Michael Jensen is a professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer. We ask him about his work:

Q: What problems are you trying to solve?

A: My research revolves around heat transfer, whether in large-scale heat exchangers, such as what might be found in a chemical process plant, or at the microscale, such as with electronics cooling in high performance computers. The goal is to try to understand what the governing processes are, and then to develop methods to predict the processes; this is essential for design, as well as for troubleshooting.

What is your favorite course to teach?

I most enjoy teaching undergraduate thermal and fluids courses. On nearly every topic I can relate the material to something in the students’ lives; either they have used it, seen it, or heard about it, so it is fun to ask them if they’ve thought about it. Tying the theory to a practical application they’re familiar with makes it more real to the students; it’s not just an abstract concept.

When you were an undergraduate student, what was your favorite course?

I confess that as an undergraduate, I didn’t really have a favorite course. Many courses interested me, but when I graduated I said I would never go back to school; I just wanted out.  However, in my first job in industry at an oil refinery, I did a variety of assignments with heat transfer, and that piqued my interest and enthusiasm. After two years of unchallenging work, I decided to go back to school, just until I figured out what to do when I grew up. I’ve been challenged, and since I’ve never left the university, I guess that means …

What is your favorite place to travel?

If the travel is focused on outdoor activities, I love going to the mountains, as high and as remote as I can get. If the focus is on cities, I want to go where there is much history, not only in the museums, but also with the architecture, environment, and people. If I hadn’t become an engineer, there is a good chance I would have become an historian.

What drives your passion for mountain climbing?

Being out in the natural beauty. It’s great to be up high, so I can see forever. It’s also the physical challenge, to go where few others go. To be in the wilderness with, perhaps, no one else other than your own group around for hundreds of square miles is a neat feeling. You can only rely on what you carried in on your back, and you get away from all issues associated with modern life. It can be tough, but it is also quite satisfying and relaxing.

Much of your work centers on energy efficiency and sustainability, and you are the faculty adviser of the Engineers for a Sustainable World student group. Why is this topic important to you?

We are fortunate in this country to have had many resources—both natural and human—available to advance our country, but resources are finite, and other countries do not have the abundance that we have. Engineers always seek to improve efficiencies, use less material, etc. However, we can do a better job if we educate the new generations of engineers to not only consider function, cost, aesthetics, and safety when designing a device, but to also consider sustainability issues. We use the same tools, but we bring in more understanding of where other savings can be realized. While there are many definitions of sustainability, the one from the Great Law of the Iroquois (established between 11th and 16th centuries) is nice; I use it in class. It says that leaders have a duty to “have always in view not only the present, but also the coming generations, even those whose faces are yet beneath the surface of the ground—the unborn of the future Nation … In every deliberation, we must consider the impact on the seventh generation … even if it requires having skin as thick as the bark of a pine.”

To read more about Michael and his work, click here.

(In the wake of this morning’s headlines about a meteorite blast in Russia, the Institute’s own Laurie Leshin, dean of the School of Science and space science rock star, wrote this  post for The Approach. Enjoy!)

This morning people in Russia got a loud reminder that Earth isn’t really a blue marble floating peacefully in space. A meteor, about the size of a bus, slammed into our atmosphere going over 30,000 miles per hour. This caused very loud sonic booms which damaged buildings and injured about 1,000 people near the city of Chelyabinsk. Luckily, there weren’t any deaths, and damaged buildings can be repaired. But this cosmic intruder reminds us that in fact we live in solar system filled with space debris—Earth collects 40,000 tons of it EVERY YEAR. Most of it looks the above picture.

The image is of a small dust particle (about 10 microns across, or one-tenth the width of a human hair) that is slowed down in the upper atmosphere and harmlessly floats to Earth. Walk to your car, and you’ll step on lots of them…

But there are bigger things out there, too. We need to find them and then figure out how to deflect them or change their course, before a large one hits Earth. Most people have seen the really entertaining movie Armageddon, starring Bruce Willis as a driller who saves the earth from an asteroid “the size of Texas.” Well, the truth is that it doesn’t have to be the size of Texas to be a global killer. (In fact, the largest known asteroid is only about one-third the size of Texas…Hollywood!) The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs was, in fact, only about the size of our own city of Troy. And there are lots of those. Nervous yet? Me too. How about putting some of our science and engineering talents to work figuring out how to deflect one? In the meantime, remember, we live on a space rock. And sometimes, we interact with other space rocks.

By the way, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that space rocks are good for more than scaring us. They are a boon to science. Meteorites (and I bet they’ll find some from the event of this morning) tell us about the very birth of our solar system. Most are 4.6 billion years old, and were the very first solids to form in our solar system. They bore witness to the birth of the planets and may have delivered the raw ingredients for life to the early Earth.

(Click here, here, and here to read more and see a video about Dean Leshin’s space research and work as part of the Mars rover Curiosity team.)

Whenever anyone remarks at the wonder of a Ferris wheel, they are indeed invoking the genius of a Rensselaer engineer. George W.G. Ferris is among the most notable alumni of our university, and there’s certainly an argument to be made that his is the most widely-recognized name of all the Institute’s graduates.

Today, Google paid homage to Ferris’ 154th birthday with a Google Doodle, which you can see above (and archived here). The Doodle is a mash-up of a Ferris Wheel scene with plenty of St. Valentine’s Day imagery.

Here is the citation about Ferris (Class of 1881) from the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame:

Ferris began his career in the railroad industry and pursued an interest in bridge building.

Foreseeing an increase in the use of structural steel, he founded G.W.G. Ferris & Co. in Pittsburgh, a firm that tested and inspected metals for railroads and bridge builders.

When the chief of construction for the World’s Columbian Exposition challenged America’s civil engineers to produce something to rival the Eiffel Tower of the Paris Exposition, Ferris’s imagination was fired.

He conceived the Ferris Wheel, which rose 250 feet and carried 36 cars, each with a capacity for 40 passengers, revolving under perfect control, and stable against the strongest winds from Lake Michigan.

The daring and accuracy of its design and the precision of the machine work of its construction won the admiration of engineers and the joy and wonder of generations.

Campus is still abuzz from last week’s announcement that IBM will give a version of its Watson system to Rensselaer. The computer rose to fame in early 2011 after if defeated the two all-time human champions of the quiz show Jeopardy!. The Internet is also abuzz with the news, and our own Jim Hendler is at the very center of the media merriment.

Professor Hendler, who is the head of our Department of Computer Science and one of the lead researchers on the Watson project at Rensselaer, recently did a Q&A with the Washington Post about the future of Watson at Rensselaer. A snippet is below, and you can read the entire story here.

WashPo: What will be the first steps in introducing Watson to the RPI team?

Hendler: Programming Watson requires understanding its particular flow of control in Question-Answering. For those people on campus who have not already been involved in the project, we will have several faculty, staff and students take a 2-day training course led by the IBM team, and then those people, in turn, will be able to teach others as well as jump-starting our work.

What “classes” will Watson be taking? Additionally, will this be, perhaps, the opportunity to create a “curriculum,” if you will, for other systems when it comes to processing the large volume of unstructured data out there?

We will be looking at a number of different projects that explore what Watson can do. One thing we want to explore is how Watson can interact with social media, especially things such as “tweets” where the language is not as carefully constructed as it is in the documents Watson has used in the Jeopardy game. Another thing we will be exploring is adding various kinds of numerical reasoning to Watson. There’s lots more.

So to do all this, we’re taking a two-pronged attack. One approach, utilizing our graduate students, will be exploring how to add new capabilities to Watson and how to use its current capabilities in many of our ongoing research projects. For example, I run a group that does a lot of work with Open Government Data systems (like the US data.gov) and we’re excited about the possibility of using Watson to help researchers around the world find relevant government data and documents for their work.

At the end of the three-year project, what is the ultimate goal for Watson?

Imagine having been the first university to get a telescope a few centuries back. Everywhere you pointed it was something new and exciting, and it would be impossible to predict everything you would see. Having Watson is like that for us — our goal for the next few years is to gain an understanding of what having the new ways of bringing unstructured data and documents into our computational lives will be.

News sites were abuzz today with a fun update from 400 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. NASA on Monday released new video footage of its friendly-faced robotic astronaut, Robonaut 2, working aboard the International Space Station (ISS). NASA has been running tests and experiments with R2, as the robot is called, since it was ferried to the ISS early 2011. The goal is for R2 to one day serve as an assistant or stand-in for astronauts during spacewalks, or perform overly dangerous or complex tasks.

I love a good space robot news story, but this one is particularly exciting because Rensselaer senior Nathaniel Quillin played a role in developing R2. Nathaniel, a computer and systems engineering major, seen in the photo above, spent two semesters and three summers at Johnson Space Center near Houston working directly on the R2 project. That is a hugely impressive and prestigious level for any researcher to be functioning at—it’s pretty amazing that Nathaniel got to work on this stuff as an undergraduate student.

During his time at NASA, Nathaniel wrote the computer code used to help debug R2’s hardware. Additionally, he helped write code for the graphical user interface that NASA researchers use to control R2. This control software creates 3-D visualizations that allows researcher to see how R2 will carry out their commands, prior to sending the actual commands for the robot to execute. All in all, he estimates he contributed hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

Click here to check out the video footage on NASA’s website, shown as part of an interview with Robonaut project lead Ron Diftler. Click here to read a newspaper story on Nathaniel and his work with R2.

A new study from professor Mariana Figueiro at the Rensselaer Lighting Research Center is lighting up the Internet with news that nobody wants to hear: your phone, computer, tablet, and other back-lit devices may be keeping you awake at night.

Here’s why: Looking at a back-lit display for two hours can trick your brain into producing less melatonin, the hormone that helps regulate our internal clocks. Essentially, since your eyes are looking at a bright screen, your brain thinks it’s still early and puts off getting ready for bed. Sadly, this kind of disruption to our circadian rhythms has been implicated in all sorts of nastiness including sleep disturbances and increased risk for diabetes and obesity.

A step in the right direction, says Figueiro, would be electronic displays that could increase or decrease circadian stimulation depending on the time of day—specific settings and types of light to provide less stimulation in the evening and set the stage for a better night’s sleep, and specific settings and types of light to provide more stimulation in the morning and encourage alertness.

Tech blog Mashable created the above video about the study. Additionally, everyone from the New York Times and LA Times to the Daily Mail, Times of India, and Huffington Post have written about it. There’s also a nice local piece by the Times Union.

Check out this older post (and video!) on Figueiro’s work: Night Owls Need More Blue Rays

(Senior Hannah Fix wrote this excellent post for The Approach to tell us about her educational outreach work with Professor Patrick Underhill. Enjoy!)

My name is Hannah Fix, I am a  senior undergraduate studying aeronautical and mechanical Engineering. I work with Professor Patrick Underhill on the “Fluid Dynamics Demo Kit: Fluid Physics on the Road” project, which is funded through the American Physical Society Division of Fluid Dynamics.

The Fluid Dynamics Demo Kit is an educational outreach project designing kits that contain experiments to teach students basic fluid and flow concepts. The aim of the project is to use exciting experiments aimed at high school students to teach them practical applications of the concepts they learn in the classroom. These experiments include a water gun, a siphon, Heron’s fountain, and a viscous drag experiment. There is a list of topics covered for each experiment and the assumption is that the topics will have previously been covered in class.

Heron's Fountain

Along with materials for the experiment, each kit includes the information for the teachers and worksheets for the students. There is a PowerPoint presentation which goes along with the experiment, walking through the set-up for the experiment, as well as the procedure, and the calculations that give a basic explanation of all the topics covered. The worksheets are designed to help the high school students walk through the various calculations to get theoretical results, compare them to the experimental results, and explain why they differ. For each experiment a sample worksheet is done with all the calculations written out to provide the teachers with extra guidance.

The supplies needed for each experiment are listed on both the PowerPoint slides and the worksheets. Each kit contains the basic components needed to complete every one of the experiments—beakers, scales, water, and other common laboratory equipment and supplies are assumed to be available to the students and will not be included in the kits. The experiments in all four kits are use parts that are cheap and easy to find, so even if something is broken or lost it can easily be replaced.

In the  water gun experiment, the students choose a target, calculate the number of times they have to pump the water gun, fire the water gun, and then see how close they were to hitting the target. The idea behind the water gun is that by pumping it and adding air, the water in the tank becomes pressurized thus causing it to exit the gun at a faster rate of speed and to go a farther distance. The students have to take measurements of the gun’s performance and calculate in advance the number of times they should have to pump it, using principles including ballistics, conservation of energy, Bernoulli, ideal gas law, conservation of mass, and generation of entropy. Then, using the results from the first test shot, the students calculate the coefficient of friction, recalculate the number of pumps, and fire again hopefully getting closer to the target with friction taken into account.

A siphon is a tube that pumps water up and out of one bucket and down to a bucket at lower lever. Atmospheric pressure is used to pump the water up the tube and then the water flows down into the lower bucket because it has less potential energy. The lab covers principles including Bernoulli, conservation of mass, conservation of energy, and viscous drag. The students are asked to calculate the theoretical time it takes to fill the lower bucket a certain amount and then compare it to experimental results. This lab also then has the students use those results to calculate the frictional losses.

Heron’s fountain, in which water runs up from the bottom tank and out through a tube in the top tank with no pumps, seems impossible. But it is just a matter of pressures pushing the water up and out. To prime the fountain,  water is added to the bottom tank and then the fountain is flipped upside down and water from the bottom tank fills the middle tank pressurizing the middle tank. The high pressure of the middle tank causes the water to flow up and out of the top of the fountain. Over time all the water from the middle tank flows up and out of the top of the fountain and the fountain stops until it is re-primed. The students calculate the time it takes for the fountain to stop running and compare it to the actual time.

The viscous drag experiment involves dropping various size and weight glass spheres in corn syrup and measuring the amount of time it takes for them to fall a certain distance. The students also heat and cool the corn syrup, to see if its viscosity changes at different temperatures. The drag laboratory covers principles including force balance, gravity, viscous drag, and buoyancy.

Our hope is to soon have these four experiments complete, and for the kits ready to be sent out to a few teachers who will test them out and give us feedback. We also hope to add more experiments to the kits, including one that covers surface tension. The education outreach project will help high school students learn to apply fluid concepts to real-world examples, and to gain a deeper understanding and appreciation for theory they learn in lectures.

I’m Michelle Riedman, a civil engineering (structures) graduate student working with Professor Christopher Letchford and Professor Michael O’Rourke. We are currently conducting a research project for the New York State Department of Transportation (NYSDOT) entitled “Determining the Remaining Fatigue Life of In-Situ Mast-Arm Traffic Signal Supports.” Harry White is the NYSDOT project manager while my two advisors are co-principle investigators. Undergraduate electrical engineering student, Vinh Nguyen, is also working on the project as part of RPI’s Undergraduate Research Program.

The project studies wind-induced vibrations of long cantilevered mast arm traffic signal structures. When the wind flows past the mast arm of the structure, low-pressure vortices are shed on alternating sides of the arm causing the mast arm to vibrate in a cross-wind or vertical response, as shown below.

If the frequency at which the vortices are shed (which is a function of both the wind speed as well as the diameter of the mast arm) matches the natural frequency of the structure, then vibrations with high amplitudes can occur. These vibrations cause structural stresses and strains to occur in a cyclical fashion which can lead to fatigue of the structure, and in some cases full collapse.

To study these wind induced vibrations, we are currently conducting a full scale experiment on a 25 meter cantilevered traffic structure in Malta, NY. An ultrasonic anemometer and two 3-component accelerometers were installed on the structure with the help of Jon LaPointe from the civil engineering department and data is currently being recorded at intervals of 23Hz through a data acquisition system. A picture of the traffic structure along with several pictures from the installation of our equipment is shown below.

While installing the equipment, pluck tests were conducted in order to determine the dynamic properties of the structure. To conduct these pluck tests, the free end of the mast arm was manually excited by a person from the research team with access via a boom lift and then let go so that the structure entered into free vibration. Using both the time history of the data collected during these tests and the corresponding Fourier transform, the natural frequencies and damping ratios were determined for both the in plane and out of plane directions.

These results compared well with the finite element model that had been developed prior to the full scale tests. A screen-shot of the finite element model in its first mode of vibration is shown below.

The natural frequency of the structure was calculated to be 0.52 Hz for the first mode of vibration. Knowing the diameter of this particular mast arm, it has been calculated that vortices should be shed at this same frequency when the wind speed is around 6 m/s or about 13 mph. In order to determine how frequently this wind speed of interest should occur, wind climate data for the Albany, N.Y. area was obtained from the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) and a wind rose was constructed. A wind rose shows the frequency at which wind blows from a particular direction at a particular speed. The angle of attack of the wind relative to the mast arm is of interest as well since the vibrations are most severe when the wind hits near perpendicular to the mast arm’s longitudinal direction. When overlayed on a site map, the wind rose for the Albany, NY area shows that the majority of winds in the area should hit the arm in a near perpendicular fashion, which is good news for our research project, but bad news for the life of the structure.

The end goal of the project is to use the data collected through the full scale experiment, the finite element computer model, as well as the general climate data from the NCDC for various locations in New York state to come up with a general methodology that the DOT can use to assess the remaining fatigue life of these types of structures throughout the state.

Congratulations to the Class of 2012! More than 1,600 Rensselaer gradates crossed the stage stage this morning, at the university’s 206th Commencement. I’m sure it won’t be long before we’re reading about all of their amazing successes and innovations!

Riccardo Bevilacqua is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering at Rensselaer, who recently received a prestigious award and grant from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. We ask Riccardo about his work:

Q: You’re interested in building self-assembling space robots. Tell me a little bit about it.

A: The whole point is: we service cars, refuel them, and we repair almost everything—except satellites. The very first thing space robots would do is supporting on orbit spacecraft. And then, they will help us colonize space, self assembling in bigger robots and performing tasks that are beyond humans’ reach.

I can’t help but think of Voltron, Go-Bots, and Transformers. Did you ever watch those cartoons as a kid?

More than that, in a simple answer: I still have a small model of Voltron back at my parents’ house. I played with it so much that the lions forming the limbs had to be super-glued to the torso body! And, yes, I still enjoy its company when I go visit!

What fascinates you most about space?

I believe that we are on this planet to do great things, to go beyond our limits, and space is the Unknown, the Challenge. I simply believe that space is the coolest application for an engineer, where no discipline is left out.

When did you know that you wanted to be a engineer?

At 14 years old, when I disassembled the carburetor of my 50cc scooter just for the fun of it. I removed it, cleaned, put it back…and the scooter was still working! Big deal for me at that time! Engineers understand and do things that are just magic to other people.

What would you say to young students and high schoolers who are thinking about studying engineering or becoming an engineer?

That they need to be ready for a match, that life as an engineer can lead you anywhere in the world, but you need to love the challenge. And that the satisfaction and gratification can be beyond expectations. In three words: never give up!

You’re from Roma, Italy. I absolutely loved the city when I visited a few years ago. Tell me a little about what it was like to grow up there.

I was born in Rome, grew up in Anzio, 40 miles south. Studying near the Coliseum give you a feeling of eternity…and the food is so good ! Life in Anzio was riding a bicycle with friends and going to the beach—not too bad.

Outside of the lab and the classroom, what do you like to do for fun?

Spending time with my wife, Noemi, and my daughter, Sophia. Travelling, reading, and running. And, I used to own a Honda CBR600F before moving to the US.., my plans for the future include going back to two wheels.

To read more about Riccardo and his work, click here.