Month: May 2017

Future Transmission Development by Darrell Robinette

Triple ClutchUK Car Magazine, a European car enthusiast magazine and Lubrizol Additives 360, an online driveline news organization, have published articles featuring a new automatic transmission design developed by Darrell Robinette(ME-EM). The new transmission design was developed during his time at General Motors and was presented at CTI Ttransmission Symposium in Berlin, Germany last December. The articles can be found here and here.

Future engines will have more torque at low(er) engine speeds. It’s part of our job when designing transmissions to maximize that efficiency but, also, to ensure a pleasurable driving experience.Darrell Robinette

John Johnson Award for Outstanding Research in Diesel Engines

John H. Johnson
John H. Johnson

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer and other news outlets around the country reported on the winners of the John Johnson Award for Outstanding Research in Diesel Engines.

The award is funded through contributions from John H. Johnson (ME-EM), his colleagues and former students. Johnson is a Presidential Professor with Michigan Tech’s Department of Mechanical-Engineering Mechanics, a fellow of SAE International and the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. He is a renowned expert in the field of diesel engines.

See the full story here.

Supermileage Enterprise Wins at Shell Eco-Marathon

SSE and ShellThe 33rd annual Shell Eco-marathon Americas competition took place over the weekend, April 27-30 in Detroit, MI. This year’s event was the second season that Michigan Tech’s Supermileage Systems Enterprise team competed.  Shell Eco-marathon challenges student teams from around the world to design, build, test and drive ultra-energy-efficient vehicles. More than 100 teams from universities and high schools across the country and abroad came to the heart of the Motor City to compete on the track located on the city streets surrounding the Cobo Convention Center.

Read more at Pavlis Honors College, by Amy Karagiannakis.

Abdelkhalik Team at Global Space Competition

GTOCA team of Michigan Tech and University of Michigan students placed 16th in the European Space Agency’s 9th Global Trajectory Optimization Competition. The online competition attracted 69 teams.

The competition challenge was: “It is the year 2060 and the commercial exploitation of Low Earth Orbits (LEOs) went well beyond the trillion of Euros market size. Following the unprecedented explosion of a Sun-synchronous satellite, the Kessler effect triggered further impacts, and the Sun-synchronous LEO environment was severely compromised.

Scientists from all main space agencies and private space companies isolated a set of 123 orbiting debris pieces that, if removed, would restore the possibility to operate in that precious orbital environment and prevent the Kessler effect from permanently compromising it. You are thus called to design a series of missions able to remove all critical debris pieces while minimizing the overall cumulative cost of such an endeavor. Each single mission cost (in EUR) will depend on how early the mission is submitted via this web-site (regardless of their actual launch epoch) and on the spacecraft initial mass.”

Michigan Tech’s team included Ossama Abdelkhalik (MEEM), four graduate students and one remote graduate student.

By Jenn Donovan.

Mobile Lab at TARDEC

Mobile Lab
Mobile Lab

The Michigan Tech Mobile Lab is currently at TARDEC (U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research Development and Engineering Center) in Warren, Michigan, delivering six professional development short courses in Instrumentation and Experimentation, Hybrid Electric Vehicles and High Voltage Safety.

Classes involve a mix of direction instruction, hands on activities, demonstrations and lab exercises. Students will have a chance to operate a propulsion system dynamometer test cell, experience the differences between different HEV architectures, build their own signal conditioning circuits, as well as perform a high voltage battery removal.

The students are composed of design and test engineers and technical staff. Instructors include Jeremy Worm, Chris Morgan, Darrell Robinette, Lucia Gauchia, Wayne Weaver and Ron Butler.