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article an introduction to rigid-flex design best practices continues Figure 5: Simulated bending of a flex circuit reveals a clearance violation between a flexmounted pin-header and SMDs on the main rigid board. The violating components are highlighted green. Figure 4: An example rigid-flex PCB design in Altium Designer's 3D mode, showing intended bends in the flex circuit areas. improved rigid-flex design capabilities into existing PCB design tools. PCBDESIGN Sources & Additional Reading 1. Clyde F. Coombs, Jr. (Ed.), "Flexible Circuit Applications and Materials," Chapter 61 in Printed Circuits Handbook, Sixth Edition, 2008 McGraw Hill. 2. Joseph Fjelstad, Flexible Circuit Technology, p. 186, Fourth Edition, 2011 BR Publishing. Group Hopes to Produce Electricity On the Moon with... at Night by Real Time NEPCON South China Researchers from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and U.S. collaborators have studied two options for storing energy on the moon during the day for use at night. "The first system consists of modifying fragments of regolith or lunar soil, incorporating elements such as aluminium, for example, such 3. Benjamin Jordan, Ruminating Rigid-Flex - Part 1 - 5, "Flex Circuit Materials," Altium Live Blog, available here. Ben Jordan has more than 20 years of electronics experience, including PCB design and embedded computing and FPGA hardware and software, and has research interests in signal processing, audio electronics, and PCB design. Ben Jordan has worked as an account engineer, field account engineer, and in marketing and management roles at Altium since 2004. that it becomes a thermal mass," says study coauthor Ricard Gonzalez-Cinca. The second system incorporates a more sophisticated series of mirrors and a heat engine. The mirrors are Fresnel reflectors, which concentrate solar rays upon a fluid-filled tube. This heat converts the liquid into a gas, which heats the thermal mass. At night, heat is transferred to a Stirling engine to produce electricity. January 2014 • The PCB Design Magazine 33