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Conduction and thermal radiation are two ways in which heat is transferred from one object to another: Conduction is the process by which heat flows between objects in physical contact, such as a pot...
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Researchers at MIT and Stanford University have developed a new kind of solar cell that combines two different layers of sunlight-absorbing material in order to harvest a broader range of the sun’s...
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One day in the 1990s, as he was riding home from high school in São Paulo, Tonio Buonassisi looked out the bus window at the Brazilian city’s long lines of traffic, and its smoggy haze. In that...
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Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu ’09 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT’s D-Lab: a bike-mounted maize sheller....
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You’ve probably heard of MechE alum and Associate Professor Hugh Herr (SM ’93), head of the Biomechatronics group at MIT Media Lab.
The TED Talk he gave earlier this year sparked a flurry of media...
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Wind turbines across the globe are being made taller to capture more energy from the stronger winds that blow at greater heights.
But it’s not easy, or sometimes even economically feasible, to build...
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The boom in oil and gas produced through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is seen as a boon for meeting U.S. energy needs. But one byproduct of the process is millions of gallons of water that’s...
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When someone crumples a sheet of paper, that usually means it’s about to be thrown away. But researchers have now found that crumpling a piece of graphene “paper” — a material formed by bonding...
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The key to creating a material that would be ideal for converting solar energy to heat is tuning the material’s spectrum of absorption just right: It should absorb virtually all wavelengths of light...
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While Evelyn Wang (SB '00), an associate professor of mechanical engineering, attended MIT as an undergraduate, her connection to the Institute goes back much further than that: This is where her...
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MIT engineers have fabricated a new elastic material coated with microscopic, hairlike structures that tilt in response to a magnetic field. Depending on the field’s orientation, the microhairs can...
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The magnets cluttering the face of your refrigerator may one day be used as cooling agents, according to a new theory formulated by MIT researchers.
The theory describes the motion of magnons — quasi...
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A new material structure developed at MIT generates steam by soaking up the sun.
The structure — a layer of graphite flakes and an underlying carbon foam — is a porous, insulating material structure...
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Last year, MIT researchers discovered that when water droplets spontaneously jump away from superhydrophobic surfaces during condensation, they can gain electric charge in the process. Now, the same...
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Whenever there is a major spill of oil into water, the two tend to mix into a suspension of tiny droplets, called an emulsion, that is extremely hard to separate — and that can cause severe damage to...
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The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) recently presented three researchers in the Department of Mechanical Engineering — C. Justin Kamp, Alex G. Sappok, and Victor W. Wong — with the 2014 Arch T...
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Vast amounts of excess heat are generated by industrial processes and by electric power plants; researchers around the world have spent decades seeking ways to harness some of this wasted energy....
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Alexander Slocum, the Pappalardo Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Precision Engineering Group, teaches and conducts research in the area of precision machine design. Precision...
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Materials that can be used for thermoelectric devices — those that turn a temperature difference into an electric voltage — have been known for decades. But until now there has been no good...
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Researchers have tried a variety of methods to develop detectors that are responsive to a broad range of infrared light — which could form imaging arrays for security systems, or solar cells that...