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.

‘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

Off

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

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.

��-Dearborn bolsters battery engineering curriculum with new courses this fall

lblouin — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 13:25:25 +0000

��-Dearborn bolsters battery engineering curriculum with new courses this fall lblouin Thu, 08/29/2024 - 09:25

The College of Engineering and Computer Science has been busy retooling its popular Automotive and Mobility Systems Engineering master’s program, with new classes and concentrations that reflect ongoing shifts in the industry. One newer emphasis, not surprisingly, is electric vehicles, though Mechanical Engineering Professor and Department Chair Oleg Zikanov says the plethora of headlines about slowing EV sales growth in the U.S. have made the optics of that pivot a bit more complicated. “Some students are asking about it,” says Zikanov, who often takes time to chat with new students as they enter the program. “Especially the students who are coming from an automotive or mechanical engineering background, they’re saying, ‘I thought I would do electric vehicles, but now I’m not so sure. Should I do something else?’”

Zikanov’s advice to them is two-fold. First, it’s true the all-EV future may not arrive as quickly as overly optimistic hype people claimed a few years ago, a line Zikanov says many serious people in the industry were skeptical about anyway. But batteries will undoubtedly play a major role in both the automotive and energy industries now and in the coming decades. He notes that even in the short term, if we see a pivot back to hybrid vehicles, which is how some manufacturers are coping with tepid consumer appetite for today’s EVs, advanced batteries are a critical component, especially in larger vehicles. Second, Zikanov counsels students to “not put all your eggs in one basket.” To that end, he says the AMSE degree is set up well for students, since they can take a wide variety of coursework in traditional areas like powertrain and manufacturing, as well as emerging ones like electrification and autonomy.

For students who are interested in batteries and storage, however, Zikanov says this fall’s addition of two new courses to those already in the ME curriculum gives students a background in all major subjects. One course, taught by Associate Professor Lei Chen, whose research focuses on EV battery fires and e-mobility manufacturing, introduces students to battery materials, manufacturing and recycling. “For many of our students, they may know something about charging and discharging,” Chen says. “But I think the materials and manufacturing process for batteries, and how the materials contribute to things like the structure of the battery and energy density, will be a totally new area.” Recycling of battery materials is an especially important subject for the industry right now, as finding ways to reuse expensive elements like lithium and cobalt could be vital to making energy storage and EVs more affordable and environmentally sustainable.

Mechanical Engineering Professor Hong Tae Kang is leading the other new course, which focuses on structural design of battery pack casings. This is a crucial design element of EVs, because the large, very heavy battery packs must be mounted in the car in a way that doesn’t negatively impact the vehicle’s structural integrity, safety and performance. Kang says they’ll be focusing on computer-aided engineering analysis to determine how the battery cages, which are typically mounted underneath the vehicle floor, stand up to different loads, impacts and levels of vibration over the life of the vehicle.

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Youngki Kim will also be reprising his Battery System Modeling and Control course in Winter 2025. In that class, students learn the basics of battery system operations and how to describe them with mathematical models. In particular, the course focuses on key functions of battery management systems, like tracking a battery’s charge, power and health, which are crucial for EVs and consumer electronics alike. In keeping with the university’s focus on practice-based learning, Kim has nixed all quizzes and exams for his class, opting instead for a team project where students get to apply what they’ve learned to battery modeling or state estimator design.

Indeed, as ��-Dearborn debuts this new bolstered battery curriculum this fall, it’s already looking like the panic over EV sales may have been an overreaction. First, it’s important to note that EV sales aren’t actually falling in the U.S.; the rate of growth merely slowed in the early part of 2024. In fact, the lion’s share of that can be attributed to slumping sales at Tesla, which has such a large share of the domestic EV market that it’s capable of skewing the overall picture. EV sales were actually up at six other automakers during the first quarter of 2024, including by more than 80 percent at Toyota and Ford. Even GM, which was hit hard in early 2024, expects sales growth to rebound by year’s end. Meanwhile, long-term forecasts for EV growth continue to look quite rosy, especially globally.

“I think there is still widespread recognition that EVs will dominate the auto market,” Kim says. “Stringent emissions regulations in the U.S., E.U. and other countries make it clear that internal combustion engines alone cannot meet future requirements. I reassure students that the fundamentals of battery modeling and control remain the same, so their education and skills will continue to be relevant and valuable regardless of market fluctuations.”

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Want to learn more about battery research at ��-Dearborn? Read more about Associate Professor Lei Chen’s research on EV fires, or students and faculty who are participating in the national Battery Workforce Challenge.

Student Success

Technology

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

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Wed, 09/04/2024 - 13:18

Despite a recent blip in domestic EV sales growth, there are good reasons to keep the foot on the accelerator when it comes to battery engineering education.

Graduate student Hossein Abbasi works in the lab of Associate Professor Lei Chen, one of several faculty working on battery research at ��-Dearborn.

PhD student is helping pave the way for high-performance metals

jpow — Fri, 26 Jul 2024 19:47:57 +0000

PhD student is helping pave the way for high-performance metals jpow Fri, 07/26/2024 - 15:47

Metals are one of the most essential classes of materials for modern life, prized for their strength, flexibility, conductivity, durability and aesthetic beauty. But you don’t always get all these properties in a single metal; in fact, those qualities are sometimes at odds with each other, says second-year mechanical engineering doctoral student Hossein Abbasi. One of the property tradeoffs engineers regularly encounter is between strength and ductility, the latter of which Abbasi says can be thought of as a metal’s elastic ability to temporarily deform and spring back to its original state. Typically, metals that are very strong aren’t very ductile, which makes them brittle. Conversely, metals that have high ductility usually sacrifice strength. The reason, Abbasi says, has to do with their crystalline structure — particularly the size of the “grains” that comprise the metal’s base architecture. Large grains, Abbasi says, make a metal more ductile, while smaller grains give it strength.

Materials scientists are trying to defy this basic rule of physics, however, with a new class of metals called gradient nano-grained metals. Unlike most metals, which have a singular grain size throughout their entire thickness, GNG metals have large grains toward the material’s interior that gradually taper into very small grains at the surface. This continuum of grain sizes gives GNG metals a rare combination of ductility and strength — and thus dozens of interesting possible applications. A turbine blade in an airplane engine, for example, must be both very strong and able to bounce back after impacts in order to avoid catastrophic failure. Similarly, Abbasi says, GNG metals could one day be an ideal material for vehicle suspension components, which have to be strong but also stand up to dynamic loads.

So if GNG metals have such desirable properties, why aren’t they in widespread use already? Abbasi says one reason is they’re still a relatively new class of materials, and as such, materials scientists and engineers don’t fully understand how they perform under a wide variety of conditions. Abbasi’s doctoral research, supervised by Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Lei Chen, is focused on helping engineers get a clearer picture of GNG metal behavior. Abbasi’s biggest contributions thus far are some advanced computer models, which map not only GNG metals’ ideal crystal structure but also defects within the metal. This makes his models much more representative of metals in the real world. “It’s almost impossible to create a perfect metal. In the real world, all metals have some defects, which we call geometrically necessary dislocations,” Abbasi explains, owing to the fact that the grain crystals don’t fit perfectly together. “So if we run our simulations without accounting for these voids in the underlying structure, we don’t get very accurate results compared to the real world.”

Using these highly detailed models, Abbasi can perform a battery of relatively quick, inexpensive tests. In one simulation, for example, he predicted how different grain sizes affect stress and strain behavior. In another, he modeled the effects of different strain rates on the metal’s tendency to “recrystallize,” which refers to the process in which large grains are subdivided into smaller grains as a result of applied stress. Simulations, of course, are only useful if they reflect what happens in the real world, so Abbasi then validated his simulated experiments with collaborators at Michigan State University, who put actual GNG materials through the same tests. This demonstrated that Abbasi’s models are able to provide highly accurate predictions of how the materials actually behave — making them an incredibly useful tool for engineers interested in GNG metal applications.

Abbasi’s work has won the ��-Dearborn doctoral student poster competition two years running — which is particularly impressive given he’s relatively new to the field of computer modeling and simulation. Abbasi came to ��-Dearborn from Iran, where he studied and then lectured at the University of Tabriz. His work focused on nanomaterials, but his research was focused on the manufacturing of experimental materials in the lab. When he was looking for a PhD program in the United States, he says he was attracted to Chen’s work because it combined manufacturing and modeling, giving him an opportunity to broaden his skillset.

Abbasi says his experience at an American university has been great so far, even if his studies will likely require him to be away from his family until his doctoral program is complete. With political relations strained between Iran and the U.S., he said he honestly didn’t know what to expect from Americans, and he was pleasantly surprised by how friendly most people are. “Right from the very start, in fact, when I arrived in Chicago, the border officer asked me to take everything out of my pockets, and I had some snacks I had brought with me from Iran,” he explains. “And he told me that I could not take them with me, that they had to go in the trash. But then a few moments later, he tapped me on the shoulder and brought me a package of nuts to replace the snacks. So here I am, my first minutes in the United States and a border officer is being very nice to me. That made me feel good about my new adventure in the United States.”

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Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Mechanical Engineering

Off

Fri, 07/26/2024 - 19:47

Hossein Abbasi’s doctoral research is untangling the mysteries of gradient nano-grain metals, a unique material with some seemingly contradictory properties and dozens of promising applications.

Mechanical engineering doctoral student Hossein Abbasi. Photo by Kristin Palm

��-Dearborn is infusing sustainability into its engineering programs

lblouin — Wed, 03 Jul 2024 12:57:45 +0000

��-Dearborn is infusing sustainability into its engineering programs lblouin Wed, 07/03/2024 - 08:57

The days when engineering was thought of as a purely technical discipline are disappearing fast. For sure, engineers still need strong foundational knowledge in math and science and discipline-specific technical training. But there’s a growing movement within engineering education to ensure we’re training engineers who can also think deeply about the environmental and societal impacts of their creations as a fundamental part of the engineering process.

At ��-Dearborn, this emphasis on creating holistic engineers is already taking a number of forms, from sustainability-focused classroom projects and research, to a new course in trustworthy AI, to undergraduate and graduate programs in human-centered design, a discipline that blends traditional engineering with skills borrowed from art, anthropology and sociology. Now, sustainability is poised to take an even broader role within the College of Engineering and Computer Science, say Associate Professors Alireza Mohammadi and Samir Rawashdeh. The robotics experts and frequent collaborators recently landed a $200,000 grant from the Lemelson Foundation to support CECS faculty who want to incorporate sustainability-focused projects into their courses. “In talking with the people at Lemelson, we realized if you want this to become part of the culture and not just an occasional or fringe thing, you have to reach a critical mass,” Rawashdeh says. “Sustainability has to be something students are hearing about in multiple places, across courses, across programs for them to internalize that this is part of what engineering is all about.”

Specifically, the Lemelson funding will enable Mohammadi and Rawashdeh to award minigrants to faculty who want to add course modules or projects that incorporate the Engineering for One Planet Framework, a set of fundamental environmental sustainability-focused learning outcomes developed by Lemelson and VentureWell, with input from stakeholders in academia, industry and nonprofit organizations. For example, in a smaller-scale antecedent to this larger Lemelson-funded initiative, Rawashdeh and Mohammadi used a minigrant to add sustainability-focused modules to two of their robotics courses. “It was an interesting challenge because the overlap between robotics and environmental issues isn’t obvious,” Rawashdeh says. But as they read up on it, they got all kinds of ideas — from robotics applications for environmental industries, like recycling, to end-of-life e-waste management strategies for robotics components, including their valuable lithium-based batteries. In Mohammadi’s course, the students optimized control algorithms for their lab’s fleet of mobile robots so that the machines would consume less energy while doing the same amount of work.

While the primary goal of the initiative is to develop a more environmentally focused mindset among engineering students, Mohammadi says emphasizing sustainability in CECS programs could also make engineering disciplines more attractive to a broader range of students. “The younger generation cares more about environmental and social issues, and engineering is absolutely a profession where you can make a large impact on society,” Mohammadi says. “But we don’t often describe it that way. So showing them how they can shape the world in a way they care about might make students who’ve never considered engineering before think about it as an option.” To match students and employers, they’ll also be hosting several industry events, where employers can talk with students about their sustainability-focused opportunities and students can showcase their work.

Interested faculty can apply now for minigrant funding by contacting Mohammadi or Rawashdeh. They’re hoping to fund projects in 10-16 courses over three years.

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Story by Lou Blouin

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Wed, 07/03/2024 - 12:55

Part of being a great engineer these days is understanding the environmental and societal impacts of your work. But how do we train students to be holistic engineers?

Graphic by Violet Dashi. Images by Marianna and KUA g Gear via Adobe Stock

Spring ’24 grad parlays research and baseball experience into MLB job

lblouin — Mon, 10 Jun 2024 14:27:20 +0000

Spring ’24 grad parlays research and baseball experience into MLB job lblouin Mon, 06/10/2024 - 10:27

Matthew Williams doesn’t remember a time when he didn’t picture himself in baseball. When he was a 4-year-old kid, the dream was playing in the big leagues. As he got older and more realistic, he imagined being a coach or a strength and conditioning trainer might be where he’d land. His associate degree in exercise science from Grand Rapids Community College put him in a good position for that. But after graduation, he decided to keep going with his education and transferred into the business program at ��-Dearborn, where he also scored a starting position as an outfielder and pitcher on the baseball team. “My thinking was maybe I’d open my own training facility, and I knew the baseball side of things. But I didn’t know anything about running a business,” Williams says. About a semester in, however, he figured out the business curriculum wasn’t for him. Baseball remained the dream, but he’d have to find another path.

Williams took a straightforward approach to finding a new major: He did a thorough survey of the university’s online program catalog and tried to find something that matched his interests and exercise science background. He’d never thought about engineering, but among the course offerings in the mechanical engineering program he found several biomechanics classes. He decided to place his bets there, and it turned out to be a much better fit. He found Associate Professor Amanda Esquivel’s courses particularly interesting, and when he discovered she ran a bioengineering lab that focused on athletics and injury prevention, he reached out to see if she had any open positions. “It was kind of a chance thing,” Williams says. “I didn’t really know that doing research with a professor was something you could do, but a friend of mine was telling me about their experience, so I just sent Professor Esquivel an email and hoped she’d have something available.” It turned out Esquivel did, and Williams landed a position as an undergraduate research assistant. For someone who loved sports and exercise science, it was pretty much a perfect part-time job. In the lab, Williams got to work on several projects that used wearable sensors and video motion capture to research how various movements strain the body, with a goal of preventing ACL injuries. Though many of the studies focused on girls’ soccer, Esquivel also helped Williams with his own independent study, where he analyzed open source data collected on baseball pitchers.

Williams played three years for ��-Dearborn’s baseball team and owns several team records, including most career home runs. He had to miss the April commencement ceremony for a game. He hit three home runs that day, the most ever by a ��-Dearborn player in a single game. Photo courtesy ��-Dearborn Athletics

Williams wasn’t necessarily thinking about it when he started in Esquivel’s lab, but the work was basically setting him up for that career in professional baseball he’d been searching for. Elbow injuries, long a problem for pitchers, have become a full-blown plague in the modern game. Today’s pitching is all about velocity, and as athletes try to throw harder and harder, they’re almost literally ripping their elbows apart. Even young pitchers are having to resort to Tommy John surgery — the sport’s now-routine remedy for ulnar collateral ligament reconstruction, named after a former MLB pitcher. Fear of catastrophic elbow injuries is also why starting pitchers going deeper than five innings is now the exception not the rule, something many fans and critics have pointed out has fundamentally changed the nature of the game. Williams says teams now closely track pitching speed and total innings pitched in an effort to ensure their star players don’t end up on the disabled list — or out of baseball altogether.

In the past few years, teams have also started using biomechanics labs to reduce injuries and evaluate prospects. Using the same technology that Williams used in Esquivel’s lab, trainers try to figure out if aspects of a pitcher’s throwing motion are putting them at risk for injury, as well as whether changes to their pitching mechanics could help prevent injury. With high-speed cameras, force plates in the pitching mound and wearable sensors affixed to an athlete’s legs, torso, pelvis, shoulders and elbows, Williams says engineers can actually track how energy flows through the body at critical stages of the pitching motion. The data reveal, for example, if a risky amount of torque is being placed on the throwing elbow. You can also measure whether a change in motion, like a slightly earlier rotation of the pelvis, can reduce strain on the elbow without sacrificing velocity.

As a baseball player, Williams knew that biomechanics labs like this were becoming a big thing in the sport. So as graduation approached, he started looking into whether he could parlay his ��-Dearborn experience into a job. “I basically Googled ‘MLB and biomechanics’ and found a job posting with the Kansas City Royals to work with their pitching prospects in Arizona,” Williams says. Not surprisingly, with Williams’ history as a pitcher, lifelong baseball player and someone who had experience working in the same kind of biomechanics lab, the Royals snatched him up. Williams says it’s basically a dream job — aside from the fact that it’s with one of the Tigers’ division rivals and it’s not actually playing baseball. However, he’s not ready to accept that his playing days are behind him. He points out that he still has one year of college eligibility. And if he decides to go to grad school at some point, he’ll likely take a look at his chances of making the school’s baseball team when deciding where to apply — even if that means being the oldest guy on the field. That, or he says he’s considering trying out for the independent league team near the city he’ll be living in in Arizona — though there’s no chance he’d give up his job with the Royals even if he made the roster. “The pay is like $200 for three months. So, yeah, probably not worth it,” he says. His years at ��-Dearborn, however, seem like they were.

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Story by Lou Blouin

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Mon, 06/10/2024 - 14:26

After working in Associate Professor Amanda Esquivel’s bioengineering lab, ��-Dearborn slugger Matthew Williams landed a gig working with pitchers in the Kansas City Royals’ biomechanics facility.

��-Dearborn baseball player Matthew Williams. Photo courtesy ��-Dearborn Athletics

Could we make food processing ‘smarter’?

lblouin — Mon, 15 Apr 2024 14:17:27 +0000

Could we make food processing ‘smarter’? lblouin Mon, 04/15/2024 - 10:17

How does the rice you buy at the grocery store stay shelf stable basically indefinitely? Or why can you expect your favorite crackers will always have the same color, taste and crispness — despite being made of always slightly varying batches of flour, cheese and oil? We owe a lot of the longevity and predictably of the food supply to canning, drying and dozens of other technologies and processes that are collectively known as “food processing.” Yet surprisingly, this consistency is earned through a fair amount of inefficient trial and error on the farm or factory floor, according to ��-Dearborn Associate Professor of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering Cheol Lee. In a potato chip factory, for example, Lee says an inspector might notice the chips coming off the line today are a little too brown, so they try cooking the next batch for 10 seconds less. Still too brown. So they try 20 seconds less. Just right! But then, tomorrow’s batch, which is made using potatoes from a different farm, isn’t brown enough. So they adjust the cooking time again. “Obviously, this is not an optimal way to do it. You waste a lot of energy and time and reduce yields,” Lee says.

Finding a more efficient way to make these process adjustments is the subject of new research led by Lee in collaboration with Professor of Mechanical Engineering Oleg Zikanov and partners at Michigan State University. Their project, funded by a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture — ��-Dearborn’s first from the agency — focuses on optimizing food drying processes, which are some of the most energy intensive in the industry. Lee and Zikanov’s hypothesis is that many of the tweaks that humans make now through educated guesswork could be better executed by a computer model — specifically, a high-fidelity physics-based model. The basic idea is that the dynamics inside the drying equipment, like the way air moves or heat is transferred, are subject to the basic principles of physics. And if you could build a mathematical model that described all of those dynamics, you could actually predict the output of the drying process — e.g. color, crispiness, bacteria levels — from some easy-to-measure inputs, like the moisture content of the pre-processed food, drying temperature, fan speed, speed of the conveyor, etc. Thus, with a good model, you could eliminate the need for human trial-and-error adjustments — and the wasted food, energy and carbon emissions that come with that.

Associate Professor Cheol Lee (left) and Professor Oleg Zikanov

Modeling highly complex phenomena like this is possible, but this approach typically has a major drawback: For the models to be very accurate without having to resort to trial and error themselves, they have to account for so many variables and relationships between variables that they become very large, and thus very computationally intensive. “It can take days, and sometimes weeks, to simulate one possible scenario, which is not good when you’re talking about processing conditions changing possibly every couple of hours,” Lee explains. “So you need a way to simulate the process a lot faster.” Their solution is an approach called reduced order modeling, which can drastically shrink the size of the model — thus making it speedier — while sacrificing very little accuracy, a bit like the way image compression creates photos that look nearly identical to the originals, but at a much smaller file size. “The basic philosophy is that you have an output that is very high dimensional and contains a lot of information,” Lee explains. “But most of the solutions lie in a very small subset of this very large space. We call that subspace. And the challenge is, how do we find this subspace where the solution can exist?”

Lee and Zikanov have special techniques for finding this subspace, and they’ve actually used this approach successfully on two other recent projects. One modeled how the coronavirus could spread throughout an indoor environment. The other, a collaboration with General Motors, created a reduced order model for cooling lithium ion batteries in electric vehicles. Despite the drastically reduced size and increased speed of the models, Lee says they still had more than 99 percent of the accuracy of the original model — meaning a modest computer could execute the smaller version in seconds or less, compared to the days or weeks needed for the computationally heavy models. Another advantage of this approach: It’s light on hardware. In a food processing environment, Lee says it would integrate easily into factory equipment with a few controllers and draw on information that existing sensors are already collecting.

Throughout the course of the three-year project, Lee and Zikanov will also field test their model and control algorithm on actual drying equipment located at Michigan State University. “If everything goes well, we’ll end up with a model that can, in real time, make predictions about what is going to happen, then take in data from a few sensors and optimize the process on the go. That’s the bright future for this technology,” Zikanov says. Plus, because drying is a common process in many industries, from pulp production to pharmaceuticals, Lee says the technology could have a wide range of applications.

One other cool part of their project: In an effort to get young people interested in STEM subjects, Lee and Zikanov will periodically host high school students from University Prep Academy High School in Detroit, who will also get to tour the drying facilities at Michigan State. Lee and Zikanov’s research team will also include several ��-Dearborn pre-engineering students. These are students who plan on entering engineering programs but are still working on meeting their introductory math and science requirements. Lee and Zikanov are hoping the hands-on learning from this project will help get students over the hump and into their chosen programs in the College of Engineering and Computer Science.

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Lee and Zikanov’s project is funded through a U.S. Department of Agriculture and National Science Foundation interagency program. Story by Lou Blouin

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��-Dearborn professors are teaming up with Michigan State University to take the human guesswork out of modern food processing.

Photo by Lou Blouin

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ��-Dearborn

lblouin — Mon, 25 Mar 2024 14:09:47 +0000

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ��-Dearborn lblouin Mon, 03/25/2024 - 10:09

Amanda Esquivel knows firsthand how having an opportunity to do research as an undergraduate can change the course of your life. When she was a young engineering student at ��-Ann Arbor, she went in with a plan to get her bachelor’s degree and find a solid job in the automotive industry. But during her first year, she got a heads up about a program that the campus had started to recruit more undergraduates to work in research labs. Esquivel remembers leafing through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program’s “huge book of 400 research projects” that students could apply to work on, and she landed a spot in a lab where she’d end up spending a year and a half. “That was my first experience seeing that there are undergrad students, master’s students, Ph.D. students and faculty all working together to make these things happen,” she says. “I mean, I had no parent, no aunt or uncle who had any sort of job like that. So until then, I didn’t really think of ‘research’ as a job — like, as something you could do with your life.”

After a brief stint in an ill-fitting automotive engineering job, Esquivel did indeed decide to make research the thing she’d do with her life. She enrolled in a master’s, then Ph.D., program at Wayne State University — a life move she likely wouldn’t have considered without her prior lab experience. She knows not every student who does undergraduate research is going to follow that path. And she thinks it’s totally OK if students try working in a lab and decide it’s not for them — or choose to apply what they’ve learned to their lives or careers. But Esquivel believes strongly that every student — especially students, like she was, who don’t have someone in their personal life guiding them toward these opportunities — should get a shot to do this kind of work. Throughout her career at ��-Dearborn, Esquivel has poured her energy into making this happen. In her own bioengineering lab, undergraduate researchers power much of the work, and she’s watched several continue into master’s and Ph.D. programs, in part, as a result of their experience. (She jokes that the only reason she recently and reluctantly joined LinkedIn is because it’s the best way to keep tabs on all the great things her former students are doing now.) And a few years back, she was part of the team that launched the Summer Undergraduate Research Experience, a cohort experience that provides paid student research positions in faculty labs across campus, along with a variety of skill development workshops.

By nearly every measure, Esquivel says SURE has been a huge success. It’s grown every year, and it’s attracted the diverse pool of applicants the program was intended for. But Esquivel believes the program — and undergraduate research in general — will need a steadier foundation if it’s going to continue to grow at the university. Right now, Esquivel says SURE is funded largely with contributions from the Provost’s Office and a recent contribution from Enrollment Management, as well as a dedicated fund that supports 10 students. “Luckily, we’ve been able to fund every student so far, but I think if we want to continue to grow the program, we need a more sustainable way to fund it," Esquivel says. "And the funding is so important because, in my opinion, if these student positions aren’t paid, they’re only going to be available to students who are in a financial position to be able to work for free.”

To that end, Esquivel is using her current Provost Fellowship to help shore up funding for SURE. She recently worked with Institutional Advancement to set up a dedicated fund for the program, a key bit of financial infrastructure that will help organizers fundraise and court donors. And she’s currently working on ideas to extend opportunities like SURE beyond the summer. “Especially for any kind of lab science, the longer that you can do it, the more you’re going to get out of it. With a summer experience, students are really just getting started and then it’s over,” she says. One other thing Esquivel is focusing on during her fellowship: Getting more faculty to apply for the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates Sites program. REU Sites provides funding for cohorts of 10 students to do work around new or ongoing NSF research awards, which a growing number of ��-Dearborn faculty are laying claim to. To date, just a handful of faculty have hosted an REU Site at ��-Dearborn, though Esquivel is hoping that the strong attendance at her March REU workshop for faculty is a sign that could soon change.

For Esquivel, it’s lots of little steps like this, more than big initiatives, that are likely to move the undergraduate research culture forward at ��-Dearborn. The reality is that funding for extras is always going to be a little tight. And we may never have a big book of hundreds of research opportunities that students can simply browse and pick from. Building on the current momentum will take creativity, pluck, generosity and people like Esquivel making the pitch that undergraduate research can be a life changer — especially for students who never imagined research was a thing you could do with your life.

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Do you have a story about how undergraduate research made a difference for you? We’d love to hear about it. Drop us a line at umdearborn-news@umich.edu. Story by Lou Blouin

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Mon, 03/25/2024 - 14:05

Undergraduate research has some solid momentum at ��-Dearborn. With her 2023-24 Provost Fellowship, the associate professor of mechanical engineering is focusing on how to keep it going.

Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering Amanda Esquivel

Breaking the ‘cold chain’

lblouin — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 17:29:40 +0000

Breaking the ‘cold chain’ lblouin Mon, 02/05/2024 - 12:29

History will likely look back at the rapid development of the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines as one of modern medicine’s greatest success stories. Just one year after the coronavirus ignited a global pandemic, the first mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna were going into arms — breaking the previous vaccine development record, held by the mumps vaccine, by three years. Within another 12 months, tens of millions of people had received at least one dose, giving them highly effective protection against the virus. But this quick rollout of the most advanced vaccines was a story that mostly played out in higher-income countries. Part of that had to do with the high cost. But it was also rooted in logistics. Both of the mRNA vaccines required continuous cold storage all the way through the supply chain. The initial formulation of the Pfizer vaccine, in particular, required super cold storage of at least -60ºC from the moment it left the factory all the way to the pharmacy. When President Biden announced in June 2021 that the U.S. would send half of billion doses of Pfizer’s vaccine to the 100 lowest-income countries, it was understandably met with a bit of eye rolling in the NGO world and the Global South, since many countries on the list had extremely limited cold storage infrastructure. For example, NPR reported at the time that Sierra Leone, a country of almost 8 million people, had just one ultra-cold freezer. It was filled to capacity with Ebola vaccine.

This network of cold storage infrastructure — what’s known as the “cold chain” — is essential not only for vaccines but a wide variety of medicines, especially modern biopharmaceuticals. It’s also necessary for storing biological samples for research, as well as reagents, which are a common ingredient in lab tests. The idea that refrigeration keeps things fresh is so intuitive, it’s easy to think cold storage is simply one of medicine’s immutable realities. But a few years ago, ��-Dearborn Professor Pravansu Mohanty began to question how absolute this truth was. What if there was some way to keep vaccines and medicines from degrading without cold temperatures? If there was, that could change all kinds of things we do in medicine and research. It also had the potential to remove one of the biggest hurdles to bringing vaccines and advanced medicines to places off the cold chain grid.

Mohanty is not a physician or medical researcher by training, though his mother did want him to become a doctor. He might have followed that path had he been better at biology, but chemistry and physics were his stronger subjects, so he chose to study materials science and engineering. Still, his interest in biology, and human medicine in particular, has colored an eclectic, adventurous research career. For years, the mechanical engineering professor ran an advanced 3D-printing lab at ��-Dearborn, where one of his flagship projects was developing a process for creating custom titanium artificial joints for U.S. military service members. He saw 3D-printing’s capability to create one-off, ad hoc components as an obvious fit for human medicine, given that each person’s body is a uniquely configured machine. When Mohanty began working on the cold chain problem, he approached it with similar engineering sensibilities. Yes, the vaccines and medicines he was interested in were biological in nature, but at the end of the day, they were “just molecules.” In particular, they were mostly proteins. Proteins are often described as the “machines” of the cell, and it’s an apt metaphor. Just like human-engineered technology, a protein’s unique function owes a lot to its intricate hierarchical structure. “If you change the shape of a protein molecule, even slightly, likely it will no longer bind to a particular site and it won’t do what it’s supposed to do in the body,” Mohanty says. To preserve a protein, you have to preserve its structure.

This fact about proteins is what makes cold storage such an effective preservation technology. To jostle some memories from your high school physics course, temperature, on the molecular level, is fundamentally a measure of how much things are moving. At lower temperatures, atoms in materials move less than at higher temperatures, which is one reason why it’s easier for physical objects to maintain their shapes in colder conditions. In addition, cold slows down bacteria and chemical reactions that can degrade biological materials. But as a materials scientist, Mohanty knew that low temperatures weren't the only way to stabilize things. In particular, glass — not window glass, but glass as a class of materials with disordered molecular structure — can be an excellent stabilizer. In fact, glasses are often used to store very hazardous materials — even radioactive materials — because glass’ unique encapsulation power immobilizes things on the molecular level. Mohanty began to wonder if the right kind of glass could do the same for biological materials. That is, by surrounding the molecules of proteins with a glasslike substance, could he essentially immobilize their intricate structures, the way packing peanuts protect fragile items for shipping? Could he essentially “freeze” them in place — without the cold?

Even if he could, that would still only solve part of the problem. Since the goal was to preserve vaccines and medicines, his glass also couldn’t wreak havoc in the human body. And, of course, he’d also need a way of getting the desired proteins back out of the glass without damaging them. For years, he experimented with different materials and eventually found a group of polymers and sugar-based molecules with seemingly all the right properties. They could be used to form glass, and many were common vaccine preservation ingredients. Perhaps most interestingly, this glass could simply be dissolved in water. That meant releasing the biological materials wouldn’t require any special equipment or processes. It looked like a promising approach, though he says he was often filled with self-doubt. “You know, I’m not a formally trained biologist,” Mohanty says. “So my first thought was that this probably wasn’t real.”

It turned out, however, that his team was onto something. Now six years into development, Mohanty’s unique biopreservation method has become the foundation for a biotech start-up, Upkara, which has an explicit mission to advance “global health equity.” Mohanty says starting Upkara, a Sanskrit word that loosely translates as “good deed,” has been a challenge unlike any he’s faced as a scientist and engineer. Over a more than two decade-long career, he’s won tens of millions of dollars in grants and earned many patents for his work. But starting a company has meant spending long hours trying to convince investors that this was indeed an idea that could have a profound impact on the world. “I am the kind of person who doesn’t enjoy things once they become routine, so starting this company has been an interesting learning experience,” Mohanty says. “In the beginning, of course, you are everything. You are the president, and the strategy person, and the recruiter, and you are also the person running the lab. You have to get good at telling your story to people, who have a lot of ways they could invest their time and money. You have to convince them that you have the edge over your competitors. You have to convince people this is real. Now I have people to help with all of that, and I am very thankful for all the support I’ve received, including from the university. I’ve enjoyed the challenge, although I could definitely not see myself becoming a CEO.” The curious scientist is still happiest in his lab.

For many startups, the ultimate goal is to score a big payday by selling the company to a bigger firm. But Mohanty has a different vision for Upkara. Rather than sell, they plan to license their biopreservation technology to anyone who wants it. Pharmaceutical companies have shown the strongest interest thus far, and Mohanty says Upkara, which currently operates from an incubation space on the ��-Ann Arbor campus, is on track to sign its first agreements with several clients this spring, including with at least one major American pharmaceutical company. However, by maintaining control of the core technology, Upkara will have the option to license it, at a sliding fee scale, to smaller entities, like government health agencies or NGOs in lower-income countries, which are in the singular business of helping people. If the company can make that vision a reality, it could potentially ease the cold chain problem by rendering it far less important — a remarkable achievement that would open up an alternative path for bringing advanced medicines to people in all corners of the world.

Mohanty says structuring the company around a social mission has surprised some of his friends and colleagues. “I’ve had people literally ask me how much money I’m making from all this,” he says. “But I’m not really someone who gets excited about the idea of selling something for a million dollars. For me, the thrill comes from creating, and the prospect that something can be so far-reaching. I mean, I’m happy with my life. The first home I bought when I became an assistant professor 24 years ago, that’s still my home. As a scientist, if I can make discoveries that help people, that’s plenty of satisfaction.”

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You can read more about Upkara at the company’s website. Story by Lou Blouin

College of Engineering and Computer Science

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Mon, 02/05/2024 - 17:24

Materials scientist Pravansu Mohanty has developed a way to eliminate the need for cold storage of vaccines and biopharmaceuticals. Could his startup be a game changer for bringing advanced medicines to lower-income countries?

��-Dearborn Professor of Mechanical Engineering Pravansu Mohanty. Photo by Emily Barrett-Adkins

Mechanical Engineering

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

‘Healing’ batteries with ultrasonics

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

������-Dearborn bolsters battery engineering curriculum with new courses this fall

PhD student is helping pave the way for high-performance metals

������-Dearborn is infusing sustainability into its engineering programs

Spring ’24 grad parlays research and baseball experience into MLB job

Could we make food processing ‘smarter’?

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ������-Dearborn

Breaking the ‘cold chain’

��-Dearborn bolsters battery engineering curriculum with new courses this fall

��-Dearborn is infusing sustainability into its engineering programs

Amanda Esquivel is pushing student research into its next phase at ��-Dearborn