Applied Nanotech puts Printed Antennas into Armour Composites: Protecting Vehicles and Troops

A development project headed by US firm Applied Nanotech has successfully integrated printed electronic antennas into bomb- and bullet-resistant armour panels intended for military vehicles.

The work has been conducted with Armortex, an existing Texas-based supplier of composite armour systems into the defence industry.

Additional antenna design and modelling expertise was supplied by academics based at the University of Tennessee (UT) in Knoxville and Pennsylvania’s University of Villanova.

Applied Nanotech has built the wideband antennas in two designs. These have been tested and found to be satisfactory when built into fibreglass-based armour panels supplied by Armortex.

Armour with printed electronics could work as an ECM jammer – Source: Hatehof Industries

The antennas will allow low-profile multichannel communication, without the separate conspicuous antenna arrays that can lead to certain vehicles – and particular command units – being deliberately targeted by the enemy.

The same printed antennas could be used for electronic countermeasures (ECMs) – emitting signals that jam radio waves used by opponents to, for example, remote detonate an improvised explosive device (IED) near the vehicle.

University of Knoxville professor Aly Fathy says: ‘This has been a challenging yet exciting programme, to take a passive composite material and create a complex antenna structure that not only provides ballistic protection, but also may help defeat improvised explosive devices and other threats.’

The development work has been financially supported by the US Office of Naval Research. In addition to armoured fighting vehicles the Armortex fibreglass panels could be added to ships and buildings.

Paper(?) Touch pad Printed with Silver Nanowire Ink

Paper has become a popular substrate for fabricating electronics – it is a cheap, abundant material and easy to print on. Electronics printed on paper are inexpensive, flexible, and recyclable, and could lead to applications such as smart labels on foods and pharmaceuticals or as wearable medical sensors. Paper has been used for printed memory, as gas sensors (“Cheap nanotechnology paper-based gas sensors“) or bioactive sensor to detect neurotoxins. Most printed electronics applications rely on some kind of ink formulated with conductive nanomaterials (read more: “Conductive nanomaterials for printed electronics applications“). Researchers have now introduced a rapid and facile method to fabricate a foldable capacitive touch pad using silver nanowire inks. The international research team has published their findings in the November 3, 2014 online edition of ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces (“Direct Writing on Paper of Foldable Capacitive Touch Pads with Silver Nanowire Inks”).

Paper-based touch pad. (a) Schematic view of a paper-based touch pad. (b) Working principle of the paper-based touchpad. (c) Fabrication of the paper-based touchpad involving direct writing silver nanowire ink, flashlight sintering and tape coating. (d) The schematic of the direct writing equipment. (Reprinted with permission by American Chemical Society)

“Paper electronics have been extensively studied in the past years but a printing protocol has yet to be developed,” Anming Hu, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, tells Nanowerk. “Here, we wanted to develop a way to print it directly on a variety of paper to make a sensor that could respond to touch or specific molecules, such as glucose.” “We also proposed a simplified theoretical model to elucidate the capacitive operating of touch pads, which closely approximated empirical data,” notes Hu. Hu and his collaborators developed a technique that uses a 2D programmed printing machine with postdeposition sintering using a camera flash light to harden the deposited silver nanowire ink. The researchers point out that the resulting paper-based touchpads produced by direct writing with silver nanowire inks offer several distinct advantages over existing counterparts including:

• low-cost and disposable;
• rapid sintering of nanowires through surface plasmonic excitation, typically requiring 3 flash pulses and less than 20 seconds using a commercial camera flash;
• ultrathin and ultralight: less than 0.1 mm thickness with printing and inkjet paper substrates and less than 60 mg for a single keypad on printing paper; and
• flexible and robust: the device responded to touch even when curved, folded and unfolded 15 times, and rolled and unrolled 5,000 times.

Four keypad touch pad in (a) untouched state, (b) touching with a single finger, (c) touching with two fingers. (d) Folded touch pad, (e) touch pad after 15 folding cycles, (f) unfolded touch pad with two fingers touching, (g) touch pad functioning on a curved surface. (Reprinted with permission by American Chemical Society) (click on image to enlarge)

The team is now working on printable biosensors and energy devices with paper-based or polymer-based substrates. “We hope that we can integrate micro-sized batteries into a sensor and form a stand-alone microsystem,” says Hu.

By Michael Berger – Nanowek

Nanoparticles Harness Powerful Radiation Therapy for Cancer

Posted: May 17th, 2013

Nanoparticle harnesses powerful radiation therapy for cancer

(Nanowerk News) Researchers at the University of Missouri have demonstrated the ability to create a multi-layered harness nanoparticle that can safely encapsulate powerful alpha-emitting radioisotopes and target tumors. The resulting nanoparticles not only offer the possibility of delivering tumor-killing alpha emitters to tumors, but also sparing healthy tissue from radiation damage. J. David Robinson and his colleagues published their findings in the journal PLoS One (“Gold Coated Lanthanide Phosphate Nanoparticles for Targeted Alpha Generator Radiotherapy”).Typically, when radiation treatment is recommended for cancer patients, doctors are able to deliver radiation from a source outside the body or they might inject one of several radiopharmaceuticals that emit low-energy radiation known as beta particles. For years, scientists have been studying how to use “alpha emitters,” which are radioactive elements that release high-energy alpha particles that would more effectively damage cancer cells and trigger cell death. The challenge to using alpha emitters is that the decay elements, the so-called daughters, are themselves highly toxic and difficult to contain in the vicinity of the tumor, thus causing significant damage to healthy tissues.”If you think of beta particles as slingshots or arrows, alpha particles would be similar to cannon balls,” said Dr. Robertson. He explains that recent work has shown that alpha particles can be effective in treating cancer in specific instances. “For example, a current study using radium-223 chloride, which emits alpha particles, has been fast-tracked by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration because it has been shown to be effective in treating bone cancer. However, it only works for bone cancer because the element, radium, is attracted to the bone and stays there. We believe we have found a solution that will allow us to target alpha particles to other cancer sites in the body in an effective manner.”In their studies, Dr. Robertson and colleagues from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the School of Medicine at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville used the isotope actinium-225, an element that when it decays produces a high-energy alpha particle and radioactive daughter elements, which are also capable of emitting alpha particles. Efforts to contain the daughter elements using traditional molecular constraints proved fruitless because the emitted alpha particles broke the chemical bonds necessary to hold the daughter elements in place.The Missouri team solved this problem by sequestering actinium-225 in the core of a gold-coated magnetic nanoparticle. The magnetic layer, comprised of gadolinium phosphate, serves to increase retention of the daughter elements while simplifying particle purification and the gold coating provides a surface to which tumor-targeting molecules can be attached. In the experiments described in their current publication, the researchers used an antibody that targets a receptor found on the surface of lung tumors.”Holding these alpha emitters in place is a technical challenge that researchers have been trying to overcome for 15 years,” Dr. Robertson said. “With our nanoparticle design, we are able to keep more than 80 percent of the element inside the nanoparticle 24 hours after it is created.” While alpha particles are extremely powerful, they do not travel very far, so when the nanoparticles get close to the targeted cancer cells, the alpha particles are more selective at damaging cancer cells but not surrounding cells.

Read more: http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/newsid=30558.php#ixzz2TiEg009k