From cutting-edge robotics, design, and bioengineering to sustainable power options, ocean engineering, nanotechnology, and revolutionary supplies science, MechE college students and their advisors are doing extremely revolutionary work. The graduate college students highlighted right here signify a snapshot of the good work in progress this spring throughout the Department of Mechanical Engineering, and reveal the methods the long run of this area is as limitless because the imaginations of its practitioners.
Democratizing design by way of AI
Lyle Regenwetter
Hometown: Champaign, Illinois
Advisor: Assistant Professor Faez Ahmed
Interests: Food, climbing, snowboarding, soccer, tennis, cooking
Lyle Regenwetter finds pleasure within the prospect of generative AI to “democratize” design and allow inexperienced designers to deal with advanced design issues. His analysis explores new coaching strategies by way of which generative AI fashions may be taught to implicitly obey design constraints and synthesize higher-performing designs. Knowing that potential designers usually have an intimate data of the wants of customers, however might in any other case lack the technical coaching to create options, Regenwetter additionally develops human-AI collaborative instruments that permit AI fashions to work together and assist designers in fashionable CAD software program and actual design issues.
Solving a whale of an issue
Loïcka Baille
Hometown: L’Escale, France
Advisor: Daniel Zitterbart
Interests: Being open air — scuba diving, spelunking, or climbing. Sailing on the Charles River, martial arts courses, and taking part in volleyball
Loïcka Baille’s analysis focuses on growing distant sensing applied sciences to review and defend marine life. Her primary mission revolves round enhancing onboard whale detection expertise to forestall vessel strikes, with a particular give attention to defending North Atlantic proper whales. Baille can also be concerned in an ongoing examine of Emperor penguins. Her workforce visits Antarctica yearly to tag penguins and collect knowledge to boost their understanding of penguin inhabitants dynamics and draw conclusions concerning the general well being of the ecosystem.
Water, water wherever
Carlos Díaz-Marín
Hometown: San José, Costa Rica
Advisor: Professor Gang Chen | Former Advisor: Professor Evelyn Wang
Interests: New England climbing, biking, and dancing
Carlos Díaz-Marín designs and synthesizes cheap salt-polymer supplies that may seize giant quantities of humidity from the air. He goals to alter the way in which we generate potable water from the air, even in arid situations. In addition to water era, these salt-polymer supplies can be used as thermal batteries, succesful of storing and reusing warmth. Beyond the scientific purposes, Díaz-Marín is worked up to proceed doing analysis that may have large social impacts, and that finds and explains new bodily phenomena. As a LatinX particular person, Díaz-Marín can also be pushed to assist enhance range in STEM.
Scalable fabrication of nano-architected supplies
Somayajulu Dhulipala
Hometown: Hyderabad, India
Advisor: Assistant Professor Carlos Portela
Interests: Space exploration, taekwondo, meditation.
Somayajulu Dhulipala works on growing light-weight supplies with tunable mechanical properties. He is at the moment engaged on strategies for the scalable fabrication of nano-architected supplies and predicting their mechanical properties. The capacity to fine-tune the mechanical properties of particular supplies brings versatility and flexibility, making these supplies appropriate for a variety of purposes throughout a number of industries. While the analysis purposes are fairly numerous, Dhulipala is obsessed with making area liveable for humanity, a vital step towards turning into a spacefaring civilization.
Ingestible health-care gadgets
Jimmy McRae
Hometown: Woburn, Massachusetts
Advisor: Associate Professor Giovani Traverso
Interests: Anything basketball-related: taking part in, watching, going to video games, organizing hometown tournaments
Jimmy McRae goals to drastically enhance diagnostic and therapeutic capabilities by way of noninvasive health-care applied sciences. His analysis focuses on leveraging supplies, mechanics, embedded programs, and microfabrication to develop novel ingestible digital and mechatronic gadgets. This ranges from ingestible electroceutical capsules that modulate hunger-regulating hormones to gadgets succesful of steady ultralong monitoring and remotely triggerable actuations from throughout the abdomen. The rules that information McRae’s work to develop gadgets that operate in excessive environments may be utilized far past the gastrointestinal tract, with purposes for outer area, the ocean, and extra.
Freestyle BMX meets machine studying
Eva Nates
Hometown: Narberth, Pennsylvania
Advisor: Professor Peko Hosoi
Interests: Rowing, working, biking, climbing, baking
Eva Nates is working with the Australian Cycling Team to create a device to categorise Bicycle Motocross Freestyle (BMX FS) methods. She makes use of a singular worth decomposition methodology to conduct a principal element evaluation of the time-dependent point-tracking knowledge of an athlete and their bike throughout a run to categorise every trick. The 2024 Olympic workforce hopes to include this device of their coaching workflow, and Nates labored alongside the workforce at their amenities on the Gold Coast of Australia throughout MIT’s Independent Activities Period in January.
Augmenting Astronauts with Wearable Limbs
Erik Ballesteros
Hometown: Spring, Texas
Advisor: Professor Harry Asada
Interests: Cosplay, Star Wars, Lego bricks
Erik Ballesteros’s analysis seeks to assist astronauts who’re conducting planetary extravehicular actions by way of the use of supernumerary robotic limbs (TremendousLimbs). His work is tailor-made towards design and management manifestation to help astronauts with post-fall restoration, human-leader/robot-follower quadruped locomotion, and coordinated manipulation between the TremendousLimbs and the astronaut to carry out duties like excavation and pattern dealing with.
This article appeared within the Spring 2024 version of the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s journal, MechE Connects.