Department Achievements

New technology from Prof. Thanh Nguyen published in Science

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The latest issue of Science features a new technology invented and developed by our very own assistant professor Dr. Thanh D. Nguyen. Prof. Nguyen’s brainchild, developed during his postdoc with Prof. Robert Langer at MIT, offers the latest advance in 3D manufacturing for microstructures of biomaterials: StampEd Assembly of polymer Layers, or SEAL for short. The reliance of current 3D printing techniques on potentially toxic impurities (e.g. UV-curing agents) for formulating printable inks poses clear problems for bio and medical applications. SEAL, on the other hand, can create nearly any 3D micro-objects of pure biopolymers (e.g. polymers used for surgical sutures) with complex geometries and at high resolution. Such enhanced biocompatibility of fabricated 3D microstructures for medical applications enables a broad scope of exciting new possibilities. For example, Prof. Nguyen along with other researchers at MIT used SEAL to create 3D core-shell micro-particles containing biological cargos (e.g. vaccines), which can be programed to sequentially release at different times or even at specific locations within the body. The compelling implications of this technique include the potential for a new set of single-injection vaccines/drugs, which could avoid the repetitive, painful, expensive, and inconvenient injections often required to administer vaccines and drug therapies like insulin or growth hormone. To view the article, click here. 

 

Top UConn Interns Are Engineering Students

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The top two UConn undergraduate interns from 2015 are both from the school of engineering, according to the Center for Career Development.

Meredith Rittman, biomedical engineering (‘16) spent her summer with NASA, and Ashley Dumaine, computer science and engineering (‘16) interned with Google. Rittman was named the top intern of the year and Dumaine the runner up.

During her internship at NASA, Rittman studied the effects of deep space radiation on the effectiveness of medication. Unlike many interns, she was starting a new project.

“A lot of interns came on board and were helping research that was already happening,” Rittman said. “[My project] was to start something new. My mentor was the one who identified that he wanted me to work with pharmaceutical efficacy in deep space radiation.”

Working with her NASA mentor and co-mentor, Rittman first did research into what information existed on the topic, since her project was a new idea.

“We’d have weekly meetings to review what I’d come up with during the week. I’d also attend all the branch presentations. It was really like I was a member of the branch. They didn’t treat me like an intern, they treated me like another member of the team,” Rittman said.

Rittman eventually presented her solution to the branch chief and deputy branch chief. She suggested creating a small satellite- about 11 inches by 4 inches by 4 inches- to send pharmaceuticals into deep space, to examine how radiation affects the drugs.

“Basically, will it work, how well will it work and how long will it last,” she said.

After her presentation and some questions, Rittman said the NASA officials agreed with the potential of her solution. As a result of her work at NASA, she is spending this semester studying how effective freeze drying pharmaceuticals can be for long term space travel, a different approach to the same problem her internship addressed.

Dumaine’s Google internship took her to New York City, but she first had to interview for the position.

“The way the internships work, you actually go through the normal interview questions, you pass the interviews and then you get host matching, where you get matched with a project,” Dumaine said. “I was working on the site reliability engineering team.”

Dumaine was eventually placed on the technical infrastructure team and  later worked on  Google’s Borg system, which deals with large scale cluster management, which is a group of linked servers and other resources used for shared tasks. Her project was to create a program that moved relatively poor performing computer tasks onto a different machine, which would allow the Borg jobs to work more effectively.

“That’s mostly what cyber reliability is about, performing stuff faster and in a more reliable manner,” she said.

Her main project in New York was at Google’s Manhattan Complex, which encompasses a city block.

In addition to her primary project, she also participated in a 2-week code sprint at Google’s Mountain View, California headquarters.

Both Dumaine and Rittman said that their internships affected their future careers, though in very different ways.

Dumaine said that she has a job lined up for after graduation at a small company in Norwalk called Datto. She said the difference in size between Datto and Google was intentional.

“I kind of want to work at a smaller company after working at such a big company,” she said. “It was a little bit overwhelming at first.

“They have around 500 employees. It’s significantly smaller but I really like the company,” Dumaine said.

Rittman was interested in orthopedic medical devices as a career path. That changed after her internship.

“My internship at NASA allowed me to see biomedical engineering applied in a way I had never seen before, and made me want to apply biomedical engineering principles to the space environment.” she said.

Published: March 14, 2016

UConn Formula SAE places in the top group in the International Competition

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UConn Formula SAE places in the top group in the International Competition by Timothy Thomas, B.S., ME 2014, UConn SAE Team Leader

After an eighteen hour trek across the country and a days rest thereafter, the downloateam began the four day Formula SAE Competition at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan. The Formula SAE® Series competitions challenge teams of university undergraduate and graduate students to conceive, design, fabricate and compete with a small, formula style, competition vehicle. To give teams the maximum design flexibility and the freedom to express their creativity and imagination there are very few restrictions on the overall vehicle design. Teams typically spend eight to twelve months designing, building, testing and preparing their vehicles before a competition. The international competitions themselves give teams the chance to demonstrate and prove both their creation and their engineering skills in comparison to teams from other universities around the world. The University of Connecticut has fielded a vehicle in the largest of these competitions, Formula SAE Michigan, located at the Michigan International Speedway since the team began just seven years ago. With over 120 colleges and universities registered, Formula SAE Michigan is the largest of its kind. Over the course of four days, the cars are judged in a series of static and dynamic events including: technical inspection, cost, presentation, and engineering design, solo performance trials, and high performance track endurance. These events are scored to determine how well the car performs. Come close of competition the team executed an incredible performance placing 20th overall out of the 120 teams in attendance at one of the most competitive events of the year. This milestone places UConn Formula SAE amongst the elite, solidifying that they are a force to be reckoned with. In the midst of teams with decades of experience, a sizable team base, and much larger budgets, UConn Formula SAE is still considered in its youth as building a successful vehicle involves extensive growth in both engineering and team dynamics. With the continuing support of sponsors and the department of mechanical engineering, UConn Formula SAE is working towards even greater success with the refined design and manufacture of the 2014-2015 vehicle already underway.

Program Wins Grant from  the Harvey Hubbell Foundation

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A program designed to improve learning outcomes for students in Engineering and eventually other STEM fields has been awarded a $178,384 grant from the Hubbell Foundation in Shelton, CT. The proposal, “Improving Educational Outcomes for Undergraduate Students in Engineering: The UConn Lifelong Learning Project”  is a collaboration of the School of Engineering and the School of Nursing, with the support of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning to improve the success of undergraduate students, particularly underrepresented students. The PIs for the program are Daniel Burkey, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Diversity for Engineering, Kevin McLaughlin, Program Director for the Engineering Diversity Program and Thomas Van Hoof, Associate Professor of UConn’s Schools of Nursing and Medicine.

UConn Formula SAE places in the top group in the International Competition

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UConn Formula SAE places in the top group in the International Competition

Although still new to the competition, UConn’s Formula SAE team placed in the top group of competitors at the Formula SAE Competition at Michigan International Speedway in Brooklyn, Michigan.

The four-day competition brings together teams of university undergraduate and graduate students from around the world to conceive, design, fabricate and compete with a small, formula style, competition vehicle. To give teams the maximum design flexibility and the freedom to express their creativity and imagination, there are very few restrictions on the overall vehicle design. Teams typically spend eight to twelve months designing, building and preparing their vehicles before a competition.

The cars are judged in a series of static and dynamic events including technical inspection, cost, presentation, and engineering design, solo performance trials, and high performance track endurance. These events are scored to determine how well the car performs.

The UConn team began competing at the Michigan event seven years ago, making it a relative newcomer compared to many of the other teams. Under advisor Dr. Thomas Mealy, the team nonetheless placed 20th overall out of the 120 teams in attendance at one of the most competitive events of the year. With the continuing support of sponsors and the department of Mechanical Engineering, UConn Formula SAE is working toward even greater success with the refined design and manufacture of the 2014-2015 vehicle already underway.

– Timothy Thomas, B.S., ME 2014, UConn SAE Team Leader

Stanley Black & Decker Teams With UConn

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Stanley Black & Decker Teams With UConn

Drs. Jiong Tang and Chengyu Cao are collaborating with engineers at global tool giant Stanley Black & Decker to create a methodology to analyze the precise mechanism of tools in two of the company’s product lines, impact wrenches and air hammers, as the key step in developing software capable of shortening the company’s new product development cycle and enhancing the product performance.

Their Stanley Black & Decker collaborator on the project is Mark Lehnert, Vice President of Product Development.

Lehnert explains, “The challenge is that in new product development, the traditional cycle is to design a new product based on empirical experience, build a prototype, performance test it, tweak the design again based on empirical experience, build a new prototype, test it – repeat. Our aim is to create a dynamic simulation model that can eliminate one or more of the prototype stages. If we can design and test a new product on a computer, we have much greater flexibility to tweak the design, change the design parameters and materials without sacrificing time. With a computer, we can run a simulation in four to six hours, while the traditional prototyping cycle can consume up to six months. An effective simulation model will allow us to dramatically cut the time to market for new products and to develop better performing products.”

Impact wrenches are widely used in infrastructure construction, manufacturing assembly, machine repair and other industrial applications requiring a high torque output. According to Tang, a professor of Mechanical Engineering, the basic mechanism was invented over 80 years ago and exploits the impact momentum produced when an internal hammer is rotated by a motor at an accelerating rate before striking an anvil. The force of the strike results in an impact causing high torque that far exceeds what could be produced solely by the motor, and after striking the anvil, the hammer is quickly retracted and again spun by the motor. In response, the bolt or screw tightens.

Tang remarks, “The power of impact is easy to envision.  Consider, for example, throwing a baseball versus striking a baseball with a bat. Within an impact wrench, it is the mechanisms that are complicated: these can generate high-frequency continuous dynamic interactions with high precision and high durability that, to date, are designed based on trial-and-error empirical knowledge.”

The UConn/Stanley Black & Decker team has planned a multi-phase project, with the first step centering on the careful mechanical analysis of the wrench aimed at revealing the precise action underway when the wrench is operating.  “Jiong and Chengyu are doing a very ‘deep dive’ analysis that will allow us to understand at a fundamental level the mechanics of the impact wrench. This will lead to the development of better simulation models and allow us to introduce variables such as different materials, heat treating variations and the like,” says Lehnert.

Tang notes that this analysis is complicated because “There are many forces of contact inside the impact wrench, such as when the internal hammer strikes the internal anvil, which cannot be directly observed.  And the entire analysis encompasses dynamic events occurring at vastly different time scales, from a micro-second – the duration of a single impact – all the way to thousands of hours, as in the life-span of the tool.”

One challenge involves the gear transmission in impact wrenches. Tang explains that, while gear transmissions are employed in a myriad of machines and are seemingly an ‘old’ subject, researchers do not yet have a complete understanding of these devices, due to the nonlinear gear meshing and time-periodicity, which generate very complex vibratory behaviors that often cause unexpected failures.  Tang remarks that these issues are not uncommon in much larger-scale devices such as wind turbines, which are another application area within his research scope. In the case of impact wrench, the problem is further compounded by the consecutive impacts that create additional vibrations.  If the vibrations are well understood and then mitigated by new designs, the precision and durability can be enhanced.

To work toward a better understanding of the tool mechanisms, Tang, Cao and their graduate students, Victor Zhang and David Yoo, are developing a dynamic model using a series of software platforms.  They combine first-principle based global modeling with local finite element analysis to predict the time-domain response of the impact wrench, and further incorporate advanced frequency-domain-based algorithms to assist in parametric analysis.  This month the two-year project, which began in July 2013, is approaching an important milestone.  As the UConn researchers are putting together a system-level dynamic model, Stanley Black & Decker is developing a test bed that will enable the researchers to collect data from a prototype.

Lehnert explains, “The prototype has been fabricated and the process has been documented. The next step is to physically test the prototype and to compare the actual performance against the model’s prediction. A good analogy is the odometer in your car. You don’t know how accurate it is until you calibrate it against a known distance. The predictive model will have to be calibrated and aligned with the real performance of the prototype impact wrench. After the model has been properly aligned at the system level, we will carry out detailed component analysis, which will allow us to predict wear and durability.”

When complete, this process will be repeated, step for step, for the air hammer.  Air, or pneumatic, hammers exploit a compressed air and piston system to produce a rapid-fire movement of a piston much like that of a woodpecker drilling for insects on a tree.  Air hammers are commonly used to hammer nails, cut metal, engrave ornamental designs onto materials or drill holes.

For Stanley Black & Decker, this industry-university collaboration promises to enable the company to develop more customized, durable tools on a dramatically reduced time-to-market cycle. As the nation redoubles its support for a revival in American manufacturing, academic-industry partnerships are likely to gain increasing momentum.

Alumnus Helped Popularize Mickey Mouse Watch

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Alumnus Helped Popularize Mickey Mouse Watch

Across his long and storied career, alumnus Gordon Cooper, PE (B.S. Mechanical Engineering ’50) played a leading role in helping major manufacturers grow their global operations.  Among the highlights of his career was his contributions toward expanding the iconic Mickey Mouse watch line first introduced in 1933.

Mr. Cooper is now retired and living in Palm Beach, Florida, where this octogenarian still enjoys hitting the golf links under sunny skies whenever possible.

But during his working career, he was a focused, ambitious achiever who contributed to the expansion of three companies that still exist today: Timex, Shuron Optical and Broan/Nutone.

As a student at Leavenworth High School in Waterbury, Mr. Cooper recalls, one of his teachers had a second job as an engineer at the Brass City’s Waterbury Clock Company.  Admiring Mr. Cooper’s skillful drafting work, the teacher suggested he apply to work at the clock company. That recommendation commenced a long relationship between Mr. Cooper and the company that would become Timex.  At 16, he began work as a junior drafter translating the engineers’ designs into exact, scale models of the mechanical parts that enable a watch to function.  Those were the days before the advent of computers, when everything from architectural drawings and car designs to small devices were painstakingly designed on large pads of paper using a T-square, to be faithfully reproduced by the production team.

As he graduated from high school, World War II dominated global events, and like so many young men, he enlisted in the Air Corps.  He explains that back then, aviation cadets had to have two years of college. To help young men fulfill this requirement, they were sent to one of two universities offering intensive, compressed college courses for cadets. He attended Xavier University in Cincinnati, which provided two years’ worth of education in just six tightly choreographed months. “We students were in school seven days a week, day in and day out, without a break,” he recalls. Next up was pilot training in Biloxi, MS and then cadet training in Enid, OK.  Mr. Cooper was a pilot until the war ended in 1945.

After returning home to Connecticut, Mr. Cooper attended UConn on the GI Bill and focused intently on his engineering studies with the ambition of building a successful engineering career.

Meanwhile, in his native Waterbury, as the Waterbury clock company struggled during the war, it was bought by two Norwegian families, who expanded the operation and renamed it United States Time Corp. (renamed Timex in 1969).

Storied Career Years

With his freshly minted degree in hand, in 1950 Mr. Cooper returned to his former employer to work full-time as an engineer.  Through hard work, he ascended to Chief Engineer and later Plant Manager.  One of his fondest memories from his years at U.S. Time Corp./Timex is his work with Walt Disney, the visionary, on the design of the company’s iconic Mickey Mouse watch series.  He still has a prototype Mickey Mouse watch among his collection of 200 watches and notes mickey1that the Mickey Mouse watches were very popular with children.  Another dearly-held memory was his role in presenting Timex watches to two of the original seven astronauts, John H. Glenn and L. Gordon Cooper, shortly after their historic Mercury spacecraft flights in 1962-63.

Intent on climbing the career ladder, he left for Rochester, NY, where he joined Shuron Continental Optical, a manufacturer of lenses and optical equipment for the eyeglass industry, in the role of Vice President of Manufacturing.  After ascending to President and CEO, he was lured back to Connecticut by Timex to serve as Vice President and later President of Timex Industries.

Like a ping-pong ball being volleyed across the net, in 1976, he was recruited away by another big company, Energy Products Group/Gulf & Western in Illinois, which he left two years later to assume the role of President and CEO of Broan Manufacturing Corp. (now Broan-NuTone) in Hartford, Wisconsin.  Cooper remarks that he took the company – the leading manufacturer of kitchen range hoods, trash compactors and built-in household fans – from a small company to a very large corporation.  When the company was sold to Nortek, he remained President until his retirement in 1989.

Despite the demands of a remarkable executive career, Mr. Cooper married and helped raise two children, earned his Professional Engineer license (he was licensed in Connecticut, Florida and Arkansas) and became a Certified Manufacturing Engineer, and also managed to earn a certificate from Harvard’s Graduate Advanced Management Program. He also helped to invent two patented technologies – a vacuum die casting process and apparatus and an air-to-ground missile device.

For his accomplishments, in 1986 Mr. Cooper received the Most Distinguished Alumni Award and in 1998 the Most Distinguished Engineer Award from UConn Engineering.

An avid golfer, he moved to Palm Beach Gardens, FL after retirement, where he lived next to a golf course and still – undaunted at the age of 87 – regularly enjoys golf.

Public-Private Partnership Advances Gas Turbine Materials Technology

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Public-Private Partnership Advances Gas Turbine Materials Technology

By Victoria Chilinski (CLAS ’16) and Maurice Gell, Ph.D.

Drs. Maurice Gell and Eric Jordan have developed a new process for making ceramic thermal barrier coatings (TBCs) that are used extensively in gas turbine engines. This Solution Precursor Plasma Spray (SPPS) process allows the deposition of higher temperature, lower thermal conductivity TBCs that will provide significant fuel savings for aircraft and land-based gas turbines.

This technology captured the interest of HiFunda LLC, a Salt Lake City small business, in 2011.  As a result, HiFunda LLC and UConn have teamed on two U.S. Department of Energy Small Business Technology Transfer Program (STTR) projects. The latest is a newly-begun Phase II award totaling $1 million, of which UConn receives $387,000 as the sub-contractor.  The program, entitled “Ultra-High Temperature Thermal Barrier Coatings,” utilizes the SPPS process to deposit highly durable TBCs made from yttrium aluminum garnet (YAG), a high-temperature, low thermal conductivity ceramic that cannot be deposited with adequate durability using commercial TBC processes. The SPPS process uniquely provides YAG TBCs with a strain-tolerant microstructure that provides excellent durability in thermal cycle tests.

DOE is committed to increasing the energy efficiency of turbines through the use of thermal barrier coatings, which are highly advanced material systems that are applied to insulate the metallic components of machines operating at high temperatures. For these turbines to become more efficient, however, they must operate at a temperate above current thermal barrier coatings’ limit of 1200°C.  Higher temperature thermal barrier coatings would permit engines to operate more efficiently at higher temperatures, thus saving fuel and reducing greenhouse emissions.  Alternatively, the thermal barrier coatings can be used at the same turbine temperatures and provide improved turbine component durability.

HiFunda has established a Thermal Spray Facility within the technology incubator at UConn’s Depot campus, moved a senior researcher to UConn, and is providing funds for capital equipment and supplies. The company’s intention is to license this UConn-patented technology and to establish a new company at UConn to further develop and market the SPPS technology.

Initial results from the earlier Phase I HiFunda LLC/UConn DOE collaboration on this same technology were very promising. As a result, five U.S companies, including Pratt & Whitney, Praxair, Progressive Surface, Siemens Energy and Solar Turbines have become industrial partners to the Phase II program and will provide more than $250,000 of cost share funds. These companies will evaluate the SPPS YAG TBCs in specimen, rig, and engine tests and will evaluate the economics of the process in production facilities.

STTR is a highly competitive federal program coordinated by the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), which grants research and development funds to non-profit research institutions that partner with small businesses. The program combines the strengths of both non-profit research and small business’s innovation by introducing entrepreneurial skills to high-tech research efforts.