capable of shedding enough arsenic into surrounding soil for it to be classified as a contaminated, among other findings. Subsequent investigations by Hinkley Center researchers and news organizations linked CCA wood in playgrounds to arsenic contamination in soils, a particular concern because of children unintentionally ingesting the dirt.

While the amount of arsenic flowing into the U.S. has slowed since the change, the disposal of CCA-treated lumber remains a tough problem to solve, Schert said. There are about 35,000 acres of decks in Florida alone, most built with CCA-treated lumber, and more than 1,000 playgrounds nationwide built with CCA, he said.

Solo-Gabriele said some CCA wood can be coated or painted to prevent it from shedding its arsenic, particularly when touched. But that is only a short-term solution because the paint will eventually wear away. With public structures, officials need to prioritize which ones should be replaced and which can be coated or left in place, she said.

“Playgrounds and picnic tables – these are the ones we really need to be concerned with,” she said. “Decks, I would place next on the priority list.”

Also needed, she said, are better methods for identifying CCA-treated lumber, which is often indistinguishable from regular lumber when aged. Today, CCA-treated wood often winds up in landfills. Concerned about contaminating the water supply, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection is considering a ban on CCA-treated wood in unlined landfills.

CCA-treated lumber also may go to plants that burn discarded vegetation and wood to generate electricity. Because burning CCA-treated lumber can release arsenic into the air or create arsenic-tainted ash, Solo-Gabriele and Townsend have developed new ways to identify and remove CCA-treated wood from the waste stream. It also may be possible to install scrubbers that cleanse the air emissions of arsenic. “If we can burn both the treated and the untreated wood that comes from the demolition industry here in Florida without having to separate the two, it could be a big green energy source,” Schert said.

For more information and downloadable photos, see http://www.ccapressrelease.org/Index.htm

It may sound like science fiction, but University of Florida researchers are developing devices that can interpret signals in the brain and stimulate neurons to perform correctly, advances that might someday make it possible for a tiny computer to fix diseases or even allow a paralyzed person to control a prosthetic device with his thoughts.

Armed with a $2.5 million grant they received this year from the National Institutes of Health, UF researchers from the College of Medicine, the College of Engineering and the McKnight Brain Institute have teamed up to create a “neuroprosthetic” chip designed to be implanted in the brain. They are currently studying the concept in rats but are aiming to develop a prototype of the device within the next four years that could be tested in people.

The initial goal? To correct conditions such as paralysis or epilepsy.

“We really feel like if we can do this, we’ll have the technology to offer new options for patients,” said Justin Sanchez, director of the UF Neuroprosthetics Research Group and an assistant professor of pediatric neurology, neuroscience and biomedical engineering. “There’s kind of a revolution going on right now in the neurosciences and biomedical engineering. People are trying to take engineering approaches for directly interfacing with the brain.

“The hope is we can cure more immediately a variety of diseases.”

Researchers have been able to decode brain activity for years using electroencephalography. Referred to commonly as an EEG, this technology involves placing a sensor-wired net over the head to measure brain activity through the scalp. But the technology wasn’t quite sensitive enough to allow researchers to decode brain signals as precisely as needed, Sanchez said. Now researchers are focusing on decoding signals from electrodes placed directly into the brain tissue using wires the width of a strand of hair.

“(Scientists have) realized that by going inside the brain we can capture so much more information, we can have much more resolution,” Sanchez said.

The chip UF researchers are seeking to develop would be implanted directly into the brain tissue, where it could gather data from signals, decode them and stimulate the brain in a self-contained package without wires. In the interim, UF researchers are studying implantable devices in rats and are evaluating an intermediate form of the technology — placing electrodes on the surface of the brain — in people.

UF researchers have developed new techniques using surface electrodes to access signals almost as precisely as they could with sensors implanted in the brain, according to findings the researchers published in May in the Journal of Neuroscience Methods. Developing these techniques is a big step forward in understanding how to best decode a patient’s intent from their brain waves and should have broad implications for delivering therapy, Sanchez said.

To gather data about the brain’s sophisticated cues, which vary from person to person, Sanchez studies the brain signals of children with epilepsy who are scheduled to undergo surgery to remove the part of the brain that is causing seizures. These patients often must be monitored for several days to weeks with electrodes placed directly on the brain. Doctors use this to pinpoint the problem area when a child has another seizure.

Because the children already have electrodes in place, Sanchez is able to use the data gathered from them to understand more about the brain’s signals in general.

UF researchers are also working on intermediate concepts that could be wearable, like a diabetes pump, Sanchez said.

“We have intermediate designs that connect to the brain, interpret signals and can wirelessly send commands to devices,” he said. “This is another path of technology we’re pursuing.”

To create these technologies, Sanchez is in the process of developing a center for brain-machine interfaces at UF with faculty from the College of Engineering, including Jose C. Principe; John G. Harris; Toshikazu Nishida; and Rizwan Bashirullah.

But several challenges face researchers in bringing these technologies to patients, said Dr. Steven J. Schiff, a professor of engineering and neuroscience at The Pennsylvania State University and director of the Penn State Center for Neural Engineering.

For patients with epilepsy, who often have to take several medications or undergo surgery for relief from debilitating seizures, a neuroprosthetic device could be the best form of treatment, Schiff said, adding that more work needs to be done to understand the mechanics of what causes diseases such as epilepsy and Parkinson’s.

“The challenge is not so much the technology,” Schiff said. “The challenge is to use that technology wisely.”

The day may not be too far off when patients can control a prosthetic hand or leg just by thinking about it, Sanchez said.

“It’s becoming a reality,” Sanchez said. “We’re designing electronics that we can interface with biological systems and we can use that to help people.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Always on, connected, cheap and on sale everywhere.

What people have come to expect in cell phones and personal communicators may soon become common in health-care devices and products at home and in medical offices, thanks to new technology announced today by the University of Florida and IBM.

The technology creates the first-ever roadmap for widespread commercial development of “smart” devices that, for example, take a person’s blood pressure, temperature or respiration rate the minute a person steps into his or her house – then transmit it immediately and automatically to doctors or family.

That could eliminate the need for many doctor’s visits, which are often difficult for the elderly or sick. By enabling regular updates via text message or e-mail, the technology also could pave the way for people to share real-time information on their health or well-being with absent loved ones. And it could prove useful for doctors who need to keep tabs on many patients at one time by helping the doctors to prioritize whom to treat first.

“We call it quality-of-life engineering,” said Sumi Helal, professor of computer engineering and the project’s lead UF researcher. “It’s really a change of mindset.”

The idea of using technology to provide medical care at a distance is nothing new. Doctors have relied on “telemedicine” to communicate with specialists for years. More recently, telemedicine has been expanded to include, for example, surgeons performing robotic procedures on distant patients.

But the UF-IBM advance goes a step further: It provides the technological
“stepstones” to make it easy for any company to manufacture and sell smart networked devices — while also making them more user-friendly for consumers.

“UF and IBM both see the need and the opportunity to integrate the physical world of sensors and other devices directly into enterprise systems,” said Richard Bakalar, Chief Medical Officer for IBM. “Doing so in an open environment will remove market inhibitors that impede innovation in critical industries like health care and open a broader device market that’s fueled by uninterrupted networking.”

Helal has devoted the past several years to developing smart devices for the elderly in a model home known as the “Gator Tech Smart Home” in Gainesville.

He and his students pioneered the “Smart Wave” microwave oven that can automatically determine how much time to cook a frozen meal or keep track of how much salt it contains. Among other devices, they also created an instrument that records how many steps a person takes, information that can tell absent caregivers how active its occupants are.

But these and other devices currently have a major shortcoming: They require “a team of engineers” to install them, Helal said. In a world where consumers are accustomed to electronics that require no more than a power outlet, that dramatically limits their appeal. “We decided to create a technology that self integrates,” Helal said. “When you bring it in to the house and plug it in, it automatically provides its service and finds a path to the outside world.”

With $60,000 in research funding from IBM, Helal designed “middleware,” or software and hardware that glues together different systems, that can give his and any similar health-aid devices this independence and connectivity. Importantly, the software is based on open standards, or publicly available specifications useable by anyone, such as those now being made available by consortiums of technology companies including Eclipse, W3C and OSGi.

Open standards make it easy for product developers to tap the technology in any new smart assistive devices, Helal said. That, in turn, will make the devices more common.

The hardware component of the system is an inexpensive sensor platform about half the size of a business card. Developed at UF and licensed to Pervasa, a Gainesville-based UF spinoff company headed by Helal, the “Atlas” platform makes it easy to create a network of sensors and make their information available on a computer network.

The advance is crucial given the increasing number of elderly Americans. The number of people 85 and over is expected to rise from 4.2 million in 2000 to 6.1 million in 2010 and 9.6 million by 2030, according to federal government statistics. Meanwhile, the percentage of older Americans living alone will either remain high or continue to grow: About half of women and nearly a quarter of men aged 75 and older currently live alone.

But the UF-IBM technology may also prove useful in many other medical settings. For example, Helal said, it could help emergency rooms operate more safely. Rather than a standard waiting list, patients could be equipped with networked wireless monitors of their vital signs, allowing doctors to determine who in a waiting room needs the most immediate care.

The Gran Telescopio Canarias, or GTC, under construction in Spain’s Canary Islands for the past seven years, will hold its “first light” opening ceremony Friday. UF, which contributed $5 million to the project and owns a 5 percent share, is the only U.S. institution with a stake in the massive telescope.

“This is one of the largest international projects that the university is involved in, and first light is certainly a big step for a small department,” said Stan Dermott, astronomy department chairman and one of four UF astronomy faculty members who will attend Friday’s ceremony.

The roughly $175 million GTC is not yet complete. Only 12 of the 36 mirrors that together will compose its 34.1-foot primary mirror have been installed, Dermott said. The rest are expected to be mounted this year, with the telescope’s grand opening — to be presided over by King Juan Carlos I of Spain — set for next summer. Only after that date will scientific-quality observations begin.

All that said, enough of the mirror is assembled to allow telescope operators to make initial test runs, he said. So at 10 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time Friday (6 p.m. EDT), Prince Felipe, heir to the Spanish throne, will train the telescope on Polaris, the North Star, for a ceremonial observation to be attended by about 300 people.

Besides Dermott, the UF contingent will be astronomers Charlie Telesco, Rafael Guzman and Anthony Gonzalez, as well as Tom Walsh, UF director of sponsored research. “This will be the first demonstration that the telescope can produce a focused image of a star,” Dermott said.

The Spanish government is the main owner of the GTC, with UF and two institutes in Mexico as partners. As a result of its participation, UF astronomers will be allotted 20 nights of telescope time annually for observations. A UF-designed and built infrared imager and spectrometer, meanwhile, will be one of the first instruments mounted on the telescope when it opens for scientific observation next year.

“We are not just passive partners in this project,” Dermott said. “We are the world’s leader in developing astronomical instruments, and our instrument, CanariCam, will be one of the first instruments used on the GTC.”

Dermott said UF’s participation in the GTC effectively makes it one of a handful of institutions with guaranteed access to the world’s most powerful telescopes. That will open the door to a wide range of research not only at the GTC but elsewhere as well.

”Already we are forming scientific teams that will involve other telescopes to take part in surveys of the distant universe,” he said. “For example, Rafael Guzman is leading a team that will investigate the origin of galaxies. In a sense, we have joined the club of big observers now.”

Funded in part by the Spanish government with a $6.5 million grant, Guzman’s team of 40 astronomers from the U.S., Spain, France and England is conducting a survey called GOYA, or Galaxy Origins and Young Assembly. Other UF astronomers are also participating or heading GTC-related projects.

So University of Florida experts are developing an electronic system to “see” and count fruit, a concept called machine vision. It could be commercially available by the end of the decade.

“Basically, you use a camera and a computer to mimic what a human being can do,” said Daniel Lee, an associate professor with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences who leads the project.

This week Lee presented two papers on the system at the American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers’ annual meeting. In one, the system was used to count green oranges in the field and had an 85 percent success rate.

By knowing their expected yield, growers can tell how much time, labor and equipment will be needed for harvest, said Lee, a faculty member in the agricultural and biological engineering department.

Because the system includes a Global Positioning System receiver and notes the position of each tree, it can help growers manage specific areas for better productivity.

Traditionally, orange groves have been managed in blocks – land units ranging from 5 to 500 acres. Each is managed as though it had no variations in soil fertility, irrigation and other characteristics. But that’s not the reality.

“Yield is not constant in the whole grove,” Lee said. “Some places you see more fruit, some places you have less fruit. So (with this system) you can do things differently at different locations.”

Similar methods are used for crops such as cotton, potatoes and tomatoes, he said. It’s part of a trend called precision agriculture, the use of technology to better manage crops.

But it will be another two or three years before the system can be sold because researchers are addressing challenges inherent in machine vision, he said. One is uneven lighting, which makes it hard for the camera to detect fruit in the dark recesses of the tree canopy. The other is detecting fruit partially obstructed by leaves or other objects.

The system includes a digital camera with special optical filters, a portable computer, GPS receiver and software designed by Lee and his graduate students. The camera and computer are mounted on a truck and driven through groves.

In smaller groves it’s possible to photograph every tree, Lee said. But for those covering thousands of acres, operators would photograph trees in representative parts of the grove and use the results to make projections.

The project is funded by the Florida Citrus Production Research Advisory Council, an industry organization supported by growers, and also by a state initiative that supports research and education programs for citrus mechanical harvesting.

Currently, Florida’s citrus yield is estimated each month during harvest season by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, using a system that relies on hand counts of specific trees, as well as tree size, Lee said.

Machine vision could be a big help to some growers, especially for predicting yield when the fruits are still green, said Esa Ontermaa, precision agriculture coordinator for Lykes Brothers Inc., one of the state’s largest citrus growers.

“I can’t really answer for everybody in the industry, I think, but it would definitely be highly beneficial for us,” said Ontermaa, based in Lake Placid. “We utilize crop estimation as one of our primary tools to project toward the future. And that (machine vision) would allow a whole lot better picture of what the coming crop would be.”

Ontermaa said his company already uses precision agriculture to manage its groves. One of Lee’s recent studies used machine vision to count ripe fruit just prior to harvest in a Lykes grove.

“That’s why Dr. Lee’s work is very interesting to us, because it would integrate very well with what we already do.”

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — It will huff, and puff, and blow the house in — but only for research purposes.

Two days before the June 1 start of the 2007 hurricane season, University of Florida wind engineers unveiled the world’s largest portable hurricane wind and rain simulator. Mounted on a trailer, the industrial-sized behemoth is composed of eight 5-foot-tall industrial fans powered by four marine diesel engines that together produce 2,800 horsepower. To cool the engines, the system taps water from a 5,000-gallon tank aboard a truck that doubles as the simulator’s tow vehicle.

UF civil and coastal engineers plan to use the simulator to blast vacant homes with winds of up to 130 mph — Category 3 on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale — and high-pressure water jets that mimic wind-driven torrential rain.

The goal: to learn more about exactly how hurricanes damage homes, and how to modify them to best prevent that damage.

“We want to conduct experiments to evaluate real homes in communities that are impacted by hurricanes,” said Forrest Masters, an assistant professor of civil and coastal engineering and the leader of the project. “This simulator also gives us the ability to test home retrofits and new building products aimed at preventing hurricane damage.”

The simulator, which cost about $500,000 in parts and labor, was designed and constructed entirely by Masters, lab manager Jimmy Jesteadt and a team of undergraduate students.

It is one of a kind.

Unlike previous, smaller simulators, the new simulator uses an innovative hydraulic system, rather than chains or mechanical drive trains, to transfer power from the engines to the fans. Designed by Linde Hydraulics Corporation and Cunningham Fluid Power Inc., the engines spin pumps, which then drive fluid through motors housed in the fans. The result is lighter, less bulky and safer than traditional drive systems, Masters said.

At full power, the fans turn at about 1,800 revolutions per minute, producing wind speeds of about 100 mph. A custom-built duct reduces the space available for the air to flow through, ratcheting up the wind speeds to a potential 130 mph. Steering vanes allow the engineers to direct the air wherever they want it to blow.

Implanted in the vanes, the water jets can simulate the most extreme rainfall of up to 35 inches per hour, although 8 inches per hour is more typical, Masters said.

The simulator is the latest addition to a growing arsenal of hurricane research equipment designed and assembled by UF wind engineering researchers trying to learn more about ground-level hurricane winds and how they affect structures. In a related project, the researchers built several portable hurricane wind monitoring towers that were deployed in the path of land-falling hurricanes in recent years.

“When this program first started, we brought the lab to the hurricane,” Masters said. “Now, we’re bringing the hurricane back to the lab.”

Rick Dixon, executive director of the Florida Building Commission, said state officials began to tap UF research for help in strengthening the state’s hurricane-related building codes shortly after Hurricane Andrew in 1992.

The 2004 storms showed that while improved codes were effective in preventing catastrophic building failures, challenges remained in blocking wind and water intrusion, he said. It will take more research to learn how to protect windows, doors, soffits, roof coverings and other so-called “components and claddings” – research for which the new wind simulator will be pivotal, he said.

“The test facility that Forrest has built allows us to evaluate those components and claddings and determine where they are failing,” he said. “So if the building code establishes minimum performances, than that can give us new standards for upgrading the building code.”

An environmentally friendly bug trap designed in part by University of Florida engineering undergraduates uses battery-powered LEDs flashing at different frequencies to attract house flies. The flies make their way through slots in the trap toward the lights, only to become immobilized on a sticky glue strip in a disposable plastic cartridge.

“The combination of the different frequencies of light and the ultraviolet wavelengths is what does it,” said Hans Yeakel, a UF senior in industrial engineering. “They see that, and they want to come into the trap.”

Yeakel is one of six engineering seniors who designed the trap as part of the UF College of Engineering’s Integrated Product and Process Design Program. The program pairs student teams with corporate or government sponsors for yearlong design projects.

The problem with conventional bug zappers is that they blow up bugs into millions of tiny particles, said Yeakel and other team members. Research at Kansas State University and the University of Wisconsin has shown that these particles can hang around in the air for four days or more. The research has also shown that the particles can contain tiny bits of metal – also blown away when the bugs hit the zapper – and sometimes harbor live colonies of bacteria, Yeakel said. Both are a health concern, considering the common use of the zappers near homes, restaurants and businesses.

The students began working on the project after Niceville-based Nacon Technologies approached UF seeking assistance in tweaking the design of its light trap.

Jeffrey Brown, Nacon’s president and CEO, said he designed the first light-based insect traps in 1988 while director of technical development for Johnson Wax, now SC Johnson. After leaving the company, he founded Nacon to sell an improved version of the technology.

Wal-Mart, Disney and McDonald’s are among the companies that have expressed an interest in Nacon’s products, which have just begun to be manufactured in China, Brown said. Early this spring, Wal-Mart installed two Nacon traps at a Fort Myers store that is its largest in Florida to test the effectiveness of the traps in large stores, Brown said.

Brown said the current trap works well, but it has to be plugged in. He sought a portable, battery-operated trap because it could be placed anywhere for maximum effectiveness. Battery-powered traps also might appeal to the military, campers, emergency responders and others, he said. “Anyone who needs to be mobile could use it,” he said.

For Yeakel and the other students, the problem was that the plug-in traps currently use black light bulbs, which draw too much power to be battery operated.

The students tested cold cathode bulbs and LEDs instead. The cold cathode bulbs also required too much power. The tiny, silicon-based LEDs used far less power, but it took considerable research to nail down their best wavelength and flashing frequency to attract flies, Yeakel said. The students field tested their device at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s insect laboratory on the UF campus. “It was pretty hard trying to get the flies attracted to it,” Yeakel said. “The physical components aren’t necessarily that complex, but when you’re dealing with a biological element, obviously it has a mind of its own.”

Eventually the team settled on a combination of ultraviolet and visible light flashing a repeating pattern of three different frequencies. Normal light bulbs flash at about 60 hertz, and the three differing frequencies appear to make the traps stand out to flies, the students said.

Tests showed the trap could attract as many as three dozen flies per hour with the lights off, although that number dropped when several lights illuminated the room, Yeakel said. Five flies per hour is considered good in high light environments, and the trap achieved that level or higher, he said. Still, “it’s something we need to work on,” he said.

The goal of the 12-year-old IPPD program is to assist corporations, small businesses and government agencies with engineering problems while giving future engineers practical experience. Another student on the bug trap team, Ryan Murray, said it succeeded in providing a unique educational environment. “It’s real-world experience, and it’s a lot more group oriented than most classes,” Murray said.

The other team members were Joshua Muriel, Tristan Aldinger, Raul Riveros and Anna Granovskaya. The team’s faculty adviser was Bill Eisenstadt.