With the support of $5.5 million in U.S. Department of Energy funding, the project, led by Derek Johnson, associate professor at the Benjamin M. Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, will focus on methane emissions — a planet-warming greenhouse gas — from liquid storage tanks across West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio.

A new report by the National Science Foundation ranked the Statler College in the top 23 percent of engineering programs in the United States, coming in at 94 among 413 institutions. Mechanical engineering was ranked 41st, materials science was ranked 69th, and aerospace engineering was ranked 84th.

The Science, Technology & Research division of the West Virginia Higher Education Policy Commission awarded three research challenge grants worth approximately $1.3 million each to support research conducted by students and faculty at West Virginia High education institutions. Cosmin Dumitrescu, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, will serve at the project principal investigator of the third research group that will study “Synergistic Conversion of Captured C02 and Green H2 to Value-Added Products for a Decarbonized Economy.” The grant will provide funding for the group to advance science and engineering around the production of value-added products for a decarbonized and low-carbon West Virginia economy.

Researchers at West Virginia University have engineered a material with the potential to dramatically cut the amount of heat power plants release into the atmosphere.

MAE Mountaineer Mentors is a program where outstanding juniors and seniors are chosen to mentor sophomores in introductory mechanics courses, such as MAE 241, 242, and 243, and help them grow in their academic and professional careers. The mentors also receive a $500 scholarship to benefit their own academic careers.

Four Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Students participated in the 2023 Undergraduate Research Day at the Capitol, which provides students the opportunity to present their original scholarly works during a poster session and to talk with legislators about their findings.

Members of WVU DBF will travel to Tucson, Arizona on April 13-16, where they will be tasked with building and testing an aircraft that can carry out flight missions such as surveillance and jamming.

This research carried out by WVU MAE student Alexander Flasch focused on the design and development of a gripper for produce growing on trees. The robotic gripper was tested on its capability to grip varying diameters of fruits and vegetables so that it can eliminate human labor and make harvesting automated.

A West Virginia University alumnus aims to boost the number of women working in STEM fields via a $50,000 scholarship gift to his alma mater.

David Mebane, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources, has been awarded a one-year, funded sabbatical from the NASA Ames Research Center to develop a theoretical framework and models of electrochemical devices like batteries and fuel cells using a combination of science-based models and machine learning. NASA has provided Mebane with funding that will allow him to step away from some of his teaching duties for the 2023-2024 academic year and focus on the research project.

Andrew Nix, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at West Virginia University, has been named an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.

The event was designed to expose MARS members to the robotics projects going on at WVU and teach them about the opportunities available at Statler College.

For the first time, West Virginia University’s Statler College of Engineering and Mineral Resources hosted the VEX Robotics Competition on February 18-19. The event was sponsored by the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering.

Dear Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Alumni and Friends,

I hope you are enjoying the start of Spring and looking forward to the warm weather!

Our department is excited to host many world-class experiential learning opportunities for our students and be engaged in numerous high-profile research projects. I hope you enjoy reading about some of these recent successes in this current newsletter including our new $5.5M project to examine methane emissions at oil and gas sites led by Dr. Derek Johnson and about our students like Alexander Flasch engaged in undergraduate research. We look forward to the coming summer months when our numerous student-led engineering design teams will participate in several national and international competitions!

This semester, we’ve been busy in efforts to build upon our strengths and improve the department’s K-12 outreach activities. In particular, we were excited to partner with the College’s outreach office to host and judge WVU’s first-ever VEX Robotics Competition where over 50 high school and middle school teams competed for Statler College scholarships and summer camp scholarships. Our faculty were also engaged in Merit Badge University and contributed to the earning of over 70 Scout Merit Badges in engineering, energy, materials, robotics, space, and aviation.

We’ve also continued to strengthen our educational programs. In particular, our Mechanical Engineering Curriculum Committee revamped our mechanical engineering undergraduate curriculum for students starting in Fall 2023 to allow students to customize their degree by selecting an area of emphasis in energy, materials, robotics, or dynamics and controls. Further, we continued the new MAE Mountaineer Mentors program and have worked with our mentors to integrate new hands-on learning modules into our sophomore statics courses.

Finally, we are happy that our department was successful in hosting our first-ever Day of Giving Challenge. This year, we called upon everyone to help support a new scholarship in recognition of the Microgravity Research Team, and we hope to start the tradition of creating a new department scholarship each year.

Best Regards,

MAILING ADDRESS:
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering | West Virginia University
1306 Evansdale Drive | P.O. Box 6106 | Morgantown, WV 26506-6106
PHONE: 304.293.3111 | EMAIL: Statler-MAE-research@mail.wvu.edu

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