This fall, UC Davis broke ground on a first-of-its-kind bird flight research center, which will allow students and researchers in the College of Engineering and School of Veterinary Medicine to study how birds fly to advance scientific understanding and aerial system design.
From fire-detecting drone swarms to optimally efficient human-autonomy collaboration, the UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and a principal investigator at CITRIS uses complex technological systems to address complex challenges.
From electrifying off-road vehicles to finding a pathway to advanced decision-making in autonomous vehicles, the assistant professor is working on some serious vehicular upgrades starting with the foundation: control systems.
Gutta Prudhvi Reddy, an alum of the UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineering master’s program, earned the IEEE Intersociety Conference on Thermal and Thermomechanical Phenomena in Electronic Systems, or ITherm, 2024 Best Overall Poster Award for his research titled “Assessment of Bubble Pump Model for Fluid Directional Motion for Asymmetric Heated Ratchets.”
With recent $1.98 million in funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, an interdisciplinary team of researchers aims to decarbonize the industrial sector by efficiently extracting ultra-low-grade waste heat from gas streams and using it for various applications in the food and beverage industry.
Robots. Laundry. Emergency care. At the University of California, Davis, Center for Spaceflight Research, these topics and more are investigated as they relate to human spaceflight. The multidisciplinary research center is poised to become the preeminent resource for human spaceflight engineering research in the U.S.
Mechanical engineering student Rowan Glenn has been recognized for their research with the AIAA Jefferson Goblet Student Paper Award. They share how getting involved in research as an undergraduate has shaped their engineering experiences.
The U.S. Department of Energy, or DOE, has selected a University of California, Davis, collaboration to receive $1.98 million in funding as one of 49 projects aimed at decarbonizing the industrial sector and moving the nation closer to a net-zero economy.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Davis, is currently working to divert textile waste from landfills and turn it into composite mycelium materials, or CMMs, for use in architecture and the construction industry.
UC Davis' first wind tunnel was built in 1975 in Bainer Hall by then-new faculty member Bruce with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Today, assistant professors Camli Badrya and Christina Harvey are taking the wind tunnels to the next level.
Christina Harvey, a University of California, Davis, researcher studying how bird flight can be used to improve aircraft design, has been awarded a 2023 Packard Fellowship in Science and Engineering from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
At first glance, Orobanche ramosa looks like an interesting blossoming plant, one that could add a unique flair to flower arrangements. But it’s a parasitic weed that attaches to roots, sucks out nutrients and is threatening California’s lucrative $1.5 billion processing tomato industry.
Non-invasive implant surgery? Fixing a space shuttle from the outside in? Mohsen Habibi, a recent addition to mechanical and aerospace engineering, is on the cusp of making these a reality with his breakthrough discovery — printing with soundwaves.
In a paper published last week by Physical Review Letters, Jean-Pierre Delplanque, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering and the dean of graduate studies at the University of California, Davis, and a team of researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories, have developed a scaling law to analyze the kinetics of high-pressure, rapid solidification of metastable liquids observed in national laboratory and academic experiments over the past few decades.
Typically, the primary indicator of a burgeoning wildfire in California is a plume of hazy, gray smoke wafting through the air, seen by satellites or cameras. The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection, or CalFire, is alerted, and mitigation and containment efforts ensue.
Initial results of a unique, multi-disciplinary public scholarship partnership between UC Davis researchers and Shriners Children's Northern California to create better prosthetic options for children are "unexpected and amazing."
Seongkyu Lee, associate professor of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, was recently awarded a grant-funded joint research project by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, as part of the lab’s Academic Collaboration Team, or ACT, Awards.
It is the year 2035. In a world facing climate catastrophe, the human enterprise is powered by fields of wind farms, with turbine blades made from fast-growing grasses and the roots of a million-year-old fungus.
Fertilized chicken eggs can be sexed by “sniffing” volatile chemicals emitted through the shell, according to new work by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and Sensit Ventures Inc., a startup company in Davis. The work is published May 22 in PLOS ONE.
Second-year mechanical and aerospace engineering master's student Anna Rita Moukarzel’s love for the world of neuroengineering is rooted in her background in robotics and the performing arts.
Moukarzel graduated from UC Davis in 2020 with a B.S. in mechanical engineering with a minor in theater & dance.
Before aircraft, birds ruled the skies and Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Assistant Professor Christina Harvey thinks there’s still a lot to be learned from them. Harvey’s Biologically-Informed Research and Design (BIRD) Lab sits at the intersection of aerospace engineering and biology and looks to combine disciplines to make an impact in both fields.
Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society and the Banatao Institute (CITRIS) at the University of California (UC) recently announced the 2022 CITRIS Seed Awards recipients. The eight selected proposals, submitted by multicampus teams from Berkeley, Davis, Merced and Santa Cruz, will receive up to $60,000 for their work, thanks in part to external philanthropic support.
New technologies with ambitious approaches are being developed to screen for SARS-CoV-2, including breath tests. In fact, the US FDA approved the first breath test for COVID-19 under emergency use authorization (EUA) in April 2022.
Unfold, a UC Davis podcast, interviews Assistant Professor Jonathon Schofield and his collaborators to look at how the combination of surgery and machine learning is making life easier for amputees.
A new study from Assistant Professor Christina Harvey uses modeling and aerodynamics to describe how gulls can change the shape of their wings to control their response to gusts or other disturbances. The lessons could one day apply to uncrewed aerial vehicles or other flying machines.
An interdisciplinary team at UC Davis led by Professor Cristina Davis has been awarded a five-year, $5.9M grant from the National Institutes of Health for its work on innovative, non-intrusive diagnostic technology that aims to shorten the time it takes to diagnose a range of conditions from asthma to autism.
For her doctoral research at the University of Michigan, Assistant Professor Christina Harvey and her colleagues found that most birds can morph their wings mid-flight to flip back and forth between flying smoothly like a passenger plane and flying acrobatically like a fighter jet.
Professor Vinod Narayanan and Assistant Professor Jonathon Schofield are among nine groups of UC Davis faculty members to receive a proof-of-concept grant this year, which helps scientists advance compelling research and innovations toward commercial applications.
With a new grant from the U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies Office, Narayanan and his team of collaborators will develop 3D-printed high-temperature, high-pressure receivers for solar-thermal energy that can be used to generate power or produce renewable industrial process heat.
Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Seongkyu Lee has been selected as a participant in Stanford University’s Center for Turbulence Research (CTR) Summer Program . The CTR Summer Program is a biennial research program that promotes the development and evaluation of new ideas in turbulence research.
As businesses send up more space missions, build their own space stations and even think about mining the moon, they will need to find and train new types of workers. Professor Stephen K. Robinson weighs in on the first episode of Tech News Briefing’s special series about the developing space economy.
A few miles away from West Sacramento at UC Davis, a team of engineers, scientists and designers led by MAE Professor Valeria La Saponara is researching ways to apply mycelium to other human problems.
Over the next four years, UC Davis students will be designing the car of the future as part of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s EcoCAR Electric Vehicle (EV) Challenge. The competition challenges students to convert a Cadillac LYRIQ EV into an autonomous, next-generation battery-electric vehicle with vehicle-to-everything connectivity so it can interact with devices and the environment.
With a new two-year grant, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Seongkyu Lee and his team have an opportunity to make a direct industry impact with their groundbreaking rotorcraft noise prediction tools. Lee’s group will apply their expertise in predicting rotorcraft noise to help industry leader Supernal identify noise sources in their aircraft designs and recommend strategies to reduce it.
One new trick a dog can learn is how to smell COVID-19. But although studies show they can accurately detect coronavirus infections, training enough canines to recognize the scent will take a long time to scale up. Cristina Davis, a professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering and associate dean of research for the UC Davis College of Engineering, has a faster tool set to enter the industry by the end of 2022: a breathalyzer-like device to detect COVID-19 and its severity in individuals.
The California Department of Transportation (Caltrans) has awarded a team of researchers from the University of California campuses at Berkeley, Davis and Merced a two-year grant to simulate urban air mobility in the San Francisco area, and to draft regulations for this highly complex form of travel.
The Main Theatre at Wright Hall this month became the unlikely site of an experiment on technology that could eventually go into space.
Students in the Center for Spaceflight Research at UC Davis are working on technologies for a class of satellites that could inspect other spacecraft, such as the International Space Station, in collaboration with NASA. But up in space, the light is harshly bright with no atmosphere to attenuate the sunshine, and the technology must be configured for that environment.
With a new grant from the California Department of Transportation (Caltrans), Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Associate Professor Seongkyu Lee and his collaborators at UC Berkeley and UC Merced will develop software that will help pave the way for air taxis, also known as advanced air mobility (AAM), to fly in California. AAM promises a new method of transportation through small electric aircraft that can fly passengers and cargo over short distances.
An interdisciplinary team of UC Davis scientists and plastic and reconstructive surgeons is collaborating to help improve quality of life for patients with upper limb amputations. They are utilizing a novel amputation surgical procedure and smart prosthetics to help patients better control their residual muscles, receive sensory feedback and reduce limb pain.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) assistant professor Jonathon Schofield, neurobiology, physiology and behavior (NPB) associate professor Wilsaan Joiner and their team are working to develop better and more functional prosthetic devices for children.
Mycelium, the white filament-like root structure of mushrooms, might be an important building block of a more sustainable world. By growing mycelium with a biomass—anything from coffee grounds to leftover agricultural waste—researchers at UC Davis are creating sustainable structures that can be turned into everything from biodegradable plastics and circuit boards to filters that remove harmful antibiotic and pesticide residues from water.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) associate professor Seongkyu Lee will join the renewed multi-institutional Vertical Lift Research Center of Excellence (VLRCOE) at Pennsylvania State University, a $7.5M project funded by the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy and NASA. This is Lee’s second time participating in VLRCOE at UC Davis.
In less than a decade, your taxi might come from the sky instead of the street. Once a hallmark of science fiction, flying taxis have become the cutting edge of aerospace engineering thanks to researchers like UC Davis’ Seongkyu Lee, an associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE). Lee’s group is conducting groundbreaking aeroacoustics research to lay the computational groundwork to make air taxis a reality.
The UC Davis College of Engineering is pleased to announce that mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and chair Cristina Davis has been appointed to serve as associate dean for research effective October 1.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering associate professor Seongkyu Lee is part of a new three-year, $5.8 million multi-institution project funded by NASA to improve the rapid development of urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles, also known as air taxis.
Through the new UC Davis Center for Neuroengineering and Medicine and projects funded by NASA and the National Science Foundation (NSF), mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) faculty members Sanjay Joshi, Jonathon Schofield and Steve Robinson are pushing the boundaries of the developing field of neuroengineering and finding new ways for humans and machines to work together.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) professor Steve Robinson, assistant professor Jonathon Schofield, and Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior (NPB) associate professor Wilsaan Joiner are teaming up in a new four-year, $1.3 million NASA-funded project to study different visual and haptic strategies to help astronauts more safely and precisely operate robotic arms in space.
The University of California, Davis and RePurpose Energy, a clean energy startup co-founded by professor Jae Wan Park, have executed a licensing agreement for an innovative system that repurposes batteries from electric cars to use as energy storage systems with various applications, like solar power.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering (MAE) professor Cristina Davis’ group will lead one of the largest studies to-date on the health effects of e-cigarette use, or vaping. In the three-year, $1 million study funded by the UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP), the team will collect samples from over 600 volunteers to understand how vaping affects the pulmonary system, especially in comparison to smoking cigarettes.
While drugs help patients mitigate the most extreme conditions of mental illnesses like schizophrenia or depression, they often don’t address the cognitive deficits many diseases cause, such as memory loss, low attention span and impaired decision-making.
With an increase in cognitive and neurological disorders such as dementia, stroke and Alzheimer’s, researchers worldwide are actively seeking pathways to help people restore neural function and improve their quality of life. The UC Davis College of Engineering announces the launch of the UC Davis Center for Neuroengineering & Medicine (NE&M), an integrated, multi-disciplinary effort that seeks to repair, restore and augment human capacity to benefit society.
As companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin launch a new era of commercial spaceflight, astronaut-turned-engineering-professor Stephen Robinson ’78 aims to make UC Davis a key player by establishing a new Center for Spaceflight Research this fall.
On September 9, Northern California residents woke up to a dark orange smoky sky that rained down ash and made it hard to breathe. Sadly, days like this are becoming our “new normal.” As climate change makes wildfires burn faster, hotter and more often, humans need to understand the effects of these disasters and how to live with them.
Caltrans and the UC Davis Advanced Highway Maintenance and Construction Technology (AHMCT) Research Center today released two reports highlighting ways to prevent rare but often deadly collisions involving wrong-way drivers.
Mechanical and aerospace engineering professor Case van Dam and his team are developing new ways to generate lift in aircraft using microjets to blow air out at the trailing edge of an airfoil. With new funding from NASA Ames and interest from Boeing, the team, including recent Ph.D. graduate Seyedeh Sheida Hosseini, will prototype and refine their design and conduct wind tunnel tests at Texas A&M university to bring their technology closer to use in the field.
With the advent of autonomous vehicles, smartphones and drones, lithium-ion batteries have become the device of choice for powerful and long-lasting energy. However, to ensure that the batteries are safe and effective, researchers need to find out what’s happening on the inside to make sure they’re healthy.
With new seed grants from the UC Davis Office of Research’s COVID-19 Research Accelerator Funding Track (CRAFT), three teams of UC Davis engineers are applying their expertise toward the pandemic response to help people become safer, healthier and better-tested.
Anyone who has seen a small drone flying knows loud buzzing sound it makes as it flies. This sound—the result of air flowing around the vehicle, through the blades and between the rotors—is a barrier to wider acceptance of drones and a problem mechanical and aerospace engineering assistant professor Seongkyu Lee hopes to help solve.
A team of UC Davis researchers look to give humanity an extra hand—literally. A new, NSF-funded collaboration between the Departments of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) and Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior (NPB) plans to develop and test a robotic fifth limb to give humans extra capabilities in extreme environments.
Urban air mobility (UAM), or the use of air taxis, is poised to be the next big thing in transportation. Companies are already promising fleets in traffic-congested cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles and Dallas as early as 2023, and Morgan Stanley estimates that the UAM business will create a $1.5 trillion market in the coming decades.
The work of a four-member international team of scientists including UC Davis mechanical and aerospace engineer Zhaodan Kong, a newly-published review paper in the Journal of Economic Entomology is one of the first of its kind to summarize scientific literature on the use of agricultural drones for pest management.
If space is the final frontier, UC Davis is taking giant leaps to reach it. With expertise in human-machine cooperation, control systems and materials under extreme conditions, the university aims to make itself a rising star in space engineering and play a crucial role in the next generation of space exploration.
A breakthrough by UC Davis mathematicians could help scientists get three or four times the performance from supercomputers used to model protein folding, turbulence and other complex atomic scale problems.
Young people are adopting new nicotine products faster than they can be researched or regulated, though the health effects are still unknown. MAE distinguished Professor Tony Wexler looks to change this by studying smoke deposition in the lungs through a three-year grant from the UC Tobacco-Related Disease Research Program (TRDRP).
A test to detect opioid drugs in exhaled breath has been developed by engineers and physicians at the University of California, Davis. A breath test could be useful in caring for chronic pain patients as well as for checking for illegal drug use.
Professor Francis Assadian is working on two projects with Ford Motor Company to bring intelligent control systems design and artificial intelligence to enhance vehicle safety and performance and automating manufacturing.
Though electric cars are great for the environment, the batteries they use are not. Because recycling is extremely expensive, they end up thrown into storage at car dealerships or buried in landfills. As electric cars become an increasingly large part of the market, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Professor Jae Wan Park and his lab have found an inexpensive and environmentally-friendly solution to this problem by giving these batteries a second life in electrical energy storage systems for renewable energy power grids.
Professor Stephen K. Robinson’s lab has received a grant from NASA to study the aerodynamics of flap-based steering system for small atmospheric entry vehicles moving at hypersonic speeds. The proposal, titled “Aerodynamic Flaps for Control of Hypersonic Atmospheric Entry Trajectories,” will receive $215,400 over two years.
Domestic cats, like many other mammals, use smelly secretions from anal sacs to mark territory and communicate with other animals. A new study from the University of California, Davis, shows that many odiferous compounds from a male cat are actually made not by the cat, but by a community of bacteria living in the anal sacs.
In a new paper published March 8 in Science, a team led by researchers at the University of California, Davis, and the California Institute of Technology show how complicated and surprising behavior can emerge in a very simple experimental network.
