Category: Research

The Vice President for Research Office has announced the Fall 2019 Research Excellence Fund (REF) awards.

In the College of Engineering, Jung Yun Bae received a Research Seed (RS) grant.

REF-RS grants are designed to provide untenured tenure-track academic faculty and research faculty who have been employed for less than six years with resources to develop an externally supported research program.

Bae is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering-Engineering Mechanics, College of Engineering, and the College of Computing. Her research interests include coordination of heterogeneous robot teams, vehicle routing problems, multi-robot system control and optimization, autonomous navigation, and unmanned vehicles. Her main goal of research is development of operational strategy for multi-agent autonomous vehicle systems.

Paulus van Susante (MEEM/MARC) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $5000 other sponsored activities grant from the University of Michigan. The project is entitled, “MTU Team for NASA Lunabotics Competition.” This is a 5 1/2 month project.

This competition is a full-on engineering exercise where students receive practical experience in the full engineering lifecycle process from concept development to system closeout.

Yongchao Yang (MEEM) is the principal investigator on a project that has received a $300,000 research and development contract with UChicago Argonne, LLC. The project is titled, “Making Physical Sense of Machine Learning: Full Field, High Resolution Imaging of Structural Dynamics.”

This is a one year project.

Fernando Ponta (MEEM/APSRC) is the PI that has received a $25,000 research and development contract with Sandia National Laboratories on the project titled, “Wind Turbine and Wind Farm Controls Code Evaluation for Reduced Order Models.” This is a two-month project.

By Sponsored Programs.

Jeff Naber (MEEM/ASPRC) is Principal Investigator on a project that has received a $99,752 research and development grant from the National Science Foundation. Greg Odegard (MEEM), Sheryl Sorby (MEEM), Kellie Raffaelli (CDI), and Michael Bowler (Humanities), are Co-PI’s on this one-year project entitled, “Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Emerging Disaster Engineering Encompassing Human Directed Expert Systems (ERC-DEES).”

By Sponsored Programs.

Extract

Disasters cause immense economic and human losses. Those persons in the communities most significantly impacted are the elderly, disabled, and those economically disadvantaged with limited resources and limited mobility.

Concurrently, man-made infrastructure is becoming more vulnerable due to aging and degradation, while weather extremes and terrorism threats are increasing the occurrence and impact of disasters.

Thus, there is a critical need to have rapid intelligence and an ability to deploy limited resources with maximum impact at the earliest stage of the disasters.

The proposed vision is to develop expert systems with autonomous agents directed by humans with rapid response capabilities in partnership with, and in support of, first responders, communities and their citizens, and local and federal agencies.

Read more at the National Science Foundation.

Jeff Naber (MEEM/ASPRC) is Principal Investigator on a project that has received a $481,013 research and development contract with the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC. Youngchul Ra (MEEM), Mahdi Shahbakhti (MEEM), Jeremy Worm (MEEM), Henry Schmidt (MEEM), Paul Dice (MEEM), and Joel Duncan (MEEM) are Co-PI’s on this project entitled, “A Compression-Ignition Mono-Fueled NG High-Efficiency, High-Output Engine for Medium and Heavy-Duty Applications.” This is the first year of a potential three-year project totaling $1,156,042.

By Sponsored Programs.

Jeff Naber has been nominated as an associate member of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) United States Driving Research and Innovation for Vehicle efficiency and Energy sustainability (U.S. DRIVE) Committee.

It is a three year term starting September 2019. It involves direct meetings between the OEM’s and DOE’S Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy (EERE) Vehicle Technologies Office (VTO) at a high level.

The American Council of Engineering Companies (ACEC) tech team is part of the U.S. DRIVE partnership. This partnership is between the U.S. Council for Automotive Research LLS (USCAR) and the DOE.

Gurpreet Singh, Advanced Combustion Engines and Fuels R&D Program Manager, Vehicle Technologies Office, DOE, is the other co-chair. Other members of the team include combustion and emission control experts from FCA, GM and Ford as well as a broad spectrum of representatives from the DOE and U.S. national labs (Argonne, Oak Ridge, Sandia, NREL, Lawrence Livermore, Pacific Northwest).

The committee meets six times a year at the USCAR office in Southfield, MI, to discuss pre-competitive technology and research to improve engine efficiency while meeting emission standards.

Jeff Naber (ME-EM), the Richard and Elizabeth Henes Professor in Energy Systems and director of the Advanced Power Systems Research Center, has been appointed to the Executive Committee of the Automotive Research Center (ARC) by the center’s director Bogdan Epureanu.

The ARC is a US Army Center of Excellence for Modeling and Simulation of Ground Vehicles sponsored by Ground Vehicles Systems Center (formally TARDEC in Warren, Michigan) and led by the University of Michigan.