Videos tagged mechanical engineering
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PSNE & BEH Tumor Ablation Animation
Animated demonstration of perfluorocarbon based phase-shift nanoemulsion (PSNE) paired with HIFU in tumor treatment.
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A New Wrinkle in Waterproofing: BU-MIT Team Engineers Surface That Repels Water Faster
BU Assistant Professor James C. Bird (ME, MSE) and collaborators in the Varanasi group at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering found that when they augmented micro- or nanostructured surfaces with periodic, wrinkle-like features, liquid drops [...]bounced off at faster rates than previously thought possible. The engineers reported their findings in the cover story of the November 21 issue of Nature.
In the top video, prior to adding ridge-like features to a micro- or nanostructured surface, a water drop would spread out to a maximum diameter, retract until the edges of the drop met its stationary center point, and bounce off the surface. With the introduction of the ridges (bottom video), the center point moved to meet the edges as the drop recoiled, heading it off at the pass. The drop then split in two before jumping off the surface.
"We've demonstrated that we can use surface texture to reshape a drop as it recoils in such a way that the overall contact time is significantly reduced," said Bird, the paper's lead author, who directs the Interfacial Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at BU. "The upshot is that the surface stays drier longer if this contact time is reduced, which has the potential to be useful for a variety of applications."
Such surfaces may improve the performance of systems that operate better under dry conditions, such as steam turbines or aircraft wings, and enable cold surfaces, such as rooftops, to resist icing by shedding liquid drops before the drops freeze.
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BU Goes to the Moon | Behind the Scenes Featurette: LEXI Launch Diary
At 1:11am on January 15, NASA’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 spacecraft blasted into the sky from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, riding on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and destined for the moon. On board: a telescope designed and built at Boston [...]University. Postdoctoral researcher Emil Atz was watching the launch from the project command center in BU's Photonics building, on call to communicate remotely with LEXI in case anything went wrong. (Spoiler alert: Everything went great! But it was very emotional.)
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BU Goes to the Moon | Behind-the-Scenes Featurette: Mounting LEXI on Blue Ghost
In the video above, go behind the scenes at Firefly Aerospace’s operations center, as the LEXI telescope is mounted to Firefly’s Blue Ghost lander.
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BU Goes to the Moon | Behind-the-Scenes Featurette: Fancy (and Fragile!) Optics
In the video above, Professor Brian Walsh discusses the inherent risks of sending LEXI’s new, innovative optical technology to the moon.
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How Math and Engineering Changed This Student’s Life: A Personal Story
When most people think of robots, what comes to mind is probably something with a hard shell, likely made of metal or plastic—and maybe shaped like a human. But when Boston University mechanical engineering major Sarah Alizadeh-Shabdiz thinks of [...]robots, she pictures a bendy, wiggly piece of rubber. Purple rubber. That’s because Alizadeh-Shabdiz (ENG’26) spent her summer doing research in BU’s Soft Robotics Control Lab.
Soft robots are just that: robots—or parts of robots—made from bendable, pliable materials, such as silicone rubber. Designers of soft robots often take inspiration from nature, looking at animals with naturally flexible limbs, like octopuses. The potential applications of their work are wide-ranging, from assisting with surgeries to engaging in search and rescue missions in difficult-to-squeeze-into places. In the Soft Robotics Control Lab, principal investigator Andrew Sabelhaus, a College of Engineering assistant professor of mechanical engineering, and his students are studying novel ways to improve how soft robots are controlled, as well as the fundamental physics underlying how they interact with the environment.
“Soft robots are understood in the scientific community to be inherently safer,” says Alizadeh-Shabdiz. This makes sense, intuitively: a robot arm made of soft rubber seems less likely to crush something than one made of hard plastic or metal. But it turns out that very little research has been done on exactly how much safer soft robots might be. Among Alizadeh-Shabdiz’s summer research projects was an experiment, funded by a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, designed to measure the force one of the lab’s soft robot limbs can exert on an object.
In the video above, find out why Alizadeh-Shabdiz needed the help of Toys“R”Us to complete her study and how her love of mathematics inspires her research—and her goal of becoming a teacher.
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Trying to Make Water Out of Thin Air
Some 300 million to 500 million people in the world have no access to safe water at all, and perhaps 2 billion have inadequate access. One group of Boston University College of Engineering students is attempting to come up with an innovative way to [...]address the crisis: creating a water harvester that would pull moisture from the air to provide potable water without great effort or expense.
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This Robot's Soft Gripper Was Inspired By Japanese Kirigami
Boston University mechanical engineers have developed a unique way to use an ancient Japanese art form for a very 21st-century purpose. Douglas Holmes, BU College of Engineering associate professor of mechanical engineering, studies how materials [...]change shape when they are bent or warped by external forces. In a paper published this week in Science Robotics, Holmes and BU PhD student Yi Yang demonstrate how they were inspired by kirigami, the traditional Japanese art of paper cutting (cousin of origami paper-folding art), to design soft robotic grippers.
By cutting sheets of plastic in specific shapes, and then bending them in a specific way, the plastic morphs into a gripper that can safely and securely pick up objects of various size, weight, shape, and fragility. Using the kirigami technique, they’ve developed grippers so small they can pick up a single grain of sand, and large enough to pick up a bottle of water. Holmes and Yang hope that this research will make a significant contribution to the emerging field of soft robotics.
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LEXI is Going to the Moon! (In 2023)
Boston University’s LEXI telescope is going to the moon! (But not until 2023.) Part NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative, LEXI (the Lunar Environment Heliospheric X-ray Imager) will hitch a ride on Firefly [...]Aerospace’s Blue Ghost lunar lander, alongside nine other science and technology payloads. Once there, LEXI will take one-of-a-kind images of the Earth’s magnetic fields and how they interact with the solar wind, providing critical insights into the plasma environment surrounding our planet.
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