By PAUL WELLING
Campus life may slow down for some during the summer, but students and faculty in engineering have plenty to keep them busy.
This summer a number of projects are underway in the Clyde Building. Research in merging fiber optics with silicon wafers, monitoring the polar ice caps and work in detecting potential archaeological sites are just a few of many projects.
Richard Selfridge, associate professor of electrical engineering, is working with students to investigate the merging of fiber optics with silicon wafer technology.
Merging these two technologies has incredible potential. “One thing that is nice about fiber technology is that you can send more information per second across a single line,” Selfridge said.
The combination of these two technologies could possibly be developed to make computers many times faster than they now are, Selfridge said. Another potential use is the creation of optic sensors to detect things such as temperature and pressure.
However, do not look for major developments in this field anytime soon, Selfridge said.
“We’re not very far along yet. We’re just getting started,” he said.
BYU’s MERS Lab (Microwave Earth Remote Sensing) is working on many projects, including one that will be used to help archaeologists find sites of interest.
Dr. David Long, professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, said that this is done with a type of radar camera that measures topography.
“Mainly, it provides high resolution maps that can help identify sites of interest to archaeologists,” Long said.
Michael Jensen, assistant professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, said that MERS is set up to monitor the characteristics of the earth. This monitoring is done from a remote location, generally a satellite, aircraft, or even a tower.
Another project being studied in the MERS Lab is the monitoring of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. The radar signal sent from a sensor can penetrate the ice and snow and give the physical characteristics of the ice. This information can then be studied to determine where the ice is melting.
“This helps us to monitor the global change and melting of the polar ice,” Long said.
A third major project being studied involves data from a radar tower in the ocean.
“We study the waves so we can determine what the winds are doing,” Jensen said. “We combine that information with information from a satellite.”
Long said that this combined information can be used to predict the weather. It is also useful in studying air/sea interaction–where gases from the atmosphere and the ocean are mixed.
Jensen said that a future project for the MERS lab is one that will work to prevent hazards on railroad tracks.
“We want to develop an instrument that can detect hazards on railroad tracks,” Jensen said. “This would monitor the tracks and detect any potential hazards.”
Anyone wanting to find out more about the MERS lab can check their website at www.ee.byu.edu/ee.mers.
The Clean Room is a state-of-the art facility at BYU where the much publicized microbattery was recently developed. According to Dr. Phil Brown, professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, there are only about 10 universities in the United States that have a clean room.
The Clean Room is named because of its requirements to wear special clothing in order to enter or work there. Special suits that cover nearly the entire body must be worn.
Brown said that the equipment in this room can be used to create integrated circuits, such as the ones in a computer.
“We process simple integrated circuits,” Brown said. He also said that the students that work in this room work to test the capacity of circuits.
Another engineering project currently being developed is one which uses infrared light to read ancient scripts and murals. The use of this infrared light is a great help to archaeologists in studying ancient writings that have faded over time.
Some ancient texts have become damaged and worn over time. Douglas Chabries, dean of Engineering and Technology, said that the use of infrared light picks up clues in these texts that the eye can’t see.
“Infrared light brings out the details of the text,” Chabries said. “We try different frequencies of infrared light until we find one that brings out a certain color of the original mural,”
The image from the infrared light is then combined with the original image. Then much of the original image is restored, Chabries said.
Chabries said that Gene Ware, BYU professor in electrical engineering technology, is currently in Guatemala using this method to decipher hieroglyphs from cave walls. Ware will then travel to Jordan to the city of Petra.
Petra is a city carved into a canyon wall–the same city where the final scene from “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” was filmed.
In this city, scientists are attempting to recover and read the writing from the remnants of scrolls found in the remains of an ancient Byzantine library. The library had fallen in, and the scrolls were burnt, leaving them in a carbonized state.
“We’ve recovered half a kilometer of scroll remnants from this library,” Chabries said. “We are trying to use this method to find out what they said.”
Chabries said that BYU is working on this project jointly with Yale and George Washington University.
