Present Technology

E. N. Bamberger, Bearing Design—Historical Aspects, Present Technology and Future Problems, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, New York, 1980, pp. 1-45. 

The raw materials needed to supply about ten million new automobiles a year do not impose a difficult problem except in the case of the noble metals. Present technology indicates that each car may need up to ten pounds of pellets, two pounds of monoliths, or two pounds of metal alloys. The refractory oxide support materials are usually a mixture of silica, alumina, magnesia, lithium oxide, and zirconium oxide. Fifty thousand tons of such materials a year do not raise serious problems (47). The base metal oxides requirement per car may be 0.1 to 1 lb per car, or up to five thousand tons a year. The current U.S. annual consumption of copper, manganese, and chromium is above a million tons per year, and the consumption of nickel and tungsten above a hundred thousand tons per year. The only important metals used at the low rate of five thousand tons per year are cobalt, vanadium, and the rare earths. 

The above discussion does not mean that the use of urease and subsequently the use of an ammonia electrode is not practicable for a urea determination. Unfortunately, the commercial company that produced the urea analyzer, chose a conductivity procedure, which happens to be unsuitable for the laboratory of Neonatology. Had they chosen the ammonia electrode, which happens to be a relatively good electrode, and is especially specific, since only ammonia and not potassium can pass an air space, then the instrument could have been made highly specific for urea. In this case an ammonia determination would be done initially and then subtracted by the computer, from the amount which has been generated subsequently. In any case, with present technology, sensitivity is not adequate to use less than approximately 15fil of serum. 

It is unlikely to do so, ifthe industry stick to its stance (whether correct or not) that the present technology is the best, that if the playing field were level, it would be competitive and that past records show it to be at least as safe as competitive energy sources... 

Hydrogen has the potential to play a major role in energy independence but policies are needed that mobilize our present technologies. This means raising fuel economy standards, increasing hybrid vehicle use and developing options such as cellulose ethanol. 

Instrumentation and methods currently available provide limited means for realtime measurements of the continuous wave (CW) and transient characteristics of luminescent substances. The measurement, in real time, of the spatial distribution of a parameter of interests, for instance, in cells and in tissue cannot be attained with present technology. Optical fibers are used to monitor the response of a sensor in limited regions in space. 

The previous examples highlight some of the present technologies being applied for construction of host defense peptides with increased stability and retention of natural peptide activity. Similarly, the examination of host defense peptide candidates has also focused on the identification of methodologies that increase the cost effectiveness of present screening techniques and are also able to examine peptides in a high-throughput fashion. 

Morrow makes a point of calling the system designed at CPRR a "resin recovery system, to stress the fact that it will work on about five different resins. Currently PET and HDPE can be processed together and are easily separated because of their different densities. The center hopes to add polystyrene and polyvinyl chloride to the mixed plastics stream they process. But, with the present technology, PET and PVC cannot be run together since they have similar densities. 

How believable would out present technology be to someone living 200 years ago How... 

Was this your answer Hindsight is 20-20. It s always easy to look back over time and see the progression of events that led to our present state. Much more difficult it is to think forward and project possible scenarios. Perhaps the future technology of 200 years from now is just as unbelievable to us as out present technology is unbelievable to someone of 200 years ago. 

Table A3.1 Status of present technology for recycling spent batteries...

The rate of sampling with piezoelectric sensors is limited by their physical characteristics and present technology to the millisecond range for applications in the liquid phase. The technique is versatile in that it can be used in a variety of locations. The solid state electronics necessary to operate the piezoelectric sensor are easily miniaturized, and data can be recorded continuously or periodically. A small computer with a reasonable memory could easily record data over long times. There may be some problems in deep-sea locations, simply because of the complications in packaging the sensor for high-pressure environments, although this problem may be surmountable. 

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