- Bring on the potholes
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Neither rain nor road rut will slow down new
bicycles engineered with space-age materials.
Mountain bikers pedal the path of most resistance, always searching for the ultimate ride on trails snarled with rocks, ruts, roots and ravines. Bike manufacturers rise to the challenge of this hard-driving bunch with featherweight composite frames and suspension systems that would rival your father's Buick. But there remains an Achilles heel: Bicycle rims, it seems, are most prone to buckling under off-road punishment. UW mechanical engineer Terry Richard and the late materials scientist Frank Worzala, who died in August, have been on the trail of new materials to help mountain bike rims withstand the onslaught. The duo teamed recently with TREK Bicycle Com-pany of Waterloo, Wis., the nation's top moun-tain bike manufacturer, to look at improving the strength and performance of off-road rims - without inflating the cost. They found a good candidate by blending a composite of 80 percent aluminum and 20 percent boron carbide, the same super-tough material the Department of Defense uses for helicopter components. "This turned out to have considerably better properties than all the other components we tested," Worzala said. "It has very high strength and high modulus."
Bicycle rims reinforced with boron carbide will allow riders to tackle even the most pothole-infested streets.
A material's modulus is essentially its stiff-ness. Standard aluminum rims, while lightweight, have a low modulus. Bolstering the aluminum rims with boron carbide roughly doubled the stiffness of standard rims, Worzala said. Richard is continuing to work with TREK to produce rim sections that can later be tested by the company's fleet of riders. But another UW-Madison innovation is being adopted by the company, solving a different problem: braking in rain-slicked conditions. Adding a ceramic-metal composite to rim surfaces, through a plasma-coating process, produced better stopping power in wet conditions, the re-searchers found. TREK recently began market-ing ceramic-coated rims, but the surfaces are brittle and crack easily. Worzala said their innovation - adding 20 percent nickel and chrome to the ceramic - helped the material bond more strongly to the rim. TREK is planning to market the improved rims soon. A third project will help manufacturers produce better, cleaner welds on rims through a laser-welding technique, which eliminates the need to machine away excess metal from conven-tional flash welds. In addition to TREK, the researchers formed partnerships with two Wisconsin companies, Laser Machining Inc. of Somerset and Thermal Spray Technologies of Sun Prairie. Beyond building university-industry partner-ships, Richard says the knowledge gained is of larger importance to material scientists. "By working with several companies on a common project, we are able to apply our knowledge of new materials to applications beyond a single industry," he says. "What we're doing in a larger sense is improving existing concepts by using advanced materials."
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- Into the great unknown
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Advances in medicine, energy and technology
can often be the unexpected results of basic research.
When Hector DeLuca began studying vitamin D 30 years ago, treating disease seemed a distant goal. His research team was after something more basic: How does this unusual vitamin work in the body? The UW-Madison biochemist's discoveries changed what everyone thought they knew about vitamin D, and a whole gallery of unexpected new uses availed themselves to science. DeLuca's work led to more than 150 U.S. patents for life-enhancing drugs, including treatments for osteoporosis and a number of bone, muscle and skin diseases. New analogs of the active vitamin D compound are now being developed for the treatment of multiple sclerosis and cancer. The vitamin D story provides a clear example of why universities conduct basic research: Without first answering fundamental questions, the information for cures and treatments would not be available. "If you look at the modern miracles of medi-cine," DeLuca says, "virtually all of them have come from basic science. Penicillin is a perfect example. It wasn't discovered because we were trying to cure infectious disease. It was discovered because researchers were trying to figure out why molds inhibit the growth of bacteria. The pursuit of that led to the discovery of compounds that are enormously useful." Basic research - the quest to understand all the natural phenomena around us, from particle physics to the human genome - is big business at UW-Madison. About 90 percent of the $370- million-plus research enterprise here is considered basic research. There are literally thousands of basic research projects under way. They include exploring the molecular rules that govern limb formation; using supercomputers to map engine combustion; using magnetic resonance imaging to locate emotional activity in the brain; and studying genes that control fruit ripening and flowers wilting. Basic research can thrill scientists with unexpected results. DeLuca says his work "went against the dogma of the time" by showing that vitamin D had to be modified into entirely new compounds before it performed in the body. When they traced its path in animal models, they found it would disappear. The kidneys convert the vitamin into an entirely new, active compound. "It became immediately apparent," DeLuca says, "that these would be useful compounds in the treatment of disease." But basic research takes time - often lots of time - before the benefits start to make them-selves evident. Fusion is an example of a complex scientific problem that may take another 30 to 40 years to reach large-scale use. But researchers keep their eyes on the prize: providing a cheap, safe and nearly limitless supply of energy for the world. Physics professor and fusion researcher Stewart Prager admits he was attracted in part by the "save-the-world" implications of fusion. But he is also driven by the theoretical challenges it poses. He works with one of three UW-Madison experiments in fusion research, which attract about $6 million in federal funds. Fusion is the equivalent of "producing a miniature sun here on earth," Prager says. It involves creating a plasma - an electrically charged gas, similar to lightning - which can reach a heat of 100 million degrees. Unlike nuclear power, fusion does not pose the risk of meltdown. Fusion plants could run on natural elements found in sea water, giving it almost limitless potential. But the research has proven more difficult than scientists imagined. Fusion researchers in the 1950s believed they would see fusion power plants in their lifetime. Even though great progress has been made, Prager says fusion research has reached a kind of "mid-life crisis." Its federal funding was cut by one-third last year, from $336 million to $244 million. Fusion is federal research personified, he says, since its goals are long-term and it probes a fundamental question. State or private funding sources could not support such a giant enterprise, he says, which must be made a national priority to survive. "I think we will see fusion power in our lifetime. It's inevitable," Prager says. "It will start to have greater urgency as we have more knowl-edge about depletion of oil and the polluting effects of fossil fuels."
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