Mechanical Engineering

Office of Digital Learning announces MITx Grant Program recipients

August 20, 2015

AIM Biotech's microfluidics device (shown here) has an array of culturing sections, each with three chambers: a middle chamber for hydrogel and any cell type, and two side channels for culturing additional cell types.

Capturing cell growth in 3-D

Spinout’s microfluidics device better models how cancer and other cells interact in the body.

August 14, 2015

A bipedal robot with human reflexes

New human-machine interface keeps robot balanced, with human reflexes.

August 10, 2015

A simple robotic gripper can adjust its grip using the environment. Here, a robot grips a rod lightly while pushing it against a tabletop.

Giving robots a more nimble grasp

Engineers use the environment to give simple robotic grippers more dexterity.

August 3, 2015

Yashraj Narang SM '13 (right) conducted a comprehensive survey of above-knee amputees in India to understand their unique user-needs and the performance of their current prostheses.

A cheaper, high-performance prosthetic knee

Researchers design cheap prosthetic knee that mimics normal walking motion.

July 31, 2015

Materials that have good wetting properties, as illustrated on the left, where droplets spread out flat, tend to have hydroxyl groups attached to the surface, which inhibits catalytic activity. Materials that repel water, as shown at right, where droplets form sharp, steep boundaries, are more conducive to catalytic activity, as shown by the reactions among small orange molecules.

How to look for a few good catalysts

New research shows non-wetting surfaces promote chemical reaction rates.

July 30, 2015

The proposed SLAM-aware object recognition system is able to localize and recognize several objects in the scene, aggregating detection evidence across multiple views. The annotations are actual predictions proposed by the system.

Object recognition for robots

Robots’ maps of their environments can make existing object-recognition algorithms more accurate.

July 23, 2015

William Green, Ashwin Raghavan, and Ahmed Ghoniem

Making clean, high-quality fuels from low-quality oil

New insights into a promising approach to fuel production that would reduce costs, energy use, and carbon dioxide emissions.

July 17, 2015

Gradiant's selective chemical extraction plant (shown here, near the pools of water) uses chemical reactions to remove specific contaminants from produced water to make clean brine.

Toward cheaper water treatment

MIT spinout makes treating, recycling highly contaminated oilfield water more economical

July 15, 2015

Solving mysteries of conductivity in polymers

Materials seen as promising for optoelectronics and thermoelectric devices finally yield their secrets.

July 14, 2015

Why do puddles stop spreading?

Simple everyday phenomenon was unexplained by physics — until now.

July 9, 2015

Yarn made of niobium nanowires, seen here in a scanning electron microscope image (background), can be used to make very efficient supercapacitors, MIT researchers have found. Adding a coating of a conductive polymer to the yarn (shown in pink, inset) further increases the capacitor’s charge capacity. Positive and negative ions in the material are depicted as blue and red spheres.

Tiny wires could provide a big energy boost

Yarns of niobium nanowire can make supercapacitors to provide a surge of energy when it’s needed

July 7, 2015

Alumnus Hock Tan pledges $4 million gift for endowed chair in MechE

New professorship to be named in honor of Professor Emeritus Nam P. Suh

July 6, 2015

Graduate student Sami Khan receives Young Researcher Award

The PhD candidate was honored at the 2015 World Hydropower Congress in May.

July 2, 2015

Mujid Kazimi, leading educator and researcher in nuclear technology, dies at 67

Leader of efforts to design new fuel cycles for nuclear power plants had been on the faculty since 1976.