Mechanical engineering

Carlos Daganzo, J. Karl Hedrick and Jack Moehle

NAE adds three Berkeley faculty to its ranks

02/06/14 — Three Berkeley Engineering faculty - Carlos Daganzo (CEE), J. Karl Hedrick (ME) and Jack Moehle (CEE) - are among 67 new members and 11 foreign associates elected Thursday to the National Academy of Engineering.

Seafloor carpet catches waves to generate energy

01/28/14 — UC Berkeley mechanical engineers are developing a seafloor carpet system to capture ocean wave energy and convert it into usable electricity. The system could eventually help lower the cost of converting seawater into fresh water, easing the pressure during periods of drought.

Chris Ategeka named to Forbes 30 Under 30

01/08/14 Forbes — Christopher Ategeka (B.S. '11 ME), founder of CA Bikes, which builds bike and motorcycle ambulances for those in need in his native Uganda, has been selected as one of Forbes magazine's 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneurs.

ME professor’s research determines particles most likely to cause stroke

12/09/13 Daily Californian — While some mechanical engineers use their supercomputers to build airplanes and vehicles, assistant professor Shawn Shadden uses his to map the inner workings of the human heart, and to improve its man-made replacement parts.

Stanley Berger, known for his work in blood flow, dies at 79

12/04/13 — Stanley A. Berger, Montford G. Cook professor emeritus of mechanical engineering and bioengineering at the University of California, Berkeley, and a renowned expert in fluid mechanics, died on Nov. 25, 2013. He was 79.

Flying to the edge of darkness

11/22/13 — Adam Wright (B.S'05 ME) is building submarines that fly through water. He started his career at Hawkes Ocean Technologies as an unpaid intern before his freshman year of college. Early this year, he was named the company's president and CEO.

Under observation

11/01/13 — Scientists have discovered a better way to study integrins experimentally, by creating a computer model.

Check your head

11/01/13 — Researchers have developed affordable technology to help diagnose brain injuries in real time.

Adam Wright in the cockpit of the Super Falcon

Diving to the edge of darkness

11/01/13 — At Hawkes Ocean Technologies, alum Adam Wright builds manned submarines capable of underwater flight.

Luck, smarts lead from Uganda to UC Berkeley

10/22/13 San Francisco Chronicle — The amazing journey of Christopher Ategeka, who went from teenage orphan and human scarecrow in Uganda to mechanical engineer at UC Berkeley (two degrees down, one more in the works), winning honors and prizes, founding a nonprofit and a biotech company, even giving a TED talk.

March of the ‘zombie vortices’

09/11/13 — A team led by Philip Marcus, a mechanical engineering professor and computational physicist, shows how variations in gas density lead to instability, which then generates the whirlpool-like vortices needed for stars to form. According to the researchers' models, the change in density is what triggers the violent birth of a new star, upending an otherwise stable dead zone of gas-or what Marcus calls ‘zombie vortices'

Promising cost analysis for thermoelectricity

07/01/13 Royal Society of Chemistry — Scientists, including Berkeley mechanical engineering Ph.D. candidate Shannon Yee, have derived a metric to analyze the cost of power generation using thermoelectric technology. The metric shows that thermoelectric devices have greater potential in large-scale power generation than previously thought.

Manufacturing energy

06/18/13 — Lindsay Miller (Ph.D'12 ME) opted to pursue graduate studies at Berkeley because of the university's reputation for groundbreaking alternative energy research and its multidisciplinary approach. As a post-doc in Paul Wright's lab, she became intrigued by the process of turning a prototype into a device ready for real-world application. “My research was trying to make wireless sensor nodes that never die - batteries that can be recharged infinitely by the energy available in the environment,” says Miller.

Hyundai Center of Excellence dedicated at UC Berkeley

06/12/13 — The Hyundai Center of Excellence in Integrated Vehicle Safety Systems and Control was dedicated on Wednesday at Berkeley's Hesse Hall. Engineers from Hyundai and Berkeley will collaborate “to design the car of the future,” said Dean Shankar Sastry.

Student entrepreneurship is humming at elite universities

05/14/13 Forbes — “I am young, have time and am willing to take the risk. We want to innovate and deliver awesome engineering products,” says mechanical engineering major Timothy Lee in a story examining the passion of student entrepreneurs and UC Berkeley's expanding efforts to nurture them.

Engineering benchmarks for cap-and-trade

05/01/13 — The Mechanical Engineering Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability is helping the California Air Resources Board to develop methodologies for determining CO2 allocations for companies to help reduce the state's overall CO2 emissions to 1990 levels by 2020.

Everlasting clock

05/01/13 — An eternal clock that would always keep accurate time, even after the heat-death of the universe, is no longer just an intriguing concept, thanks to a team of scientists, led by ME professor Xiang Zhang.

Experiential ed.

05/01/13 — Many hands-on labs, shops and workspaces around campus allow students to learn by doing.

Greening the factory floor

05/01/13 — Berkeley graduate students and professors at the Laboratory for Manufacturing and Sustainability, led by mechanical engineering chair David Dornfeld, are guiding factory owners and builders to a green manufacturing future.

Experts tackle questions about broken Bay Bridge anchor rods

04/16/13 Mercury News — Two Berkeley Engineering professors, metallurgical engineer Tom Devine and mechanical engineer Robert Ritchie, field questions about why 32 high-strength threaded steel anchor rods in the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge weakened and snapped.