Mechanical Science research areas include:
Mechanics and Materials
Research Areas: Acoustics; Multi-body dynamics; Fatigue and fracture processes; Friction and wear; Biomechanics; Plasticity; Composites; Microelectronic materials; Materials under extreme loading conditions; Irradiation hardening; Nanomechanics of materials; Multiscale computational methods.
Participating faculty: Kurt Anderson, Terry Blanchet, Suvranu De, Fudong Han, Nikhil Koratkar, Jie Lian, Emily Liu, Antoinette Maniatty, Kristen Mills, Catalin Picu, Johnson Samuel, Mark Shephard, John Tichy, and Lucy Zhang.
Thermal and Fluids Engineering
Research Areas: Energy efficiency and sustainability; Advanced microfluidics for thermal management; System level thermal management, heat conduction and solid-state thermoelectric energy conversion in nanostructured materials; Nanoscale thermal metrology; Interfacial heat transfer; Convection and phase-change in microchannels; Structured surfaces for enhanced heat transfer; Nanostructured thermal interface materials; Thermal energy storage materials; Heat generation and dissipation in radio frequency heated magnetic nanoparticles; Microsystems for energy harvesting; Plasmonic nanoparticles spectrally coupled with luminescent solar concentrators; Loop heat pipes; and Combustion.
Participating faculty: Theodorian Borca-Tascuic, Diana Andra Borca-Tascuic, Fudong Han, Amir Hirsa, Jie Lian, Shankar Narayan, Matthew Oehlschlaeger, Johnson Samuel, Shanbin Shi and Lucy Zhang.
Design and Manufacturing
Research Areas: Research areas: Design methodology in general and mechanical engineering design techniques in particular; Tribology, Metrology; Rapid prototyping; Flexible manufacturing; Micro/nano-scale manufacturing (subtractive and additive techniques); Process modeling; Material design for manufacturing; Sustainable manufacturing; Fiber-composite processing; Fuel-cell manufacturing; Bio-medical manufacturing; New manufacturing techniques; Operation of manufacturing facilities; CAD/CAM; Diagnostics and controls.
Participating faculty: Terry Blanchet, Antoinette Maniatty, Sandipan Mishra, Daniel Walczyk, and John Wen.
Dynamics and Controls
Research Areas: Adaptive and Smart Optics Systems; Intelligent Building Systems; Control of Micro/Nano-scale Manufacturing; Learning Control Systems; Nonlinear, Robust and Adaptive Control, Human-in-the-loop Control Design; Stochastic system identification, time-varying and non-linear systems, statistical signal processing.
Participating faculty: Kurt Anderson, Fotis Kopsaftopoulos, Sandipan Mishra, and John Wen.