MIE FALL FACULTY NEWSLETTER
November 2002
New Arrivals
Congratulations to Ana
Muriel and husband! Their son Daniel
was born on Friday October 25 at 12:10 pm. He is 6lbs and 13
ounces and 20.5 inches in length. Both mom and baby are doing
well at home now.
We have 2 new faculty members this year. Bob Hyers in M. E. comes to UMass from NASA's Marshall
Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, where he was
a research scientist in Microgravity Materials Science. Before
that he received both his S.B. and Ph.D. from the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology in Materials Engineering. His
main area of interest is materials processing.
Erin Baker
in I.E. is working on Climate Change Policy in the face of uncertainty.
Her general interests are in decision theory applied to energy
and environmental issues. She hopes to find a project related
to Ghana (in West Africa), where she taught math in the Peace
Corps before getting her Ph.D. at Stanford in Engineering Economic
Systems. She has also taught math in junior high, and
worked as an actuary for Coopers and Lybrand.
In the News
UMASS RESEARCHER HELPING TEEN DRIVERS
TO ANTICIPATE DANGER ON THE ROAD
Web-based
driving scenarios are part of the driving simulator lab
AMHERST, Mass. – Younger, inexperienced drivers are dying at a rate
some 10 times higher than more experienced drivers. A University of Massachusetts Amherst researcher is helping
to teach new drivers to anticipate dangerous situations on the
roadway – without endangering themselves or others. Donald
Fisher, professor of mechanical and industrial engineering,
has created a series of sixteen driving scenarios which teach
new drivers to be alert to situations that demand extra caution.
The scenarios, which are on the World Wide Web, “drive” through
each situation, and then detail safe and unsafe responses. A
narrator describes the driving choices as the virtual car moves.
“We
know that new drivers understand the basics of operating a car,”
Fisher said, “but problems arise when these new drivers are
faced with potentially hazardous situations, such as a hidden
stop sign, or a bicyclist riding toward a vehicle. Our research
shows that, unlike more experienced drivers, people who are
new behind the wheel don’t necessarily identify these situations
as being potentially dangerous, and therefore they often don’t
respond in the safest way possible.”
The
project is an outcropping of research at the Human Performance
Laboratory, a facility that
contains an advanced driving simulator in which a sedan
is placed before three screens, onto which highways and neighborhoods
are projected. The “car” reads the driver’s speed, direction,
and even eye movements as input.
“We tested
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Sundar Krishnamurty and Robert
Gao's work on deep-pressure vest for children with autism
was featured in the May 2002 issue of PTC
Express, a web-based monthly newsletter of PTC (Parametric Technology
Corporation). The title of the article was Helping Today's
Students Become Tomorrow's Innovators. Community Center for People with Autism also had a feature
article on their work in their Fall/Winter 2001-2002 issue titled
"Deep Pressure Vests and Sleeping Bags: A UMass Research
Project.” As part of PTC's campaign to highlight the importance
of design, PTC did a video-shoot of Krishnamurty's MIE313
classroom in April 2002 and also interviewed students and
faculty. This video will be used for distribution to high
schools. It was also shown at the PTC's
2002 Design for the Future Conference in August 2002, Boston.
Three
student groups from Krishnamurty's class of MIE313: Design
of Mechanical Components participated in the PTC and Motorola
sponsored "Flip for Design Competition." Two groups
made it to the semifinals, and one group won the first
prize in the technical merit category. The winning team of
Paul Witherel, Travis Dane,
Jay Robbins, and Alexander Brown were invited to present their work at
the Motorola booth in Epcott Center, Orlando in June 2002. Larry
Rivais from the Springfield Union Newspaper wrote
a feature article on their design and their experience titled
“Classwork a matter of design” which appeared in the newspaper's
July 8, 2002 issue
Awards and Distinctions
Jonathan Rothstein was selected to receive the Frenkiel Award from the American Physics Society Division
of Fluid Dynamics in recognition of significant contributions
to fluid mechanics published in Physics of Fluids in 2001. He will be accepting the award at the annual meeting of the APS
Division of Fluid Dynamics in Dallas in November
Janis Terpenny was awarded the Women in Engineering
Program Recognition Award in May 2002.
Blair Perot
received the College Outstanding Junior
Faculty Award, a Lilly Fellowship from the Center for Teaching and the
College Outstanding Teacher Award
in May 2002
Robert Gao was formally appointed Adjunct Professor
at the School of Mechanical
Engineering and Automation by the Northeastern
University in Shenyang, China. He gave several lectures
during his visit to the university in July, and discussed with
faculty and administration on collaborative research and graduate
student education in the area of micro electromechanical sensors
and manufacturing process monitoring
Grants and Publications
Dr
Lawrence Ambs, Professor of Mechanical Engineering and
Dr. Beka Kosanovic have been
awarded $861,000 over four years from the Department of Energy for operation of the Industrial
Assessment Center (IAC). The IAC has been operating at UMass
since 1984 under Dr. Ambs and provides education and training
for MIE graduate students. Students and staff provide industrial
resource assessments for small to medium manufacturing facilities.
Assessments target savings from energy efficiency, waste minimization
and productivity improvements. Over 550 assessments have been
performed throughout New England and New York. Yearly savings
for manufacturers served by the IAC exceed $30,000,000.
Dr.
Eric Winkler, Technical Services Director at CEERE, was
awarded, for the second year in a row, $72,800 to provide information
and outreach to manufacturers in Massachusetts on energy efficiency
programs available through state, federal, and private sector
sources. This funding also came from the DOE. This program supports the University lead “Massachusetts
Industries of the Future” program (www.maiof.org), which leverages
R&D funds and service programs through public/private partnerships.
More than 50 companies and 25 public and trade group associations
are participants in this program.
CEERE received
$170,000 from the Chancellor to support the University participation in
the Strategic Envirotechnology and Energy Technology Commercialization
Program (STEP) Funding for this program is being used
to support energy program innovations directly on Campus as
well as in the Commonwealth at large. In particular the
program is supporting deployment of technologies which are high
risk with high return situations.
Robert Gao
has received a three-year $325,000 grant from NSF on integrated
signal processing techniques for bearing health assessment and
life prediction. This grant is aimed at developing a new
multi-domain approach for bearing defect signature extraction,
severity identification, and time-to-failure prognosis. The
project is co-sponsored by the SKF Condition Monitoring company.
In addition, Professor Gao has received third-year funding from
the UMass-Baystate Medical Center Collaborative Program to continue
his work on biomechanical evaluation of lumbar spine fixation
techniques. Highlights from this work will be presented at the
upcoming ASME IMECE conference in New Orleans.
Janis Terpenny
has been awarded an NSF Planning Grant Awarded for a “Multi-University
Center for E-Design: IT Enabled Design and Realization of Engineered
Products and Systems,” under the NSF - Industry University Cooperative
Research Center (IUCRC) program. This is a multi-university
NSF IUCRC with University of Pittsburgh. Faculty from across
the UMass campus are participating, including faculty in Mechanical
and Industrial Engineering, Computer Science and the School
of Management. A large meeting with industries interested
in partnering will be held in Pittsburgh, Dec 9-10.
Professor Smith
has submitted a patent application for an algorithm for routing
in resilient packet ring networks. This is
joint work with Peter Kubat of Verizon
Laboratories in Waltham, Massachusetts
Blair Perot
received an exploratory grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific
Research to begin looking at drag reduction using ultrahydrophibic
surfaces with Prof. Rothstein. He has also had 3 papers published recently
in the Journal of Turbulence
and Journal of Computational Physics
Professor Rothstein
has also recently received a Faculty
Research Grant and his had several papers accepted for
publication in the Journal of Non-Newtonian
Fluid Dynamics and the Journal
of Rheology
Invited Seminars and Conference Presentations
CEERE is
sponsoring a workshop on Wind Energy in New England Islands
and Coastal Communities: Wind Energy on the Community Scale.
For more information see their web site http://www.ceere.org/rerl/events/ne_islands.html
CEERE is also
a co-organizer of a seminar and workshop on “Energy
Efficient windows and Building Design” in New
Delhi (Nov 22-23, 2002) and Bangalore (Nov 25-26, 2002) in India.
Dr. Charlie Curcija from CEERE
is one of featured seminar speakers from USA. This seminar and
workshop is intended to introduce fenestration (windows, doors,
curtain walls and other transparent façade systems) simulation
programs like WINDOW, OPTICS and THERM and the use of whole
building energy simulation software in energy efficient design
of new buildings and improvement of energy performance of existing
buildings. Both Dr. Curcija and Dr. Mahabir Bhandari from CEERE will be teaching the use of software
in rating and design of fenestration systems and energy efficient
design of buildings during workshops in New Delhi and Bangalore.
For more details Charlie Curcija can be reached at 413/545-4454
or curcija@ceere.org
Steve Malkin
was an invited keynote speaker at the Machining
2002 conference which was held in Sao Paulo, Brazil,
October 29 - 31. While in Brazil, he also visited and presented
seminars at three other universities: University of Sao Paulo
in Sao Carlos, University of Campinas, and Sao Paulo State University
in Bauru.
Professor Jim Smith
was invited to Saint Petersburg Russia for two weeks this last
June
to work with faculty members at the Saint
Petersburg State Technical University Department of Systems
and Cybernetics on Location and Land Use Planning Models.
Jim gave seminars in St. Petersburg and Pskov, Russia and is
collaborating with professors at the University on modeling
extreme events and emergency evacuation planning models.
Professor Smith
was also invited for three weeks this past August to the Department
of Electrical Engineering at the University of Melbourne,
Melbourne Australia to work on network design problems. In particular,
Jim was working with colleagues at the Department of Electrical
Engineering on algorithms for 3-dimensional Steiner Minimal
Tree problems. Jim also gave two seminars in Melbourne and even
took a tour of the Great Ocean Road along the coast of Australia.
Jim highly recommends the trip.
Blair Perot
made conference presentations in Hawaii and Mallorca on the
application of the turbulent potential model to complex flows and to unsteady
flows.
Staff from CEERE presented
talks at two conferences held on the Amherst Campus this fall,
as well as at national and international conferences. Dr.
Beka Kosanovic and Dr. Eric Winkler both presented at A US Department of
Energy Distributed Energy Road Show
held in series with the Massachusetts Building Inspectors Annual
Conference. Dr. Kosanovic presented a talk on Combined
Heat and Power sand Peak Shaving. Dr. Winkler presented
information about University Resources and statewide program
supporting energy efficiency and renewable energy. Dr.
Eric Winkler presented a talk at the Annual Conference
on Watershed Conservation, 2002. His talk covered
the state's role in stormwater management innovation and advances
in engineered systems for meeting the water quality requirements
under federal and state law. Dr. Lawrence L. Ambs presented a talk on the system
optimization of water recovery systems for steam-injected gas
turbines at the ECOS 2002 Conference
Berlin, Germany this past July. Dr.
Beka Kosanovic presented a talk on the economic analysis
of water recovery systems for steam injected gas turbines
at the ASME 2002 international joint power generation
conference in phoenix in June.
Janis Terpenny has published
and presented seven refereed conference papers, including an
award winning paper entitled “Utilizing the Internet to Improve
Student Learning in a First Course in Engineering Economy with
Real-World Unsolved Problems in Collaboration with Industry.”
This paper, co-authored by Sullivan, Singh, and Sward,
won the best paper award in Engineering Economy Division of
the ASEE Annual Conference as well as first runner up in Professional
Interest Council III.
Industry Connections
CEERE completed a technology
assessment of the Vortechs™ system for Strategic Envirotechnology
Partnership (STEP), which promotes the innovation of new technologies
to meet the Commonwealth’s energy and environmental goals. The Vortechs™ system is a structural Best Management Practice (BMP)
used to provide treatment of stormwater runoff. The technology uses hydrodynamic separation to remove a significant
portion of sediment from stormwater.
The Vortechs™ system
is considered an innovative treatment technology that can be
used to meet the Commonwealth’s Stormwater Standards as outlined
in the Stormwater Management Handbooks. For innovative technologies, performance claims
must be supported before the technology is approved for use
by Conservation Commissions or other permitting entities. Historically, STEP Technology Assessments have
been accepted by Conservation Commissions as substantiation
of performance. The
Vortechs™ Technology Assessment report provides an analysis
of both laboratory and field data collected in support of the
performance claims of the VortechsTM system.
Students
Margaret Patterson,
Professor Smith's Ph.D. student, is finishing up her dissertation
work on graph theoretic approaches to the facility layout problem.
She has already produced three papers from her dissertation
which are being submitted to journals for publication.
Mustafa Yuzukirmizi
will be presenting his Ph.D. proposal defense very soon. He
is working on closed queuing network models of production and
manufacturing systems with single and multiple servers and multiple
products. He has some generated some very interesting results
so far.
Alex Stepanov
is beginning his Ph.D. work on emergency planning and evacuation
modeling of vehicular networks with state dependent queuing
models. He is working with both transient and steady state models.
He also has some interesting results for these special traffic
networks.
Li
Zhang and Charles (Burt) Theurer (Ph.D. students of Robert Gao and David Kazmer) have presented two papers at the
30th NAMRI conference in Purdue University and the IEEE
Sensors conference in Orlando, FL. The papers describe the
design, analysis, and experimental validation of a new sensor
that extracts energy from the pressure differential at the injection
molding cavity as a self-contained power source. Another paper
will be presented at the upcoming ASME IMECE conference on the
design of an “energy switch” to enable ultrasound signal generation
for wireless mold pressure measurement. The papers are based
on their NSF project "Self-Energized Micro Sensors for
Process Monitoring of Injection Molding''
As faculty advisor, Janis Terpenny is proud
to announce that the UMass IIE Student
Chapter received 2002 Bronze Recognition Award from National Headquarters
in 2002. Congratulations IIE!
Editorial Comments
Please send email to edbaker@ecs.umass.edu if you have ideas on how to improve the faculty
newsletter. Cheers!
