Mechanical Engineering

  Brandon Dimmig steadies a fan cart for a cluster of eager fifth graders. The fan cart looks like a toy and students are instantly attracted to the straight grey track and the small black cart with a movable fan. Brandon Dimmig, Vanderbilt Aerospace Club president, readies… Read More

Silicon chip with porous surface next to the special furnace where it was coated with graphene to create a supercapacitor electrode. (Joe Howell / Vanderbilt)   Solar cells that produce electricity 24/7, not just when the sun is shining. Mobile phones with built-in power cells that recharge in… Read More

Mechanical engineering alumnus J. Robert Sims Jr. (BE’63) will serve as president of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers for 2014-2015. Bob Sims Sims, of Basking Ridge, N.J., is a senior engineering fellow with Becht Engineering Company Inc. He is a renowned authority in risk-based technologies, high pressure equipment, mechanical… Read More

Engineer Tracie Prater stands next to the nose cone for the Delta IV heavy rocket that will launch NASA’s Orion Crew Capsule on its first test flight in 2014. Tracie J. Prater has been selected to participate at the 2013 Emerging Space Leaders Grant Program during the 64th International Astronautical… Read More

Marince Near the end of his freshman year in 2011, mechanical engineering student Christopher Marince was feeling the stress of working on a dual major in Vanderbilt University’s Accelerated Graduate Program. Now he’d expected the strain of an academic workload, but there was something else bothering him. “I felt frustrated… Read More

L-R, A. Voss, B. Dimmig, J. Langford, J. Lee, D. Watkins, B. Smethills, F. Corradetti, R. Thompson, F. Folz, and M. Mitchell with the Vanderbilt Rocket ‘Hello Good Bio’ that flew the bio-hybrid fueled ramjet engine today at the NASA competition. A biohybrid fueled ramjet engine design paid off as… Read More

A novel redesign of industrial exhaust stacks by four mechanical engineering seniors that could result in 12% energy savings for their corporate sponsor has earned the student design team a second-place win in the team division at the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Region II conference last week. (L-R)… Read More

A mechanical engineering sophomore has received early acceptance notice to take part in the 2013 Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in Gaithersburg, Md. The highly competitive SURF program is substantially supported by the National Science Foundation. It exposes outstanding undergraduates to… Read More

A Vanderbilt engineering graduate student has created a small-scale, efficient way to produce high energy density plasma using a tabletop device. Its features and capabilities are described in an article published in the April edition of Physical Review Letters. Mechanical engineering Ph.D. student Marc Ramsey Marc Ramsey, a doctoral candidate… Read More

Cary Pint’s lab – Nanomaterials and Energy Devices Laboratory in Olin Hall – is close to completion and it brings to Vanderbilt its first two atomic layer deposition (ALD) systems, relatively small tools that deposit atomically thin layers of material on virtually any surface. The lab also houses a host… Read More