Funding and Awards

For more news about the Department of Mechanical Engineering, see our recent news page.



Exciting news at LLE

August 26, 2021

A burst of energy that lasted 100 trillionths of a second has reverberated far and near– and was especially good news for our scientists at the Laboratory for Laser Energetics. Their colleagues at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced last week that an experiment at the National Ignition Facility had generated more than 10 quadrillion watts of fusion power.

Continue Reading

Professor Aluie Wins NSF Award for Probing the Ocean's Multiscale Pathways

August 2, 2021

The project utilizes a somewhat novel ‘coarse-graining’ approach to analyze multiscale interactions that is more versatile and powerful than the classical ‘mean-eddy’ decomposition. It numerical models, it is almost never possible to directly resolve all motions down to the smallest scales. Instead, the influence of the smaller scales on the larger scale circulation of interest is estimated using parameterizations, whose choice typically depend on where the cut off for resolved scales are and sometimes on the particular location which may determine what physical processes are important.

Continue Reading

Professor Dias Wins NSF CAREER Award for Warm Quantum Materials: Harnessing Exotic Quantum Properties at High Temperatures

March 1, 2021

The primary goal of this project is to synthesize novel hydrogen rich, room temperature or above room temperature superconducting materials at ambient pressure for practical applications, such as advanced power grids, new transportation, medical imaging, and scanning techniques such as MRI and magnetocardiography, and faster, more efficient electronics for digital logic and memory device technology.

Continue Reading

Professor Askari wins NSF Quantum Leap grant

August 28, 2019

Advancements in computational power over the past fifty years have mostly relied on shrinking the size of the transistor, the fundamental constituent element of the integrated circuits that make up computers. As we reach the physical limits of how small transistors can be, further progress depends on exploring new concepts. One of these concepts is quantum computing, in which the quantum state of individual quantum bits (qubits) is manipulated to achieve exponential speedup of computational performance. A critical challenge to quantum computing lies in the stability and manipulation of qubits, which are highly sensitive and easily perturbed by the environment.

Continue Reading