College of Engineering News

Two Cyclone Engineers have been elected to the National Academy of Construction 2021 class. Vilas S Mujumdar, professor of practice in civil, construction and environmental engineering, and alumnus Rao Surampalli (’85 PhD civil engr) are being recognized for their outstanding contributions to the field.

Questions from youth across Iowa will be asked of astronauts aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in a live broadcast arranged by the Iowa Space Grant Consortium and Iowa State Extension and Outreach.

Iowa State University’s undergraduate program in industrial engineering is ranked 20th in the nation, according to the “Best Colleges 2022” rankings released by U.S. News and World Report. Iowa State’s IE program, which was first established at Iowa State in 1919, is one of just three programs within the College of Engineering to crack the top 25.

Dr. Rohit Trivedi, a senior scientist at Ames Laboratory and a professor of Materials Science and Engineering at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa, is the Principal Investigator of a physical science investigation known as DEvice for the study of Critical Liquids and Crystallization – Directional Solidification Insert-Reflight (DSI-R), being carried on the Space X23 rocket to resupply the International Space Station.

Thanks to a $42 million gift commitment from C.G. “Turk” and Joyce A. McEwen Therkildsen, the department will have a new facility that will serve as its home and provide technically enhanced research laboratory and learning spaces where industrial engineering students can gain the knowledge to design tomorrow’s innovative, nimble and intelligent processes needed now more than ever across all industrial sectors.

A feature article about Iowa State University alumni C.G. “Turk” and Joyce A. McEwen Therkildsen.

The Iowa State University Cyclone Football ‘Varsity’ Marching Band is performing during the 2018 Band Extravaganza. The drumline is equipped with lights that flash different colors every time they hit their drums and the crowd goes wild over the spectacle. This is when Jacob Schmieder, a trumpet player in the band, came up with a business idea.

Mechanical engineering student Jillian Dunn has a passion for helping others. She spent her summer doing just that.

Luke Roling, an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering, was recently named a Black and Veatch Building a World of Difference Faculty Fellow in Engineering.

Recognizing College of Engineering faculty and staff award winners, new named faculty positions, and patents received.

The Iowa State University Department of Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) welcomes Andrea Mauton to its staff as business administrator.

The tenth year of the Department of Aerospace Engineering’s Make to Innovate (M:2:I) program officially got underway with its kickoff event August 25. More than 130 undergraduate students were on hand in the Howe Hall atrium to learn about the 2021-22 edition of the Boeing-sponsored, student project-centered program. M:2:I touts teamwork in the planning, design and execution of 14 varied projects. Development of a satellite that will be launched aboard a NASA rocket; design of a payload-carrying rocket; a lunar roving vehicle; gravity-challenging devices tested underwater; unmanned aerial vehicles for space exploration; a high-altitude balloon, and more await student scientists. Many of the projects will be entered in national-level competitions. The M:2:I program offers course credit and is open to all Iowa State University undergraduates. Students unable to attend the kickoff event but who would still like to learn about the program should contact Christine Nelson cnnelson@iastate.edu and Matthew Nelson mnelson@iastate.edu. The course may be added in AccessPlus through Friday, August 27. The final deadline to register is September 3. See the M:2:I web site. Look for more photos from the event on the Facebook pages of M:2:I and the Department of Aerospace Engineering.

A mechanical engineering (ME) team of two graduate students and a postdoctoral researcher took second place at the national Hackathon competition hosted earlier this month by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ (ASME) Computers & Information in Engineering Division. The team consisted of Ankush Mishra, Ph.D. student; Venkat Nemani, postdoctoral research associate; and Adam Thelen, Ph.D. student. All three researchers work in the System Reliability and Safety Laboratory, overseen by ME associate professor Chao Hu. The team tackled a problem statement proposed by the Siemens Corporation. The problem statement had two parts: first, the researchers developed a machine learning model to predict an output given 36 different feature inputs; and second, the researchers created a scheduling algorithm to optimize the time taken to complete a set of given tasks using the output from the first sub-problem. Each of the researchers tackled a different aspect of the task. Mishra, who holds a masters in aerospace engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Madras, developed a pseudocode for the scheduling algorithm based on the available literature and research. “I got to know about some of the machine learning algorithms and learned different algorithms for scheduling optimization,” said Mishra. “Moreover, the experience of working and trying to solve an industrial problem within a very limited time [roughly 24 hours] gives us a different perspective which we rarely experience in our daily research activity.” Nemani, who holds a Ph.D. in ME from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, helped the team to implement their pseudocode and also developed a Gantt chart to help them explain their scheduling results. “We were given additional points for showing why a certain model works instead of just showing how it works,” said Nemani. “Also, for the second part of the problem, we developed our own algorithm instead of using pre-developed software and algorithms which was very much appreciated by the panel.” Thelen, who holds his B.S. in ME from Iowa State University, conducted a parametric study for an elastic net machine learning model. “I investigated the magnitude of the feature weights from the machine learning model to see which of the data features mattered the most when predicting the time it takes to test a part. Our findings were appreciated by the panel,” said Thelen. The Iowa State University researchers competed against six other teams during the virtual competition. They took home $800 in prize money because of their second-place finish.

A team of engineering researchers at Iowa State University is studying the most effective ways for manufacturing materials in outer space, with the hope that astronauts can use these methods while on space missions.

Shauna Hallmark is the inaugural holder of the Robert J. and Roxann L. Paulsen Professorship in Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, and director of Iowa State’s Institute for Transportation. But her job title could be just lifesaver.