Faculty News

ME Students Revamp Hartford’s Historic Keney Clock Tower

Posted on by

After a four-year vacation, the Historic Keney Clock is telling time again thanks to senior design project completed by Mechanical Engineering students seniors Henry Courchaine ’19, Garrett Murphy ’19, and Spencer Padget ’19 advised by Thomas Mealy. The project was a collaboration between UConn, the City of Hartford and Friends of Keney Park.

Through our Senior Design Program, directed by Prof. Vito Moreno, industrial sponsors put the bright UConn ME undergraduate students to work on a real-world problem that they are interested in researching, while reaping the benefits of our faculty’s experience and expertise. The renovation of the Historic Keney Clock Tower is one of the more than 65 senior design projects that Mechanical Engineering students worked on during the 2018-2019 academic year.

For additional information, please see the article in UConn Today or the press coverage, including:

 

Our Senior Design Program Leads to Mutually Beneficial Partnerships with Industry

Posted on by

Through our Senior Design Program, industrial sponsors put the bright UConn ME undergraduate students to work on a real-world problem that they are interested in researching, while reaping the benefits of our faculty’s experience and expertise. For students, this program is an opportunity to synthesize and apply the classroom engineering knowledge they have acquired. They delve further into various aspects of product development process, and are experiencing first hand how ethics affect engineering decisions, how professionals communicate ideas and the day-to-day implications of design decisions and of intellectual property.

Here is a podcast, part of Simsbury Bank’s “Manufacturing Matters” initiative, in which CEO Martin Geitz discusses a UConn Engineering Senior Design partnership with EDAC Technologies that has provided a mechanism to hire some of our talented engineering graduates while providing solutions to one of the company’s major challenges.

 

From left to right in the video: Kenneth Osborn (Engineering Manager, EDAC), Emily Sweeney (UConn senior), Martin Geitz (CEO, Simsbury Bank) and Prof. Vito Moreno (UConn).

 

A new, nature-inspired self-healing rubber developed by Prof. Li and his collaborators from USC.

Posted on by
A severed 3D-printed shoe pad repairing itself (Submitted Photo/An Xin and Kunhao Yu)

A new paper published by Prof. Ying Li and his collaborators from University of Southern California in NPG Asia Materials provide the details of a new class of self-healing rubber that is inspired by the healing of natural tissues.

For more details, please see the news article from UConn Today.

 

 

Jiong Tang to serve as the General Chair for ASME IDETC & CIE 2019

Posted on by

Prof. Jiong Tang will serve as the general conference chair for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ international annual design conference in Anaheim CA. The 2019 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference (IDETC) and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (CIE) will take place between August August 18 – 21, 2019  at the Anaheim Convention Center.

Strain Improves Performance of Atomically Thin Semiconductor Material

Posted on by

Dr. Michael Pettes and his graduate student Wei Wu have significantly improved the performance of an atomically thin semiconductor material by stretching it, an accomplishment that could prove beneficial to engineers designing the next generation of flexible electronics, nano devices, and optical sensors. The findings mark the first time scientists have been able to conclusively show that the properties of atomically thin materials can be mechanically manipulated to enhance their performance, Pettes says. Such capabilities could lead to faster computer processors and more efficient sensors.  The process the researchers used to achieve the outcome is also significant in that it offers a reliable new methodology for measuring the impact of strain on ultrathin materials, something that has been difficult to do and a hindrance to innovation.  More information is available at UConn Today:  http://s.uconn.edu/4ad

Profs. Chen and Norato win coveted 2018 NSF CAREER awards for their work on Additive Manufacturing and Topology Optimization

Posted on by

Two ME professors received the 2018 National Science Foundation’s CAREER award, which is the Foundation’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.

Prof. Xu Chen’s award will support his research on thermal modeling, sensing, and controls to enable new generations of powder bed fusion (PBF) additive manufacturing. In contrast to conventional machining, where parts are made by cutting away unwanted material, additive manufacturing — also called 3D printing — builds three-dimensional objects of unprecedented complexity by progressively adding small amounts of material. PBF is a popular form of AM for fabricating complex metallic or high-performance polymer parts. This CAREER project will create new knowledge critical for substantially higher accuracy and greater reproducibility in PBF and AM. Building on innovations to model and control the thermal mechanical process, the research will illuminate ways to mitigate quality variations on the fly, and provide new feedback-centric control paradigms to engineer the layered deposition of thermal energy, which is imperative for quality and reproducibility. PBF parts are increasingly preferred in applications ranging from advanced jet-engine components to custom-designed medical implants. The outcomes of this project will facilitate fabrication of products to benefit the US economy and improve quality of life. More broadly, methods and tools developed from this research has the potential to drastically impact the manufacturing of a wide range of components for the energy, aerospace, automotive, healthcare, and biomedical industries that can benefit from short-run high-quality production.

Prof. Norato’s award will support fundamental research to formulate a design framework to systematically incorporate geometric design rules and manufacturing cost considerations into the computational design of structures. In particular, the techniques advanced in this project belong to a group of techniques called topology optimization, in which a computer program finds the optimal shape of a structural component or an architected material. This research will enable the conceptual design and optimization of lightweight, high-performance, and economically-viable structures with applications across a wide range of engineering industries. The new design capabilities will have the potential to significantly reduce manufacturing and R&D costs and thereby increase the economic competitiveness of American manufacturers. Prof. Norato is also a recipient of the 2017 ONR Young Investigator Award.

Both awards are for five years and approximately $500,000 (minimum), and have an outreach component towards K-12 students and people from underrepresented communities.