By Candace Stuart
Small Times Senior Staff Writer

CHICAGO, June 6, 2001 — NASA to industry: Make it small and we will use it. Be small and we will use you.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is counting on small tech to help it explore the planetary system and

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A MEMS-based hydrogen sensor made by Makel Engineering Inc. has been used in the Space Shuttle Discovery to detect potentially deadly fuel leaks.

outer cosmos, two NASA technology directors said Tuesday in Chicago. And the agency is turning more and more to start-ups and small businesses developing MEMS and other innovations to get those products in its space missions.

“The smaller you can make it the more interested we are,” said Harley Thronson, technology director of NASA’s Office of Space Science and keynote speaker at the 2001 Sensors Expo. MEMS sensors and microsystems help NASA design smaller, lighter weight and more energy- and cost-efficient rockets, satellites and space probes.

“We will be very grateful if people can save us mass in our detectors,” Thronson said. “We don’t have a lot of space to put them into.”

Speaking later to Small Times, Thronson said NASA cultivates relationships with emerging businesses, which can benefit from the agency’s support and guidance as they enter the profitless initial development phase.

“In some ways we prefer to work with a small company,” Thronson said. “They’re more versatile, easier to work with, more adaptable and lighter on their feet.”

NASA realizes its smaller partners need more than a NASA contract to survive, which is why it offers grants – usually about $100,000 but up to $1 million – to help them develop a device for space application.

“That $100,000 can make a difference for a small company,” he said, “but it is not so attractive to a Lockheed Martin.”

Robert Norwood, NASA’s director of commercial technology, said the U.S. space agency funds about 200 companies – not all small tech – through its Small Business Innovation Research Program and regional enterprises such as the Glennan Microsystems Initiative in Ohio. Its goal is to develop a technology that is useful for NASA but can be adapted for commercial applications.

“We don’t develop products,” Norwood said. “We develop technologies. It’s that underlying technology that goes into products. What we’re able to do is help companies retire that technology risk.”

In his speech, Thronson outlined NASA’s upcoming projects and needs, and encouraged industry representatives in the audience to look at how their products might be adapted for NASA uses. Among them:

* Sensors that can analyze Mars’ chemical elements and minerals. For instance, Thronson said, sensors that incorporate infrared spectrometry could detect any signs of oxygen, carbon dioxide or water beneath the planet’s surface, ingredients scientists say are necessary for life. Spectrometers don’t detect the actual elements and molecules, but instead a distinctive spectral signature.

“This is a keystone in the Mars exploration program,” he said. “It is the planet most similar to Earth. We know it was once warm, wet and had a thicker atmosphere. Did life ever arise on Mars, or – this is a long shot – does it still exist?”

* The next generation of telescopes launched in space to help astronomers peer into the cosmos for clues of how the Earth formed, how it will evolve and the entities that exist far beyond it. Thronson, who also serves on NASA’s Decade Planning Team and its Space Infrared Telescope Facility, said NASA is looking to support small infrared technologies that can detect very weak light signals from very far away.

Thronson, who was a professor of astronomy for 16 years at the University of Wyoming before he joined NASA, promised to quiz the audience at the end of his talk. Instead, he and other NASA personnel visited the Sensors Expo exhibit arena, on a mission to meet possible industrial collaborators.

A few NASA collaborators were already there, including Makel Engineering Inc. (MEI), an 18-person sensor manufacturer in Chico, Calif. MEI’s hydrogen sensor has been used in the Space Shuttle Discovery and the Hyper-X flight vehicle to monitor for potentially catastrophic hydrogen leaks.

Hydrogen is used as a fuel source in space apparatus. Leaks of the volatile substance can cause extreme damage, as happened in 1986 when hydrogen and oxygen vapors leaked in the external tank and right solid rocket booster of the Space Shuttle Challenger, leading to an explosion that killed all seven crew members.

MEI, which owner Darby Makel launched in the mid-1990s, recently joined NASA’s Glennan Initiative, a project that links NASA and university researchers with industries making or needing microsystems. One of the initiative’s goals is to encourage MEMS and microsystem designers to build devices with silicon carbide, a material MEI plans to integrate into future products. The state of Ohio, which sees itself filling a niche for silicon carbide MEMS and microsystems, and NASA fund the initiative.

MEI adapted its hydrogen sensor for use in hydrogen-filled weather balloons and an alternative fuel vehicle built by Ford Motor Co. that burns natural gas. It also offers a cooling technology that can augment high-power electronic parts such as switching devices, and is working with NASA to design an on-site fuel production technology and miniature chemical reactors for its Mars missions.

MEI also hopes to integrate the hydrogen sensor into fuel cells that one day may be used to power passenger vehicles. Fuel cells use oxygen and hydrogen to create energy.

“If (fuel cells) becomes a viable market, that will be a large market,” said MEI engineer Susana Carranza.

Norwood said that NASA expects more MEMS-based companies to convert their NASA projects into commercial products. “There just aren’t that many MEMS out there yet,” he said. “Over the next couple of years, I guarantee there will be.”

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RELATED STORY: UNCLE SAM WANTS YOU — TO HANDLE SMALL TECH RESEARCH

CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Candace Stuart at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 233.

By Tom Henderson
Small Times Staff Writer

Delphi Automotive Systems Corp., General Motors’ giant parts supplier spinoff, is expected to announce soon that it has formed a small-tech partnership with Wayne State University in Detroit. The reported deal is part of Delphi’s efforts to expand its nonautomotive business.

Under the plan, approved last month by WSU President Irvin D. Reid, Delphi will move laboratory equipment with a book value

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Two graduate students at work in WSU’s clean room. Courtesy WSU.

of $6.5 million and a replacement value of $10 million to WSU’s engineering labs and clean rooms. It will also assign three researchers and one lab technician to the school.

WSU has hired a contractor to double the size of its clean-room space to 12,000 square feet to accommodate needs of the Delphi contract, according to Greg Auner, director of Wayne State’s Center for Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems (CSSIM). Auner said Thursday that work has begun on blueprints and that demolition work will begin in about two weeks.

A spokesperson for Delphi, though, said the company has not formally approved the agreement and a date for an announcement has not been set.

Three Delphi researchers are expected to have the title of adjunct professor. The company is also expected to assign some patents in microsystems to the university. More Delphi researchers are expected to join WSU as adjunct professors as programs ramp up.

“This is a fabulous deal for us,” said Auner. His center has 21 faculty from the colleges of engineering, science and medicine, five staff scientists and engineers, 25 graduate students and 12 undergrads.

Auner said the lab expansion will include a Class 10 clean room of 3,500 square feet. City air typically has one million particles of at least half a micron in size per cubic meter of air; a Class 100 clean room has 100 particles that size. Clean rooms range between Class 10,000, for some fabrication purposes, to Class 1, for growing exotic crystals.

“Delphi doesn’t need a Class 10 clean room. That’ll be for our nanobiological research, but obviously the cleaner the better for Delphi, too,” Auner said.

DRIVING AWAY FROM AUTO

Delphi, which is headquartered in the Detroit suburb of Troy, hopes to leverage WSU’s expertise in research into nonsilicon-based microsystems as part of its efforts to expand its business into nonautomotive applications.

Early in March, Delphi announced that it was consolidating its fledgling nonautomotive operations under a “new markets” division to be headed up by Atul Pasricha, a Delphi and GM veteran.

Delphi announced that the new division, which was created to mitigate the auto industry’s traditional boom-or-bust cycles, would look into such markets as military, aerospace, communications and agriculture. WSU’s microsystems research has applications in all four areas.

Company officials have said they hope nonauto revenues will grow to 5 percent of sales in two years, up from 1.5 percent of 2000’s sales of $29.1 billion.

Delphi researchers say that nonsilicon systems also offer advantages for auto applications because of their ability to function in a far wider range of temperatures than their silicon counterparts.

According to Joe Mantese, group manager for materials at Delphi Research Labs in Shelby Township, the auto supplier had explored partnering with a number of universities, including the University of Michigan’s renowned MEMS engineering group, with which it has worked on a project basis over the years. Delphi decided to pursue an affiliation with WSU because of its expertise in nontraditional materials.

“The word `nonsilicon’ comes up an awful lot with Wayne State,” Mantese said. “We think a lot of U-M, but they are silicon based. That’s not a weakness; that’s a strength. They go with what they know. If we want to address the future in a good way, we need to be more flexible than we have been. We need to look at both silicon and nonsilicon.”

“Nonsilicon offers a broader range of devices for automotive applications, and also for getting into nonautomotive markets,” said Michel Sultan, Delphi’s group manager for devices, who works closely with Mantese. “There are a lot of nonautomotive possibilities in nonsilicon.”

The proposed partnership would expand a relationship that goes back about six years. Delphi has had a handful of WSU’s Ph.D. and masters engineering students working on projects as part of their degree work.

WSU’S CUTTING-EDGE RESEARCH

Auner’s department has several broad-based initiatives in place.

The CSSIM is involved in prototype work on a sensor bra for early detection of breast cancer with the Karmanos Cancer Institute. Lab tests have begun with the Kresge Eye Institute that aims to restore sight to those who suffer from retinitis pigmentosa, and another program with Children’s Hospital involves designing sensors that would allow doctors in one location to assist in operations far away.

All three medical institutions are, along with WSU, part of Detroit’s Medical Center.

Auner’s work with biosensors fits in well with a mandate from Delphi’s chief executive, J.T. Battenberg, to branch into nonauto markets, said Mantese. “Battenberg wants us to be more than just an automotive company. We’re not going to turn into a nonautomotive company, and change isn’t going to come overnight.”

The new partnership with WSU could help the push into aerospace, too. In July, two nonsilicon sensors developed by WSU are scheduled to rocket into space in a Boeing satellite carried aloft by the space shuttle. They are to remain in space for three years of testing.

One is called a solar-blind imaging sensor. Certain narrow wavelengths of light from the sun are absorbed by ozone and are invisible on earth. Sensors operating in that wavelength would be useful in detecting enemy aircraft or missile launches.

The other is a hydrogen sensor, which could be used to detect and pinpoint potentially dangerous hydrogen leaks on manned spacecraft.

Both sensors are made of aluminum nitride, a semiconductor material that Auner and his staff have developed an expertise in growing.

On earth, the hydrogen sensor could be used in vehicle fuel cells for monitoring and controlling hydrogen production. With fuel cells expected by some to be huge part of the auto-supply market in the not-so-distant future, a hydrogen sensor clearly has an attraction for Delphi and other parts suppliers.

“If you envision fuel cells to be huge — and I do — then this is very, very important,” said Auner.

A SIGN OF THE TIMES

Delphi’s innovative partnership with WSU — and the push toward nontraditional materials — is indicative, say Mantese and Sultan, of the freedom to think outside the box that has been encouraged at the parts supplier since it was spun off from the more staid GM.

“We take risks with the research we do,” Sultan said. “Some programs will make it. Some won’t.”

“We are the children of our parents,” Mantese said, “but Delphi really wants to push the risk-taking. We have a Hall of Fame here, where we put up the pictures of inventors who hold patents. Delphi has gone out of the way to reward invention. Much more so than GM. Battenberg wants us to take risks.”

Regarding the Wayne State partnership, the point, Mantese said, is “instead of being evolutionary, invest in the revolutionary.”

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CONTACT THE AUTHOR:
Tom Henderson at [email protected] or call 734-994-1106, ext. 233.

COVER PHOTO: Greg Auner, director of Wayne State’s Center for Smart Sensors and Integrated Microsystems, with Delphi research associate Margarita Thompson, one of his former doctoral students. Courtesy Wayne State University.

By Candace Stuart
Small Times Senior Writer

College junior Tracy Haverty admits her role in developing a coin-size detector that hides within the dashboard and tattles on drunk drivers unnerves some of her peers.

“Of course I get teased all the time that I’ll be the downfall of college life,” she said.

But her almost yearlong effort to refine

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Haverty

an alcohol microsensor that recognizes when a driver is legally drunk and silently signals police impressed judges at a recent regional engineering contest. Haverty, an engineering student at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, won first place at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers conference in Colorado Springs, Colo., in April. The award includes a $500 cash prize and the chance to publish her paper.

The goal is to deter people from drinking and driving, and reduce the carnage that results from such behavior, says Edward Kolesar, a TCU engineering professor and MEMS specialist who heads the research project. A total of 15,786 people lost their lives in alcohol-related accidents in 1999, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Alcohol-related accidents accounted for almost 38 percent of all traffic fatalities that year.

Kolesar says his team needs about three more years to work out kinks in the technology before it could be used commercially. It already has the support of the auto industry and the law enforcement community, and a company that specializes in hand-held breath analyzers is tracking its progress.

While its constitutionality could be questioned, precedent suggests it would survive a legal challenge, according to companies that make similar alcohol-sensing products.

“The automakers are eager and anxious,” Kolesar said. “If you can legally show the vehicle was fine but the operator was impaired” then the company most likely will be free of liability.

Police favor such a device because it is specific and efficient: It helps them target impaired drivers based on unbiased information, not subjective observations that could be challenged in court; and it eliminates the need for checkpoints, a hit-and-miss system where officers test drivers in prescribed numbers, say every third driver.

“I’ve never talked with a law enforcer who wasn’t for it,” Kolesar said.

A YEAR OF DISCOVERIES

Kolesar enlisted Haverty last summer to help build and test a microsensor and wireless communication system that could fit within a vehicle’s dashboard. The microsensor detects any alcohol on a person’s breath and measures the concentration to determine the blood alcohol level. Any level that exceeds the legal limit triggers a wireless transmitter, which signals police. The signal could include the vehicle’s identification number, which police computers could trace to the car make and license plate number.

The project let Haverty apply her training as a mechanical engineer and gave her hands-on experience in electrical engineering. Kolesar selected Haverty based on colleagues’ recommendations. She decided to spend her summer in a lab because she considered the project worthwhile and challenging. And she discovered her classmates — while they like to rib her — are equally intrigued.

“The reason I think this is so interesting is it applies to everybody,” she said. “Most people don’t realize how little it takes to get legally drunk. I know people who now really think about it, that if they have more than one or two beers they could go to jail.”

Kolesar is working with engineers at the University of Texas at Arlington and a law professor at Texas Southern University on the project, which started in 1999. The state of Texas and the National Science Foundation are providing about $140,000 for the research.

The key sensing component is a microelectronic fuel cell that catalytically converts ethyl alcohol into water and carbon dioxide. Ethyl alcohol is the intoxicating ingredient in beer, wine and liquor. “The only thing it (the fuel cell) reacts to is ethyl alcohol,” said Kolesar, making it the perfect instrument for his purposes.

Several alcohol detectors in the market today use fuel cells. PAS Systems International, a company in Fredricksburg, Va., supplies police with fuel cell-based breath testers and passive alcohol sensors. PAS Systems International president Jarel Kelsey says he is intrigued with Kolesar’s approach because it allows remote monitoring, a feature not yet available.

Alcohol vapor that comes in contact with the fuel cell’s surface undergoes a chemical reaction that frees up electrons, which in turn creates a measurable electrical current. The voltage is proportional to the amount of alcohol.

Haverty determined the voltage an alcohol concentration of 0.08 percent (the legal limit for drinking and driving in Texas) would create. She calibrated the device so that when the sensor registered that voltage or higher, circuits would amplify the voltage signal and send a warning through a wireless transmitter to police. The device can be recalibrated to accommodate other DUI limits.

TRAINS, PLANES AND AUTOMOBILES

Kolesar proposes imbedding the microsensors behind the dashboard panel, perforating the panel with tiny holes that would let in vapor. The device is about the size of an inch-thick half dollar coin. It weighs several ounces and needs a 12-volt power source to function. The fuel cells perform double duty, as sensors and as an energy source.

Kolesar says he can get the cost per unit between $50 and $25. “Nothing in the system is that expensive,” he said.

He expects the trucking, aviation and railroad industries also will find uses for his system — “any situation when a person is operating equipment where others could be harmed,” he said.

This summer researchers will test the system on the road, driving by bakeries, printing plants, gasoline stations and even a brewery to see if any fumes trick the device. Kolesar also will expose it to aromatic and alcohol-based products such as hair spray, perfume and aftershave to test its reliability.

Efforts to trick the sensors — mints, chewing gum or rolled down windows — won’t work because the sensors are sensitive and precise. But Kolesar does fear one manmade byproduct.

“(Cigarette) smoke is the one thing that really worries me,” he said. The fine particles could coat the fuel cell surface or clog up the miniscule parts, making the system inoperable.

Kelsey said PAS Systems International would be interested in the technology once the size, cost, reliability and durability issues are resolved. While Kolesar envisions it as a tool for police and transportation industries, Kelsey sees other possibilities. Thinking as a father with one child now in adulthood and a second in diapers, he envisions a technology that alerts parents instead of the police.

“If my children knew that if they or one of their friends had been drinking, or had a drink in the car, and I’d know — now that would be a deterrent.”

Kelsey, whose company has specialized in passive alcohol sensors for the past decade, says the courts so far have favored the benefits the technology provides to the public at large over any perceived civil liberty infringements. For instance, PAS markets a flashlight that also contains alcohol sensors. Police officers can pull motorists over and use the “Sniffer” to determine a driver’s sobriety without his or her knowledge.

“Interestingly enough, up to this point the legal questions have been minor,” he said. The Sniffer has been likened to a radar gun, a tool that enhances an officer’s ability to determine traffic violations.

TESTING OTHER OPTIONS

As much as she enjoyed her year of research, Haverty said she decided she should try another enterprise this summer. “It was a tough decision to give it up,” she confessed. She still has ideas she’d like to test — for instance, placing microsensors in the car roof instead of the dashboard, where she predicts she would get an even more rapid reading.

Instead, she will be working as an intern at Lockheed Martin, an aeronautics, space and telecommunications technology company, to gain a perspective on industry. Whichever path she chooses after graduation in 2002, she’ll stand out, Kolesar said. Few students get published by the prestigious IEEE, and fewer still can boast that they helped design a potentially life-saving device. “That’s something you have forever,” he said.

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COVER PICTURE: Tracy Haverty