Author: Orlando E

ME Students Triumph with Fastest Formula SAE Car

By Olivia Drake, Written Communications Specialist
Photos courtesy of Doug Willoughby/SAE and the UConn FSAE team

During the FSAE intercollegiate competition, held May 17-20, 2023, at Michigan International Speedway, the student-run motorsport club placed in the top 10% of 121 teams from the U.S. and Europe. This was UConn’s 13th year competing.

UConn’s Formula SAE team recently competed at the Michigan International Speedway and placed 11th overall.

“As a whole, this year’s competition was one of the most successful in the team’s history,” said UConn FSAE President Abhimanyu “Abhi” Sukumaran ’24 (MENG). “The car and team both performed immaculately, and everyone knows that we brought one of—if not the fastest—cars to competition.”

Luka Liguori ’24 (MENG), seated, participates in a “tilt test” to see if any fluids leak when the car is lifted to a 60 degree angle.
Luka Liguori ’24 (MENG), seated, participates in a “tilt test” to see if any fluids leak when the car is lifted to a 60 degree angle.

The annual competition, organized by SAE International (previously known as the Society of Automotive Engineers) challenges college students to conceive, design, fabricate, develop, and compete with formula-style vehicles. “Formula” vehicles are small, single-seater racecars characterized by a low-to-the-ground aerodynamic design, an open cockpit, and exposed wheels. These high-performance vehicles can reach speeds over 110 mph on certain tracks.

During the three-day event, teams are awarded points for participation in three static events (cost presentation, design presentation, and business presentation) and five dynamic events (acceleration; skidpad; autocross; fuel economy; and endurance).

UConn’s vehicle—the CT-14 (Connecticut, version 14)—scored an impressive 28/30 for its cost analysis presentation and 88/100 points for the design presentation. 

“This year we had very tough judges who grilled us quite a bit and really tested our knowledge,” Sukumaran said. “Luckily we had done a lot of prep work and we managed to get some of the highest scores of the day!”

But the true test of the CT-14 was measured during the dynamic events. UConn’s team scored 12th in the “figure-eight” skid pad event; seventh in the 45-second timed autocross event; and first place in the 75-meter acceleration event—with a time of 4.17 seconds.

“We had been prepping for months trying to get the car setup right and squeeze the most performance out of it,” Sukumaran said. “We were almost a 10th of a second ahead of second place, so we were thrilled with that result. This was the first time in the team’s history that we have ever won an event and we did it convincingly.”

More than 70 students worked on the CT-14 during the 2022-23 academic year; 50 of whom went to the competition in Michigan. Team members learn to design, fabricate, assemble, manage budgets, acquire sponsors, and market themselves and their vehicle.

Formula SAE organizing committee member Steve Balanecki congratulates UConn’s driver Tyler Dickey ’24 (MENG), who placed first in the acceleration event.
Formula SAE organizing committee member Steve Balanecki congratulates UConn’s driver Tyler Dickey ’24 (MENG), who placed first in the acceleration event.

More experienced members, such as recent alumnus Simon Getter ’23 (MENG) frequently take on leadership roles. Getter joined the FSAE team as a freshman—seeking an extracurricular activity where he could learn practical engineering skills alongside like-minded students. As a sophomore, Getter served as the team’s control systems lead, and during his senior year, he served as the controls and ergonomics lead.

As the controls system lead, Getter’s group made the vehicle’s steering, brakes, seat, and pedals.

“In that position I got a ton of very important experience leading and communicating with other systems of the team,” he said. “Engineering wise, I was able to create parts and validate designs with [Computer Aided Design] software and [finite element analysis]—things we touched on in classes but were greatly expanded on during my time on the team.”

While member participation varies, Getter clocked more than 20 hours a week working on the project—but the dedication paid off. Not only did the team place 11th in the competition, he and 11 other graduating seniors, who were members of the 2022-23 Formula SAE team, had job offers or plans to continue their education well before graduation in May.

“Formula” vehicles are small, single-seater racecars characterized by a low-to-the-ground aerodynamic design, an open cockpit, and exposed wheels.
“Formula” vehicles are small, single-seater racecars characterized by a low-to-the-ground aerodynamic design, an open cockpit, and exposed wheels.

“The experience we gain through FSAE complements the more theoretically-based classes at UConn. This keeps our team members balanced and helps us to become the best engineers the school has to offer,” Getter said.

Thomas Mealy, adjunct professor of mechanical engineering and FSAE senior design advisor credits the team’s success to an overwhelming passion for creating the best car possible.

“UConn’s Formula SAE team embodies a spirit of excellence, determination, sacrifice, and collaboration,” Mealy said. “They have not only demonstrated remarkable technical prowess in designing and building a cutting-edge race car, but they have also cultivated a culture of innovation and teamwork that sets them apart. This team stands on the shoulders of hundreds of students that preceded them, many of whom come back and offer their advice and experience. As the advisor of this exceptional team, I am immensely proud of their accomplishments, and they are setting the bar high for future teams.”

For more information, visit the team’s website or follow @uconnformulaasae on Instagram

Biodegradable Ultrasound Opens the Blood-Brain Barrier

A new, biodegradable piezoelectric device far more powerful than previous devices could make brain cancers more treatable, a team of Mechanical Engineering researchers report in the June 14 issue of Science Advances.

The research team. From left to right: Kazem Kazerounian, Thanh Nguyen, Feng Lin, Thinh Le, Meysam Chorsi, and Horea Ilies.

The group, developed a novel sensor from electrospun crystals of glycine, an amino acid that is a common protein in the body, and has been recently found to be strongly piezo-electric.

Read more by following the link below:
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Prof. Bilal receives the 2023 Phononics Young Investigator Award

This year’s Phononics Young Investigator Award goes to our own ME Prof. Osama Bilal. “The Phononics Young Investigator Award (YIA) is presented by the International Phononics Society to an early-career researcher who demonstrates research excellence in the field of phononics (including phononic crystals, acoustic/elastic metamaterials, nanoscale phonon transport, wave propagation in periodic structures, coupled phenomena involving phonons, topological phononics, and related areas).” As a recipient, Prof. Bilal will deliver the 2023 Phononics Young Investigator Award Lecture during the upcoming conference in Manchester, UK.

Energy and Emissions in the Built Environment: A Grand Challenge

Abstract: The construction and operation of buildings contribute massively to global energy use and greenhouse gas emissions; therefore, buildings will play a central role in the path toward a sustainable, net zero, clean energy future. This presentation will give a high-level framing of buildings’ role in the 21st century energy challenge, as well as associated opportunities and emerging research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) that are developing in response. The talk will start out by quantifying buildings contributions to energy and emissions, and then highlight select ongoing programs and RDD&D efforts at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Wale Odukomaiya joined NREL’s Building Technologies and Science Center in 2018 as a Director’s Fellow. His research focuses on innovating heat transfer, energy storage, and functional materials in ways that improve building efficiencies and support low-carbon buildings. This research applies fundamental heat transfer, thermodynamics, and materials science to advanced energy technologies and building components, with an emphasis on thermal and electromechanical energy storage technologies; heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC); and advanced manufacturing of related components. Prior to joining NREL, Dr. Odukomaiya was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Building Technologies Research and Integration Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where he worked on the development of energy storage and magnetocaloric refrigeration technologies. His research background includes developing advanced energy technologies and building components, energy policy and economics, and thermal and electro-mechanical energy storage.

Open Access Benchmark Datasets and Metamodels for Problems in Mechanics

Abstract: Metamodels, or models of models, map defined model inputs to defined model outputs. When metamodels are constructed to be computationally cheap, they are an invaluable tool for applications ranging from topology optimization, to uncertainty quantification, to real-time prediction, to multi-scale simulation. In particular, for heterogeneous materials, metamodels are useful for exploring the influence of the (potentially massive) heterogeneous material property parameter space. By nature, a given metamodel will be tailored to a specific dataset. However, the most pragmatic metamodel type and structure will often be general to larger classes of problems. At present, the most pragmatic metamodel selection for dealing with mechanical data — specifically simulations of heterogenous materials — has not been thoroughly explored. In this work, we draw inspiration from the benchmark datasets available to the computer vision research community. These benchmark datasets have both made it feasible to compare different methods for solving the same problem, and inspired new directions for method development. In response, we introduce benchmark datasets for engineering mechanics problems (for example, the Mechanical MNIST Collection https://open.bu.edu/handle/2144/39371 [1,2,3, 4]). Then, we show some example problems that we are exploring with these datasets such as our methodology for constructing metamodels for predicting full field quantities of interest (e.g., full field displacements, stress, strain, or damage variable), for leveraging information from multiple simulation fidelities, and for creating well calibrated models. Looking forward, we anticipate that disseminating both these benchmark datasets and our computational methods will enable the broader community of researchers to develop improved techniques for understanding the behavior of spatially heterogeneous materials. We also hope to inspire others to use our datasets for educational and research purposes, and to disseminate datasets and metamodels specific to their own areas of interest (https://elejeune11.github.io/).

Biographical Sketch: Emma Lejeune is an Assistant Professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department at Boston University. She received her PhD from Stanford University in September 2018, and was a Peter O’Donnell, Jr. postdoctoral research fellow at the Oden Institute at the University of Texas at Austin until 2020 when she joined the faculty at BU. At BU, Emma has received the David R. Dalton Career Development Professorship, a Computational Science and Engineering Junior Faculty Fellowship, the Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Grant from the ASME Applied Mechanics Division, and the American Heart Association Career Development Award. Current areas of research involve integrating data-driven and physics based computational models, and characterizing and predicting the mechanical behavior of heterogeneous materials and biological systems.

In-vitro microfluidic characterization of sickle cells challenged by repeated hypoxia cycles and mechanical fatigue

Abstract: Sickle cells are known for their significantly shortened lifespan (10-20 days), which is much shorter than the lifespan (~120 days) of the normal red blood cells (RBCs). Similar to normal RBCs, sickle cells are also challenged by repeated hypoxia cycles as well as mechanical fatigue. To examine the impact of these repeated challenges toward the progressive degradation process of RBCs, we have developed in vitro microfluidic assays for testing RBCs in health and disease under cyclic hypoxia loading or cyclic mechanical loading. Both types of fatigue loading are found to cause significant RBC degradation in a cumulative manner. More importantly, our results show that sickle cells on average degrade much faster than normal healthy RBCs. These results provide new insights into the possible mechanisms underlying the significantly shortened lifespan of sickle cells. The developed assays can be used for drug efficacy screening and potentially disease severity testing in a patient-specific manner.

Biographical Sketch: Ming Dao is the Principal Investigator and Director of MIT’s Nanomechanics Laboratory, and a Principal Research Scientist in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. His research interests include nanomechanics of advanced materials, cell biomechanics/biophysics of human diseases, and machine learning for engineering and biomedical applications. He has published over 160 papers in peer-reviewed journals, including Science, Nature Materials, Science Advances, Nature Communications, PNAS, etc. He was ranked within the Top 2% Scientists list established by Ioannidis/Stanford University in all four updates published in June 2019 (single year), October 2020 (single year & career), October 2021 (single year & career), and November 2022 (single year & career). He is also ranked as a top 0.5% researcher in both citation and h-index by Exaly.com (March 2023).

He is a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and named the 2012 Singapore Research Chair / Professor in Bioengineering and Infectious Disease by MIT. He was a visiting professor with the National Institute of Blood Transfusion, Paris, France (INTS, 2016-2017) and an adjunct professor with Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an, China (2011-2020). Since 2018, he has been a visiting professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He has also chaired or co-chaired 18 international symposiums/workshops/webinar series.

An Isogeometric Approach To Immersed Finite Element Analysis with Applications to Level-Set Topology Optimization

Abstract: Topology optimization has emerged as a promising and powerful approach to design engineered materials and components. Initially restricted to two-phase, solid-void design problems in linear elasticity, topology optimization approaches for multi-physics and multi-material problems have emerged. These problems are often dominated by interface phenomena, such as contact and delamination at material interfaces and boundary layer effects at fluid-solid interfaces. Accurately modeling these phenomena and, at the same time, allowing for topological changes in the optimization process pose interesting challenges on the formulation of the design optimization problem, the physics model, and the discretization method.

This talk will provide an overview of topology optimization approaches for problems, reviewing both density and level set topology optimization methods. This overview will show that level set methods combined with immersed finite element approaches provide a promising framework, especially for coupled multi-physics and multi-material topology optimization problems. The accuracy, robustness, and accuracy of the finite element analysis play a crucial role for such problems. This talk will present an isogeometric formulation of the eXtended Finite Element Method where the level set and state variables fields are discretized on adaptively refined meshes, using truncated hierarchical B-splines. Using approximate Lagrange extraction, this formulation can be integrated in standard finite element solvers.

The characteristics of this XFEM analysis and level set topology optimization framework will be illustrated with 2D and 3D problems in solid and fluid mechanics, including elastic, flow, and conjugate heat transfer problems.

Biographical Sketch: Dr. Maute is the Palmer Endowed Chair and a professor in the Ann and H.J. Smead Aerospace Engineering Sciences Department at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Maute received a Bs/Ms. in Aerospace Engineering in 1992 and Ph.D. in Civil Engineering in 1998, both from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. After working as a postdoctoral research associate at the Center for Aerospace Structures, he started his faculty position at CUB in 2000. His research is concerned with computational mechanics and design optimization methods. He focuses on fundamental problems in solid and fluid mechanics and heat transfer with applications to aerospace, civil, mechanical engineering problems. For the past 30 years, Dr. Maute has worked on topology and shape optimization methods for a broad range of problems focusing on coupled multi-physics and multi-scale problems, such as fluid-structure interaction and chemo-mechanically coupling. Dr. Maute has published his work in over 200 journal articles, book chapters, and conference proceedings.

Embedding Physical Intelligence in Soft Active Materials through Stimuli-Responsive Phase Transformation: from Photomechanical Actuation to Thermo-switchable Adhesion

Abstract:

The emerging economic and societal needs such as advanced manufacturing, environmental treatment, and space exploration call for machines that can operate in harsh and complex environments. An attractive approach is to utilize a new paradigm of physical intelligence in material development: a rational material design will enable its on-board actuation, sensing, and analysis, without a need for central computing or complex control. This talk will present our recent progress in the fundamental research of embedding physical intelligence in soft active materials. A stretchable polymer network responds to an external stimulus such as light or heat, dramatically changes its shape or material property, and enables special functionality in its bulk or surface. The first part of the talk presents photoactive liquid crystal elastomers that can change their shape and generate work output under light illumination or temperature change. Emphasis is placed on the fundamental photo-thermo-mechanical coupling across many length scales, especially at the mesoscale where the polymer network and liquid crystal mesogens behave collectively, leading to multiple interesting phenomena and their consequences in the macroscopic actuation. The second part of the talk presents temperature-switchable adhesives with high adhesion strength, large switching ratio, fast switching speed, and good reversibility. A polymer network containing many free-end dangling chains is a strong adhesive at ambient environment due to the long chains, dense physical bonds, and large dissipation from the polymer matrix, and is completely non-adhering at an elevated temperature due to its thermo-responsive phase transition. This talk is hoped to help advance the fundamental knowledge of soft active materials, bring together communities of relevant research fields, and expand the potential large-scale applications.

Bio:

Ruobing Bai is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at Northeastern University. He received his BS in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Peking University in 2012, and PhD in Engineering Sciences at Harvard University in 2018. He was a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at California Institute of Technology from 2018 to 2020. He is the recipient of the Chun-Tsung Scholar in Peking University, the Haythornthwaite Research Initiation Award from the Applied Mechanics Division of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME), and the Extreme Mechanics Letters (EML) Young Investigator Award. Research in the Bai group aims to combine theory and experiment in areas including solid mechanics, soft active materials, fracture and toughening of materials, adhesion, and sustainable materials, for applications such as soft robotics, advanced manufacturing, human-machine interfaces, and human health.