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Professor John Heywood is one of the most recognizable and highly regarded names in internal combustion engines. His work with Professor James Fay and Professor James Keck in the MIT Sloan Automotive...
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A joyride. A cruise. A flight to your next vacation or a drive to see your family. Or just simply getting from point A to point B. Whatever the reason, there are few people who don’t appreciate a...
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The Society of Engineering Science (SES) announced on Dec. 7 that Pedro Reis, the Gilbert W. Winslow Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, and Markus...
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MIT engineers have designed what may be the Band-Aid of the future: a sticky, stretchy, gel-like material that can incorporate temperature sensors, LED lights, and other electronics, as well as tiny...
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Nature has developed innovative ways to solve a sticky challenge: Mussels and barnacles stubbornly glue themselves to cliff faces, ship hulls, and even the skin of whales. Likewise, tendons and...
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On a hot fall day this September, Department of Mechanical Engineering (MechE) graduate students were carefully hanging up posters along the perimeter of Walker Memorial’s main room. More than 125...
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Ronan McGovern, a postdoc in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been working on an innovative way to import beer. His approach allows foreign beer to reach our shores fresher than ever...
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Senior Carrington Motley spends a lot of his time at MIT surrounded by sand.
“Yeah, sand is everywhere,” he admits with a laugh. “It was already in all of my clothes, and now it’s in my backpack.”...
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Got rope? Then try this experiment: Cross both ends, left over right, then bring the left end under and out, as if tying a pair of shoelaces. If you repeat this sequence, you get what’s called a “...
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Materials known as conjugated polymers have been seen as very promising candidates for electronics applications, including capacitors, photodiodes, sensors, organic light-emitting diodes, and...
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Detailed new field studies, laboratory experiments, and simulations of the largest known “internal waves” in the Earth’s oceans — phenomena that play a key role in mixing ocean waters, greatly...
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The process of wrinkle formation is familiar to anyone who has ever sat in a bathtub a little too long. But exactly why layered materials sometimes form one kind of wrinkly pattern or another — or...
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Some of the most prized violins in the world were crafted in the Italian workshops of Amati, Stradivari, and Guarneri — master violinmaking families from the 17th and 18th centuries who produced...
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Acoustic-gravity waves — a special type of sound wave that can cut through the deep ocean at the speed of sound — can be generated by underwater earthquakes, explosions, and landslides, as well as by...
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As a grape slowly dries and shrivels, its surface creases, ultimately taking on the wrinkled form of a raisin. Similar patterns can be found on the surfaces of other dried materials, as well as in...
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Ever notice an earthy smell in the air after a light rain? Now scientists at MIT believe they may have identified the mechanism that releases this aroma, as well as other aerosols, into the...
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MechE faculty members are engineering for global change through their research, but that’s not the only way to make the world a better place.
Several are also collaborating with international...
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From a mechanical perspective, granular materials are stuck between a rock and a fluid place, with behavior resembling neither a solid nor a liquid. Think of sand through an hourglass: As grains...
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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...