Mechanical Engineering students shine at conferences

Asst. Prof. Douglas Kelly and PhD student Rakan F. Ashour at the NY-BEST Energy Storage Technology Conference.

Congratulations to Xiangzhi Yu, Mechanical Engineering PhD student in the Precision Instrumentation Group, who has been part of the winning team at the ASPE Student Competition for the second time in a row. Xianghi, along with teammates Andrew Duenner, Ian Ladner, Nilabh Kumar Roy, and Tsung-Fu Yao from the University of Texas at Austin won the ASPE Student Competition at the annual meeting of the American Society for Precision Engineering. The students were tasked with building a closed loop controlled X-Y scanning system to image an area the size of a penny using MechBlocks, voice coils, capacitance sensors, and motion controllers in about 9 hours. Each winning student was awarded a $1,000 prize and a stainless steel MechBlock kit from MOTUS Mechanical.

Steven R. Gillmer, Mechanical Engineering PhD student in the Precision Instrumentation Group of Asst. Prof. Jonathan Ellis, was awarded the 2015 Carl Zeiss Student Scholarship at the ASPE Annual Meeting. This award includes the ASPE Annual Meeting registration fee, four tutorial fees, travel expenses, and lodging to the Annual Meeting. In addition, the scholarship provides for travel and lodging to Maple Grove, Minnesota to visit Carl Zeiss Industrial Metrology. Steve is the third recipient of the Carl Zeiss Student Scholarship awarded through ASPE.

The Department of Mechnical Engineering was also well represented at SPIE Optifab, the largest optical fabrication event in North America, held recently in Rochester. Sam Butler and Mike Ricci, masters students in Mechanical Engineering, along with Chen Wang, PhD student in Electrical and Computer Engineering; and Visiting Scientist Qun Wei, were awarded first prize in the APOMA Outstanding Student Poster Competition, sponsored by the American Precision Optics Manufacturers Association. Their project was entitled "Homodyne displacement measuring interferometer probe for optical coordinate measuring machine with tip and tilt sensitivity."

Phd students Rakan F. Ashour (Asst. Prof. Douglas Kelley's lab), and Yuan Xue (Prof. David Quesnel's lab), presented at the recent NY-BEST Energy Storage Technology Conference, attended by more than 150 researchers, entrepreneurs, corporate technology experts, academics, government officials and representatives of the financial community. Rakan's presentation was on "Understanding and Controlling Transport in Liquid Metal Batteries." Yuan presented "Electrochemical Study of Gel Polymer Electrolyte Based on Cross-Linked PMMA."