Tag Archives: Mechanical Engineering

Sanjay Sarma, the Fred Fort Flowers and Daniel Fort Flowers Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has been appointed MIT’s first director of digital learning, effective immediately.  In his new capacity, Sarma will work closely with the Institute’s faculty, staff and students to assess how new models of online instruction — such as the edX online-learning platform; MITx, the Institute’s course offerings on that platform; and other online tools that enhance students’ educational experiences — might become integral parts of MIT students’ on-campus education. These tools can also allow global learners access to MIT-quality instructional experiences. Read the rest of the article on MIT news.  photo by Bryce Vickmark

In many respects, metamaterials are supernatural. These manmade materials, with their intricately designed structures, bend electromagnetic waves in ways that are impossible for materials found in nature. Scientists are investigating metamaterials for their potential to engineer invisibility cloaks — materials that refract light to hide an object in plain sight — and “super lenses,” which focus light beyond the range of optical microscopes to image objects at nanoscale detail. Researchers at MIT have now fabricated a three-dimensional, lightweight metamaterial lens that focuses radio waves with extreme precision. The concave lens exhibits a property called negative refraction, bending electromagnetic waves — in this case, radio waves — in exactly the opposite sense from which a normal concave lens would work.

For Isaac Ehrenberg, an MIT graduate student in mechanical engineering, the device evokes an image from the movie “Star Wars”: the Death Star, a space station that shoots laser beams from a concave dish, the lasers converging to a point to destroy nearby planets. While the researchers’ fabricated lens won’t be blasting any planetary bodies in the near future, Ehrenberg says there are other potential applications for the device, such as molecular and deep-space imaging. To continue reading the article, visit MITnews.

We’ve all been there. You get a bottle of Heinz ketchup from your cupboard or in a restaurant ready to dress up those fresh-cut fries. When you open it up, however, the bottle is nearly finished and you have to keep tapping the neck of the container to get the last bits to flow out. That, or you can keep shaking and pray the ketchup won’t end up everywhere. Instead, reseachers from Varanasi Research Group developed LiquiGlide, a non-stick coating for food packaging that will help substances flow out of the containers more seamlessly. Team LiquiGlide was bestowed the honor of the popular vote at the May 14th 100k finale presentation, with audience members texting their favorite pitch to the contest organizers to vote. The team, with Mechanical Engineering graduate students Dave Smith, Brian Solomon, Adam Paxson, and Chris Love, as well as postdoc Rajeev Dhiman and advisor Prof. Varanasi, was a WildCard Round winner and one of the 8 teams to make the final round. Read more and watch a ketchup video on digitaltrends.com.

A joint entry by David Fenning (Presidential Fellow) and Doug Powell, the Impurity to Efficiency Simulator, won second place in this year’s De Florez Competition for the category of Graduate Design. The competition had 38 applicants in four categories, all of which competed against each other for a total of $18,000 in prize money. The categories were Undergraduate Engineering Design, Undergraduate Engineering Science, Graduate Engineering Design and Graduate Engineering Science. Applicants try to “sell” their products and judges look at the entries’ level of creativity, innovation, practical application, scientific basis and design skill. For more information and the full list of this years’ winners, please visit April 2012 MechE News.

Dr. Norman Fortenberry, Mechanical Engineering PhD Alumnus ’91, and a longtime leader in education scholarship who has held senior positions at the National Science Foundation and National Academy of Engineering, has been appointed Executive Director of the American Society for Engineering Education.