MAE 297
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seminar
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Seminar
This 1 unit seminar is a venue for current topics in mechanical and aerospace engineering. Guest speakers are invited from both academia and industry. A primary objective is to broaden the technical and employment horizons for the MAE graduate students. All graduate students are required to take this course a specific number of times as part of their degree requirements. The seminar is open to the public and is advertised throughout the College of Engineering.
Jason K. Moore
jkm@ucdavis.edu
Bainer 2095
All but one* of the seminars will be held in Bainer Hall room 1062 on Thursday afternoons from 4:10-5:00 pm.
Enrolled students will be asked to sign in during each seminar and must arrive on time to get credit for attending. Only two missed seminars are allowed for a passing grade. If you miss more than this you must have an instructor pre-approved excuse, watch the missed seminar video outside of class, and write a half page summary of the presentation and what you have learned from it.
All of the seminar video recordings will be made publicly available soon after the presentation if the speaker consents to sharing and will be available via this website.
Due to its low insertion loss, high isolation, high linearity, wide bandwidth, and near-zero dc power consumption, radio frequency micro-electromechanical (RF-MEMS) switches have been an emerging technology with significant potential in many high frequency circuits and systems, especially those requiring reconfiguration. In this talk, we present several RF-MEMS switch designs that can significantly extend the hot-switching life-time of RF-MEMS contact switches. To prevent the contact degradation during hot-switching events, series and/or protection contacts are added in parallel with the "real" contacts. For unpackaged devices using Au-Au as the "real" contact material and Pt-Au as the protection contact material, we …
Ralf Hotchkiss will track the design of the Whirlwind Wheelchair from its beginning thirty years ago to the present and on into the future. From the first design breakthroughs of barefoot blacksmiths to the high tech testing and manufacturing methods of today, surprise breakthroughs in basic wheelchair design have come from the backyard inventors of some forty developing countries. These inventors form the Whirlwind Network of wheelchair riders and designers. Their goal is not only to make wheelchairs available in the poorest of countries; it is to radically improve the durability and rough-ground mobility so that wheelchair riders can live …
Nuclear power provides the majority of our nation's safe, reliable, carbon free energy. Advanced nuclear reactors and nuclear fuel cycles promise to further improve passive safety, fuel utilization, and environmental impacts of this key energy source. This seminar will discuss open, reproducible, computational approaches to modeling and simulation of the multiple coupled physics and scales inherent to these systems. Approaches will include (1) agent based modeling of future energy growth, reprocessing, and fuel management scenarios, (2) the interplay between probabilistic and deterministic neutron transport methods for design and safety analysis, and (3) development of reactor physics kernels for the MOOSE …
Emerging fabrication process for mechanical structures can offer advantages in terms of reduced energy requirements or increased design flexibility. However, the body of knowledge lacks the design consideration of such components to optimize the final part's characteristics. Researchers have established best practices and design considerations for traditional manufacturing processes to reduce the product cycle and increase the efficiency and quality of final components. This talk will discuss the implementation of design-for manufacturing approach for Origami sheet metal (OSM) folding fabrication process.
OSM folded structures are promising topological entities that can be folded from a flat metal sheet to complex 3-dimensional …
Dick Bourne, founder of the Davis Energy Group, the UC Davis Western Cooling Efficiency Center, and Integrated Comfort, Inc. will review key experiences in his life as an inventor, for two purposes: 1) the drawing of lessons useful to the young and creative; and 2) entertainment. From his inventive start as a grad student in the Stanford Design Division, where he was also a writer in the Engineering Case Program, Dick will describe how studying the inventing process and working with creative designers nurtured his early (but failed) attempt to support a family as an independent inventor. After reviewing several …
Understanding the interactions between robotic systems and the human's complex musculoskeletal system is a key bottleneck in designing effective assistive devices. OpenSim is free and open source software for modeling neural and musculoskeletal structures and predicting and analyzing movement. We are using the software to predict the effects of assistive devices on human performance in tasks such as load carriage, running, and jumping. We have discovered that passive assistive devices have the potential to markedly increase jump performance. These results were generated using a dynamic optimization that simultaneously optimized human performance and device design. We have also used simulations to …
During spaceflight astronauts experience musculoskeletal losses and moderate to severe lumbar pain. There is also a significant incidence of herniated intervertebral disc (IVD) in astronauts, especially in the first year after return to Earth. The pathogenesis of back pain during and after spaceflight is currently unknown. Our current investigation aims to understand this higher incidence of herniated IVDs and back pain. Studies incorporate pre- and post-flight imaging, functional tests, and pain questionnaires of International Space Station (ISS) crew members to ascertain mechanisms of back pain as well as degeneration and injury to spinal structures. Presently six out of 12 ISS …
As engineering researchers and scholars, we hope to have an impact on the world through our work. Many of us went into this field in pursuit of the dream of using our skills and training to help improve the lives of others. Unfortunately, through the pressures of career advancement we find ourselves creating and publishing work that will be read by a handful (sometimes fewer) of others. While practicing open engineering won't guarantee that more people will read your work, it does remove many of the barriers to access that make it difficult for millions of people around the world …
Micro-structured surfaces are assuming an ever-increasing role since they define the ultimate performance of many industrial components and products. Surface micro-structures, when carefully designed, can alter the optical, biological, tribological, and thermal properties of the original surfaces. The bottleneck of applying this new technology to commercial products is manufacturing efficiency. This talk demonstrates one example of using a novel vibration-assisted machining method for fast creation of periodic micro/nano-gratings for structural coloration. When the tool vibration is coupled with a constant cutting velocity, periodic cusps can be generated due to the machining marks. The periodic vibration-induced ripples can be precisely …
Surface hardening is a process that includes a wide variety of techniques used to improve the wear resistance of metallic parts without affecting the softer, tough interior bulk material. Hardened metals are usually more brittle than softer metals, there fore, hardening metals throughout the surface and bulk, is not always a suitable choice of treatment for parts subject to various kinds of stresses. In such circumstances, case-hardening can provide a better solution against fracture and adequate wear resistance. There are several methods of surface hardening techniques: flame hardening and induction heating; and diffusion methods such as carburizing and nitriding. The …
