Prof. Tom Andriacchi

Stanford’s Biomotion Lab has developed and applied a fundamental research framework for the analysis of human movement that has led to seminal contributions enhancing understanding of normal human movement as well as the interrelationships between musculoskeletal pathology and abnormal patterns of human movement.  More »

Prof. Tom Bowman, Thermosciences Group

Fuels of the Future

As concern over greenhouse gas emissions increases, and as availability of conventional hydrocarbon resources decreases, there will be a transition to new fuels derived from new sources. The chemical and physical characteristics of these future fuels will differ from those commonly used today. To assist in the production and use of these fuels, fundamental studies of the combustion chemistry of these new fuel structures are needed in order to optimize fuels for end use and to develop reduced reaction mechanisms for use in the CFD codes employed to design combustion equipment. The Mechanical Engineering Department is engaged in a comprehensive experimental and computational research program to obtain the required information.  More »

Prof. Banny Banerjee

Director, Program in Design (Design Group)

"We are creating the next generation of designers and thought-leaders who will design solutions to the complex challenges facing industry, society and our planet."  -Professor Banny Banerjee

Students in the Design Program work on a very wide range of projects, from foundational design exercises to "wicked problem" projects in energy, sustainability, health, and more, often with industry affiliates. Undergraduates in the Product Design major concern themselves with the invention and design of products, services and experiences that benefit society. The program teaches a design process that encourages creativity, craftsmanship, and personal expression, and emphasizes brainstorming and need finding to discover latent or under-served human needs. This methodology, called Design Thinking, is taken further in the graduate program, combining business factors, technology, and human factors in a mix that produces powerful designers. "Building is thinking," and our classes use a problem-based learning methodology where the students learn by doing in studio-based classes in both the Art and Mechanical Engineering departments. They also have a state-of-the-art facility, the Product Realization Lab http://prl.stanford.edu/ at their disposal to realize their ideas and inventions.  More »

Consulting Prof. Ed Carryer

Director, Smart Product Design Lab (Design Group)

Stanford's Smart Product Design Laboratory (SPDL) is home to the Mechatronics courses in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. These courses (ME218a,b,c,d at the Masters level, and ME210 at the undergraduate level) have been developed over the past 30 years with the principal goal of integrating the knowledge gained in the classes into real artifacts. While each of these courses meets for four hours of lecture a week, the real learning goes on in the laboratory. A mixture of individual laboratory assignments and team projects help the students take command of the material as they integrate it into their own designs. Each year, new projects are designed for each class that incorporate the pedagogical goals of the particular course, while paying close attention to the public venues in which the projects are presented. As a result, many of the projects have a whimsical nature that helps make the difficult and time-consuming engineering tasks a bit more fun. More »

Prof. Mark Cutkosky

Co-Director, Center for Design Research

Stickybot is a biomimetic robot, inspired by the wall-climbing gecko. Its toes are covered in tiny plastic bristles, imitating the gecko's setae, which cling to walls via directional adhesion. Continued work to reduce the size and improve the clinginess of the psuedo-setae may allow future Stickybots to climb to dangerous or inaccessible places to conduct safety inspections or investigations, leaving human scientists safely on the ground. More »

Assistant Prof. Eric Darve

Flow Physics and Computational Engineering Group
Mechanics and Computation Group

Computational Engineering is an exciting discipline of engineering that's relatively new. Its aim is to use computer simulations for modeling and design. In many instances, it can replace costly experiments and allow measurement of quantities that are inaccessible to experimentation. Despite the impressive progress in computer hardware, there remain many exciting research problems to improve the reliability, accuracy and speed of computer models and numerical algorithms. My research is focused on large scale scientific computing with application in protein modeling, acoustics, electromagnetics, and microfluidics. For example, the fast multipole method (which was named one of the Top 10 Algorithms of the Century, along with the Monte-Carlo method, Krylov iteration methods, the Householder matrix decomposition and the fast Fourier transform) is one of my main focus areas. Other exciting projects include creating time integrators for multiscale problems and stochastic differential equations. Along with state-of-the-art numerical algorithms, I also have projects in computer science where we use processors developed for gaming by NVIDIA and AMD for scientific computing. These processors can provide unprecedented performance; in some cases, we were able to measure 100x speed-ups between an Intel core and a graphics-processing unit (GPU). In 2008, modern GPUs had hundreds of computing cores and can achieve 1 Teraflop (e.g., 1,000,000,000,000 arithmetic operations per second). Today's programming environments, however, are inadequate for these new parallel processors and this is therefore the focus of several research projects.  More »

Professor Scott Delp

Director, Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab (Biomechanical Engineering Group)

The Neuromuscular Biomechanics Lab combines experimental and computational approaches to study movement. We investigate the form and function of biomechanical systems ranging from molecular motors to persons with movement disorders. We seek fundamental understanding of the mechanisms involved in the production of movement, and are motivated by opportunities to improve treatments for individuals with cerebral palsy, stroke, osteoarthritis, and Parkinson's disease.  More »

Associate Prof. Chris Edwards

Thermosciences Group

Our research into exergy management for simple cycle engines made clear that increasing compression ratio is the most direct way to vastly improve engine efficiency. To explore this, we have built in the lab a free-piston combustor capable of compression ratios in excess of 100:1. A 6 cm diameter piston is accelerated down a 2 meter cylinder to speeds in excess of 100 m/s; it then travels into a high-strength steel combustor section where it compresses the gas to 500 bar before expanding again. This clip shows a view through a large sapphire window mounted in the bottom of the combustor, looking up at the face of the piston. The blue color is from an argon-ion laser; by collimating the laser beam and reflecting it off a mirror mounted to the piston face we can achieve schlieren photography, in which light and dark variations in the image indicate gas density variation. A high-speed camera captures the video, in this case taking 20,000 frames per second. The video begins about 3 ms before the point where the piston turns around (called TDC). From the schlieren you can see a large degree of turbulence in the center and upper right portion of the cylinder. At about 1ms before TDC a high-pressure diesel injector in the side of the chamber opens. As the spray reaches the center of the chamber it is ignited by energy in the hot gas, and burns with a bright yellow color indicative of soot, and typical with diesel combustion. With video such as this we can investigate the nature of liquid spray combustion at the previously unexplored compression ratios that this device can achieve.  More »

Assistant Professor Beth Pruitt

Investigating the sense of touch (Mechanics and Computational Engineering Group)

The sense of touch is one of our most vital but poorly understood senses. In humans, the degradation of touch sensation with age, disease, and drug treatments is a debilitating and costly problem. Touch, hearing, pain sensation, and balance all depend upon mechanotransduction, which is the conversion of a mechanical stimulus to an electrical signal. Mechanotransduction is difficult to study due to the very small forces involved, and we are using our expertise in microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to engineer new tools to study the senses of touch and hearing.  More »

Professor Marc Levenston

Director, Biomechanical Engineering Group

Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory (STBL)

The research activities of the Soft Tissue Biomechanics Laboratory focus on the function, degeneration and regeneration of articular cartilage and fibrocartilage, with an emphasis on understanding the complex interactions between biophysical and biochemical cues in controlling cell behavior. Our approach combines contemporary approaches from a variety of disciplines including experimental and theoretical mechanics, cell and tissue culture, imaging, biochemistry and molecular biology.  More »

Associate Professor Juan G. Santiago

Thermosciences Group

Graduate student Daniel Strickland shows Professor Juan G. Santiago the modifications he has implemented into a hydrogen fuel cell experiment. The group is developing and optimizing methods for removal of product water from fuel cells; they aim to develop more robust, higher performance power systems.  More »

Associate Professor Reggie Mitchell

Thermosciences Group

Since coal is the cheapest and most abundant energy resource in the United States, it is quite likely that it will continue to be the primary fuel for electricity generation for the next few decades. However, when coal is used in conventional power plants, copious quantities of CO₂ are released into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas that is instrumental in causing global warming. Three research projects are underway in Professor Mitchell’s laboratories that have the goal of enabling the development of technologies that produce electricity using coal as the energy source that facilitate CO₂ capture, so that the CO₂ is not released into the atmosphere. One of the projects involves the development of a coal-driven fuel cell, where the oxygen for coal oxidation is separated from air using an electrolytic membrane. Coal oxidation products are rich in carbon dioxide and water vapor, and after water condensation, a nearly pure stream of carbon dioxide is ready for sequestration. Another project involves coal conversion in supercritical water (SCW), water at conditions above its critical point. When coal and oxygen are injected into SCW, the combustion products are dissolved in the water. In our novel scheme, the water is obtained from a deep saline aquifer, and the water containing the dissolved combustion products is returned to the aquifer. Deep saline aquifers have been identified as good site for CO₂ sequestration. In a third project, the possibility of applying chemical looping combustion (CLC) technology to coal is being investigated. In CLC, a metal oxide is used to provide the oxygen for coal combustion, yielding a product stream that is nearly all CO₂ and H₂O. After removing the water, a sequestration-ready stream of CO₂ is available.  More »