Month: February 2015

Odegard Earns Exceptional Graduate Faculty Mentor Award

Dr. Greg Odegard was recently presented wit the 2015 Exceptional Graduate Faculty Mentor Award from the Graduate School at the 2015 Graduate Research Awards Banquet. This Merit Award for Exceptional Graduate Student Mentor recognizes advocacy for graduate students, being available and encouraging to students, and creativity/interdisciplinary collaboration in new opportunities for graduate student.

ME-EM Graduate Seminar: Multi-Scale Modelling Tools for Fuel Cell Developmen

feb26The ME-EM Graduate Seminar speaker on Thursday, February 26 at 4:00 in 103 EERC will be Dr. J. G. Pharoah professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Fuel Cell Research Centre at the Royal Military College of Canada at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.

The title of his presentation will be ‘Multi-Scale Modelling Tools for Fuel Cell Development’.

Fuel cells inherently involve phenomena occurring over a wide range of length scales, from the molecular scale on electro-catalyst surfaces through various scales of porous media including catalyst layers, micro-porous layers porous transport layers, to gas supply channels within a cell and finally to the manifolds at the stack scale. In total, length scales spanning about 10 orders of magnitude are of interest to the fuel cell developer.

This talk will discuss the various tools developed to represent phenomena occurring from the catalyst scale to the stack scale and methods for coupling information from the various scales. These tools include the ability to model arbitrary porous materials comprising multiple solid phases and to model transport phe-nomena and electrochemical reactions in these materials using both virtual porous media and experimen-tally determined geometries. At the next scale, full cell models are developed and are capable of modelling both beginning of life performance and selected degradation mechanisms. Finally, at the largest scale en-tire stack simulations are carried out and can be used to explore temperature distributions within a stack as well as stack manifold design. The talk will highlight and present the open source software developed for these analysie and discuss the application of the tools to the design of superior fuel cells.

J. G. Pharoah is a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Queen’s—RMC fuel cell research centre, which he co-founded. Dr. Pharoah obtained his M. A. Sc and Ph D degrees in Mechanical Engi-neering from the University of Victoria’s Institute for Integrated Ener-gy Systems and has been working with energy systems, with an empha-sis on fuel cells, for more than a decade. Dr. Pharoah has been invited to spend some time at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences and has given invited and keynote lectures at many international conferences, universities, and companies. He regularly sits on the scientific commit-tees of international conferences and works actively with several lead-ing fuel cell developers to help overcome the challenges necessary for the large scale commercial success of fuel cells in clean energy systems.

February 26th Seminar PDF

Winter Baja 2015 Update Results

IMG_5650640The 2015 Winter Baja was held Saturday, Feb. 21, near the Student Development Complex at Michigan Technological University.

The University of Iowa car #48 came in first place, followed by Northern Michigan University car #40 at 2nd Place and Ferris State University car #76 at 3rd Place. Other standings are listed below showing the place and laps completed. In the dynamic event University of Michigan Car #1 came in first followed by University of Iowa Car # 68 at 2nd and University of Michigan Car #161 at 3rd.

ME-EM Graduate Seminar: Structural Dynamics Tailoring for Health Monitoring and Acoustic Metamaterials Applications

Feb19The ME-EM Graduate Seminar speaker on Thursday, February 19 at 4:00 in 103 EERC will be Dr. Fabio Semperlotti from University of Notre Dame.

The title of his presentation will be ‘Structural Dynamics Tailoring for Health Monitoring and Acoustic Metamaterials Applications’.

In recent years, structural systems of interest for many mechanical and aerospace applications have been required to integrate new functionalities ranging, for example, from structural health monitoring, to adaptive vibration and acoustic control, to energy harvesting. In many cases, new technologies (e.g., transducers, adaptive elements) have been simply retrofitted to the existing structures. Although for structures already deployed in the field this approach might be the only viable option, the development of future structural systems could greatly benefit from the use of a concurrent design where the host structure is conceived as an integral part of the subsystems and developed to enhance their individual as well as combined performance and functionalities.

This presentation will focus on the concept of structural dynamics tailoring achieved via geometric inhomogeneity as a means to design structural systems that support, and possibly enhance, the integration of advanced functionalities. Although applications to several different fields are possible, this talk will present the theoretical and numerical implementation of this concept for the design of structural health monitoring (SHM) systems and acoustic metamaterials. The SHM application will show how a relatively recent tomographic technology, known as impediography, can be combined with the concept of structural tailoring to enable highly sensitive damage identification with a very limited number of sensors. The structural tailoring approach is then applied to the synthesis of thin-walled acoustic metamaterials obtained via a periodic distri-bution of geometric tapers. These materials offer a largely reduced fabrication complexity, compared to the traditional multi-phase design, while still maintaining the same high-level dynamic characteristics. Numerical results will be presented to illustrate the many interesting disper-sion and propagation properties offered by such materials.

Dr. Fabio Semperlotti is an Assistant Professor in the Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering Department at University of Notre Dame. He received a M.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 2000 and a M.S. in Astronautic Engineering (summa cum laude) in 2002 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. Later, he completed his doctoral studies at the Pennsylvania State University where in 2009 he received a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering.

Prior to joining Penn State, Dr. Semperlotti served (2000-2006) as structural a few European aerospace industries, including the French Space Agency (CNES), working on the structural design of space launch systems and satellite platforms.

After graduating from Penn State, he worked as a postdoctoral associate at the Penn State-Vertical Lift Research Center and, later on, at the University of Michigan conducting research in Adaptive Structures and Structural Health Monitoring.

Dr. Semperlotti joined the AME department at Notre Dame in 2011 where he started the Structural Health Monitoring and Dynamics laboratory (SHMD). Together with his research group, he conducts research on several aspects of structures and materials including structural dynamics and wave propagation, smart and adaptive structures, structural health monitoring, energy harvesting. His re-search has received funding from US ARMY, DARPA, National Science Foundation, Air Force, and industrial sponsors. He was recently awarded the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2015) for his research on Structural Health Monitoring and the Air Force Office of Research Young Investigator Program (YIP) (2015) for his research on acoustic metamaterials.

February 19th Seminar PDF