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Primary research areas in Mechanical Engineering
Mechanical engineering covers a wide range of activities, including research in dynamics, fluids, materials, solids, and thermodynamics. These areas form the core of mechanical engineering and related engineering fields, such as aerospace and civil engineering, and study mechanical engineering topics such as computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided manufacturing (CAM), and robotics.
Research is strongly interdisciplinary, with many connections to Applied Mathematics, Applied Physics, Earth and Planetary Sciences, and Chemistry and Chemical Biology.
Fluid Dynamics
Areas of Focus
- Complex fluids
- Suspension mechanics
- Low-Reynolds-number hydrodynamics
- Microfluidic systems
- Drainage in foams
- Flows manipulated by electric fields (e.g. electrokinetics, electrospinning)
- Coating flows
- Multiphase flows
- Systems combining viscous and elastic elements
Researchers
Research Groups/Labs
Areas of Focus
- Role of sensing, mechanical design, and control in manipulation
- Mechanics of manipulation, tactile sensing and display devices and algorithms
- Teleoperation and supervisory control
- Motion description languages
- Medical robotics, with projects in image guidance, haptic feedbacks, and interactive control modes for robotic surgery
Researchers
Research Groups/Labs
Areas of Focus
- Mechanics and thermodynamics critical to understanding the design and manufacture of engineered materials and structures for a variety of applications including electronic packages, thermal barrier coatings, thin films, and multilayers with a focus on interfaces, high-temperature composites, micromemchanical devices, and plate and shell structures at at both meso- and macro- scales
- Mechanics at the cellular and molecular levels
- Earthquake faulting research, with special emphasis on topics such as the mechanics of frictional sliding and dynamic fracture