Iowa State’s Formula SAE Team raced all 14 laps around the twisty endurance course at the Lincoln (Nebraska) Airpark last week, piling up enough racing and fuel economy points for a solid return to the competition’s overall top 20. Over the nearly 14-mile endurance race, the team’s car burned 3.616 liters of E-85 fuel, good …Continue reading “Iowa State student engineers met their goal in Formula SAE Lincoln competition”
Greg Bott, finishing a series of 60 mph acceleration runs in a campus parking lot, pulled over to his teammates with a whoop and a double fist pump. “You like?” asked Derek Peters, the technical director of this year’s Iowa State Formula SAE Team. “I like,” said Bott, a senior studying mechanical engineering from Clinton. And then he …Continue reading “Iowa State student-engineers tune their open-wheel racer for speed, reliability”
Iowa State University has once again won designation as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance/Cyber Defense Education. The designation covers the academic years from 2014 to 2021. Iowa State was one of the first seven universities to earn the designation in 1999 and has had it ever since. “This goes to show our …Continue reading “Iowa State remains a National Center of Academic Excellence for cyber security”
Somehow, the off-road racer built by Iowa State student-engineers held together through the end of the four-hour endurance race, earning the Baja Team its second checkered flag of the season and its best-ever overall finish. Sometime in the last quarter of the race, the rough, muddy racing sheared tubes used to repair damage from the …Continue reading “Update: Iowa State Baja Team expects more success”
A disappointing first round in the mining arena kept Cyclone Space Mining from defending its NASA title. But, the team still made its presence known at the NASA Robotic Mining Competition at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. The Iowa Staters will forever be the contest’s first team to successfully run a fully autonomous mining robot. The result …Continue reading “Cyclone Space Mining invited to first “World Cup” of robotic space mining”
Iowa State’s off-road racers already have a big win to their credit. Last month, competing over a dusty course at the University of Texas at El Paso, the Baja team bounced to a frame-bending-but-not-breaking win in the four-hour endurance race. That helped the team move up to seventh overall (among 96 registered teams from as …Continue reading “As rocky racing turns to mud runs, Iowa State Baja Team expects more success”
Even though other teams have started to copy some of their winning ideas, the student-engineers of Cyclone Space Mining feel good about defending last year’s NASA championship. “That’s all right,” David Peiffer, a junior in industrial engineering from Marion and the president of Iowa State’s robotic mining club, said of the copycat teams. “We’ve had issues in the past and …Continue reading “Cyclone Space Mining ready to defend title at NASA Robotic Mining Competition”
Iowa State University engineers and plant scientists are joining forces to design better crops that tolerate climate change, produce bigger yields and feed more people. The collaborative effort to develop computationally engineered plants could have the same kind of impact on agriculture as biomedical engineering has had on medicine, said Daniel Attinger, the leader of …Continue reading “Presidential initiative creates team of engineers, plant scientists to develop smart plants”
As campus sidewalks cleared for the day, Dylan Neal settled behind a corner window and a bank of computer screens. He was devoting a recent midweek evening to a few more hours of solar car engineering. Neal, a freshman from St. Louis who’s studying mechanical engineering, was designing parts of Phaëton, Team PrISUm’s 12th solar race car. …Continue reading “Team PrISUm builds next solar racer; cross-country race includes Ames stop”
A medical device, once its job is done, could harmlessly melt away inside a person’s body. Or, a military device could collect and send its data and then dissolve away, leaving no trace of an intelligence mission. Or, an environmental sensor could collect climate information, then wash away in the rain. It’s a new way …Continue reading “Iowa State materials scientist developing materials, electronics that dissolve when triggered”
Suraj Kothari’s talk of smartphone security quickly took a turn toward sabotage and worst-case scenarios. What happens, he asked, if a soldier’s smartphone is hacked for its GPS data? What happens if an attacker drains the battery in a general’s phone and essential communication is cut off? Or, what happens if a hacked phone provides …Continue reading “Iowa State engineers build software tools to assure security of smartphones”
Iowa State University is a top-tier partner in a new Digital Lab for Manufacturing to be based in Chicago with affiliated partners across the country. President Barack Obama today announced a $70 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to support creation of the lab by UI LABS, a Chicago-based research and commercialization collaborative. In addition …Continue reading “Iowa State part of $320 million national manufacturing lab announced by White House”
From somewhere back behind the Iowa State University Icing Research Tunnel, Rye Waldman called out to see if Hui Hu was ready for a spray of cold water. The wind tunnel was down to 10 degrees Fahrenheit. A cylindrical model was in place inside the 10-inch-by-10-inch test section. The wind was blowing through the machine …Continue reading “Iowa State’s icing wind tunnel blows cold and hard to study ice on wings, turbine blades”
The holiday headlines about stolen credit and debit card numbers were a reminder that cyber security can’t be taken for granted. And so the National Cyber Defense Competition at Iowa State University is a lot more than an academic exercise. “Yes, this does matter,” said Doug Jacobson, a University Professor of electrical and computer engineering …Continue reading “National Cyber Defense Competition at Iowa State challenges, prepares students”
Lysle Whitmer, giving a quick tour of the technical upgrades to an Iowa State University biofuels pilot plant, pointed to a long series of stainless steel pipes and cylinders. They’re called cyclones, condensers and precipitators, he said, and there’s an art to getting them to work together. The machinery is all about quickly heating biomass …Continue reading “Iowa State engineers upgrade pilot plant for better studies of advanced biofuels”
