“This grant provides a unique training opportunity for top engineering graduate students looking to understand how to control stem cells into clinically relevant numbers,” stated Todd McDevitt, PhD.

McDevitt, associate professor in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering is co-directing the IGERT program with Robert M. Nerem, professor emeritus of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech.  McDevitt is also director of the Stem Cell Engineering Center which administers this award.

Recently highlighted by Nature magazine as one of the “out of the box” manufacturing educational programs in the country, the $3 million NSF-funded IGERT was awarded to Georgia Tech in 2010 to educate and train the first generation of Ph.D. students in the translation and commercialization of stem cell technologies for diagnostic and therapeutic applications.

The Stem Cell Biomanufacturing IGERT program supports new incoming Georgia Tech Ph.D. students for their first two years of graduate school. The program offers a core curriculum in stem cell engineering and bioprocessing coupled with elective tracks in advanced technologies, public policy, ethics or entrepreneurship.

“The current state of the field of stem cell research offers a unique opportunity for engineers to contribute significantly to the generation of robust, reproducible and scalable methods for phenotypic characterization, propagation, differentiation and bioprocessing of stem cells,” McDevitt added.

Trainees are afforded opportunities to meet with leading experts in the field who visit as part of the Stem Cell Engineering seminar series, attend the annual stem cell engineering workshop, participate in outreach activities and interact with representatives from leading companies during Georgia Tech’s annual Bio Industry Symposium.

Georgia Tech's Stem Cell Biomanufacturing IGERT award will support at least 30 graduate students over the 5 years of the award.

2012 Trainees

Olivia Burnsed - Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Efrain Cermeno - Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Albert Cheng - Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Jose Garcia - George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Emily Jackson - School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

2011 Trainees

Tom Bongiorno – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Rob Dromms – School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering

Devon Headen – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Greg Holst – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Torri Rinker – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Shalini Saxena – School of Material Science & Engineering

Josh Zimmerman – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

2010 Trainees

Amy Cheng – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Alison Douglas – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Jennifer Lei – George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering

Douglas White – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Jenna Wilson – Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering

Microorganisms, of course, have evolved ways to swim in spite of these challenges, but tiny robots haven’t quite caught up. Now a team of researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology has used complex computational models to design swimming micro-robots that could overcome these challenges to carry cargo and navigate in response to stimuli such as light.

When they’re actually built some day, these simple micro-swimmers could rely on volume changes in unique materials known as hydrogels to move tiny flaps that will propel the robots. The micro-devices could be used in drug delivery, lab-on-a-chip microfluidic systems – and even as micro-construction robots working in swarms.

The simple micro-swimmers were described July 23 in the online advance edition of the journal Soft Matter, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry in the United Kingdom.

“We believe that our simulations will give experimentalists a reason to pursue development of these micro-swimmers to go beyond what is available now,” said Alexander Alexeev, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech. “We wanted to demonstrate the principle of how robots this small could move by determining what is important and what would need to be used to build a real system.”

The simple swimmer designed by Alexeev and collaborators Hassan Masoud and Benjamin Bingham consists of a responsive gel body about ten microns long with two propulsive flaps attached to opposite sides. A steering flap sensitive to specific stimuli would be located at the front of the swimmer.

The responsive gel body would undergo periodic expansions and contractions triggered by oscillatory chemical reactions, oscillating magnetic or electric fields, or by cycles of temperature change. These expansions and contractions – the chemical swelling and de-swelling of the material – would create a beating motion in the rigid propulsive flaps attached to each side of the micro-swimmer. Combined with the movement of the gel body, the beating motion would move the micro-swimmer forward.

The trajectory of the micro-swimmer would be controlled by a flexible steering flap on its front. The flap would be made of a material that deforms based on changes in light intensity, temperature or magnetic field.

“The combination of these flaps and the oscillating body creates a very nice motion that we believe can be used to propel the swimmer,” said Alexeev. “To build a device that is autonomous and self-propelling at the micron-scale, we cannot build a tiny submarine. We have to keep it simple.”

Key to the operation of the micro-swimmer would be the latest generation of hydrogels, materials whose volume changes in a cyclical way. The hydrogels would serve as “chemical engines” to provide the motion needed to move the device’s propulsive flaps. Such materials currently exist and are being improved upon for other applications.

“We are using the state-of-the art in materials science, changing the properties of the material,” explained Masoud, a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Mechanical Engineering. “We have combined the materials with the principles of hydrodynamics at the small scale to develop this new swimmer.”

As part of their modeling, the researchers examined the effects of flaps of different sizes and properties. They also studied how flexible the micro-swimmer’s body needed to be to produce the kind of movement needed for swimming.

“You can’t swim at the small scale in the same way you swim at the large scale,” Alexeev said. “There is no inertia, which is how you keep moving at the large scale. What happens at the small scale is counterintuitive to what you expect at the large scale.”

The computational fluid modeling the researchers used allowed them to study a wide range of parameters in materials, oscillation rates and flexibility. What they learned, Alexeev said, will give experimentalists a starting point for actually building prototypes of the flexible gel robots.

“We have captured the solid mechanics of the periodically-oscillating body, the fluid dynamics of moving through the viscous liquid, and the coupling between the two,” he said. “From a computational fluid dynamics standpoint, it’s not an easy problem to model at this scale.”

Ultimately, the researchers hope to work with an experimental team to actually build the micro-swimmers. Combining their theoretical work with actual experiments could be a powerful approach to building robots on this size scale.

“This is a simulation that we hope to see in real life one day,” Alexeev said. “We have learned how experimentalists can pursue fabrication of these devices without extensive trial-and-error. We can use the simulations to look inside what will happen by using the laws of physics to explain it.”

The researchers envision groups of micro-swimmers carrying cargo through microfluidic chips or other devices. Swarms of them could one day work together as tiny construction robots moving materials to desired locations for assembly.

But the micro-swimmers won’t win any Olympic competitions. Alexeev estimates that their top speed could be on the order of a few micrometers per second – which should be enough to accomplish their mission.

“If your body is micrometers in size, that kind of speed is really not too bad,” he said. “The swimming speed will be rather slow, but at that size scale, you don’t really need to go very fast since you only need to go short distances.”

Citation: Hassan Masoud, Benjamin I. Bingham and Alexander Alexeev, Soft Matter, 2012, Advance Article. DOI: 10.1039/C2SM25898F.

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Writer: John Toon

“Georgia Tech Professional Education seeks to provide innovative educational opportunities to foster professional, economic and workforce development,” said Nelson Baker, dean of Georgia Tech Professional Education. “We are further supporting an individual’s quest to advance their careers and remain more competitive in their place of employment.”

Taught by top Georgia Tech faculty and leading industry experts, Georgia Tech Professional Education courses are relevant and immediately applicable in the workplace. Registration for all courses is now open. Individuals who register 30 days or more in advance will receive a 15 percent discount on course fees.  Courses include:

• Lean Overview and Simulation for Healthcare – Sept. 13
• Lean for Healthcare:  Turnover Time Reduction – Sept. 14
• Grain Handling Safety – Sept. 20
• Transportation and Distribution Planning and Management – Oct. 2-4
• Trainer Course in Occupational Safety and Health Standards for the Construction Industry – Oct. 29-Nov.2
• Trainer Course in Occupational Safety and Health Standards for General Industry – Oct. 29-Nov.2
• Lean Manufacturing:  Overview and Live Simulation – Nov. 5
• Lean and Safe: Safety Integrated Process Improvement – Nov. 6-8
• Introduction to Safety and Health Program Management – Nov. 9
• Project Management Introduction: Fundamentals to Successful Projects – Oct. 16-17
• Project Management:  Managing Risk and Procurements – Dec. 11 -13

The mission of Georgia Tech Professional Education is to develop an educated workforce that is prepared to lead our industries and communities. The division has global impact by supporting economic development via commercialization, innovation and advancing knowledge through research and discovery. In the last year alone, Georgia Tech Professional Education had an overall enrollment of 28,000 students from around the world.

“Over the next year, we will look at other programs that tie the global strengths of Georgia Tech with local and regional assets to better provide education to industry partners, businesses and military organizations, as well as visitors and students from abroad,” said Baker. “We are empowering people to learn, and are connecting and expanding our global learning community to meet the evolving needs of students.”

Georgia Tech Professional Education programs do not have minimum requirements or other prerequisites for enrollment. For more information and a complete description of upcoming professional education courses at Georgia Tech-Savannah, visit:  http://www.gtpe.gatech.edu/gts-fall

### 

About Georgia Tech Professional Education

Georgia Tech Professional Education is an academic division of the Georgia Institute of Technology, which consistently ranks as one of the nation’s top 10 public universities by U.S. News & World Report. Professional Education offers professional master's programs, short courses, and certificate programs to meet the needs of working professionals and industry partners. Programs are available worldwide through a variety of face-to-face, blended learning, online and/or distance learning formats. In addition to professional course offerings, the division administers K-12 outreach and English proficiency programs, and manages a meeting and event facility. Professional Education serves and educates more than 3,100 companies and over 13,000 individuals on an annual basis, and is located at the Georgia Tech Global Learning Center in Atlanta and at the Georgia Tech-Savannah campus.

The I-Corps program connects NSF-funded scientific research with the technological, entrepreneurial and business communities to help create a stronger innovation ecosystem that couples scientific discovery with technology development and societal needs. Leveraging experience and guidance from established entrepreneurs and a targeted curriculum, I-Corps attendees learn to identify valuable product opportunities that can emerge from academic research.

Beyond Georgia Tech, the NSF will also establish an I-Corps network node at the University of Michigan. By adding these two institutions to its I-Corps program – which began at Stanford University – the NSF will replicate the I-Corps curriculum across the country and begin creating a national network to identify emerging technology concepts that have potential to transition into economically viable products.

“One of Georgia Tech’s strengths is its ability to provide the links needed to help move scientific research quickly from the lab to products coming off the manufacturing floor,” said G. P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech. “We are honored to partner with NSF in expanding I-Corps’ ability to help the entrepreneurial and business communities and boost economic growth.”

With a three-year, $1.5 million grant, Georgia Tech will research, analyze and leverage data from the I-Corps program to develop an understanding of how academic institutions can improve support for innovation ecosystems and how the I-Corps network can enable new collaborations in geographic regions to support commercialization opportunities. Georgia Tech will also teach the I-Corps curriculum to cohorts of NSF-designated teams from around the United States.

“Through our translation-friendly technology transfer policies and our 11-year-old VentureLab program, Georgia Tech has built a repeatable process for successfully generating new companies from research at the university,” said Stephen Fleming, a Georgia Tech vice president and executive director of the Enterprise Innovation Institute. “Now we will be able to share with participants of the NSF I-Corps program our experience and commitment to developing best practices in the science of vetting ideas for their suitability to be successful startups.”

One of two seven-week summer 2012 I-Corps classes began July 9 at Georgia Tech and the fall class will begin at Georgia Tech on Oct. 1, 2012. Spanning a broad range of potential products and research areas, the 27 teams in the summer class are participating in a specially designed training curriculum, obtaining guidance and mentoring from private- and public-sector experts – including technology developers, business leaders and venture capitalists. They have received $50,000 grants to begin assessing the commercial readiness of their technology concepts.

Beth Mynatt, a professor in the Georgia Tech School of Interactive Computing, and Ioannis Brilakis, an assistant professor in the Georgia Tech School of Building Construction and the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, have previously participated as principal investigators in the I-Corps program.

“The I-Corps program provides a critical missing piece for a university committed to translating research insights into commercial innovations,” said Mynatt. “Working in three-person teams that included research expertise, entrepreneurial focus and business mentorship provided us with a focus on identifying commercial value. The method to the madness is testing ‘hypotheses’ of possible value instead of trying to build a fictitious business model. The best teams ‘pivot’ rapidly by testing these hypotheses and focusing on specific opportunities.”

Mynatt led a team developing “SmartMenu,” an online tool for helping diners choose the best meals for their specific needs. “We honed our product ideas and made numerous discoveries along the way,” she added. “Access to business mentors in the program was invaluable and resulted in a number of important introductions.”

The Georgia Tech I-Corps network node will expand the NSF’s cadre of innovation experts that are mentoring on effective practices for leveraging outcomes of basic research.

“Academic researchers already have many skills valuable for success in business, such as critical thinking, teamwork and an ability to move in a new direction and learn when a hypothesis proves false,” says Errol Arkilic, NSF program director for I-Corps.  “The NSF I-Corps builds upon that expertise, introducing researchers to the business community and teaching them to seek, and speak to, the needs of potential customers.”

Nearly 50 teams – composed of academic researchers, student entrepreneurs (undergraduates, graduate students and post-docs), and business mentors – have participated so far in the six-month I-Corps program. The curriculum is a hypothesis-based approach to assessing technological readiness that combines two site-based short courses, extensive online coaching, and hands-on outreach to potential customers.  I-Corps merges the structured coursework with guidance from NSF program officers and leading entrepreneurs who have committed their time to the program.  

The Innovation Corps is supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, and the Deshpande Foundation.  For more information, see: www.nsf.gov/i-corps.

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Media Relations Contacts: Georgia Tech – John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu) or National Science Foundation – Josh Chamot (703-292-7730)(jchamot@nsf.gov).

Writer: Abby Robinson

"Georgia Tech is committed to using technology and advanced platforms to enrich and expand educational opportunities,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson.  “Through Georgia Tech’s Office of Professional Education, we already offer courses to more than 25,000 students worldwide.  Steps such as this agreement will enable even more students throughout the world to have access to Georgia Tech’s expertise, and help to meet the needs for lifelong learning.”

"It seems clear that higher education is currently experiencing the first ripples of a wave that could drastically alter the method, scope and scale of educational access and delivery, " said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president of academic affairs for Georgia Tech. "Georgia Tech has been in the business of offering online courses and education for some time. By joining Coursera we seek to expand our presence in that space, provide increased global access to our excellent educational products, experiment with new methods and ideas in the delivery of education and, most importantly, enhance the learning options and convenience for our own students."

Georgia Tech’s initial courses include Computational Photography, Computational Investing, Energy 101, Control of Mobile Robots and Fundamentals of Online Education. The Institute plans to add online courses across a range of disciplines to the online platform.

"The technological sophistication and expectations of today's college students drastically outpace their institutions," said Rich DeMillo, director of Georgia Tech's Center for 21st Century Universities. "By embracing innovators such as Coursera, who are the vanguard for the oncoming technological revolution, universities can not only improve student access to course content, but also fundamentally change core value structures such as student recruitment and retention, degree customization, and overall productivity and efficiency."

Georgia Tech Dean of Professional Education Nelson Baker also noted, “We are empowering people to learn, and are connecting and expanding our global learning community to meet the evolving needs of students worldwide. By adding courses via Coursera, we are further supporting an individual’s quest for wanting to be more competitive and competent whether that is in their studies at a university, in their place of employment or just to be members of an educated society.”

Other institutions partnering with Coursera are the California Institute of Technology, Duke University, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, UC San Francisco, University of Edinburgh, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Pennsylvania, University of Toronto, University of Virginia and the University of Washington.

“Coursera is dedicated to creating better educational opportunities inside and outside the classroom, and we could not do it without the blessing and commitment of universities,” said Coursera co-founder Daphne Koller. “We’re fortunate to have the support of these highly respected academic institutions as we move toward our shared goal of providing a high-quality education to everyone around the world.” 

To date, Coursera has seen more than 680,000 students from 190 countries and more than 1.55 million course enrollments across its 43 courses.

 About Coursera
Coursera is on a mission to change the world by educating millions of people by offering classes from top universities and professors online for free. Coursera's comprehensive education platform combines mastery-based learning principles with video lectures, interactive content and a global community of peers, offering students from around the world a unique online learning experience. Coursera has partnered with top-tier universities to provide courses across a broad range of disciplines, including medicine, literature, history and computer science, among others. Coursera is backed by leading venture capital firms Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and New Enterprise Associates. For more information, visit Coursera.org.

Key to the new control system is a piezoelectric cellular actuator that uses a novel biologically inspired technology that will allow a robot eye to move more like a real eye. This will be useful for research studies on human eye movement as well as making video feeds from robots more intuitive. The research is being conducted by Ph.D. candidate Joshua Schultz under the direction of assistant professor Jun Ueda, both from the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“For a robot to be truly bio-inspired, it should possess actuation, or motion generators, with properties in common with the musculature of biological organisms,” said Schultz. “The actuators developed in our lab embody many properties in common with biological muscle, especially a cellular structure. Essentially, in the human eye muscles are controlled by neural impulses. Eventually, the actuators we are developing will be used to capture the kinematics and performance of the human eye.”

Details of the research were presented June 25, 2012, at the IEEE International Conference on Biomedical Robotics and Biomechatronics in Rome, Italy. The research is funded by National Science Foundation. Schultz also receives partial support from the Achievement Rewards for College Scientists (ARCS) Foundation.

Ueda, who leads the Georgia Tech Bio-Robotics and Human Modeling Laboratory in the School of Mechanical Engineering, said this novel technology will lay the groundwork for investigating research questions in systems that possess a large number of active units operating together. The application ranges from industrial robots, medical and rehabilitation robots to intelligent assistive robots.

“Robustness against uncertainty of model and environment is crucial for robots physically interacting with humans and environments,” said Ueda. “Successful integration relies on the coordinated design of control, structure, actuators and sensors by considering the dynamic interaction among them.”

Piezoelectric materials expand or contract when electricity is applied to them, providing a way to transform input signals into motion. This principle is the basis for piezoelectric actuators that have been used in numerous applications, but use in robotics applications has been limited due to piezoelectric ceramic's minuscule displacement.  

The cellular actuator concept developed by the research team was inspired by biological muscle structure that connects many small actuator units in series or in parallel.

The Georgia Tech team has developed a lightweight, high speed approach that includes a single-degree of freedom camera positioner that can be used to illustrate and understand the performance and control of biologically inspired actuator technology. This new technology uses less energy than traditional camera positioning mechanisms and is compliant for more flexibility.

“Each muscle-like actuator has a piezoelectric material and a nested hierarchical set of strain amplifying mechanisms,” said Ueda. “We are presenting a mathematical concept that can be used to predict the performance as well as select the required geometry of nested structures. We use the design of the camera positioning mechanism’s actuators to demonstrate the concepts.”

The scientists’ research shows mechanisms that can scale up the displacement of piezoelectric stacks to the range of the ocular positioning system. In the past, the piezoelectric stacks available for this purpose have been too small.

“Our research shows a two-port network model that describes compliant strain amplification mechanisms that increase the stroke length of the stacks,” said Schultz. “Our findings make a contribution to the use of piezoelectric stack devices in robotics, modeling, design and simulation of compliant mechanisms. It also advances the control of systems using a large number of motor units for a given degree of freedom and control of robotic actuators.”

In the study, the scientists sought to resolve a previous conundrum. A cable-driven eye could produce the eye’s kinematics, but rigid servomotors would not allow researchers to test the hypothesis for the neurological basis for eye motion.

Some measure of flexibility could be used in software with traditional actuators, but it depended largely on having a continuously variable control signal and it could not show how flexibility could be maintained with quantized actuation corresponding to neural recruitment phenomena.

“Each muscle-like actuator consists of a piezoelectric material and a nested hierarchical set of strain amplifying mechanisms,” said Ueda. “Unlike traditional actuators, piezoelectric cellular actuators are governed by the working principles of muscles - namely, motion results by discretely activating, or recruiting, sets of active fibers, called motor units.

“Motor units are linked by flexible tissue, which serves a two-fold function,” said Ueda. “It combines the action potential of each motor unit, and presents a compliant interface with the world, which is critical in unstructured environments.”

The Georgia Tech team has presented a camera positioner driven by a novel cellular actuator technology, using a contractile ceramic to generate motion. The team used 16 amplified piezoelectric stacks per side.

The use of multiple stacks addressed the need for more layers of amplification. The units were placed inside a rhomboidal mechanism. The work offers an analysis of the force-displacement tradeoffs involved in the actuator design and shows how to find geometry that meets the requirement of the camera positioner, said Schultz.

“The goal of scaling up piezoelectric ceramic stacks holds great potential to more accurately replicate human eye motion than previous actuators,” noted Schultz. “Future work in this area will involve implantation of this technology on a multi-degree of freedom device, applying open and closed loop control algorithms for positioning and analysis of co-contraction phenomena.”

Future research by his team will continue to focus on the development of a design framework for highly integrated robotic systems. This ranges from industrial robots to medical and rehabilitation robots to intelligent assistive robots.

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Writer: Sarah E. Goodwin

That’s what it is like walking into the Georgia Tech Invention Studio, where every surface is filled with equipment or creations from the studio’s participants. From miniature Yoda heads crafted on 3D printers to a miniature wooden bulldozer that would light up the eyes of any toddler, the studio is clearly a hotbed of Georgia Tech students’ creativity and innovation.

Managed by the Makers Club, the Georgia Tech Invention Studio has been around since 2008, when an old mailroom was transformed into a small machine room. Almost four years later, it has expanded into a 1,000-square-foot space with cutting-edge prototyping equipment that students of all disciplines can use to get real-world designing and building skills.

The studio is now comprised of three separate rooms on the second floor of the Manufacturing Related Discipline Complex containing several high-end pieces of equipment, including a water jet and a hot injection mold machine. The studio recently obtained two additional laser cutters to meet growing student demand. One student expanded the functionality of these cutters by writing a code that enables the machine to cut patterns that can then be assembled into 3-D creations.

“The cutting-edge tools we have are due to very generous support from the Institute’s student technology fee and from corporate sponsorship,” said Craig Forest, mechanical engineering professor and faculty advisor for the Invention Studio. “We want to send forward inventors and engineers into society by providing a home for design-build education and culture. The studio is a small step in the right direction.” Hands-on education is also a fundamental aspect of the Institute’s Strategic Plan.

Though originally established to provide mechanical engineering capstone students with a workspace to foster collaboration and efficiency, the Invention Studio welcomes students of all disciplines.

Eric Weinhoffer, a fifth-year mechanical engineering student and outgoing president of the Makers Club, emphasizes the importance of applying theory learned in the classroom. “By leveraging the equipment in the Invention Studio, graduates are more desirable job candidates because of their abilities and skills,” Weinhoffer says.

Approximately 50 undergraduate laboratory instructors, or ULIs, staff the lab each week and are available to teach visitors how to use the space’s equipment and resources. Workshop facilitators also volunteer in the studio, teaching techniques and skills in woodworking, knitting, rocketry and other specialized areas. After experimenting with machines and attending workshops, students are eligible to apply to become a volunteer ULI or workshop facilitator, and also become a member of the Makers Club.

“Knowing how things are designed makes you a better engineer,” added Chris Quintero, a recent alumnus and staff member in the studio. In February, the White House took an interest in how the studio is doing that, interviewing Quintero and Weinhoffer for its Office of Science Technology and Policy blog. 

Perhaps the most unusual characteristic is the student ownership of the space. “I left one weekend and returned to find our new sitting blocks had been vinyl-printed with the studio logo,” Quintero said. ULIs are present in the studio at all hours, hosting holiday events, working on academic projects or designing in their free time.

“It’s hard not to get inspired to build something if you hang around there long enough,” said Weinhoffer. Last year, Weinhoffer spearheaded the creation of the Atlanta Mini Makers Faire, a celebration of do-it-yourself projects. This year’s event is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, October 6, on Tech Walk.

Students interested in learning more about the Invention Studio are encouraged to visit the website or drop in to meet the ULIs and experiment with the equipment.

Effective August 1, Lieuwen will become executive director of Georgia Tech's Strategic Energy Institute. There, he expects to be a "systems integrator," bringing together the many elements of Georgia Tech science, engineering, computing and policy research to address the planet's most pressing energy challenges.

"We want to work on the problems that really matter," he said. "We want to do the fundamental science and be great engineers and great scientists, but we want to address real-world problems that will serve society."

Georgia Tech operates a broad range of energy-related research initiatives, including power generation and distribution, power electronics, fuel production, water management, materials, transportation, sustainability, urban systems and atmospheric sciences. Beyond these interdisciplinary strengths, a key differentiator for Georgia Tech is its ability to collaborate with industry.

"One of the things that industry respects about us is that we not only develop the fundamental science, advancing our mission as an education institution, but we also tackle the tough applied problems that they face today," he said. "We are building strong linkages to leverage our strengths to build on the science and engineering base we already have."

The Strategic Energy Institute is playing a vital national and international leadership role in developing energy solutions and transitioning them to the marketplace, said Steve Cross, Georgia Tech's executive vice president for research.

"Energy cuts across almost everything we do as a society, affecting national security, the economy, our environment and quality of life," Cross said. "Through the Strategic Energy Institute, Georgia Tech is bringing its considerable resources to bear on energy challenges, in collaboration with partners in industry and government."

Lieuwen, who also has a faculty appointment in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, received a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Georgia Tech in 1999. He specializes in low-emissions combustion and energy systems.

"I get to make fire and to make noise for a living, which is a lot of fun," he admitted. "A lot of what I do is to focus on combustion as applied to gas turbine systems, which are important for power generation facilities as well as aircraft engines."

Lieuwen emphasizes that human behavior — as expressed in policy and sustainability issues — is a key part of energy solutions.

"My natural inclination as an engineer is to look for an engineering solution — such as higher efficiency — to an energy problem," he said. "But decisions people make about energy play a key role in affecting issues such as air quality. We need advanced technology for that, but we also need to address the human side of that."

In addition to leading his own research program, Lieuwen has been part of planning Georgia Tech's new Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (CNES) Building, which will serve as the headquarters for the Strategic Energy Institute when the building opens this fall. Lieuwen has also served on the sustainable energy task force, a strategic initiative that focused on charting a new course for Georgia Tech's energy programs.

Beyond his appreciation for the outdoors, Lieuwen is a self-proclaimed "soccer dad" who has four daughters ranging in age from 18 months to 11 years.

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Writer: John Toon

To address this problem, a startup company based on technology developed at the Georgia Institute of Technology is creating an efficient, safe and repeatable delivery method that protects cells from death and migration from the treatment site. Using microbead technology developed in the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University, SpherIngenics is producing protective capsules for the delivery of cell-based therapies.

Supported by a broad range of Georgia Tech initiatives, the company recently received a two-year $730,000 Phase II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to continue development of the technology.

“When damaged tissue is being repaired by a cell-based therapy, our microbead technology ensures that cells travel to and remain in the targeted area while maintaining continued viability,” said SpherIngenics CEO Franklin Bost, who is also a professor in the Coulter Department. “This technology has the potential to reduce the cost of treatment by eliminating the need for multiple therapeutic procedures.”

Bost and Coulter Department Professors Barbara Boyan and Zvi Schwartz founded the company in 2007. They worked with the Georgia Tech Research Corporation to license five patents from Boyan’s lab for technology originally developed in the Georgia Tech/Emory Center for the Engineering of Living Tissue (GTEC), which was funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. Then they secured $450,000, which included a Phase I SBIR grant from the U.S. Department of Defense and grants from the Georgia Research Alliance and the Coulter Foundation.

During Phase I of the SBIR grant, the researchers confirmed that as many as 250 human adult stem cells could remain viable in culture if they were encapsulated in a 200-micron-diameter bead made of natural algae materials and that they could release factors that enhance tissue regeneration.

“For the Phase II SBIR grant, we’re going to examine whether delivering microbeads full of stem cells can enhance cartilage repair and regeneration of craniofacial defects in an animal model,” said Boyan, who is the company’s chief scientific officer. Boyan is also the associate dean for research and innovation in the Georgia Tech College of Engineering, the Price Gilbert, Jr. Chair in Tissue Engineering at Georgia Tech, and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar.

The company will perform this research in its laboratory space located in the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) biosciences incubator.

The company’s ultimate goal is to commercialize the microbead technology for use in hospitals and by cell therapy companies. To help reach this goal, a group of students wrote a business plan for SpherIngenics last year through the Georgia Tech Scheller College of Business Technological Innovation: Generating Economic Results (TI:GER) program.

The team -- which included Coulter Department doctoral student Christopher Lee, Georgia Tech MBA students Chris Palazzola and Eric Diersen, and Emory University law students Bryan Stewart and Natalie Dana -- won third place in the 2011 Georgia Tech Business Plan Competition. The competition, while largely an education experience, provided students an opportunity to develop their venture ideas and present them to a panel of highly experienced judges in the venture capital, technology transfer and legal fields.

“The TI:GER team’s business plan helped us learn about where the market for our technology is right now and where it is going in the future, which is extremely valuable knowledge as we work toward determining the most promising pathway to market,” said Bost.

Additional members of the company include Anthony Nicolini, the principal investigator on the Phase II SBIR grant, and Joseph Williams, clinical director of craniofacial plastic surgery at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta at Scottish Rite and clinical assistant professor in the Department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at Emory University.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command under award numbers W81XWH-07-1-0219 and W81XWH-11-C-0071. The content is solely the responsibility of the principal investigators and does not necessarily represent the official views of the U.S. Government.

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Fellows are appointed based on significant contributions to the biomaterials field as well as national and international recognition of accomplishments documented by a continuous productivity in biomaterials research and are considered role models in the biomaterials science and engineering field.

The Fellows program began in1992 after the constituent biomaterials societies of the World Biomaterials Congress recognized the need for public recognition of their members who have gained a status of excellent professional standing and earned high achievements in the biomaterials field. For this reason, the honorary status of "Fellow, Biomaterials Science and Engineering" (FBSE) was established.

Boyan and García have had significant accomplishments throughout their careers which include receiving awards from the Society for Biomaterials, authoring papers in leading biomaterials journals and they both have several biomaterials-related patents and invention disclosures.

Boyan’s research laboratory focuses on bone and cartilage cell biology and tissue engineering of musculoskeletal tissues. Researchers are investigating signaling pathways involved in implant osseointegration, or the connection between the bone and a material. Specifically, they are exploring how surface properties influence biological processes and pathways such as cell proliferation, differentiation, angiogenesis and apoptosis to better understand healing and regeneration.

Boyan was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering and other 2012 awards include and the Orthopaedic Research Society Women's Leadership Forum Award and she was named a fellow of the International Team for Implantology.

García’s research activities center on analyses of cell adhesive forces and mechanotransduction, cell-biomaterial interactions and the engineering of biomaterials to control cell delivery and engraftment and tissue repair, including bone repair, therapeutic vascularization, pancreatic islet delivery for the treatment of diabetes, and inflammation and infection. These findings provide fundamental insights into mechanisms regulating cell-material interactions and constitute novel approaches to the engineering of bioactive materials for enhanced tissue repair.

García was awarded the Clemson Award for Basic Research from the Society of Biomaterials and will be presented with that award in New Orleans in October 2012. García serves on the editorial board of leading biomaterial and regenerative medicine journals as well as National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation review panels.

Even though a single raindrop can weigh 50 times more than a mosquito, the insect is still able to fly through a downpour.

Georgia Tech researchers used high-speed videography to determine how this is possible. They found the mosquito’s strong exoskeleton and low mass render it impervious to falling raindrops.

The research team, led by Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Biology David Hu and his doctoral student Andrew Dickerson, found that mosquitoes receive low impact forces from raindrops because the mass of mosquitoes causes raindrops to lose little momentum upon impact. The results of the research will appear in the June 4 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

“The most surprising part of this project was seeing the robustness this small flyer has in the rain,” Dickerson said. “If you were to scale up the impact to human size, we would not survive. It would be like standing in the road and getting hit by a car.”

What the researchers learned about mosquito flight could be used to enhance the design and features of micro-airborne vehicles, which are increasingly being used by law enforcement and the military in surveillance and search-and-rescue operations.

To study how mosquitoes fly in the rain, the research team constructed a flight arena consisting of a small acrylic cage covered with mesh to contain the mosquitoes but permit entry of water drops. They used a water jet to simulate rain stream velocity and observed six mosquitoes flying into the stream. All the mosquitoes survived the collision.

“The collision force must equal the resistance applied by the insect,” Hu said. “Mosquitoes don’t resist at all, but simply go with the flow.”

The team also filmed free-flying mosquitoes that were subjected to rain drops. They found that upon impact the mosquito is adhered to the front of the drop for up to 20 body lengths.  

“To survive, the mosquito must eventually separate from the front of the drop,” Hu said. “The mosquito accomplishes this by using its long legs and wings, whose drag forces act to rotate the mosquito off the point of contact. This is necessary, otherwise the mosquito will be thrown into the ground at the speed of a falling raindrop.”

The Radiation Science and Engineering Lab will provide hands-on training to students in Georgia Tech’s Medical Physics and Nuclear and Radiological Engineering Programs, as well as continuing education for medical physicists currently practicing in the field and research opportunities for faculty. 

Georgia Tech’s lab includes top-of-the-line technology for delivering image guided radiotherapy and radiosurgery, including a brand new medical linear accelerator with beam shaping and imaging accessories.

“What’s unique about this laboratory is that this is the only one in the country at a university where the laboratory is completely dedicated to research and education,” said Farzad Rahnema, chair of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Programs at Georgia Tech.

Medical physicists are experts who assist oncologists with the safe and effective delivery of radiation therapy in which high-energy radiation is used to shrink tumors and kill cancer cells. Nearly half of all cancer patients receive radiation therapy during the course of their treatment.  A linear accelerator uses microwaves to accelerate a stream of electrons to relativistic velocities to create high-energy radiation to treat cancer.

Georgia Tech graduate students studying to become medical physicists will have unprecedented access to the machine so they can master calibration, beam data commissioning, linear accelerator service troubleshooting and other techniques before they graduate.

In other programs, students typically have to wait until after therapy hours at a hospital or clinic to have access to radiotherapy equipment for labs. Even then, they aren’t able to adjust settings and master the machine since the machines are monitored and maintained for patient treatment.

“Here we have the freedom not available in the clinical environment to change the settings and push the machine to the limits,” said Eric Elder, assistant professor and associate director of Medical Physics at Emory University Department of Radiation Oncology, and adjunct assistant professor of Medical Physics and the director of the new lab at Georgia Tech. “This allows students to get hands-on experience and get more individualized attention. This is extremely beneficial.”

The lab also has sophisticated treatment planning software and an oncology information system so students can learn how to manage cancer treatments using real-world techniques.

Professionals in the southeast will also have the opportunity to get additional training on the linear accelerator, which will advance treatment in the field, experts say.

“Radiation oncology medical physics is a field that can change rapidly and professionals don’t always have the opportunity to learn new techniques,” Elder said. “With this lab, we can reach out to practicing medical physicists – regionally, nationally and internationally – and offer training on the latest and greatest technology.”

Georgia Tech faculty and Emory faculty who are adjunct at Georgia Tech will also use the machine for research on diagnosis and treatment of cancer, including improving image-guided radiation to provide real-time imaging of the tumor target and low dose calculations to reduce radiation exposure in non-targeted parts of the body.

The radiotherapy equipment was given to Georgia Tech by an anonymous donor. The lab is located in the Boggs Building, home of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Programs in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. The new lab includes a clinical linear accelerator and a control room, housed in the new Radiological Science and Engineering Laboratory in the basement of the Boggs Building; and a computational treatment planning laboratory with 10 FDA approved workstations on the 3rd floor of the Boggs Building. 

Suman Das, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, has developed an all-digital approach that allows a part to be made directly from its computer-aided design (CAD). The project, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), has received $4.65 million in funding.

“We have developed a proof-of-concept system which is already turning out complex metal parts, and which fundamentally transforms the way that very high-value castings are made,” said Das, who directs the Direct Digital Manufacturing Laboratory in Georgia Tech’s Manufacturing Research Center (MaRC). “We're confident that our approach can lower costs by at least 25 percent and reduce the number of unusable waste parts by more than 90 percent, while eliminating 100 percent of the tooling.”

The approach being utilized by Das and his team focuses on a technique called investment casting, also known as lost-wax casting. In this process, which dates back thousands of years, molten metal is poured into an expendable ceramic mold to form a part.

The mold is made by creating a wax replica of the part to be cast, surrounding or "investing" the replica with a ceramic slurry, and then drying the slurry and hardening it to form the mold. The wax is then melted out – or lost – to form a mold cavity into which metal can be poured and solidified to produce the casting.

Investment casting is used to create precision parts across diverse industries including aerospace, energy, biomedical and electronics. Das’s current efforts are focused on parts used in aircraft engines. He is working with turbine-engine airfoils – complex parts used in jet engines – in collaboration with the University of Michigan and PCC Airfoils.

Today, Das explained, most precision metal castings are designed on computers, using computer-aided design software. But the next step – creating the ceramic mold with which the part is cast – currently involves a sequence of six major operations requiring expensive precision-machined dies and hundreds of tooling pieces.  

"The result is a costly process that typically produces many defective molds and waste parts before a useable prototype is achieved," Das said. "This trial-and-error development phase often requires many months to cast a part that is accurate enough to enter the next stage, which involves testing and evaluation."

By contrast, Das’s approach involves a device that builds ceramic molds directly from a CAD design, completing the task much faster and producing far fewer unusable parts.  Called Large Area Maskless Photopolymerization (LAMP), this high-resolution digital process accretes the mold layer by layer by projecting bitmaps of ultraviolet light onto a mixture of photosensitive resin and ceramic particles, and then selectively curing the mixture to a solid. 

The technique places one 100-micron layer on top of another until the structure is complete. After the mold is formed, the cured resin is removed through binder burnout and the remaining ceramic is sintered in a furnace. The result is a fully ceramic structure into which molten metal – such as nickel-based superalloys or titanium-based alloys – are poured, producing a highly accurate casting.

“The LAMP process lowers the time required to turn a CAD design into a test-worthy part from a year to about a week,” Das said. “We eliminate the scrap and the tooling, and each digitally manufactured mold is identical to the others.”

A prototype LAMP alpha machine is currently building six typical turbine-engine airfoil molds in six hours. Das predicts that a larger beta machine – currently being built at Georgia Tech and scheduled for installation at a PCC Airfoils facility in Ohio in 2012 – will produce 100 molds at a time in about 24 hours.   

Although the current work focuses on turbine-engine airfoils, Das believes the LAMP technique will be effective in the production of many types of intricate metal parts. He envisions a scenario in which companies could send out part designs to digital foundries and receive test castings within a short time, much as integrated-circuit designers send CAD plans to chip foundries today.

Moreover, he said, direct digital manufacturing enabled by LAMP should allow designers to create increasingly sophisticated pieces capable of achieving greater efficiency in jet engines and other systems.

“This process can produce parts of a complexity that designers could only dream of before,” he said. “The digital technique takes advantage of high-resolution optics and precision motion systems to achieve extremely sharp, small features – on the order of 100 microns.”

Das also noted that the new process not only creates testable prototypes but could also be used in the actual manufacturing process. That would allow more rapid production of complex metal parts, in both low and high volumes, at lower costs in a variety of industries.

“When you can produce desired volumes in a short period without tooling,” he said, “you have gone beyond rapid prototyping to true rapid manufacturing.”

The project depicted in this article is sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency; the content of this article does not necessarily reflect the position or the policy of the government, and no official endorsement should be inferred.

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For the past five years, Vito has served Tech’s Vice Provost for Graduate and Undergraduate Studies, overseeing academic activities such as curriculum development and educational technology, as well as experiential learning initiatives such as the Honors Program, cooperative education and the InVenture Prize.

“The most rewarding aspect of my career has been anything that impacts student success,” he said. “It’s amazing how clear your thinking on an issue becomes when you ask, ‘what would be best for the students?’”  

Following his official retirement, Vito will return on a part-time basis later this year as an emeritus faculty member and special assistant in support of institutional initiatives for both the Office of the Provost and Office of the Executive Vice President for Research.

“Ray has been one of the driving forces in creating the kinds of student experiences that highlight Tech’s commitment to entrepreneurship and creativity,” said Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs Rafael L. Bras. “As we start to put the building blocks in place that support our 25-year strategic plan, we will benefit from his experience, his perspective and his enthusiasm.”

On the research side, Vito’s involvement will focus on commercialization, the multifaceted process for bringing ideas from concept to reality and, ultimately, to market.

“Through programs such as the Georgia Tech Fund for Innovation in Research and Education and our startup accelerator Flashpoint, we are making significant investments to help foster the creative spirit of our faculty, students and the local community,” said Executive Vice President for Research Steve Cross. "Ray's leadership and passion for these initiatives have been instrumental in their success."

An expert in bioengineering and computer-aided engineering design who was named an American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering Fellow in 2006, Vito has remained connected to the School of Mechanical Engineering, both as an instructor and as a faculty advisor to Tech’s student chapter of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi.

"Ray Vito was in the vanguard of bioengineering research in the 1980s along with Don Giddens and Bob Nerem and really helped to put us on the map,” said William Wepfer, chair of the School of Mechanical Engineering. “In the last few years Ray has been a strong advocate for students and for the emphasis on creativity and innovation in the undergraduate curriculum. Ray's contributions to Georgia Tech are epic in impact and I am glad that he will be working with us after retirement to continue to advance these goals."

A retirement celebration event, co-hosted by the School of Mechanical Engineering and the Office of the Provost, is being planned for the beginning of the fall semester.

Established in 2001 by the National Science Foundation, the Increasing the Participation and Advancement of Women in Academic Science and Engineering Careers (ADVANCE) Program addresses the continued need to develop a more diverse science and engineering workforce through funding systemic approaches to increase the representation and advancement of women in academic science and engineering careers. Georgia Tech was one of nine universities to receive initial funding for the program.

Although the percentages of women in engineering have increased in the last several decades, men continue to dominate the profession. According to data compiled by the Society of Women Engineers in 2003, approximately 80 percent of new engineers were men, compared with only 20 percent who were women.

As the chair of the School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering for the past 25 years, Rousseau has demonstrated sustained support, mentoring, and retention of women faculty. The ADVANCE Leadership Award recognizes his commitment to creating a climate of collegiality, inclusiveness, and excellence. Under his leadership, the school has hired eleven female tenure-track professors. Ten of the eleven are still faculty members in the school, out of a total of 38 faculty members with majority appointments.

Out of the eleven female faculty members hired by Rousseau, Dr. Mary Rezac is the only one no longer at the Institute. After leaving Georgia Tech in 2001 to serve as department chair at Kansas State University, she engaged Rousseau to serve as her mentor under the ADVANCE Program at Kansas State and credits much of her own success as a leader to the mentoring he provided. “His candor, support, and guidance were invaluable for me as I transitioned from faculty member to administrator,” Rezac says. “His actions have had a direct and positive impact on many people, including, in a very profound way, on me.”

“I’m now in my eighteenth year as an academic faculty member and have had the opportunity to interact with faculty and administrators from some of the finest institutions in the country,” Rezac says. “With this sense of perspective, I can say without hesitation that through his innovation, dedication, and compassion, Dr. Rousseau has created an environment within Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering that nurtures a diverse population of faculty and students.”

Although Wepfer has served as the chair of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering for only five years, he played a significant role early in his tenure at Georgia Tech through his efforts to initiate the FOCUS program on campus. Launched in 1992, the program seeks to increase the number of master’s and doctoral degrees awarded to underrepresented minorities at Georgia Tech. The FOCUS program has been so successful that it now serves as model for similar programs implemented at other premier institutions nationwide.

The ADVANCE Leadership Award recognizes Wepfer’s consistent dedication to diversity on campus, which has continued through his leadership as school chair. Since taking the helm of the Woodruff School, he initiated a successful program for actively recruiting female faculty members that brings rising-star women to campus to give seminars. Of the nine women faculty members in the school, seven effectively began under Wepfer’s leadership. Additionally, Wepfer implemented a policy to support the success of all assistant mechanical engineering professors that reduces their teaching loads and brings transparency to the process.

As the newest faculty member in the Woodruff School, Dr. Susan Thomas has benefited directly from Wepfer’s commitment to enhancing diversity. “In my short time here, he has already organized multiple social events for untenured and female faculty, allowing us to come together to network as a group, as well as touch base with him,” she says. “Everyone talks about Dr. Wepfer making the school a great place to work—and I couldn’t agree more. Despite his enormous responsibilities to a large faculty with more than 90 members, he consistently takes time to make personal contact with me to ensure that I have what I need to succeed.”

Thomas came to Georgia Tech as an assistant professor in fall 2011 after completing a postdoctoral appointment at École Polytechnique Fédéral de Lausanne in Switzerland. She cites Wepfer’s enthusiasm and dedication to enhancing diversity within the Woodruff school as instrumental to its current and continued success. “His enthusiasm, forthrightness, and support are invaluable to me as I transition into my faculty position,” Thomas says.

In 2007, Georgia Tech incorporated the ADVANCE Program as a formal Institute initiative and continues the mission of transforming and equalizing the representation of women in science and engineering. While focusing on programs that benefit all faculty members, ADVANCE also addresses some of the most significant barriers for women. Over the years, major initiatives have included on-site daycare and clarification of promotion and tenure policies.

Daniel Poneman, U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy, said $3.1 million will go to three research projects at Georgia Tech focused on developing new and advanced nuclear reactor designs and technologies, while addressing their cost, safety and security.

The money will also fund research examining new fuel and core designs as well as two undergraduate scholarships and three graduate student fellowships. With the support of this program, students will receive financial support to pursue a degree in the nuclear field and gain the skills and experiences they need to succeed in a nuclear science and engineering career.

"This funding will help Georgia Tech and the country to enhance the quality of nuclear education and research in order to support the development of the next generation of nuclear workforce, technology and research," said Farzad Rahnema, chair of the Nuclear and Radiological Engineering and Medical Physics Programs at Georgia Tech. 

Undergraduate students will receive a $5,000 scholarship, while fellowship winners will receive $50,000 annually over the next three years in addition to a summer internship at a National Laboratory. The selected students will study a breadth of critical nuclear energy issues, from fuel cycle sustainability to reactor efficiency and design.

The three research projects in the College of Engineering that were funded include: "Uncertainty Quantification and Management for Multiscale Nuclear Materials Modeling," David McDowell, PI; "Nonlinear Ultrasonic Techniques to Monitor Radiation damage in RPV and Internal Components," Lawrence Jacobs, PI; and "Fuel and Core Design Options to Overcome the Heavy Metal Loading Limit,and Improve Performance and Safety of Liquid Salt Cooled Reactors," Bojan Petrovic, PI.

Mechanical engineering, biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and industrial design students showcased their work at the Clough Undergraduate Learning Commons on April 26 at the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering’s Capstone Design Expo. The end-of-semester event has students present the culmination of their work immediately prior to graduation each semester, awarding thousands of dollars for the most innovative student work.

Teams are either sponsored by industry experts or use a combination of imagination, experience and foundational knowledge to research problems and report solutions, designing prototypes and showcasing them to spectators and judges.

“MDAP,” the first place team – comprised of John Bryan, Matthew Chambers, Patrick Chung, Caitlin Henegar, Amanda Swanson and Spencer Vore – received $1,500 for its design of a microfluidic cell sorter that aids in the detection of malaria. No current products exist that can be used for population screening at the desired sensitivity of buyers such as non-governmental organizations, while being both portable and non-electric.

“We invented a device for the diagnosis of malaria under field conditions in third world countries and fabricated two prototypes,” said Chambers. “Our project is different because it is a purely mechanical solution to a medical problem.”

The second place prize of $1,000 comically went to “Team #1,” for its prototype of a rooftop solar panel mounting system. The method decreases the standard 170-part, 11-hour installation process to a 44-part, 5-hour installation process. The proposed solution allows a higher number of installations per day at a lower cost. The team included students Steven Beardsell, Kim Giroux, Lukas Haferkamp, Parul Kapur, Matt Ray and John Tarman.

Third place, and $500, was awarded to “Look Ma, No Hands!” developed by Joe Fulton, Ryan Kennedy, Maureen McMeekin, Matt Peterka and Rick Scheff. The team created an automated baby stroller, for active parents, that maintains a safe distance between the parent and stroller when jogging. If the jogger comes to a sudden stop, the battery charged device recognizes the inactivity and stops as well.

The People’s Choice award, earned by the team with the highest number of spectator votes at the event, went to Jon Agee, Eric Chang, Jason Lee, Arjun Menon and Disi A, Tapan Shah and for an automatic electric vehicle charging system called EZ Charge. The team earned $500 for its work.

Despite many achievements in the field of super-resolution microscopy in the past few years with spatial resolution advances, live-cell imaging has remained a challenge because of the need for high temporal resolution.

Now, Lei Zhu, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, and Bo Huang, assistant professor in UCSF’s Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry and Department of Biochemistry and Biophysics, have developed an advanced approach using super-resolution microscopy to resolve cellular features an order of magnitude smaller than what could be seen before. This allows the researchers to tap previously inaccessible information and answer new biological questions.

The research was published April 22, 2012 in the journal Nature Methods. The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health, UCSF Program for Breakthrough Biomedical Research, Searle Scholarship and Packard Fellowship for Science and Engineering.

The previous technology using the single-molecule-switching approach for super-resolution microscopy depends on spreading single molecule images sparsely into many, often thousands of, camera frames. It is extremely limited in its temporal resolution and does not provide the ability to follow dynamic processes in live cells.

“We can now use our discovery using super-resolution microscopy with seconds or even sub-second temporal resolution for a large field of view to follow many more dynamic cellular processes,” said Zhu. “Much of our knowledge of the life of a cell comes from our ability to see the small structures within it.”

Huang noted, “One application, for example, is to investigate how mitochondria, the power house of the cell, interact with other organelles and the cytoskeleton to reshape the structure during the life cycle of the cell.”

Currently, light microscopy, especially in the modern form of fluorescence microscopy, is still used frequently by many biologists. However, the authors say, conventional light microscopy has one major limitation: the inability to resolve two objects closer than half the wavelength of the light because of the phenomenon called diffraction. With diffraction, the images look blurry and overlapped no matter how high the magnification that is used.

“The diffraction limit has long been regarded as one of the fundamental constraints for light microscopy until the recent inventions of super-resolution fluorescence microscopy techniques,” said Zhu. Super-resolution microscopy methods, such as stochastic optical reconstruction microscopy (STORM) or photoactivated localization microscopy (PALM), rely on the ability to record light emission from a single molecule in the sample.

Using probe molecules that can be switched between a visible and an invisible state, STORM/PALM determines the position of each molecule of interest. These positions ultimately define a structure.

The new finding is significant, said Zhu and Huang, because they have shown that the technology allows for following the dynamics of a microtubule cytoskeleton with a three-second time resolution, which would allow researchers to study the active transports of vesicles and other cargos inside the cell.

Using the same optical system and detector as in conventional light microscopy, super-resolution microscopy naturally requires longer acquisition time to obtain more spatial information, leading to a trade-off between its spatial and temporal resolution. In super-resolution microscopy methods based on STORM/PALM, each camera image samples a very sparse subset of probe molecules in the sample.

An alternative approach is to increase the density of activated fluorophores so that each camera frame samples more molecules. However, this high density of fluorescent spots causes them to overlap, invalidating the widely used single-molecule localization method.

The authors said that a number of methods have been reported recently that can efficiently retrieve single-molecule positions even when the single fluorophore signals overlap. These methods are based on fitting clusters of overlapped spots with a variable number of point-spread functions (PSFs) with either maximum likelihood estimation or Bayesian statistics. The Bayesian method has also been applied to the whole image set.

As a result of new research, Zhu and Huang present a new approach based on global optimization using compressed sensing, which does not involve estimating or assuming the number of molecules in the image. They show that compressed sensing can work with much higher molecule densities compared to other technologies and demonstrate live cell imaging of fluorescent protein-labeled microtubules with three-second temporal resolution.

The STORM experiment used by the authors, with immunostained microtubules in Drosophila melanogaster S2 cells, demonstrated that nearby microtubules can be resolved by compressed sensing using as few as 100 camera frames, whereas they were not discernible by the single-molecule fitting method. They have also performed live STORM on S2 cells stably expressing tubulin fused to mEos2.

At the commonly used camera frame rate of 56.4 Hertz, a super-resolution movie was constructed with a time resolution of three seconds (169 frames) and a Nyquist resolution of 60 nanometers, much faster than previously reported, said Zhu and Huang. These results have proven that compressed sensing can enable STORM to monitor live cellular processes with second-scale time resolution, or even sub-second-scale resolution if a faster camera can be used.

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The fixtureless and noncontact technique, known as the magnetically actuated peel test (MAPT), could help ensure the long-term reliability of electronic devices, and assist designers in improving resistance to thermal and mechanical stresses.

“Devices are becoming smaller and smaller, and we are driving them to higher and higher performance,” said Suresh Sitaraman, a professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “This technique would help manufacturers know that their products will meet reliability requirements, and provide designers with the information they need to choose the right materials to meet future design specifications over the lifetimes of devices.”

The research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, and was reported in the March 30, 2012 issue of the journal Thin Solid Films.

Modern microelectronic chips are fabricated from layers of different materials – insulators and conductors – applied on top of one another. Thermal stress can be created when heat generated during the operation of the devices causes the materials of adjacent layers to expand, which occurs at different rates in different materials. The stress can cause the layers to separate, a process known as delamination or de-bonding, which is a major cause of microelectronics failure.

“We need to find out if these layers will separate over time as they are used and subjected to thermal and other stresses,” Sitaraman explained. “These systems are used in a wide range of applications from cell phones and computers to automobiles, aircraft and medical equipment. They must be reliable over the course of their expected lifetimes.”

Sitaraman and doctoral student Gregory Ostrowicki have used their technique to measure the adhesion strength between layers of copper conductor and silicon dioxide insulator. They also plan to use it to study fatigue cycling failure, which occurs over time as the interface between layers is repeatedly placed under stress. The technique may also be used to study adhesion between layers in photovoltaic systems and in MEMS devices.

The Georgia Tech researchers first used standard microelectronic fabrication techniques to grow layers of thin films that they want to evaluate on a silicon wafer. At the center of each sample, they bonded a tiny permanent magnet made of nickel-plated neodymium (NdFeB), connected to three ribbons of thin-film copper grown atop silicon dioxide on a silicon wafer.

The sample was then placed into a test station that consists of an electromagnet below the sample and an optical profiler above it. Voltage supplied to the electromagnet was increased over time, creating a repulsive force between the like magnetic poles. Pulled upward by the repulsive force on the permanent magnet, the copper ribbons stretched until they finally delaminated.

With data from the optical profiler and knowledge of the magnetic field strength, the researchers can provide an accurate measure of the force required to delaminate the sample. The magnetic actuation has the advantage of providing easily controlled force consistently perpendicular to the silicon wafer.

Because many samples can be made at the same time on the same wafer, the technique can be used to generate a large volume of adhesion data in a timely fashion.

But device failure often occurs gradually over time as the layers are subjected to the stresses of repeated heating and cooling cycles. To study this fatigue failure, Sitaraman and Ostrowicki plan to cycle the electromagnet’s voltage on and off.

“A lot of times, layers do not delaminate in one shot,” Sitaraman said. “We can test the interface over hundreds or thousands of cycles to see how long it will take to delaminate and for that delamination damage to grow.”

The test station is small enough to fit into an environmental chamber, allowing the researchers to evaluate the effects of high temperature and/or high humidity on the strength of the thin film adhesion. This is particularly useful for electronics intended for harsh conditions, such as automobile engine control systems or aircraft avionics, Sitaraman said.

“We can see how the adhesion strength changes or the interfacial fracture toughness varies with temperature and humidity for a wide range of materials,” he explained.

So far, Sitaraman and Ostrowicki have studied thin film layers about one micron in thickness, but say their technique will work on layers that are of sub-micron thickness. Because their test layers are made using standard microelectronic fabrication techniques in Georgia Tech’s clean rooms, Sitaraman believes they accurately represent the conditions of real devices.

“To get meaningful results, you need to have representative processes and representative materials and representative interfaces so that what is measured is what a real application would face,” he said. “We mimic the processing conditions and techniques that are used in actual microelectronics fabrication.”

As device sizes continue to decline, Sitaraman says the interfacial issues will grow more important.

“As we continue to scale down the transistor sizes in microelectronics, the layers will get thinner and thinner,” he said. “Getting to the nitty-gritty detail of adhesion strength for these layers is where the challenge is. This technique opens up new avenues.”

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Signatories representing the French funding entities were Jean-Luc Bohl, President of the Metz Metropole, Jean-Yves Le Déaut, Vice President of the Lorraine Regional Council, and François Lavergne, Vice President of the Department of the Moselle. Also present were Dominique Gros, Mayor of Metz, Yves Berthelot, President of Georgia Tech-Lorraine, Abdallah Ougazzaden, Director of Georgia Tech-Lorraine, and Director of the Georgia Tech-CNRS Unité Mixte Internationale 2958 Laboratory, and Bernard Kippelen, Professor of Electrical and  Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech who represented Georgia Tech-Global.

At this meeting, Dr. Kippelen was officially confirmed as the President of the newly established Lafayette Institute. Drs. Berthelot and Ougazzaden will serve as the Institute’s Vice Presidents.

The Lafayette Institute will be housed in a newly constructed 20,000-square-foot building on the Georgia Tech-Lorraine campus, which will include a 5,000-square-foot clean room, fully equipped with state-of-the-art semiconductor growth capabilities. Georgia Tech is to provide support from its Enterprise Innovation Institute, the university’s business and economic development arm, which aims to help enterprises use science, technology and innovation to improve their competitiveness. It also will share its expertise from the Nanotechnology Research Center.

The Lafayette Institute will focus on the development of compound and organic semiconductors for technologies at the intersection of materials, optics, photonics, electronics and nanotechnology.  These new technologies will have applications in the energy sector, new display technologies, and sensors and medical technology.

“I am honored by the trust that the stakeholders have placed in me and I am looking forward to working with the team of the Lafayette Institute. This project is a milestone in the long and fruitful partnership between the Region Lorraine, Georgia Tech, and the State of Georgia and a new chapter in US-French collaboration in higher education and innovation,” said Dr. Kippelen.  

G. P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech, said that the institute fit perfectly with the university’s recently published strategic plan calling for “global engagement.”

Georgia Tech Vice Provost for International Initiatives Steven McLaughlin said that the Lafayette Institute represents a very big step forward not only for
Georgia Tech Lorraine, but for Georgia Tech as whole. "Lafayette opens up
tremendous opportunities for researchers, scientists, small and large
companies in Europe, and for Georgia Tech faculty and researchers to engage
and collaborate in new ways in Metz," said Dr. McLaughlin, who serves as president of Georgia Tech Global, Inc. "We are very grateful to all of our
partners for launching the Lafayette Institute and look forward to great
successes."

The Lafayette Institute was named after the Marquis de Lafayette, who decided to join the American Revolution after a historic meeting held in Metz, the capital of the Lorraine region.

“I wanted to put what I was learning in lecture into practice, and getting involved in research was a way to make this happen,” said Fan, who will receive his bachelor of science in Mechanical Engineering next month.

Fan is one of 165 students who will present at this year’s Undergraduate Research Spring Symposium on April 10 from 1 to 6 p.m. The event is an opportunity for undergraduate students to share their research with students, faculty and staff from across campus.

According to Chris Reaves, director of undergraduate research, about 42 percent of graduating seniors indicate that they had an undergraduate research experience.

Fan began working with Sulchek, an assistant professor in the School of Mechanical Engineering, two years ago. Sulchek’s interest in working with undergraduates stemmed from his own positive experience as a student.

“As an undergraduate, I was able to get involved with research and had a great experience,” Sulchek said. “So it’s important to me to provide students with the same opportunity. I just wish more undergraduates would take advantage of these opportunities while they’re at Tech.”

When Fan began working in Sulchek’s lab, there were some initial challenges. For example, the first project he worked on wasn’t the best fit for him. It was more chemical engineering-based than mechanical, and it was difficult to collaborate with fellow students in the lab because none of them were working on a project similar to Fan’s.

“But I appreciated that Dr. Sulchek let me pursue the project and figure this out for myself,” Fan said.

Before Fan could get frustrated, Sulchek offered him the opportunity to work on another project that was a better fit.

One aspect of Sulchek’s research in nanotechnology is using an atomic force
microscope (AFM). The AFM “sees” tiny objects (such as molecules) with the help of a small probe that touches the object’s surfaces and creates an image based on what it feels.

Unfortunately, the probe or the surface often gets damaged during the process. To remedy the problem, Fan created a method to hover the AFM’s probe at a fixed distance above the surface, which decreases the risk of damage to the probe and the surface.

Last month, Fan’s research was published for the first time in an academic journal, the Review of Scientific Instruments — which doesn’t happen to most undergraduates, Sulchek added.

“It’s so amazing to see more than a year’s work finally pay off, ” said Fan, who will spend the summer working in Sulchek’s lab before he moves on to graduate school.

The two do have a few words of advice for faculty members who work with undergraduate researchers. For example, Sulchek recommends that the faculty member ensure that the student’s project be well defined so that progress can be made in the time the student is working in the lab. He also suggests that a graduate student mentor be assigned to each undergraduate researcher.

Fan suggests that faculty members make time to meet with the students one-on-one, as that was an important part of his success in Sulchek’s lab.

For more about the spring symposium and other undergraduate research opportunities at Tech, click here.

“To be competitive, today’s engineers require a broad interdisciplinary skill set, which means that our programs have to provide the opportunities for our students to gain these skills,” said Gary May, dean of the College of Engineering. “These changes won’t affect the rigor of the programs, rather they will ensure that the theory we teach is better connected to practice.”

The updates reflect a national trend among collegiate engineering programs to provide curricula that are challenging but also allow students more flexibility when it comes to taking electives or finding time to fit a co-op or study abroad experience into their schedules. However, as far as May knows, Georgia Tech is one of the first universities to follow through with revamping multiple engineering program curricula.

“It’s been a while since these degree programs were updated to reflect current standards, and I’m impressed that the faculty in both schools recognized the need for change and were proactive,” May added.

Mechanical Engineering

In February, faculty members in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering voted to revise the current curriculum, which will allow students to choose a “breadth” or “concentration” option. Both options will increase the total curriculum credits from 126 to 129.

“The new curriculum retains the strengths of the present program, meaning that it still gives students a broad grounding in the fundamentals as well as experience in professional practice and design. But the new curriculum will give students the ability to expand their knowledge beyond mechanical engineering, so that they can pursue their interests in truly multidisciplinary topics,” said Al Ferri, the school’s associate chair of undergraduate studies.

For years, students, employers and academic leaders have stressed the need for greater flexibility in the choice of both technical and free electives, Ferri said. To ensure that their interests were represented in the revised curriculum, students from the Woodruff School Student Advisory Council assisted the school’s Undergraduate Committee as it hammered out the details.

The breadth option will provide students with five free electives (15 credit hours) versus the two free electives (six credit hours) allowed under the previous curriculum. These electives could be used by students to complete a certificate or minor in an array of subjects from math and applied sciences to sociology and public policy.

The concentration option will provide a major depth experience in some sub-discipline of mechanical engineering — much like doing a minor within a major, Ferri added. For example, students could choose to specialize in areas such as thermal and energy systems, biomechanics, materials, or nuclear and radiological engineering.

The revised curriculum was approved by the Institute’s Undergraduate Curriculum Committee on March 13 and will now be submitted to the Georgia Tech Academic Senate for final approval in April.

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Starting this summer, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) will roll out its changes to both the Electrical Engineering (EE) and Computer Engineering (CmpE) curricula.

“There were two driving forces behind our curriculum changes,” said Joseph Hughes, senior associate chair of the school. “The first was that the two degree programs were too similar, and we either needed to blend them into one degree or make each unique. Also, we wanted to increase flexibility so that students could pursue minors or an international plan and still be able to graduate in a timely manner.”

The number of credits required for each degree program will remain the same. However, the number of ECE credit hours that were common to the two degree programs will be reduced from 29 to 20 to better differentiate the two curricula.

An electrical energy course and a course in signals and systems will be added to the EE curriculum. Also, a required programming course and lab will be replaced by ECE electives, which will allow students more flexibility and options when it comes to choosing a specialization.

CmpE majors will now take foundational courses that focus on mathematical, physical and design principles for computational systems. In addition, the number of ECE elective hours will increase from 10 to 22 hours and the number of free elective hours will increase from nine to 12.

In the future, it’s likely that many of the College of Engineering curricula will undergo similar changes to allow more flexibility, May said.

“To meet our strategic objective of being one of the most highly respected technology-focused learning institutions in the world, we have to ensure that our programs are designed to graduate competitive engineers,” May added. “Updating these two curricula are a step in that direction.”

The resulting structures, which are 100 to 200 nanometers in outer diameter with thickness ranging from 5 to 25 nanometers, show a piezoelectric response comparable to that of PZT thin films of much larger dimensions. The technique could ultimately lead to production of actively-tunable photonic and phononic crystals, terahertz emitters, energy harvesters, micromotors, micropumps and nanoelectromechanical sensors, actuators and transducers – all made from the PZT material.

Using a novel characterization technique developed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the researchers for the first time made high-accuracy in-situ measurements of the nanoscale piezoelectric properties of the structures.

“We are using a new nano-manufacturing method for creating three-dimensional nanostructures with high aspect ratios in ferroelectric materials that have attractive piezoelectric properties,” said Nazanin Bassiri-Gharb, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “We also leveraged a new characterization method available through Oak Ridge to study the piezoelectric response of these nanostructures on the substrate where they were produced.”

The research was published online on Jan. 26, 2012, and is scheduled for publication in the print edition (Vol. 24, Issue 9) of the journal Advanced Materials. The research was supported by Georgia Tech new faculty startup funds.

Ferroelectric materials at the nanometer scale are promising for a wide range of applications, but processing them into useful devices has proven challenging – despite success at producing such devices at the micrometer scale. Top-down manufacturing techniques, such as focused ion beam milling, allow accurate definition of devices at the nanometer scale, but the process can induce surface damage that degrades the ferroelectric and piezoelectric properties that make the material interesting.

Until now, bottom-up fabrication techniques have been unable to produce structures with both high aspect ratios and precise control over location. The technique reported by the Georgia Tech researchers allows production of nanotubes made from PZT (PbZr0.52Ti0.48O3) with aspect ratios of up to 5 to 1.

“This technique gives us a degree of control over the three-dimensional process that we’ve not had before,” said Bassiri-Gharb. “When we did the characterization, we saw a size effect that until now had been observed only in thin films of this material at much larger size scales.”

The ferroelectric nanotubes are especially interesting because their properties – including size, shape, optical responses and dielectric characteristics – can be controlled by external forces even after they are fabricated.

“These are truly smart materials, which means they respond to external stimuli such as applied electric fields, thermal fields or stress fields,” said Bassiri-Gharb. “You can tune them to behave differently. Devices made from these materials could be fine tuned to respond to a different wavelength or to emit at a different wavelength during operation.”

For example, the piezoelectric effect could permit fabrication of “nano-muscle” tubes that would act as tiny pumps when an electric field is applied to them. The fields could also be used to tune the properties of photonic crystals, or to create structures whose size can be altered slightly to absorb electromagnetic energy of different wavelengths.

In fabricating the nanotubes, Bassiri-Gharb and graduate student Ashley Bernal (currently an assistant professor at the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology) began with a silicon substrate and spin-coated a negative electron-beam resist material onto it. A template was created using electron-beam lithography, and a thin layer of aluminum oxide was added on top of that using atomic layer deposition.

Next, the template was immersed under vacuum into an ultrasound bath containing a chemical precursor solution for PZT. The structures were pyrolyzed at 300 degrees Celsius, then annealed in a two-step heat treating process at 600 and 800 degrees Celsius to crystallize the material and decompose the polymer substrate. The process produced free-standing PZT nanotubes connected by a thin layer of the original aluminum oxide. Increasing the amount of chemical infiltration allows production of solid nanorods or nanowires instead of hollow nanotubes.

Though the researchers used electron beam lithography to create the template on which the structures were grown, in principle, many other chemical, optical or mechanical patterning techniques could be used for create the templates, Bassiri-Gharb noted.

In studies done in collaboration with researchers Sergei Kalinin and Alexander Tselev of the Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the devices produced by the soft template process were analyzed with band-excitation piezoresponse force microscopy (BPFM). The technique allowed researchers to isolate properties of the AFM tip from those of the PZT sample, allowing analysis in sufficient detail to detect the size-scale piezoelectric effects.

“One of our most important observations is that these piezoelectric nanomaterials allow us to generate a factor of four to six increase in the extrinsic piezoelectric response compared to the use of thin films,” said Baassiri-Gharb. “This would be a huge advantage in terms of manufacturing because it means we could get the same response from much smaller structures than we would have had to otherwise use.”

The Center for Nanophase Materials Sciences is one of the five Department of Energy (DOE) Nanoscale Science Research Centers, premier national user facilities for interdisciplinary research at the nanoscale that are supported by the DOE Office of Science. Together, the NSRCs comprise a suite of complementary facilities that provide researchers with state-of-the-art capabilities to fabricate, process, characterize and model nanoscale materials, and constitute the largest infrastructure investment of the National Nanotechnology Initiative. The NSRCs are located at DOE’s Argonne, Brookhaven, Lawrence Berkeley, Oak Ridge, Sandia and Los Alamos National Laboratories. For more information about the DOE NSRCs, please visit http://science.energy.gov/bes/suf/user-facilities/nanoscale-science-research-centers/.

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Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986)(jtoon@gatech.edu) or Abby Robinson (404-385-3364)(abby@innovate.gatech.edu).

Writer: John Toon

“Shape-memory alloys exhibit unique characteristics that youwould want for earthquake-resistant building and bridge design and retrofitapplications: they have the ability to dissipate significant energy withoutsignificant degradation or permanent deformation,” said Reginald DesRoches, a professorin the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech researchers have developed a model thatcombines thermodynamics and mechanical equations to assess what happens whenshape-memory alloys are subjected to loading from strong motion. The researchersare using the model to analyze how shape-memory alloys in a variety ofcomponents -- cables, bars, plates and helical springs -- respond to different loadingconditions. From that information, they can determine the optimalcharacteristics of the material for earthquake applications.

The model was developed by DesRoches, School of MechanicalEngineering graduate student Reza Mirzaeifar, School of Civil and EnvironmentalEngineering associate professor Arash Yavari, and School of Mechanical Engineeringand School of Materials Science and Engineering professor Ken Gall.

A paper describing the thermo-mechanical model was publishedonline Feb. 3 in the InternationalJournal of Non-Linear Mechanics. This research was supported by theTransportation Research Board IDEA program.

To improve the performance of structures during earthquakes,researchers around the world have been investigating the use of “smart”materials, such as shape-memory alloys, which can bounce back afterexperiencing large loads. The most common shape-memory alloys are made of metalmixtures containing copper-zinc-aluminum-nickel, copper-aluminum-nickel ornickel-titanium. Potential applications of shape-memory alloys in bridge andbuilding structures include their use in bearings, columns and beams, orconnecting elements between beams and columns. But before this class ofmaterials can be used, the effect of extreme and repetitive loads on thesematerials must be thoroughly examined.

“For standard civil engineering materials, you can usemechanics to look at force and displacement to measure stress and strain, butfor this class of shape-memory alloys that changes properties when it undergoesloading and unloading, you have to consider thermodynamics and mechanics,” explainedYavari.

The Georgia Tech team found that the generation andabsorption of heat during loading and unloading caused a temperature gradientin shape-memory alloys, which caused a non-uniform stress distribution in thematerial even when the strain was uniform.

“Shape-memory alloys previously examined in detail werereally thin wires, which can exchange heat with the ambient environment rapidlyand no temperature change is seen,” said Mirzaeifar. “When you start to examinealloys in components large enough to be used in civil engineering applications,the internal temperature is no longer uniform and needs to be taken intoaccount.”

To predict the internal temperature distribution ofshape-memory alloys under loading-unloading cycles, which could then be used todetermine the stress distribution, the researchers developed a model that usedthe surface thermal boundary conditions, diameter and loading rate of the alloyas inputs.

The team included ambient conditions in the model becauseshape-memory alloys for seismic applications could operate in a variety ofenvironments -- such as water if used in bridge structures or air if used inbuilding structures -- which would produce different rates of heat transfer. Theresearchers used a thermal camera to record the variation in surfacetemperature of shape-memory alloys experiencing loading and unloading.

Using their model, the researchers were able to accuratelypredict internal temperature and stress distributions for shape-memory alloys. Themodel results were verified with experimental tests. In one test, they foundthat a shape-memory alloy loaded at a very slow rate had time to exchange theheat created with the ambient environment and exhibited uniform stress. If it wasloaded very rapidly, it did not have enough time to exchange the heat, leadingto a non-uniform stress distribution.

“Our analytical solutions are exact, fast and capable of simulatingthe complicated coupled thermo-mechanical response of shape-memory alloysconsidering temperature changes and loading rate dependency,” said Mirzaeifar.

In future work, the researchers plan to examine morecomplicated shapes and the effects of combination loading -- tension, bendingand torsion -- to optimize shape-memory alloys for earthquake applications.

This project issupported by the Transportation Research Board of the National Academies (AwardNo. NCHRP-147). The National Academies has rights to the data and the contentis solely the responsibility of the principal investigators and does notnecessarily represent the official views of the National Academies.

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Writer: AbbyRobinson

Heart-Thrombwas developed by Siddharth Gurnani, NicholasTurturro, Kelly Hefelfinger, Oscar Martinez and Pranav Gandhi, a team ofmechanical engineering seniors.

“It’s the only [machine] of its kind that mimics actualconditions of your heart and can give you a personalized dosage of Plavix,which is the most common way of treating cardiovascular disease and the thirdmost prescribed drug in the U.S.,” Siddharth Gurnani said.

The device could potentially help patients get a customized doseof Plavix right away, which is important because “too much prescription ofPlavix can cause internal bleeding and organ failure, and too little can causeheart attacks,” Gurnani said.

The Fall 2011 Capstone Design Expo was held in the GeorgiaTech’s Clough Commons on Dec. 8. At the semester-ending event, held by theGeorge W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, student teamssystematically design, build and report solutions, in the form of prototypes ordesigns of prototypes, for a variety of problems submitted from industrialsponsors or their own imagination.

Secondplace was awarded to ThromBOSSES, developed by seniors Kevin Parsons, PriyaPatil, Benji Hoover, Daniel Pak, Matthew Lee, Eric Kopfle, Josh DeVane andPoornima Vekataraman. This project was a redesign of a sternal retractor used duringmedian sternotomy surgeries. Median sternotomy provides access to the heart andlungs for surgical procedures such as heart transplant, coronary artery bypassand corrective surgery for congenital heart defects.

Thirdplace went to Re-Hand, an in-home rehabilitative device for strengthening handmuscles, following injury or a debilitating medical condition. The Re-Hand wouldallow for testing and rehabilitation of individual fingers and accommodates fortesting at different wrist positions. It also increases patients’ motivation throughan interactive game. Students involved with the Re-Hand project include seniorsDaphne Vincent, Elizabeth LeMar, Kunal McDonal and Alkindi Kibria. 

The Petit Institute Above and Beyond Awards are selected by the Faculty Steering Committee and given to team-based individuals who demonstrate exemplary service to the institute and contribute to its collegial, collaborative environment.  Three awards are given each year to a senior faculty member, a pre-tenure faculty member and a staff member.

Loren Williams, professor in Chemistry and Biochemistry, has contributed to the Petit Institute significantly this year. Williams is the director of one of the Petit Institute interdisciplinary research centers, RiboEvo.  RiboEvo is a NASA-funded center which is focused on integrated interdisciplinary research and education in astrobiology. As part of the center’s activities, Williams voluntarily participated in the Buzz on Biotechnology high school open house where his center hosted two booths, one with a 3-D visualization of DNA, RNA using PyMol and another demonstration showcasing the use of liquid nitrogen in cryogenics and molecular biology. In addition, Williams organized the 2011 Suddath Symposium and participated in several Petit Institute activities including the Industry Partners Symposium dinner and the Bio-Center Poster Session. Williams also sits on the core facilities steering committee. Williams will have an equally busy 2012 as he is chair of the Astrobiology Science Conference which will attract over 700 scientists to Atlanta and Georgia Tech next year.

Todd Sulchek, assistant professor in Mechanical Engineering, was nominated for his participation and support of the Petit Scholars program over the last several years and for consistently being an active community citizen. Sulchek has participated in many Petit Institute-related events, seminars and community-wide poster sessions.  In addition, Sulchek received a NSF CAREER Award for his proposal titled: "Understanding Multivalent Biological Bonds for Biosensing Applications."  Sulchek will continue to support Petit Institute activities in 2012 as he is scheduled to give a seminar for the Petit Institute’s IBB Breakfast Club seminar series in February.

Colly Mitchell, special program coordinator for marketing and communications,has been working for the Petit Institute since 2007. In 2008, she began tomanage the Petit Scholars program.  At the time Mitchell took over, the program wasdeclining.  Over the course of thelast 3 years, she has played a key role in improving the number and quality ofthe applications and in 2011 the program is thriving.  During her tenure at the Petit Institute, Mitchell has made acomplex job look easy by supporting a variety of Petit Institute events forgroups ranging from students to high-profile donors and administrators. Inaddition, she is responsible for various communication activities, includingdisplay of news and events on the atrium’s flat screen TV and the institute’swebsite. Perhaps even more impressively, she manages all of this on a part-timebasis and does so with a calm demeanor, a constant smile and an easyprofessionalism that earns her the respect and admiration of her colleagues.