CETA Winners Within the Fall 2018 Award Recipients by the CT Space Grant Consortium

Two faculty members in Mechanical Engineering, Paul Slaboch and Kamau Wright, were each awarded a Faculty Research Grant from the CT Space Grant Consortium. The grants are for $10k with a matching budget from the university of $10k for a total budget of $20k each.

Also, we had a student in our dept, Patrick Dubiel, who won an undergraduate student research fellowship. This is a $5k award for Patrick to complete his research project.

Congratulations Paul, Kamau, and Patrick!

Learn more about their awards here: http://ctspacegrant.org/5833/fall-2018-award-recipients

Vigeant Receives Highly Competitive NSF CAREER Award

Michelle Vigeant, assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department and Acoustics Program in the College of Engineering, Technology, and Architecture (CETA), has been awarded a highly competitive Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). She is the first University of Hartford faculty member to receive an NSF CAREER Award.

The NSF CAREER grant is the most prestigious award for a junior faculty member in engineering and the sciences, and it is sought by researchers from top science and engineering programs around the country. Vigeant received the award on her first attempt, which is extremely rare.

Vigeant was awarded $422,814 over a five-year period for her project, “Importance of
Late-Sound-Field Properties and Listener Envelopment to Room Acoustic Quality and Design.” The grant runs from June 1, 2012 to May 31, 2017. See the abstract for Vigeant’s award.

The overall goal of the project is to investigate the sense of acoustics quality in concert halls and to find a measurable quantity that can be used to quantify the acoustics of halls. A particular component of perceived concert hall acoustics is listener envelopment, the sense  of being immersed in the sound in the hall, or in other words the perception that sound is arriving in all directions, not just from the front. This property will be investigated in great detail and its relationship to perceived quality will also be investigated. The project includes taking measurements in a number of concert halls in both the United States and Europe. In addition, international collaborations will be established with Dr. John S. Bradley at the National Research Council of Canada and Prof. Michael Vorländer of the Institute for Technical Acoustics at RWTW Aachen University in Germany.

The project will include research opportunities for approximately 15 undergraduate students in the acoustics program at the University of Hartford. Women students in particular will be recruited to work on the project, as women remain under-represented in the engineering profession. Over the course of the five-year project, three students will assist with the research per year, with one during the academic year and two during the summer months. The students will get to participate with taking measurements in concert halls and also testing human subjects using listening tests in the anechoic chamber in the University of Hartford’s Acoustics Laboratory. A summer program for undergraduate students working in the STEM fields will be created to promote a sense of community and also to provide seminars about relevant topics, such as pursuing graduate studies.

The grant proposal also includes educational outreach in local area elementary and middle-schools to expose young students to science and to a woman scientist role model by interacting with the students through educational activities. Vigeant will collaborate with the Connecticut Science Center to enhance the educational outreach for fifth-grade students for the unit on sound. In addition, through a collaboration with the Acoustical Society of America’s Education Committee, Vigeant will create activity kits to introduce students to the topics of sound through interactive, hands-on activities. The kits will be tested in local area schools, including the University of Hartford’s Elementary Magnet School and Annie Fisher School (K-8), which includes a STEM focus in their curriculum. 

Vigeant earned a PhD in engineering, focusing on architectural acoustics, from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and she received a BSc in mechanical engineering from the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. Her research interests include architectural acoustics, specifically room acoustics measurement parameters and computer modeling. She is a member of the Acoustical Society of America, American Society of Mechanical Engineers, and the American Society for Engineering Education.

 
The NSF’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.

Eppes, Milanovic, Shetty, and Daly Present Paper at Conference in India

Professor Eppes presenting at the conference.

Jenna Daly, undergraduate student in mechanical engineering

Tom Eppes, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, CETA; Ivana Milanovic, associate professor of mechanical engineering, CETA; Devdas Shetty, professor of mechanical engineering, and Jenna Daly, mechanical engineering student, presented a research paper at the International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (ITAC), which took place in Nagpur, Maharashtra, India, in February.

The paper, "Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Wing Design," describes the aerodynamic characteristics of a single wing design for use in an unpowered vehicle. A 2D computational fluid dynamics model was developed to predict key performance parameters. The lift/drag ratio is of primary importance to ensure the vehicle has the required glide range. The model was developed with the COMSOL 4.2 computational fluid dynamics module using the single phase flow interface with low Reynolds number k-e turbulence model. Studies are conducted for angles of attack from 0 to 15 degrees at a mean velocity of 70 m/s corresponding to a Reynolds number of about 50,000.

This work was initiated and done in-part during the new course ES 591 Multiphysics Modeling and it can be found in the ITAC 2012 proceedings published in the book form: Eppes, T., Milanovic, I., Shetty, D. & Daly, J. (2012). Characterization of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Design. In M. Kshirsagar, B. Patil, U. Gawande, L. Manzione, D. Shetty, & T. Eppes (Eds.), Proceedings of International Conference on Innovation and Trends in Applied Computing (pp. 3-6), Nagpur, Maharashtra, India. Support of WELFund and Dorothy Goodwin Summer Scholarship is gratefully acknowledged.

CETA Student Attending 41st International Confrence on Enviromental Systems

Adam Clark will be attending the 41st International Conference on Environmental Systems (ICES) in Portland Oregon on July 18, 2011.  Adam will be presenting the results of a NASA sponsored investigation into Lunar Habitats.  His presentation will be attended by aerospace industry and NASA engineering personnel. His paper "An Investigation into Life Support Systems for a Lunar Habitat"

is co-authored by Tom Filburn (Assoc Prof Mech Eng.).  Adam will be presenting the results of a 6 month study on potential life support systems useful for a future lunar habitat.  In addition, Adam was the recipient of a CT Space Grant travel grant which subsidized the bulk of his travel to Portland.

CETA Professor on CT NBC 30

Professor of Mechanical Engineering Dr. Thomas Filburn on NBC 30 discussing the current nuclear issue in Japan.