People
Meet some of the many technical experts at Boeing who are making the impossible possible.
Defying Gravity
As one of a few women in aerospace technology careers, Julie Perkins is bringing a valuable diversity of thought and innovation to aerospace.
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Other People stories
Deep Thoughts about Deep Space
Q&A with Brian Breshears, Boeing Technical Fellow investigating opportunities for technical advancements in deep space.
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Starliner style
Art and design meets technology and science on Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft, ready to safely propel people into space atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket.
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Technical Articles
IQ’s content includes articles written by Boeing technical experts, including scholarly papers from the Boeing Technical Journal, a peer-reviewed periodical. While the expansive BTJ archive remains exclusive to Boeing employees, IQ offers selected articles to all readers; these articles are indicated with a “BTJ” heading.
BTJ: Telesupervised Co-Robotic Systems for Remote Confined/Hazardous Space Operations
Telerobotic technologies deploy human technicians remotely into confined or otherwise hazardous spaces by bringing the human technicians’ skills to tasks but not to the dangers.
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BTJ: Aviation Initiatives and CO2 Emissions
The aviation industry has made great efforts to lower aviation-related emissions such as the use of alternative fuels, improved airplane designs, new aircraft concepts and fuel-saving operational procedures.
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BTJ: Ultra-Low Light Level Photoresponse in Thermoelectric Nanowire Arrays
We report the first demonstration of TE response in an array of junctions of nanowires. We discuss the nanoscale optical and TE properties that give rise to the effect.
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Rocking a new space program
To simulate the acoustic environment generated at liftoff by four main engines and two solid rocket boosters, engineers set up towers of subwoofers and amplifiers to create 142 decibels of sound, testing the structure of the Space Launch System.
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Aviation's SUGAR rush
An informal brainstorm turns into potential climate-saving flight technologies.
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Lightning protection research partnership
Research being performed in a partnership between Boeing and the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), in Saudi Arabia, aims to provide lightning protection in a fundamentally different way from previous designs.
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Patent Spotlight
Here’s a look at a few of Boeing’s many latest ideas and technical breakthroughs recently granted or published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Learn MoreThought Leadership
Space: The New Frontier
Those of us at Boeing share an irrepressible curiosity to discover and learn about a universe of topics—whether it’s the molecular structure of new materials that could make our airplanes even more capable or the celestial bodies that lie light years beyond Earth.
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Other Thought Leadership Columns
Breaking gravity
A reusable horizontal landing vehicle is better than one that lands vertically, and it’s not much different from what Boeing has already done.
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The Space Launch System
To keep flying in a challenging economic environment, we designed efficiencies into the production and launch of big rocket systems.
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Technology Radar
Saint Paul, Minnesota
Delta Air Lines is testing facial recognition technology, which matches customer faces with passport photos, at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport self-service luggage drops. The airline will gauge how much time fliers save by this process and see what customers think about it.
See news.delta.com
Amherst, Massachusetts
A study by psychologists at the University of Massachusetts concluded that first-year women in college engineering majors who were paired with a female (but not male) peer mentor are more likely to continue within the major.
See umass.edu/newsoffice
Zurich, Switzerland
A research group at ETH Zurich has developed complex printed structures that can change shape into sturdy 3-D objects. By printing flat objects that can take final shape later, transportation costs and complexity can be reduced.
See ethz.ch/en
Canberra, Australia
The blue Morpho Didius butterly has conical nanostructures on its wings that create its color. Engineers at Australian National University, inspired by this insect, created similar light-controlling structures that could have many applications, including solar panels and stealth technology.
See anu.edu.au/news
Kumamoto, Japan
Researchers at Kumamoto University have developed a nanosecond pulsed electric field method to extract biofuels from microalgae – a process that’s less costly and less destructive to the microalgae than traditional drying methods.
See kumamoto-u.ac.jp/en
Dresden, Germany
What if the early signs of cracking or structural failure could be made visible via color changes? Scientists from Leibniz Institute of Polymer Research Dresden have created a coating for variable structural coloration that identifies “too small to see” cracks.
See ipfdd.de/en
Nottingham, UK
With the aim of preventing carpal tunnel and other disorders of the hands, new “e-gloves” created at Nottingham Trent University would alert workers when they experience vibrations likely to cause these debilitating conditions.
See ntu.ac.uk
About Us
Innovation Quarterly is a publication by and for the community of technical professionals at Boeing worldwide. Expected release of each edition is February, May, August and November. Comments and letters are invited by email and may be published in subsequent editions. Submissions are subject to editing; no more than 90 words will be published. To submit a letter to the editor, email candace.k.barron@boeing.com.
On the cover: Julie Perkins is a Boeing Associate technical Fellow and a chief engineer on the 702SP satellite program in El Segundo, California.
Publisher: Greg Hyslop | Associate Publisher: Peter Hoffman
Editors: Candace Barron | Junu Kim
Website: David Parke | Conan Kisor
