UAB’s Baja Car team, Blazer Motorsports, practice for next week’s regional Baja SAE competition in Peoria, IL. Baja SAE consists of three regional competitions that simulate real-world engineering design projects and their related challenges. Engineering students design and build an off-road vehicle that will survive the severe punishment of rough terrain. SAE International has more [...]
Hierarchical nanostructures of lead sulfide nanowires resembling pine trees were synthesized by chemical vapor deposition. Structural characterization revealed a screwlike dislocation in the nanowire trunks with helically rotating epitaxial branch nanowires. It is suggested that the screw component of an axial dislocation provides the self-perpetuating steps to enable one-dimensional crystal growth, in contrast to mechanisms [...]
Materials are typically ductile at higher temperatures and become brittle at lower temperatures. In contrast to the typical ductile-to-brittle transition behavior of body-centered cubic (bcc) steels, we observed an inverse temperature dependence of toughness in an ultrahigh-strength bcc steel with an ultrafine elongated ferrite grain structure that was processed by a thermomechanical treatment without the [...]
More than ever, research is a collaborative effort. You need to know what your colleagues are working on — and of course, you want your work to be highly visible and accessible as well. ResearcherID.com is a new tool that promotes this vital communication and awareness among the global research community. When you register on [...]
Rex Jameson bikes and swims regularly, and plays tennis and skis when time allows. But the 5-foot-11, 180-pound software engineer is lucky if he presses 200 pounds — that is, until he steps into an “exoskeleton” of aluminum and electronics that multiplies his strength and endurance as many as 20 times. With the outfit’s claw-like [...]
In this country, too few engineers get involved in public life. Yet engineers have a unique set of skills and perspectives that should be used to create a better future. Engineers do not just build better cars, houses or mobile phone networks. Engineers change the way we travel, the way we live, how we communicate [...]
This web page was a project funded by the National Science Foundation and developed at Virginia Tech. The applets are designed for beginning engineering and physics students taking statistics or dynamics. The three broad areas covered are fluid dynamics, statistics, and dynamics. A number of the applets have accompanying text and/or lesson plans. Visit the [...]
Thin elastic membranes supported on a much softer elastic solid or a fluid deviate from their flat geometries upon compression. We demonstrate that periodic wrinkling is only one possible solution for such strained membranes. Folds, which involve highly localized curvature, appear whenever the membrane is compressed beyond a third of its initial wrinkle wavelength. Eventually [...]
The dream of installing optical fiber all the way to the home began in the early 1990s after extensive deployment of optical fibers in long-distance and metropolitan area networks. However, significant commercial deployment of fiber-to-the-home (FTTH) in North America started only a couple of years ago. One reason for the slow growth of FTTH is [...]
A childbirth simulator developed in France can help junior obstetricians gain the equivalent of several years’ experience at forceps-assisted births in just a few days. A research team at Laboratoire Ampère, at INSA, Lyon, developed the “BirthSIM” setup together with Olivier Dupuis at the Hospices Civils de Lyon and the Department of Computing Science at [...]