Long Island Technology Briefs: March 28, 2008

Long Island Business News, Mar 28, 2008 by Pete Weiss

New Rochelle to roll out Odyne-propelled dump truck

The City of New Rochelle has selected Hauppauge-based Odyne Corp. to fit one of the municipality's refuse trucks with Odyne's plug-in hybrid vehicle technology.

The garbage truck was chosen as a test vehicle for the technology because, according to Jeffrey Coleman, commissioner of Public Works for New Rochelle, it is "one of the department's staple, work-horse vehicles, so the system will be truly road tested."

The batteries in plug-in hybrids recharge on the grid, instead of drawing excess energy from the vehicle's internal combustion engine as current hybrids do. The advantage is that the plug-in hybrids can be recharged during off-peak hours when energy costs are low.

Odyne also received a boost for its plans to expand production capacity. The company signed a cost-sharing contract with the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority that states NYSERDA will fund half of the cost of hiring new technical and production staff. The state body will also help fund the acquisition of new production and testing equipment. The contract caps the NYSERDA funding at $534,590.

Alan Tannenbaum, CEO of Odyne, said that NYSERDA has helped Odyne before, assisting with product development. He added that the need for expanded production and testing capabilities was a direct result of the success of the engineering work done with NYSERDA and other collaborators.

Veeco ships LED makers

Veeco Instruments of Woodbury has had four more of its TurboDisc K465 systems tested and approved for production by high-brightness light emitting diode manufacturers located in Asia. The company shipped two units to Japanese HB-LED makers last month. Veeco would not name any of the buyers.

High-brightness LEDs have replaced incandescent bulbs in traffic lights and other municipal applications. They are also widely used in automotive, residential and commercial lighting and for backlighting laptop computers.

Sam DiRenzo, vice president at Veeco, expects demand for these lights to grow at an annual rate of nearly 20 percent over the next five years.

While the devices themselves and their applications are mundane, the technology used in manufacturing them, metal organic chemical vapor deposition, is not. The process employs exotic chemicals and carefully controlled temperatures and pressures to deposit films of gallium nitride onto semiconductor wafers, which are then diced up into chips to form the light-emitting portion of the LEDs.

Earth Day at BNL

As part of its Earth Day observance, Brookhaven National Laboratory will hold a "Solar Grand Plan" lecture on April 21.

Vasilis Fthenakis, head of the National Photovoltaic Environmental Research Center at BNL, will discuss his ambitious plan to cover thousands of square miles of the southwestern United States with huge arrays of solar cells to convert sunlight into electricity to be distributed throughout the existing grid.

He claims the project could put an end to the country's dependence on foreign oil, reduce the trade deficit, cut air pollution and slow global climate change. However, the U.S. government would have to come up with $420 billion over 10 years to support the effort.

Nectar flows through new channel

Farmingdale-based Juma Technology's wholly owned subsidiary Nectar Services Corp. signed a channel partner agreement with ROI Networks, an Internet protocol telephony systems integrator. Juma will now distribute Nectar's suite of enterprise IP telephony management software.

Nectar also entered into a strategic partnership with NextPoint, a provider of hardware and software that links mobile and landline systems within an enterprise.

Tanker feud flies on

In the ongoing spitting contest over the Air Force's award of the new air tanker contract to Northrop Grumman, Boeing claimed that the competitor's design was not capable of refueling the exotic V-22 Osprey aircraft. Northrop's answer? "Yes it can." But neither company has tested the special rig it is offering for that purpose.

The V-22 is a tilt-rotor Marine Corps aircraft that takes off like a helicopter and flies like a plane. The Marine Corps has a squadron of V-22s in service in Iraq that are currently being refueled by older tankers.

Although there was no requirement for a V-22 refueling capability in the original bidding process, the Air Force acknowledged that the Boeing design would be better suited to that purpose. But the Air Force, defending its decision, also said that the Northrop design was better overall and that any problems could be worked out in the development phase.

Another factor affecting the choice was that the first four Northrop aircraft could be delivered quickly because they would be refitted commercial aircraft, not newly built tankers.