Woodruff School 2017-18 Annual Report

2017–2018 ANNUAL REPORT

From the Chair It has been an exciting and productive year for the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and I am happy to highlight some of our accomplishments through this annual report. As many of you know, there has been a transition in school leadership after our former school chair, Dr. William Wepfer, retired on April 1, 2018. We are thankful for the 10 great years of leadership and service that Dr. Wepfer provided, helping the Woodruff School further establish itself as one of the top mechanical engineering programs in the country. On July 1, 2018, I accepted the position of School Chair and am excited about the opportunity to help lead the Woodruff School into the future. There is a strong legacy to build on and we will be successful in continuing to break barriers and setting new standards because of our excellent students, staff, faculty, alumni, and others that have partnered with us.

During the 2017-2018 school year, our undergraduate mechanical engineering program rose to #2 nationally, our graduate mechanical engineering program rose to #5, and our nuclear and radiological engineering program was ranked #9 according to U.S. News and World Report. Over the past year,

we continued to be one of the top producers of mechanical engineers having graduated 529 BS students, 248 MS students, and 56 PhD students. Our students have taken full advantage of our innovation ecosystem with strong participation in the Montgomery Machining Mall, the Flowers Invention Studio, Student Competition Center, CREATE-X, and InVenture Prize.

All of these activities provide our students with the best facilities and programs to apply their creativity through a number of hands-on experiences outside of the classroom. Our faculty maintained a strong research portfolio, raising just shy of $40M for the third year in a row which has been a record for the Woodruff School. Our faculty were successful in winning three Multidisciplinary University Research Initiative programs from the U.S. Department of Defense. Our faculty also played a leading role in winning a National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center to make cell manufacturing for new therapies highly reproducible, enabling broad clinical use.

As you can see, there are a lot of exciting things happening in the Woodruff School and we will continue to push to educate the top ME students in the nation and define the future in research in mechanical engineering.

Best Regards, Samuel Graham, Jr. Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. School Chair and Professor

About the Woodruff School The first degree offered at the Georgia School of Technology, as the Institute was called at its inception in 1888, was the Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering. Today, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering offers:

2 bachelor of science programs 4 master of science programs 4 doctor of philosophy programs

undergraduate students

853

graduate students 460 MS

+

393 Ph.D.

B.S. Degrees

248

M.S. Degrees

5

97

9

No.

No.

national ranking of ME graduate program, released Spring 2018

FACULTY

+

national ranking of NRE graduate program, released Spring 2018

9 non-tenure track faculty 35 adjunct appointments 63 research faculty

458 women 210 international

full-time, tenure-track faculty

183 distance learning 151 women 274 international

19 senior faculty with endowed or distinguished chairs 2 faculty with new NSF Early CAREER Awards 3 NAE members who hold emeritus or adjunct appointments 72 staff members

DEGREES AWARDED, 2017-2018

529

2

No.

national ranking of ME undergraduate program, released Fall 2018

ENROLLMENT, FALL 2018

2,121

RANKINGS, U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT

FINANCES

56

Ph.D. Degrees

$37.3M

FY18 new sponsored research awards

$75.5M

FY18 expenditures

FY18 Expenditures ($75,543,535)

Other $294,849 GT Foundation $5,173,286

State $32,321,387

GTRC $456,251 Sponsored Research $37,297,762

Awards & Promotions FACULTY Chaitanya Deo – promoted to Professor

Peter Loutzenhiser – promoted to Associate Professor; National Solar Energy Award

Anna Erickson – promoted to Associate Professor

Bojan Petrovic – Elected International Member of the Croatian Academy of Engineering

Andrei Fedorov – promoted to Associate Chair for Graduate Studies

Devesh Ranjan – Named Provost Teaching and Learning Fellow

Katherine Fu – Faculty Institute Diversity Champion Andrés García – promoted to Professor; named Executive Director of Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering & Bioscience at Georgia Tech; 2018 European Society for Biomaterials International Award Samuel Graham – promoted to School Chair Robert Guldberg – Georgia Bio’s 2018 Life Science Health Impact Award Tequila Harris – L.E. Scriven Young Investigator Award Nolan Hertel – Rockwell Lifetime Achievement Award Surya Kalidindi – 2018 Department of Defense Vannevar Bush Faculty Fellowship Tony Kim – NIH Director’s New Innovator Award YongTae Kim – NSF CAREER Award Thomas Kurfess – named 2018 President of SME; DoE Advanced Manufacturing Traineeship Grant

Christopher Saldana – Awarded DoE Advanced Manufacturing Traineeship Grant Seung Woo Lee – NSF CAREER Award Suresh Sitaraman – 2018 NextFlex Fellow; promoted to Regent’s Professor Jianjun (Jan) Shi – named to the National Academy of Engineering Cassandra Telenko – appointed New Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems (BBISS0 Fellow) Susan Thomas – promoted to Associate Professor; Young Investigator Award Shuman Xia – James W. Dally Young Investigator Award

STAFF Daphne Brown – promoted to Admin Professional Sr Michelle Graham – promoted to Admin Professional Sr Amit Jariwala – promoted to Senior Academic Professional

Michael Leamy – promoted to Professor

Regina Neequaye – promoted to Admin Supervisor

Timothy Lieuwen – named to the National Academy of Engineering

Essie Reynolds – promoted to Admin Professional Sr

Angela Smith – promoted to Admin Professional Sr Laura Tolliver – promoted to Academic Advisor II

Nicholas Beskid – NIH Fellowship Camila Camargo – NSF Grad Fellowship Andrew Conant – ANS Scholarship Angelica Connor – DOD (SMART) Fellowship

ALUMNI Stacey Dixon (MSME ’95, Ph.D. 2000) – named Director for the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA)

Elijah Hammond – Hearst Fellowship

Arkadeep Kumar (Ph.D. ’18, advised by Dr. Shreyes Melkote) – Awarded The Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

Emily Kamienski – Astronaut Scholarship

Akanksha Menon (Ph.D. ’18, advised by Dr. Shannon Yee) – awarded The Industrial Technology Research Institute of Taiwan Rosenfeld Postdoctoral Fellowship at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab Alexander Rattner (Ph.D. ’15) – Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State, named the Dorothy Quiggle Professor in Engineering Blake Moret – elected Chairman of Rockwell Automation Dr. Xiayun Sharon Zhao (MSME ’09 and Ph.D. ’17) – appointed Assistant Professor at the University of Pittsburgh Min Zou (Ph.D. ’99) – awarded the Faculty Distinguished Achievement Award for Research by University of Arkansas (UA) Alumni Association

Marshall Johnson – NSF Grad Fellowship

Daniel Lorenzin – CONACYT Fellowship Karen Martin – NSF Grad Fellowship Marguerite Matherne – NSF Grad Fellowship Alexander McQuire-Guzman – Hearst Fellowship Akanksha Menon – Awarded a Silver Graduate Student Award at the Materials Research Society conference in Boston Alexander Murphy – NSF Grad Fellowship Nicholas Piper – Awarded Department of Energy Office of Science Graduate Student Research (SCGSR) Program Award Heidi Ramsower – Hearst Fellowship Kristina Reed – ANS Scholarship Katherine Scott – ASNT Fellowship

STUDENTS

Jared Tippens – NSF Grad Fellowship

Bettina Arkhurst – NSF Grad Fellowship

Vishnu Vardhan – Charles Hutchins Educational Grant

New Faculty & Staff

Yuhang Hu Assistant Professor began Jan. 2018

Anirban Mazumdar Assistant Professor began Jan. 2018

Chengzhi Shi Assistant Professor began Aug. 2018

Nichelle Compton Event Coordinator II began Apr. 2018

Amy Huttenhoff Academic Advisor I began Jan. 2018

Julia Stackhaus Admin Professional III began June 2018

Harrison Crawford Financial Admin I began Mar. 2018

Shawn McCalmon Financial Admin I began Mar. 2018

Hillary Sutherland Academic Advisor I began Sept. 2018

Kimberley Henry Financial Admin I began Aug. 2018

Randi Sloan IT Support Prof II began Apr. 2018

Lauren Swindell Financial Mgr I began June 2018

Rebecca Herrera Mail Clerk I began Nov. 2017

David Smith Lecturer began Jan. 2018

Biye (Amy) Wang Electronics Specialist began Oct. 2018

Research

NEWS Leveraging Lymph Nodes for Immunotherapies Dr. Susan Thomas studies the mechanics of the immune system — how fluids, molecules and cells move in the body. Mechanics help her better understand how cancers progress, develop and metastasize, which helps optimize drug delivery for targeted therapies that leverage the immune system to treat cancer.

New Material, Manufacturing Use Sun’s Heat for Cheaper Renewable Electricity

based alloys that get too soft at the desired higher temperatures and at the elevated pressure of supercritical carbon dioxide.

Concentrated solar power plants convert solar energy into electricity by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a lot of light onto a small area, which generates heat that is transferred to a molten salt. Heat from the molten salt is then transferred to a “working” fluid, supercritical carbon dioxide, that expands and works to spin a turbine for generating electricity.

Researchers from Purdue University and former Georgia Tech Professor Asegun Henry determined that two materials showed promise together as a composite: The ceramic zirconium carbide, and the metal tungsten. Plates of the ceramic-metal composite were created consisting customizable channels for tailoring the exchange of heat, based on simulations conducted at Georgia Tech by Dr. Devesh Ranjan’s team.

To make solar-powered electricity cheaper, the turbine engine would need to generate even more electricity for the same amount of heat, which means the engine needs to run hotter. The problem is that heat exchangers, which transfer heat from the hot molten salt to the working fluid, are currently made of stainless steel or nickel-

Mechanical and corrosion tests show that this new composite material could be tailored to successfully withstand the higher temperature, high-pressure supercritical carbon dioxide needed for generating electricity more efficiently than today’s heat exchangers.

Researchers Boost Efficiency and Stability of Optical Rectennas After announcing the first optical rectenna in 2015, Dr. Baratunde Cola’s research team is now reporting a two-fold efficiency improvement in the devices — and a switch to air-stable diode materials. The improvements could allow the rectennas — which convert electromagnetic fields at optical frequencies directly to electrical current — to operate low-power devices such as temperature sensors.

Ultimately, the researchers believe their device design — a combination of a carbon nanotube antenna and diode rectifier — could compete with conventional photovoltaic technologies for producing electricity from sunlight and other sources. The same technology used in the rectennas could also directly convert thermal energy to electricity.

Microfluidic Molecular Exchanger Helps Control Therapeutic Cell Manufacturing Researchers in Dr. Andrei Fedorov’s lab have demonstrated an integrated technique for monitoring specific biomolecules — such as growth factors — that could indicate the health of living cell cultures produced for the burgeoning field of cell-based therapeutics.

Using microfluidic technology to advance the preparation of samples from the chemically complex bioreactor environment, the researchers have harnessed electrospray ionization mass spectrometry (ESI-MS) to provide online monitoring that they believe will provide for therapeutic cell production — the kind of precision quality control that has revolutionized other manufacturing processes.

Matrix Delivers Healing Stem Cells to Injured Elderly Muscles A car accident leaves an aging patient with severe muscle injuries that won’t heal. Treatment with muscle stem cells from a donor might restore damaged tissue, but doctors are unable to deliver them effectively. A new method may help change this.

Researchers from Dr. Andrés García’s lab have engineered a molecular matrix, a hydrogel, to deliver muscle stem cells called muscle satellite cells (MuSCs) directly to injured muscle tissue in patients whose muscles don’t regenerate well. In lab experiments on mice, the hydrogel successfully delivered MuSCs to injured, aged muscle tissue to boost the healing process while protecting the stem cells from harsh immune reactions.

Sodium- and Potassium-based Batteries Hold Promise for Cheap Energy Storage Electric-powered growth has led to concerns that the world’s supply of lithium, the metal at the heart of many of the new rechargeable batteries, may eventually be depleted.

Researchers from Dr. Matthew McDowell’s lab have found new evidence suggesting that batteries based on sodium and potassium hold promise as a potential alternative to lithium-based batteries.

Flexible, Wearable Oral Sodium Sensor Could Help Improve Hypertension Control For people who have hypertension and certain other conditions, eating too much salt raises blood pressure and increases the likelihood of heart complications. To help monitor salt intake, researchers from Dr. WoonHoong Ye’s lab have developed a flexible and stretchable wireless sensing system designed to be comfortably worn in the mouth to measure the amount of sodium a person consumes.

Based on an ultrathin, breathable elastomeric membrane, the sensor integrates with a miniaturized flexible electronic system that uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly report the sodium consumption to a smartphone or tablet. The researchers plan to further miniaturize the system — which now resembles a dental retainer — to the size of a tooth.

Improving Prosthetics Researchers at Georgia Tech including Dr. Levent Degertekin have created an ultrasonic sensor that allows amputees to control each of their prosthetic fingers individually. It provides fine motor hand gestures that aren’t possible with current commercially available devices.

Student News NSF Graduate Research Fellowships Woodruff School graduate researchers Camila Camargo (ME, advised by Susan Thomas), Marshall Johnson (ME, advised by Surya Kalidindi), Karen Martin (ME – BioE, advised by Andrés García), Marguerite Matherne (ME, advised by David Hu), and Alexander Murphy (ME, advised by Julie Linsey) were awarded National Science Foundation (NSF) 2018 Graduate Research Fellowships. The NSF received more than 12,000 applications and made 2,000 award offers to outstanding students pursuing research-based master’s and doctoral degrees at accredited United States institutions.

HyTech Racing Wins First Place at Formula Hybrid Competition HyTech Racing won first place in the electric category at the Formula Hybrid Competition, with high scores in Project Management, Design, and the Endurance Event. The Formula Hybrid Competition is an interdisciplinary design and engineering challenge in which teams must collaboratively design and build a formula-style electric or plug-in hybrid race car and subsequently compete in a series of events.

Wreck Racing Takes Second Place Overall at Grassroots Motorsports $2018 Challenge Wreck Racing took home second place in a recent competition that had them build a car with a budget of $2,018. Each year, the team competes in the 20XX Challenge presented by Grassroots Motorsports. The goal is to build a high-performance motor vehicle with the budget of the year. Wreck Racing’s 1987 BMW 5 Series took home third place in autocross, first place in concourse, and second place overall. They also received the “Best Engineered” award.

Georgia Tech EcoCAR 3 Takes Fifth Place in Four-Year Competition Georgia Tech’s EcoCAR 3 Team embarked on an ambitious journey to transform a Chevrolet Camaro into an environmentally friendly, hybrid electric vehicle. The team’s goals were to increase fuel efficiency and reduce greenhouse emissions while maintaining the performance and appeal of this iconic American vehicle. The cross-discipline student team took fifth place overall in the four-year competition, as well as first place in Mechanical Systems Presentation and Controls & SMS Presentation. The team also placed second in Project Management.

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Acknowledgements Editor: Candler Hobbs Assistant Editor: Reid Pickett Contributors: Kristen Bailey, Josh Brown, Ben Brumfield, Jason Maderer, Georgia Parmelee, John Toon Photography: Karen Endicott, Rob Felt, Candler Hobbs, Christopher Moore Design: Sarah Collins Printing: Wallace Graphics

Copyright Š 2018 by The George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering