News from Mechanical Engineering

UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering Oliver O’Reilly and campus graduate mechanical engineering student Nathaniel Goldberg constructed a model showing changes in the shape of spaghetti after it is placed in water, which could help researchers create more human-like robots.

C. D. “Dan” Mote, Jr. is a Renaissance man of engineering. From sawmills to ski slopes, Mote’s research has made a variety of everyday objects and processes more efficient, safe, and ecologically sound. His early work on rotating disc stability, which transformed sawing technology while reducing wood waste, has been applied to drive belts, computer …

Look at some spaghetti and you might think lunch. When Oliver O’Reilly looks at spaghetti, he thinks about the future of robotics. Pasta and robots might not seem like natural bedfellows, but O’Reilly, a UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering, hopes his research can help engineers construct better models and designs for soft robots.

In a fire whirl, rising hot air twists flames into a towering pillar. Although fire whirls in wildlands are normally small, fire whirls can grow large and destructive, forming into a burning tornado, as in the case of the 2018 Carr fire in California. In this video, Assistant Professor Michael Gollner explains the characteristics of …

A pioneering woman in AI and Machine Learning, the first woman to receive tenure in her field at UC Berkeley, a computer scientist and digital activist challenging bias in decision-making software, and an organization that has introduced 185,000 girls to coding and computer science. The winners of this year’s WITI@UC Athena Awards represent a wide …

ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka will be awarded the prestigious 2020 Nichols Medal at the 21st International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress in Berlin, Germany on Sunday, July 12, 2020. Professor Tomizuka is being awarded for his pioneering contributions to the control of mechatronic systems. Created in 1996, the Nichols Medal recognizes outstanding contributions of …

Tarek I. Zohdi is currently a Chancellors Professor of Mechanical Engineering, holder of the W. C. Hall Family Endowed Chair in Engineering, Chair of the Designated Emphasis Program in Computational and Data Science and Engineering (DE-CSE) at UC Berkeley and Chief Technology Officer UC Berkeley Fung Institute for Innovation. Previously, he has served as the …

If you use a vacuum-insulated thermos to help keep your coffee hot, you may know it’s a good insulator because heat energy has a hard time moving through empty space. Vibrations of atoms or molecules, which carry thermal energy, simply can’t travel if there are no atoms or molecules around. But a new study by …

Martin Sanchez Sendiz (ME 19′) was born in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico. Martin immigrated to the U.S. when he was four years old, arriving in South Lake Tahoe. Martin’s mother and father both worked in the hospitality industry in the resort town. Martin’s mother cleaned hotel rooms and his father worked multiple jobs as a prep …

Pieces of the gas giant’s greatest storm had seemed to be slipping away, but scientists say the underlying vortex is unchanged.

During Native American Heritage Month, Berkeley Mechanical Engineering spotlights a prominent Native American alumna, Suzanne Singer. Originally from Flagstaff, Arizona, Suzanne is a member of the Diné (Navajo) tribe. She earned her BS in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Arizona and her Masters and PhD from UC Berkeley in Mechanical Engineering. Since graduating, she …

The shape and architecture of collagen and elastin fibers can improve our understanding of lung diseases, including the one associated with vaping.

Renowned Berkeley Citation award winner and beloved professor of mechanical engineering, Andrew Packard, passed away last week at the age of 59 after a long battle with cancer.

Arapaima gigas. Image by iStock.com/kurga The scales of the massive Amazonian freshwater fish, Arapaima gigas, are so tough that they do not tear or crack when a piranha—which has one of the animal kingdom’s sharpest bites—attacks. Material scientists have discovered the secret to the fish’s impermeable armor: each scale is made up of a highly …

ME Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka was awarded the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Soichiro Honda Medal at the 2019 Dynamic Systems and Control Conference in Park City, Utah on October 10, 2019. ASME established the medal in 1982 to recognize an individual for an outstanding achievement or a series of significant engineering contributions in developing …

Professor Andrew (Andy) K. Packard, a pioneer in robust control theory who held the FANUC Chair of Mechanical Systems, passed away on September 30, 2019 after a long battle with cancer. Andy was born July 7, 1960. He grew up in Chicago Illinois and went to the University of Illinois, at Urbana-Champaign where he graduated …

Battery power is a limiting factor for robots everywhere, but it’s particularly problematic for drones, which have to make an awkward tradeoff between the amount of battery they carry, the amount of other more useful stuff they carry, and how long they can spend in the air. Consumer drones seem to have settled around about a …