Mechanical Engineering

A team won a surprise victory at this year’s Senior Design competition

lblouin — Mon, 19 May 2025 12:08:15 +0000

A team won a surprise victory at this year’s Senior Design competition lblouin Mon, 05/19/2025 - 08:08

Of the five seniors on their team, only Micah Hagedorn says he thought they had a shot at the Best in College award — the top honor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science’s annual Senior Design Competition — and that was only after the team earned a nod for the best project from the Mechanical Engineering department. Just weeks earlier, things were not going well for Hagedorn and teammates Nicole Kormos, Rosa Carapia, Kenny Conuel Oralde and Emmet Reamer. Multiple times they’d had shipments of biological materials spoil when the supplier mistakenly shipped them to the Ann Arbor campus. And Carapia spent weeks trying to figure out their not-so-state-of-the-art microscope — at one point resorting to contacting the rep whose business card had been attached to the device who knows when. “It was the last couple weeks and I was, like, ‘Oh my gosh, this isn’t going to happen,’” Carapia says. “I was really thinking, ‘Our presentation was just going to look dumb because there’d be nothing there.’”

The team bumped into quite a few challenges, in part, because their multi-faceted project was one of the more ambitious in the competition. Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Caymen Novak had it on her to-do list for some time to bring an imaging technique known as traction force microscopy to the Dearborn campus for the first time. TFM is used often in mechanobiology to study how cells interact with their microenvironments, and Novak thought it could be very useful for her current work, which is investigating how sex-based differences influence pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease marked by significant scarring and stiffening of lung tissue. “So just to explain it briefly, you have a gel with fluorescent beads in it, and you put cells on it, so the cell interacts with the surface and pulls on it,” Novak explains. “Then, you take some ‘before’ pictures of the cells and the fluorescent beads, then you lift the cells off and take an ‘after’ picture. By measuring the movement of the beads, you can get a representation of the amount of force the cell is exerting on the surface.”

Novak had used this technique in her postdoctoral work at The Ohio State University, but there, she was plugging into an established lab setup. She hadn’t ever personally created the gels or configured the microscope for this type of imaging, and the analysis protocol was a closely guarded secret of the project’s principal investigator. So when Kormos, who’d been working as a student researcher in Novak’s lab, asked Novak if she had any projects for her and her Senior Design teammates, Novak immediately thought of the TFM setup. “I thought, ‘This sounds like a really ambitious Senior Design project. Let’s see how far they get,’” Novak says. Kormos took the idea to her teammates, who all liked the idea. They sketched out a plan for who would do what and got to work.

Because TFM is an established technique, there was actually quite a bit of literature out there to guide them. But it’s hardly a plug-and-play technology. The gels, for example, can’t be purchased off the shelf. You have to buy all the ingredients and make your own gel from scratch, fine tuning the chemistry so you have a medium with the proper stiffness for the kind of cells you want to study. Kormos and Reamer took on that part of the project and ran into several challenges. “You’d think because this has been done before, it would be pretty straightforward, but you follow the recipe, and sometimes your gel just doesn’t form,” Kormos says. “So we had to do some digging and figure out which component was doing what. Then we learned you had to add this component before that one or it wouldn’t work, or you have to dilute something just before you add it. So it took some troubleshooting before we found the proper protocol.” And then there was the unexpected challenge of even getting the materials properly delivered to their lab. Despite specifying the correct Dearborn campus address, Reamer says the distributor shipped their biologically sensitive components — one costing $400 for 50 milligrams — to the Ann Arbor campus not once but twice. When the third shipment finally made it to the lab, it arrived a week late. “I spent a lot of time on customer service,” Reamer says, wryly. “That was probably my biggest contribution to the project.”

After overcoming multiple shipping snafus, Nicole Kormos (left) and Emmet Reamer successfully created the custom gels that are used in traction force microscopy.

Carapia, meanwhile, was wrestling with the lab’s less-than-ideal microscope to see if they could get it to work for TFM. She got some initial guidance from a couple other researchers on campus who also use this particular instrument. She made some initial progress — only to discover that she’d need to integrate a totally different camera-software setup than the one she’d just spent the past few weeks learning. Then, a weeks-long email back-and-forth with the person on that business card ended up in a dead end. In the end, Carapia relied on her engineer’s instincts, rolled up her sleeves and figured out most of it herself.

Rosa Carapia (left) took on the challenge of adapting the lab’s older microscope, with help from teammate Emmet Reamer.

Hagedorn and Oralde tackled the analysis part of the project. Essentially they would have to write and tweak software to properly measure the displacement of the fluorescent beads and then convert those measurements into forces, given the known characteristics of the gel. Hagedorn dug into the published literature and found an open-source algorithm he thought they could work with. “By the end, it was pretty good, but initially, we got a lot of random arrows that were pointing in random directions,” Oralde says. “And we had to tweak variables and figure out what the right contrast was for the images, so the algorithm was tracking points that were relevant and not just random,” Hagedorn adds.

Micah Hagedorn (left) and Kenny Conuel Oralde show off the software they built to measure displacements and calculate corresponding forces that the cells exert.

All the effort finally — and somewhat unexpectedly — paid off. With just a week or so to go until the Senior Design Competition day — and following a 19-hour session in the lab — they got their final set of images to work, measured the displacements and calculated the corresponding forces. The students say they would have loved to have had more time to run a mini-study with their technique, which was their original plan. (They joke it may have been possible had their FedEx packages arrived on time.) But they’re ultimately satisfied with the results. Novak is now digging through their final report to see what her next moves will be. “I’ve still not gotten hands-on with this myself, so I’ll have to see if I can make this process work, or possibly throw it to another Senior Design team to keep working on it,” Novak says.

Regardless, she’s impressed with the team’s hard work and tenacity. “It was interesting to watch them experience the difficulties of research,” Novak says. “They were, like, ‘We were there for hours trying to take these images.’ And I’m, like, ‘Yep, that’s how it works.’ But you have to admire their dedication in forcing this project to work on any level. In research, everything takes three times as long as you predict, often because of silly things, like deliveries going to the wrong address, which are totally beyond your control. And then you have to put way more effort in than you think. So that was a little eye-opening for them. But I’m sure they’ll feel it was worth it because they won everything! It doesn’t get better than that.”

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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Awards

Experiential Learning

Undergraduate Research

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

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Mon, 05/19/2025 - 12:07

Assistant Professor Caymen Novak threw an ambitious project to her Senior Design team. It almost didn’t work out. Until it did.

From left, seniors Kenny Conuel Oralde, Emmet Reamer, Rosa Carapia, Nicole Kormos and Micah Hagedorn took home the top prize at this year’s Senior Design Competition for their work on an imaging technique known as traction force microscopy.

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‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics

lblouin — Wed, 08 Jan 2025 17:59:20 +0000

‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics lblouin Wed, 01/08/2025 - 12:59

High-capacity batteries have emerged as an essential building block of the clean energy future, but it likely won’t be today’s lithium-ion batteries alone that get us there. That’s because, as powerful and ubiquitous as they are, lithium-ion batteries have some major limitations. For starters, they are very heavy — a fundamental quality that curbs the range of today’s electric vehicles and basically rules them out as an option for powering commercial aircraft. The world’s growing demand for the minerals needed to manufacture lithium-ion batteries also requires ever expanding mining operations, which have environmental, climate and geopolitical consequences. And on the safety front, the liquid electrolytes used in lithium-ion batteries are highly flammable, which is one reason why electric vehicle battery fires can be so catastrophic.

Because of these issues, researchers are developing new kinds of batteries, including solid-state batteries, which are lighter, can hold more energy for their weight and require fewer materials. They are also considered safer, since, as the name suggests, they don’t require a liquid electrolyte. But mechanical engineering postdoc research fellow Yaohong Xiao, who works with Associate Professor Lei Chen, says that last quality is both a blessing and a curse. Inside a typical lithium-ion battery, the liquid electrolyte is responsible for transferring charged particles back and forth between the cathode and anode sides of the battery, which is necessary both for charging and discharging. Because this electrolyte is a liquid, Xiao says it creates a nearly uniform interface between the two sides of the battery, since liquids naturally fill tiny nooks and crannies that might exist between the anode and cathode materials. In a solid-state battery, however, the electrolyte separating the anode and cathode sides is a strong, stiff, solid piece of material, and Xiao says that makes it more difficult to get really good contact between the two sides. “Essentially, you have solid on solid on solid,” Xiao explains. “Right after manufacturing, you might have no problem with this interface, but after a few cycles, or after the battery has experienced vibrations from being on the road, you start to get little voids in the interface so the electrolyte is no longer making perfect contact with both sides of the battery.” As a result, Xiao says a battery can develop zones of higher than usual current, which reduces its overall effectiveness.

Typically, Xiao says researchers have tried to solve this solid-state battery interface problem in a couple of different ways. First, they use pressure to basically squish all the components back together. Or they can use an “interlayer” material, which, kind of like double-sided tape, keeps the anode and cathode materials snug up against the solid electrolyte. But each approach has its limitations. Xiao says introducing interlayers to a process is typically expensive. That might not be a huge deal for experiments in a lab, but it would increase the already high costs of solid-state batteries when they’re being manufactured at scale. On the other hand, Xiao says using pressure to smooth out the interface is sort of like trying to squish two pieces of wood together. The rigidity of the lumber and any imperfections along the surfaces mean that pressure alone often isn’t enough to create perfect contact.

A couple years ago, Xiao began kicking around a sort of unconventional solution for this interface challenge. Xiao’s background is actually in metallurgy, not battery chemistry, and he saw this issue primarily as a question of how to get different metals to stick together. As it turns out, this is actually a pretty common problem in the metals universe, and one with a variety of well-established solutions. Specifically, Xiao was thinking that a technique called ultrasonic welding might be able to “heal” the voids in the interface, restoring uniform contact with the electrolyte. Ultrasonic healing, which is commonly deployed in a wide range of industries to weld pieces of plastic or thin pieces of metal together, uses high-frequency acoustic vibrations instead of high temperatures or solders to join materials together. The result is a highly uniform bond, but the process doesn’t use a whole lot of energy and can be done very quickly. Xiao worked with his postdoc colleague in Chen’s lab, XinXin Yao, who helped provide the theoretical feasibility for the welding concept, to set up an experiment, which revealed that ultrasonic welding could indeed nearly completely restore the uniformity of the electrolyte interface in as little as a minute. Moreover, the process required temperatures barely warmer than the water in your hot water heater and used about as much energy as an old-fashioned incandescent light bulb.

Xiao says the effectiveness of this metals-based approach came as a surprise to many of his colleagues, most of whom are experts in battery chemistry. Now, he’s hoping the results, which were recently published in “Advanced Energy Materials,” will help inspire other researchers to further explore the technique’s full potential. He says one possible application would be to use this as a tune-up strategy for eventual solid-state battery-powered EVs, which could come in for a quick ultrasonic healing treatment and get their optimal range back. And one other surprise finding from his experiment is that ultrasonic welding actually increased the conductivity of the electrolyte, albeit temporarily. That result was particularly intriguing to some colleagues at ��-Ann Arbor, who recently visited the newly established Battery Manufacturing and Testing Lab for a firsthand look. “They were very interested in this point,” Xiao says. “The conductivity would slowly recover after treatment, but they were thinking, what if we can fix that? What if we can figure out a way to not let it recover? So it’s very exciting to see this research already inspiring further work in this area.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

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Wed, 01/08/2025 - 17:58

Two mechanical engineering postdoc research fellows have discovered a novel way to solve a pesky challenge with next-generation solid-state batteries.

In Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Lei Chen's lab, postdoc research fellow Yaohong Xiao has been working on developing solid-state batteries, a safer, more energy dense alternative to today's lithium-ion batteries. Photo by Annie Barker

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How organ-on-a-chip technology is changing research of human diseases

lblouin — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 17:25:26 +0000

How organ-on-a-chip technology is changing research of human diseases lblouin Mon, 11/04/2024 - 12:25

Those who study human disease, and those of us who benefit from treatments developed by their research, owe a great debt to mice. The tiny animals get many of the same diseases as us and have very similar genetics and biological processes, making them a useful stand-in for understanding what goes wrong in our bodies and how we might respond to novel therapies. But as a surrogate for humans, mice aren’t perfect, says Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Aditya Raghunandan, who started at ��-Dearborn in 2023. All you have to do, he says, is look at the thousands of human clinical trials for new treatments that showed promise in mice but failed to deliver similar results in humans. Experimenting on human cells in the lab offers a promising alternative, because researchers can theoretically study diseases more directly. But, like mice, this technique has limitations: Raghunandan says how cells behave, isolated from their neighbors and living in an artificial environment in the lab, isn’t necessarily how they behave in our bodies.

In his early days as a researcher, Raghunandan often speculated that there had to be a better way, and as luck would have it, his career intersected an era of bioengineering in which some transformative new methods were emerging. In the early 2000s, researchers from the Wyss Institute at Harvard University developed a novel technology they dubbed “organ-on-a-chip.” Like traditional cell culturing, the idea was to create an experimental environment for human cells in which researchers could subject them to all kinds of things — genetic engineering, toxins, new drugs, mechanical and chemical signals — and then see how they behave. But their technique promised several advantages. Traditional cell cultures typically contain just one or two cell types, living in some kind of media, but that environment isn’t particularly representative of how things work in our bodies. For one, Raghunandan says our cells don’t just float around statically in goo; they're constantly being subjected to things like fluid flow and mechanical forces, which greatly influence their health and regulate their function. Moreover, a key part of cell function is interacting with other cell types. If you’re just observing how one cell type reacts to something in a Petri dish, he says you’re only getting a small slice of the picture.

Organ-on-a-chip technology, which has been tweaked and improved in the decades since its invention, directly addresses these shortcomings. Raghunandan says you can sort of think of the difference between an organ-on-a-chip and a traditional static cell culture like the difference between a house and a studio apartment. In a traditional cell culture, there’s just one room and everything is just kind of thrown in that room. But with an organ-on-a-chip, you can put up to three or four different cell types in different rooms within the house. Just as walls divide the rooms of the house, membranes keep the cells where you want them, and by tweaking the porosity of the membranes, you can also facilitate different kinds of interactions between cell types. Most importantly, tiny microfluidic channels, smaller than the width of a human hair, function like hallways, connecting the rooms, allowing researchers to pump in fluids to mechanically and chemically stimulate the cells in very precise ways.

Organs-on-a-chip are small devices that can do big things. In Raghunandan's lab, he uses them to study the dynamics of fluid flow in the brain that contribute to Alzheimer's disease.

The setup much more closely resembles how things work in our bodies, Raghunandan says. For example, in his own lab, where he studies how fluid flow in the brain impacts protein aggregation, one of the factors linked to neural diseases like Alzheimer’s, he builds layered organs-on-a-chip that mimic the way that neural and blood vessel tissues are organized in our brains. “If we go from the bloodstream into your brain, the first barrier are endothelial cells. And then the next layer of cells are smooth muscle cells, then you have an empty compartment where you have fluid, and then you have astrocytes,” he explains. “So the brain is layered, and we can reproduce these compartments and membranes and fluid flow where everything can interact with each other.” You can breed a mouse to have a predisposition to develop a certain disease. But you can’t manipulate fluid flow in its brain in real time, he says. “I can do that just by turning a knob on a pump.”

Being able to manipulate fluid flow is extremely important for Raghunandan’s current research. During his recent postdoc at the University of Rochester, he worked with the teams of Mechanical Engineering Professor Douglas Kelley and Neuroscience Professor Maiken Nedergaard, where they discovered that the brain actually has a separate “plumbing system” that bypasses the blood-brain barrier and flushes away waste while we sleep — almost like an alternative lymph system that only exists within the brain. Raghunandan says about half of the waste is physically flushed away, the way your plumbing removes waste from your house. But the other half requires specialized enzymes that are secreted by specific brain cells, like smooth muscle cells, which chop up or digest waste proteins. What’s surprising, Raghunandan says, is that abnormal fluid flow can actually change these cells' behavior in ways that make them less effective. That is, fluid flow in the brain isn’t just a plumbing system. It’s a dynamic that, in itself, can directly change cells and how they function.

Raghunadan says the research teams made these initial discoveries using mice models. But to investigate the details of how abnormal brain fluid flow was impacting Alzheimer's patients — and potentially develop therapeutics — he knew he’d need a different platform. This led to a fruitful collaboration with University of Rochester Biomedical Engineering Professor James McGrath, who had developed a new organ-on-a-chip technology to study inflammation in the brain. Now, Raghunadan is adapting that technology in his own lab to expose brain cells to varying types of fluid flow and precisely measure the effects. That’s something he could never do in a static cell culture or with mice. Raghunandan and McGrath have also created their own custom organ-on-a-chip devices that are much faster to build. “With the original design, it took a long time to build them — maybe a couple days to build 10 devices, and not all of them were going to be successful,” Raghunandan says. “We’ve streamlined the design, so now you can put together the parts like Legos and it takes three minutes.” McGrath even started a company so other researchers can use the snap-together version in their work.

Raghunandan, who’s one of only two researchers that he’s aware of at ��-Dearborn currently using this technique, sees some big practical benefits if this technology is more widely adopted. First, he says you could test new drugs on human cells in an organ-on-a-chip device to get some preliminary indication of their efficacy before moving them to full-blown human clinical trials. Second, we could use organs-on-a-chip to do patient-specific modeling for drugs. “If you had a certain disease, we could biopsy your cells, build a ‘you-on-a-chip’ and then test a drug to see if it had the potential to be a useful therapy for you,” he says.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Photos by Annie Barker.

Faculty Research

Research

Technology

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

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Mon, 11/04/2024 - 17:24

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Aditya Raghunandan explains how this technology offers a better platform than mice or traditional cell culturing for understanding the complex processes in our bodies.

Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering Aditya Raghunandan (right) talks with student researchers Sena Alenzi (center) and Michael Molloy in his bioengineering lab, where Raghunandan uses organ-on-a-chip technology to study Alzheimer's disease.

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