Meet the newest edition to the Department of Mechanical Engineering’s faculty, Dr. Thomas Schutzius! Dr. Schutzius joins us as an Assistant Professor in January 2023.
Click to learn more about Dr. Schutzius and his research.
CITRIS researchers to help Northern California communities reduce wildfire risk with dynamic modeling and serious games
With $2.5 million from the National Science Foundation, an interdisciplinary, multicampus University of California research team is partnering with agencies and community organizations in the Bay Area to help residents respond to natural disasters more quickly — and more safely. The 2018 Camp Fire, which killed 85 people and laid waste to more than 240 …
Berkeley Lab Scientists Develop a Cool New Method of Refrigeration
Adding salt to a road before a winter storm changes when ice will form. Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have applied this basic concept to develop a new method of heating and cooling. The technique, which they have named “ionocaloric cooling,” is described in a paper published Dec. 23 in …
ME Joint Professor Somayeh Sojoudi and ME PhD Student Elizabeth Glista Win “Best of the Best” Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE PES GM
ME Joint Professor Somayeh Sojoudi and ME PhD Student Elizabeth Glista have won a “Best of the Best” Conference Paper Award at the 2022 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting. The paper, titled “A MILP for Optimal Measurement Choice in Robust Power Grid State Estimation,” was selected by the Power System Operation, Planning, and …
A Framework for a Hydrogen Economy
Ravi Prasher is an Adjunct Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He has more than 20 years of experience in working in R&D in large industry, startup, government, and academia. He was one of the first program directors at ARPA-E in the US Department of Energy. Prasher has published more than 100 papers on …
UC wildfire symposium focuses on wildland-urban interface
UC scientists and researchers discussed fire in the wildland-urban interface, or WUI, at the second UC wildfire symposium Wednesday. UC President Michael Drake began by explaining what was discussed in the first wildfire symposium before touching on the WUI, where the built environment comes in contact with the natural lands. “Here in California, we are seeing firsthand …
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 …
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, …
Why ‘Fire is Normal’ in California and How Communities Can Change to Cut Risks
Michael Gollner, UC Berkeley Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering, joins Yahoo Finance to discuss the risks of wildfires on the West Coast and how residents can adjust to stay safe.
New California Fire Science Seminar Series
This new online seminar series will cover the breadth of wildland fire research relevant to California and introduce researchers to new topics and research groups across the state. Topics will include fire weather, wildfire risk, fire ecology, remote sensing, emissions, fire dynamics, fire modeling and public health. Featuring many early-career researchers, this series is aimed at …
UC Berkeley researchers receive grant for biopreservation research, center establishment
UC Berkeley researchers — in collaboration with researchers from the University of Minnesota, Massachusetts General Hospital and UC Riverside — won a National Science Foundation award Aug. 4 of $26 million over the next five years to fund a new center for biopreservation research.
ME Professor Michael Frenklach Wins Jürgen Warnatz Gold Medal
ME Professor Michael Frenklach has been awarded the Jürgen Warnatz Gold Medal by the Combustion Institute. The gold medal recognizes exceptional scientific contributions having a major impact on combustion applications or combustion research; bestowed biennially to one scientist during the International Symposium on Combustion. The gold medal is named after Jürgen Warnatz (1944-2007), a former …
ME Assistant Professor Michael Gollner to Receive 2020 Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award
ME Assistant Professor Michael Gollner has been selected as a co-recipient of the 2020 Hiroshi Tsuji Early Career Researcher Award. The annual award, co-sponsored by Elsevier and The Combustion Institute, recognizes up to two early career researchers who have demonstrated excellence in fundamental or applied combustion science and have achieved a significant advancement in their …
ME Assistant Professor Michael Gollner to Give Plenary Lecture on Wildland Fires
ME Assistant Professor Michael Gollner will be giving a Plenary Lecture on Wildland Fires at the 2020 Spring Meeting of the Western States Section of The Combustion Institute (WSSCI). This year, the meeting will be held on March 23-24 at Stanford University. The spring meetings bring together researchers, scientists and engineers from academia, national labs …
ME Professors Jyh-Yuan Chen, Robert Dibble, and Michael Frenklach Elected Fellows of the Combustion Institute
Members of the international combustion community recognized by their peers as distinguished for outstanding contributions to combustion, whether it be in research or in applications, may be designated Fellows of The Combustion Institute. This lifetime honorific title confers no special rights, privileges or duties. Fellows are active participants in The Combustion Institute, as evidenced by …
What Are Fire Whirls? Researchers Examine the Behavior of These Tornado-Like Fire Columns
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 …
Heat Energy Leaps Through Empty Space, Thanks to Quantum Weirdness
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 …
Going to extremes
New research by Berkeley engineers may soon make it more practical to use battery-powered vehicles and devices in extreme temperatures, such as icy-cold winters in Minnesota or stifling-hot summers in Death Valley. Led by Chris Dames, professor of mechanical engineering, the researchers developed a thermal regulator that can improve the performance of lithium-ion batteries outside of what’s …
Berkeley ingenuity keeps lithium-ion batteries at temps even Goldilocks would love
New research by Berkeley engineers may soon make it more practical to use battery-powered vehicles and devices in extreme temperatures, such as in icy-cold winters in Minnesota or stifling-hot summers in Death Valley. Those conditions represent temperature ranges that fall outside the narrow window — typically 20 to 40 degrees Celsius — needed for a …
ME Professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello Awarded the Howard W. Emmons Invited Plenary Lectureship by the IAFSS
ME Professor Carlos Fernandez-Pello has been awarded the Howard W. Emmons Invited Plenary Lectureship by the International Association of Fire Safety Science IAFSS. As part of the award, Professor Fernandez-Pello gave the Plenary Lecture at the IAFSS’s 12th International Symposium on Fire Safety Science on current fire science interest. His paper, “Wildland Fire Spot Ignition …
ME Professor Costas Grigoropoulos’ Laser Thermal Lab Featured in Latest Issue of Advanced Materials
Researchers in the Laser Thermal Laboratory have developed a new method for the stable doping of atomically layered transition-metal dichalchogenide materials TMDCs. TMDCs play a crucial role in next generation opto- electronic devices enabling new functionalities to overcome limitations of current semiconductor devices. Doping is a central issue in the integration of these new materials …
ME PhD Students’ Research from the Laser Thermal Laboratory Published in Nature Materials
Dr. Hojeong Jeon and doctoral student Sangmo Koo of the Laser Thermal Laboratory LTL reported their work on the functionalization of the surface of biological devices by ablative direct laser writing in the August 20 issue of Nature Materials. Patterned surfaces with nanoscale craters can control the cell ability to stick to surfaces. This in …
ME PhD Student Zi Jing Wong Wins Best Paper Award at SPIE Conference
ME Professor Xiang Zhang’s PhD student Zi Jing Wong, has won the Best Student Paper award at the 2015 SPIE Active Photonic Materials Conference. Wong’s award winning paper, “Single Mode Parity-Time Laser,” discusses: “The concept of parity-time PT symmetry exploits the interplay between the material loss and gain to attain novel optical phenomena such as …