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ME Assistant Professor Kosa Goucher-Lambert Among ASME Reviewers of the Year

​The Editor and Editorial Board of the Journal of Mechanical Design would like to thank all of the reviewers for volunteering their expertise and time reviewing manuscripts in 2020. Serving as reviewers for the journal is a critical service necessary to maintain the quality of our publication and to provide the authors with a valuable …

ME Associate Professor Grace O’Connell Elected AIMBE Fellow

The American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) has announced the election of Grace O’Connell, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Don M. Cunningham Professor of Engineering, Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley to its College of Fellows. Dr. O’Connell was nominated, reviewed, and elected by peers and members of the …

Two ME Faculty Recognized for Service to Campus

The Berkeley Faculty Service Award (BFSA) honors a member of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate for their outstanding and dedicated service to the campus, and whose activities as a faculty member have significantly enhanced the quality of the campus as an educational institution and community of scholars. This award recognizes Senate service, which …

Capstone Project Profile: Creating a Stable Supply of Rare Elements for Medical and Industrial Applications Using a Molten Salt Nuclear Reactor

Nuclear fission creates many rare elements that are not normally found in nature and are discarded in traditional reactor fuels. These rare elements are useful for many industrial and medical processes, such as thickness gauging and cancer treatments. Our team is designing a new generation molten salt nuclear reactor with a sole focus on continuous production …

Capstone Project Profile: Adapting Humanoid Robots to Aid First Responders

Disaster relief demands both speed and adaptability to complex terrain; however, modern robots, which offer the potential to aid first responders, are currently specialized either for speed (wheeled robots) or for adaptability (legged robots). Our team is working to enable the transition of bipedal robots between legged locomotion and wheeled transportation. Our approach is to …

Capstone Project Profile: Using Wildfire Simulations as Predictors for Economical Risk Management

Wildfires have become an annual destructive force with the 2018 California wildfires witnessing the tragic loss of life and $3.5 billion in damages, which unraveled communities and motivated new outlooks to safety and liability. Our solution harnesses the novel firefighting technique of real time low computation wildfire prediction simulations, through a particle based representation of …

Capstone Project Profile: Developing an Affordable Alternative for Autonomous Vehicle Localization using High-Definition Radar Images

Localization of autonomous vehicles on the road currently relies on LiDAR (using lasers) and camera sensors which simultaneously map the environment around the car. Using high-definition radar images, we propose an algorithm to achieve an equivalent performance with a technology that is cheaper, easier to install, and less susceptible to adverse weather conditions such as …

Capstone Project Profile: Inflatable Modular Floating Solar Array to Meet the Global Energy Demand

Improved photovoltaic technology is essential to meet growing global energy demands. Floating solar offers numerous advantages over land-based, including increased efficiency via cooling, reduced evaporation and algal growth, and the financial and ecological benefits of facile installation and protecting undeveloped land. Our diverse team created a floating solar module for inland water bodies that is …

Capstone Project Profile: Evaluation of Novel, Less-Invasive Hip Implants

Over 370,000 total hip arthroplasties are performed annually with 70,000 revision surgeries being performed each year. Surgeons at UCSF VA Medical Center Department of Orthopedic Surgery who perform these procedures daily believe that it is worth investigating the physiological response following the implantation of novel less-invasive hip replacement designs. Our team will be using Finite …

Capstone Project Profile: Personalizing Neurological Patient’s Gait Therapy Using Machine-Learning-Based Electrical Stimulation

Neurological damage such as stroke, multiple sclerosis, and spinal cord injury cause walking impairments. The EvoCode team is improving the EvoWalk, a medical device developed by Evolution Devices, which corrects abnormal gait patterns of patients by electrically stimulating lower-limb muscles. The team aims to use machine learning techniques such as clustering and neural networks to …

Capstone Project Profile: Wearable Motion Tracking for Clinical Gait Analysis

A third of people over the age of 60 suffer from impaired gait, which leads to loss of personal freedom, falls, and injuries. Falls are the leading cause of fatal injury and trauma-related hospital admission among older adults, and costs around $50 billion each year. We are developing an affordable, user-friendly system that provides physician-requested …

This Anti-COVID Mask Breaks the Mold

To test the mask prototype’s impenetrability against small, virus-sized particles, the scientists employed fluorescent particle tests in collaboration with UC Berkeley’s Evan Variano, a professor of environmental engineering, and Simo Mäkiharju, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering. The fluorescent particles track particle distribution in and around the fabricated masks, Hosemann said.

Tracking and Fighting Fires on Earth and Beyond

Mechanical engineer Michael Gollner and his graduate student, Sriram Bharath Hariharan, from the University of California, Berkeley, recently traveled to NASA’s John H. Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. There, they dropped burning objects in a deep shaft and study how fire whirls form in microgravity. The Glenn Center hosts a Zero Gravity Research Facility, …

Five Berkeley Top Scholars Named AAAS Fellows

Five Berkeley scholars — four faculty members and one research scientist — have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), one of the world’s largest scientific societies. The distinction was awarded this year to 489 scientists, engineers and innovators for their advancement of science and its applications.

Scientists Design New Framework for Clean Water

We rely on water to quench our thirst and to irrigate bountiful farmland. But what do you do when that once pristine water is polluted with wastewater from abandoned copper mines? A promising solution relies on materials that capture heavy metal atoms, such as copper ions, from wastewater through a separation process called adsorption. However, commercially available …

ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka Receives ASME Honorary Membership

ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka was awarded an American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Honorary Membership at the 2020 ASME Annual Award Ceremony on November 16, 2020. The ASME Honorary Membership is awarded for a lifetime of service to engineering or related fields–e.g. science, research, public service. This achievement is described as “distinguished service that contributes …