Mechanical Engineering

Vanderbilt researchers have won a National Science Foundation grant to use wearable technologies to detect problem behaviors in children and adolescents with intellectual and developmental disabilities and offer strategies to protect them from potential harm. Children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) are at increased risk of showing problem behavior that expose them to being... Read More

Vanderbilt and Penn State engineers have developed a novel approach to design and fabricate thin-film infrared light sources with near-arbitrary spectral output driven by heat, along with a machine learning methodology called inverse design that reduced the optimization time for these devices from weeks or months on a multi-core computer… Read More

Vanderbilt and Penn State engineers have developed a novel approach to design and fabricate thin-film infrared light sources with near-arbitrary spectral output driven by heat, along with a machine learning methodology called inverse design that reduced the optimization time for these devices from weeks or months on a multi-core computer to a few minutes on... Read More

Through a partnership between the Coffee Equity Lab at the Wond’ry and the Del Fuego Project—a Yepocapa, Guatemala-based nonprofit that’s building capacity in small-holder farming communities—Vanderbilt students engaged in collaborative design to generate innovations in coffee processing. Read More

Three ambitious, multidisciplinary projects led by Vanderbilt School of Engineering faculty will be featured Wednesday, July 28, and Thursday, July 29, during the National Science Foundation Convergence Accelerator Expo 2021. Read More

Three ambitious, multidisciplinary projects led by Vanderbilt School of Engineering faculty will be featured Wednesday and Thursday, July 28 and 29, during the NSF Convergence Accelerator Expo 2021. The two-day virtual event will present 15-minute demonstrations of novel solutions that address big-scale societal challenges. The NSF-funded projects integrate disciplines and include industry partners from their... Read More

The Office of the Provost has announced the inaugural round of grant recipients for the Seeding Success Grant program established in March. Three engineering faculty members are among 15 faculty members across four Vanderbilt schools and colleges who will receive support for their work. They are: David Braun, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; “Catapult Legs: Enhancing Human... Read More

The Office of the Provost has announced the inaugural round of grant recipients for the Seeding Success Grant program established in March. Three engineering faculty members are among 15 faculty members across four Vanderbilt schools and colleges who will receive support for their work. They are: David Braun, assistant professor of mechanical engineering; “Catapult Legs: Enhancing Human... Read More

Will Reisner enjoys reaching new heights. The mechanical engineering senior is the vehicle team lead on the perennially top-ranked Vanderbilt Aerospace Design Laboratory rocket team. Read More

The relentless increase in heat loads imposed on devices in modern technologies is driving renewed interest among engineers and materials scientists in the area of heat transfer. A team of engineers led by Vanderbilt professor Deyu Li has shown experimentally that the thermal conductivity of a special kind of ultra-thin nanowire becomes divergent with the wire length. Read More

The relentless increase in heat loads imposed on devices in modern technologies is driving renewed interest among engineers and materials scientists in the area of heat transfer. A key challenge is finding approaches to enhance the materials’ capability of conducting heat. A team of engineers led by Vanderbilt mechanical engineering Professor Deyu Li and his... Read More

The relentless increase in heat loads imposed on devices in modern technologies is driving renewed interest among engineers and materials scientists in the area of heat transfer. A key challenge is finding approaches to enhance the materials’ capability of conducting heat. A team of engineers led by Vanderbilt mechanical engineering Professor Deyu Li and his... Read More

The idea Karl Zelik (Vanderbilt University) Erik Lamers (Vanderbilt University) Karl E. Zelik, assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and recent Ph.D. graduate Erik P. Lamers revealed a new exosuit designed to bring back relief to workers who have been under high strain throughout the pandemic, including last-mile delivery drivers and essential workers. The suit can... Read More

Research snapshot: Study shows promise to bring back strain-relieving wearable tech to last-mile delivery drivers, heavy-lifting jobs and other essential workers, including those strained during pandemic.  Est. reading time: 1.5 minutes Read More

A team led by Vanderbilt engineers has achieved the ability to transmit two different types of optical signals across a single chip at the same time. The breakthrough heralds a potentially dramatic increase in the volume of data a silicon chip can transmit over any period of time. With this project, the research team moved... Read More

Vanderbilt University Medical Center is the busiest cochlear implant center in the U.S., performing more than 300 implant surgeries each year. A key driver is close collaboration among engineers, surgeons, audiologists, speech scientists and other experts. This interdisciplinary, trans-institutional work has enabled a truly customized approach for each patient. Research teams have developed image-guided surgery for... Read More

A Vanderbilt research team has received a $2 million National Institutes of Health grant to further develop a needle-size robotic surgery system with real-time MRI guidance for drug resistant temporal lobe epilepsy (TLE). Such a procedure has the potential to reduce or eliminate seizures using a minimally invasive approach over the current standard of care,... Read More

Researchers at the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering have developed a minuscule robot that could revolutionize surgical procedures for treating prostate cancer, which affects one in nine men in the United States. Using a lifelike model, the team demonstrated that the surgical robot could not only remove the prostate gland and tissues through the... Read More

Surgery for prostate cancer—the most prevalent cancer in men—soon could no longer require cutting through healthy tissue and nerves. Surgeons instead may work with minuscule robots developed at the Vanderbilt Institute for Surgery and Engineering. Read More

Vivian Gama, assistant professor of cell and developmental biology, and Leon Bellan, associate professor of mechanical engineering and biomedical engineering, have won a $2.3 million, three-year grant from the National Institutes of Health Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative. Vivian Gama Leon Bellan (Vanderbilt University) The researchers will be developing three-dimensional brain organoids and... Read More