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Florence Sanchez
Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering |
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Concrete
Plans: Modern life
is taking its toll on an ancient
bulwark of strength: concrete. The
Egyptian pyramids and the Roman
coliseum are still standing, their
concrete holding fast after
thousands of years of weathering.
But modern concrete structures can
fail after only 20 years. The
difference? Modern structures are
forced to withstand a lot more use,
bear a lot more weight, and must
cope with more intense,
strength-withering pollutants. (more) |
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Douglas C. Schmidt
Associate Chair of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science |
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Real World,
Real Time: When
you’re trying to pilot 14-ton, $43
million fighter jet through a
hailstorm of enemy fire, you just
don’t want to deal with little
technological glitches like a
computer system freeze-up or a
circuit-busy signal. (more) |
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Thomas R. Harris
Chair of Biomedical
Engineering |
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Bringing
engineering to life:
It’s hard enough to understand how
life works. But to be able to
mathematically analyze the
complexity of living systems and
design technology that will work
for, with and within human beings
raises the bar significantly. And
when you factor in the
ever-expanding frontiers of
knowledge in the life sciences and
technology, that bar gets higher
every year. (more) |
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Michael Goldfarb
Department of Mechanical
Engineering |
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Strong Arm
Tactics: “We have
the technology,” TV doctors and
engineers intoned more than 30 years
ago as they turned Steve Austin into
the Six Million Dollar Man. But that
was science fiction back in the
seventies. The truth is that, even
today, bionic reality falls far
short of that sci-fi fantasy. (more) |
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Scott
A. Guelcher
Department of Chemical
Engineering |
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Speed Healing:
Breaking a bone might not seem like
such a big deal. Put it in a cast
and wait six weeks, and presto,
you’re good as new. For hundreds of
thousands of patients in the U.S.
each year, the bone-healing process
isn’t so easy. Pins, screws and
plates might be required, or the
damage to the bone might be so
severe that bone must be
transplanted from elsewhere on the
body or from a donor. Even with bone
harvested from the patient, the
procedure poses significant risks of
infection, nerve damage, loss of
function, and hemorrhage. The
healing process is a complicated
cascade of easily disrupted events,
and sometimes wounds do not heal
adequately. (more) |
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Clare
M. McCabe
Department of Chemical
Engineering |
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Virtually Real: Clare McCabe is
bringing the virtual world of
molecular modeling into tighter
register with the actual nano-world
of real-life molecules. She’s
interested in how molecules operate
at the nanoscale, because that’s an
area where neither classical theory
nor quantum mechanics are
sufficiently predictive. (more) |
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David
S. Kosson
Chair of Civil and Environmental
Engineering |
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Urban legend:
Technology is available to clean up
polluting smoke that billows from
the stacks of coal-fired power
plants, but power plant executives
refuse to install it because they
don’t want to spend the money.
Truth: When you take pollutants out
of the smoke, you end up with an
intensely concentrated amount of
contaminants that have to be
properly managed so they don’t end
up in our drinking water or in our
fish. Solving one problem can create
another, if you’re not careful. (more) |
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Robert W. Pitz
Chair of Mechanical
Engineering |
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Fast Times:
It isn’t easy keeping a flame going
in a 4,000-mile-an-hour wind. And
that’s just one problem with
aircraft propulsion at super-fast
speeds. If you want hypersonic
flight—and who wouldn’t want to
travel to any place on the globe
within 2-3 hours?—you’d better get
the mix just right: Chemical
kinetics, pressure, mixing rate,
temperature and stream velocity are
just some of the factors affecting
combustion at extremely high speeds.
(more) |
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Mark Does
Department of Biomedical
Engineering |
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Thinking Inside the Voxel: *Mark
Does is interested in what’s
/really/ going on inside that 1
millimeter cube of MRI space called
a “voxel.” A voxel is like a 3-D
pixel in a Magnetic Resonance
Imaging (MRI) scan and is the
smallest spatial unit an MRI scanner
is able to resolve. (more about Mark
Does' research) |
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Greg Walker
Department of Mechanical
Engineering |
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Hot Spots at
the Nanoscale: It's murky
territory, down at the bottom of
physical reality, where sound waves
are really warmth-carrying particles
and protons from the sun can make
atoms scatter like fans fleeing a
fat rock singer trying to crowd
surf. (more
on Greg Walker's nanoscale research)
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Frank L. Parker
Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering |
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Greening
China: China is the
world's largest nation, with the
world's fastest-growing economy. It
is also home to seven out of ten of
the world's most polluted cities and
is the second largest carbon dioxide
emitter. (more
about Frank Parker's nuclear power
research.) |
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