Mechanical engineering

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.

Students build 3D printing vending machine

03/27/13 QUEST — Combining 3D printing technology with the convenience and accessibility of Redbox DVD dispensers, Berkeley student entrepreneurs have built a vending machine with a seemingly infinite selection of products. The Dreambox, which now lives in Etcheverry Hall, is the first fully automated 3D-printing vending machine.

Researchers use metamaterials to observe giant photonic spin Hall effect

03/22/13 Berkeley Lab — Engineering a unique metamaterial of gold nanoantennas, Berkeley Lab researchers, led by Berkeley mechanical engineering professor Xiang Zhang, were able to obtain the strongest signal yet of the photonic spin Hall effect, an optical phenomenon of quantum mechanics that could play a prominent role in the future of computing.

Riding the wave

03/05/13 — A member of the Berkeley faculty for less than two years, mechanical engineer Reza Alam is already making waves. His efforts to “cloak” objects at sea could one day help shield oil drilling platforms, wind turbine towers or data-collecting buoys from rough seas. His inspiration came from beyond his field: “I was reading papers about electromagnetic cloaking and started thinking, can we do something similar in fluids?”

‘Sprawl-Tuned’ insect bot skitters all over the place

02/22/13 IEEE Spectrum — Berkeley's Biomimetic Millisystems Lab has posted a video of a new, six-legged robot called STAR, for Sprawl-Tuned Autonomous Robot. The tiny mechanism can adapt its limbs to scramble over and under obstacles and run along smooth and rough surfaces.

Who should share the responsibility for sustainability?

02/19/13 Environmental Leader — In a blog post for environmental and energy managers, David Dornfeld, professor and chair of mechanical engineering, writes about finding ways to include all the costs of a product into the price the consumer pays, insuring that everyone pays their “fair share” and encouraging innovation.

The science of bionic limbs

02/18/13 NBC TV — NBC Learn's Science of Innovation series for teachers focuses on the creation of robotic exoskeletons by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his team at the Berkeley Robotics and Human Engineering Laboratory.

Sink or swim

02/07/13 — To test new modeling software from DARPA, teams of students from mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni's ME 102B mechatronics design class spent months building a fleet of amphibious vehicles, along with other inventions and novel devices. Then in early December, they put their creations to the test on the soggy volleyball court behind Soda Hall - with splashy results.

Berkeley students make finals for Disney design competition

01/30/13 Daily Californian — A trio of UC Berkeley students, including Kathryn Moore from Mechanical Engineering and Andrew Lin from Bioengineering, have made it to the finals of a national Disney-sponsored design competition with their plan for SAMM-E, a robot-turned-food-truck.

Berkeley’s exoskeletons a ‘Miracle of Nature’

12/03/12 BBC One — The new BBC show "Miracles of Nature," hosted by Richard Hammond, filmed a recent episode at Berkeley's Etcheverry Hall, where the crew explored the medical exoskeleton system being developed by mechanical engineering professor Homayoon Kazerooni and his graduate students.

Personal robots moving closer to reality

11/28/12 CBS This Morning — Personal robots that can bake cookies, shoot pool and -- in the hands of EECS professor Pieter Abbeel -- fold laundry are evidence of a new generation in artificial intelligence, jump-started by a Silicon Valley tech company's PR2 robots.

Seafloor platform ‘cloaks’ structures from big ocean waves

11/19/12 Discovery News — Offshore oil drilling platforms, wind farms and buoys are vulnerable to waves and damage from storm swells. But a team led by Berkeley's Mohammed-Reza Alam, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, has found a way to make such structures invisible to waves, using a rippled platform that sits on the seafloor to 'cloak' the structure directly above.