Texas A&M Engineering News

Singh elected as National Academy of Engineering member

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 00:00:00 CST

The National Academy of Engineering (NAE) elected Dr. Chanan Singh, Regents Professor and Irma Runyon Chair Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University, honoring his contributions to the advancement of theory, practice and education in electric power system reliability.

Election to the National Academy of Engineering is among the highest professional distinctions accorded to an engineer.

“As an administrator and former department head, Dr. Singh has demonstrated great leadership in securing resources for major expansion of the faculty in our department,” Dr. Miroslav Begovic, department head and Carolyn S. & Tommie E. Lohman ‘59 Professor said yesterday. “I can hardly imagine a more deserving recipient of the high recognition that was bestowed upon him, the prestigious membership in the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.”

Singh is former department head and an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow, internationally recognized as an expert on the reliability and security of power systems. He joined the Texas A&M faculty in 1978.

Other honors Singh has received include the Merit Award by the Probabilistic Methods Applied to Power Systems (PMAPS) International Society, the IEEE Outstanding Power Engineering Educator Award and the Texas A&M University Association of Former Students' University-level Distinguished Achievement Award for Research. He has previously held the J.W. Runyon, Jr. Professorship II, the Halliburton Professorship and the Dresser Professorship, and the University of Saskatchewan awarded him a D.Sc. in 1998 for his research contributions. In 2010, he was the inaugural recipient of the IEEE-PES Roy Billinton Power System Reliability Award.

Singh will be formally inducted during a ceremony at the NAE's annual meeting in Washington, D.C., on Sept. 30, 2018.

Research to improve efficiency in oil wells leads professor, student to best paper award

Tue, 06 Feb 2018 00:00:00 CST

Texas A&M University researchers are studying seal leaks in subsea and aging oil well production facilities with the potential to greatly increase the efficiency of multiple-phase pumping and compressors turbomachinery.

Dr. Luis San Andrés, Mast-Childs Chair Professor in the Turbomachinery Laboratory, along with graduate assistant researcher Xueliang Lu, a Ph.D. candidate in mechanical engineering, conducted a series of measurements on the leakage and dynamic forced performance of wet seals, such as pump liquid seals, mixed with increasing contents of gas. The test results show the gas, or liquid, content affects the system pumping efficiency and reliability, with a dramatic impact on efficiency recorded with only a few droplets of liquid. The experimental results validate mixture model predictions produced by San Andrés in the early 2010s.

By better understanding the role seals have in the machinery, researchers can help industry officials continue to enhance pumping efficiency, increase reliability by reducing vibrations and ensure availability for extended operation times. The researchers said an electric submersible pump (ESP) manufacturer gave them positive comments on their work, and said their data may help them design novel seal types toward improving the life of seals in their ESPs. The current design can only survive 350 hours of operation, about 1/100 of the desired reliability.

The team wrote a paper recording their results, which was recently recognized with the best paper award at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Turbo-Expo 2017, selected from 133 papers accepted in the Structure & Dynamics Division. Their paper’s title is “Leakage, Drag Power and Rotordynamic Force Coefficients of an Air in Oil (Wet) Annular Seal.”

The Turbomachinery Research Consortium (TRC) has sponsored the research for the past three years.

“TRC members, original equipment manufacturers and end users envision more and more applications of multiple phase pumps for the subsea oil and gas industry,” San Andrés and Lu said. “Wet seals must retain their leakage restriction ability without impairing the dynamic performance of the machinery.”

Follow up lectures are scheduled for presentation at the Asia Turbomachinery Symposium and the Turbomachinery Symposium later this year. More research developments will be published at the Gas Turbine Conference, with another journal paper already accepted.

“The research opens a door for the future research career of Lu as it verifies the likelihood of using air/gas injection to actively control leakage and force coefficient in pump seals and hydraulic turbomachinery in general,” San Andrés said.

Real world data questions long held travel behavior theories

Thu, 01 Feb 2018 00:00:00 CST

Time is money and traffic earns nothing but road rage, lost productivity and an increased gas bill. Dr. Mark Burris, the Herbert D. Kelleher Professor at Texas A&M University, seeks to save travelers time, money and frustration with his travel behavior research.

The more accurately researchers can predict future travel, the better they can plan and build the necessary infrastructure quickly and affordably. In doing so, Burris and his team at Texas A&M strive to reduce travelers’ time and frustration in traffic while also saving tax dollars.

“My focus is to improve our understanding of how cost impacts someone’s travel,” said Burris. “How it impacts the route they take, the mode they use, the time of day they choose and more.”

Traditionally, much of this information was based on surveys completed by travelers about past trips and potential future travel. More recently, the technological advances that monitor new travel choices like “high occupancy toll lanes” and “managed lanes” provide real data that reveals more detailed information about travel behavior. This kind of information is very useful in understanding how travelers regard their travel times, and how much they would be willing to pay to reduce those travel times.

The Harris County Toll Road Authority, Texas Department of Transportation, and Houston TranStar supplied data from the Katy Freeway in Houston that Burris and his team used for this research. The Katy Freeway includes four managed lanes, two in each direction, in the middle of the freeway.

During most of the day, carpools and buses can use these lanes for free, while single occupant vehicles have to pay a toll. The toll varies based on the time of the day and the correlating traffic congestion peaks. This freeway is one of only a few worldwide that had the ability to identify travelers in both the managed lanes and the regular lanes. Note the data were anonymized so it was impossible to know who used the roadway, just that a specific vehicle had used the roadway.

When analyzing the data collected from the Katy Freeway, Burris and his team found surprising results. About 11 percent of travelers were paying to use the managed lanes at times when the regular freeway lanes were traveling at the same speed or faster than the managed lanes – a behavior that no models ever predicted. Also based on these data, little evidence was found supporting the notion that travelers would be willing to pay for more reliable travel times in the managed lanes.

Farinoush Sharifi, a master’s student in transportation engineering, is studying this anomaly in her master’s thesis.

“To make it clear, many people believe that paying a toll to use a lane will bring them shorter travel time,” said Sharifi. “However, by looking into the Katy Managed Lanes study we have found that there are times users pay to travel on the toll lane but go slower than the toll-free lanes.”

Sharifi and Burris are working to understand the reasons for these uneconomical travel decisions using pattern recognition methods. Burris also found that the vast majority (84 percent) of freeway travelers with transponders only used the regular lanes, a small percentage of people (3 percent) only used the managed lanes and 13 percent utilized both. Thus, most travelers are not choosing between these lanes every day (as models assume), but rather have chosen the lanes they will travel well in advance and do not alter that choice regardless of travel conditions.

After collecting and analyzing this data, Burris and his team have begun exploring travel behavior in new and innovative ways. Partnering with a psychologist and a behavioral economist, Burris is now working to find ways to model travel behavior decisions in laboratory studies.

“This real-world data has led to some very surprising findings that put my research at the forefront of this field,” said Burris. “This improves our understanding of how travelers’ value different travel options and should dramatically change how we model travel behavior. Combined, this allows transportation agencies to better predict and prepare for future travel demand.”

These advances in understanding traveler behavior come at the same time great advances in automobile technology are occurring. Automated and connected vehicles will also greatly impact travel behavior.

Burris has teamed up with Texas A&M Hagler Institute for Advanced Study fellow Dr. Kumares Sinha and doctoral student Arezoo Samimi to examine some of these potential impacts. They are developing a traffic simulation model of El Paso to determine the travel time and emissions impacts of having connected vehicles in the traffic stream. These vehicles will have information on travel times to their destination and can help the traveler choose the best route – or reroute when an incident occurs.

In theory, this should reduce travel times and emissions. However, if too many vehicles reroute at once it could have negative overall impacts on travel. Their research will examine these potential impacts and strategies that combine data from connected vehicles and travel behavior to maximize potential benefits of connected vehicles.

Hawkins elected chair of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices

Fri, 26 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. H. Gene Hawkins, a professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering at Texas A&M University, was elected chair of the National Committee on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (NCUTD) at the organization’s annual January 2018 meeting for a two-year appointment. Hawkins formerly served as the NCUTD’s vice chair for programs.

The NCUTCD assists in the development of criteria for the use of traffic control devices and traffic engineering practices. The NCUTCD develops, debates and suggests changes to the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, a guiding federal document that establishes national standards for traffic control devices. Hawkins is a fellow of the Institute of Transportation Engineers, which is a sponsoring organization of the NCUTCD.

Darbha named Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. Swaroop Darbha, professor in Texas A&M University’s Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been elevated to the status of Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Fellow.

Darbha was recognized for his contributions to Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and autonomous vehicles. He has worked on various aspects of ITS, and is widely recognized for his pioneering contributions to vehicle platooning in Automated Highway Systems, traffic flow and safety modeling with autonomous vehicles, and for truck brake diagnostics. One focus of his work is on string stability of vehicle platoons.

“String instabilities lead to pileups—a commonly occurring incident and a result of how much preview information each vehicle has,” Darbha said. “I have introduced singular and regular perturbation methods to analyze and design automatic vehicle following controllers and derive results, which are intuitive and of practical significance.”

His work on stochastic control of Unmanned Vehicle Systems has also been implemented successfully on flight tests by the Air Force Research Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio.

“The motion planning work that I’ve done in 2000 was instrumental in getting them started on Unmanned Vehicle Systems simulations,” Darbha said.

At Texas A&M, Darbha’s research interests include advanced vehicular control and diagnostic systems, motion planning and control of unmanned vehicles, decision making under uncertainty, and fixed structure controller synthesis.

“ITS has had a positive impact on society; for example, consider driver assist systems and Variable Message Signs,” Darbha said. “Even if autonomous driving may not be a reality, the focus on enabling communication between vehicles and infrastructure is expected to enhance mobility and safety.”

Each year the IEEE Fellow Committee reviews the work of its members for elevation to IEEE Fellow. Less than 0.1 percent of voting members are selected annually for this member grade elevation, which is the highest grade of membership within the institute.

“You bring honor to yourself and to IEEE by your achievements,” said Karen Bartleson, 2017 IEEE president and CEO, in the announcement of Darbha’s elevation.

Looking to the future, Darbha said he would next like to develop methodologies for assessing safety and addressing communication between vehicles to improve mobility and safety.

“I am working on developing techniques for quantifying the benefits of traffic safety due to vehicle-to-vehicle communication, understanding how imperfect communication affects mobility and safety and resuming my work on diagnostic systems for air brakes in trucks.”

Polymer movement: key to next-generation coatings

Tue, 23 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Researchers in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University, led by doctoral student Victor Selin and Dr. Svetlana Sukhishvili, are making headway in understanding fundamental principles that will help to create the next generation of biomedical coatings.

Medical devices, such as orthopedic implants, often need their surfaces modified with protective coatings. These devices have random shapes, which requires the use of a simple method to controllably coat the surface. These coatings can provide the surface of the objects with antireflection properties or make them able to release therapeutic compounds that kill bacteria and/or control the growth of mammalian cells.

The group is working to gain a fundamental understanding of the growth and behavior of multilayer polymer films to create functional films on the surface of different materials and aims to be able to control their properties and structures. These properties are important because they dictate how such films interact with aqueous and salinated solutions. Their work has revealed that by simple manipulations during film buildup, these properties can be easily controlled.

“By demonstrating how one can control the mobility of individual polymer chains layer-by-layer, we hope to facilitate practical applications of these films as a platform for functionalization of surfaces of biomedical devices,” Selin said.

Using several techniques, the group established a quantitative picture of the internal structure and polymer chain dynamics of these films. These experiments allowed the group to correlate the film properties with the behavior of individual polymer chains.

“The knowledge we are developing is needed to learn how to design surface coatings that will be able to controllably release multiple therapeutic agents,” Selin said. “Our research provides a better understanding of the relationship between assembly conditions and the internal structure of resulting films, and therefore significantly contributes to the existing fundamental knowledge in polymer physics and materials science.”

This research is part of a National Science Foundation research project focusing on the studies of layer-by-layer coatings led by Dr. Svetlana Sukhishvili, a professor in the materials science and engineering department at Texas A&M, in close collaboration with Dr. John Akner, a lead instrument scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who is an expert in neutron scattering techniques.

Kumar elected Indian National Academy of Engineering Fellow

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. P.R. Kumar was elected Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE). He is among five foreign fellows elected this year.

INAE is an autonomous institution with a membership comprising of the most distinguished engineers, engineer-scientists and technologists from all branches of engineering, technology and related sciences. Up to 50 fellows from academia, industry and government are elected every year. Election to INAE is by nomination only.

Kumar is a College of Engineering Chair in Computer Engineering and a distinguished professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He obtained his Bachelor of Technology degree in electrical engineering (electronics) from Indian Institute of Technology Madras in 1973, and the Master of Science and Doctor of Science degrees in systems science and mathematics from Washington University, St. Louis, in 1975 and 1977, respectively

Kumar studies problems in game theory, adaptive control, stochastic systems, simulated annealing, neural networks, machine learning, queueing networks, manufacturing systems, scheduling, wafer fabrication plants and information theory. His research focus currently includes cybersecurity, privacy, cyberphysical systems, wireless networks, smart grid, autonomous vehicles and unmanned air vehicle systems.

Kumar is a member of the National Academy of Engineering in the U.S., and a Fellow of the World Academy of Sciences.

Texas A&M biomedical engineering professor delivers lecture in Poland

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. Anthony Guiseppi-Elie, Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) research professor and professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University was selected to deliver the inaugural lecture of the newly convened Interdisciplinary Science Seminar Series at Wroclaw University of Science and Technology (WUST), Wroclaw, Poland.

The WUST Interdisciplinary Scientific Seminar series are open technical meetings with world-famous speakers delivered to all academic staff and students at all levels, but also all those interested in deepening their knowledge of exact sciences. Dr. Andrzej Trochimczuk, vice rector for scientific research and international affairs of WUST, is the originator of the seminars.

“The development of international cooperation is one of key priorities for Wrocław University of Science and Technology” said Trochimczuk. Such cooperation encompasses many areas covered by the “Programme of Tertiary Education Internationalisation” announced by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education on June 18, 2015. This includes participation by international visitors in the academic life of the university. Guiseppi-Elie is a well-travelled and highly sought after international reviewer and speaker with broad scientific, engineering and translational interests reflective of the many disciplines embraced here at WUST. It is fitting that he should open our seminar series.

Guiseppi-Elie spoke on “Engineering the Future of Medicine,” and provided a survey of his ongoing work on minimally invasive biochips for guided resuscitation during hemorrhage, biologically responsive drug delivery systems to address chronic wounds, and academic programs that blend preparation in medicine and engineering.

Founded in 1945, WUST is one of Poland’s top technical universities with several academic programs offered in English. WUST has established inter-university and inter-departmental cooperation agreements with over 120 tertiary institutes from 36 countries, and has exchange agreements and dual degree agreements with several institutions.

Xie joins materials science and engineering

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. Kelvin Xie has joined the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at Texas A&M University as an assistant professor.

Xie comes to Texas A&M from Johns Hopkins University where he received his postdoctoral training. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Sydney, Australia, in mechanical engineering and his bachelor degrees in biomedical engineering and finance from the University of Sydney, Australia.

Xie’s research focuses on understanding and designing lighter and stronger structural materials such as Magnesium alloys, boron carbide and 3-D printed ceramics, assisted by advanced nano-scale and atomic-level characterization techniques.

“In the area of ceramic engineering, we revealed the twinning mechanisms in boron carbide, a light-weight body armor material, as a function of chemistry and local bonding,” Xie said. “This ability to control twinning is expected to help design the next generation of lightweight body armor, where twin interfaces provide additional strength and toughness.”

In the area of metallurgy, Xie and his colleagues systematically investigated the dislocation and twin structures in deformed bulk magnesium single crystals, which substantially contributed to the understanding that explains why Magnesium and Magnesium alloys generally exhibit poor ductility and formability.

Xie will begin teaching fundamentals of materials science and engineering classes this spring.

Pharr awarded grant for research of lithium metal anodes in batteries

Wed, 17 Jan 2018 00:00:00 CST

Dr. Matt Pharr, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University, has received grant funds to benefit his research of lithium metal anodes in batteries.

Pharr was one of four researchers awarded a $20,000 gift award by the Applied Mechanics Division of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The program is funded by the Haythornthwaite Foundation and targets new university faculty engaged in research involving theoretical and applied mechanics.

The objective of Pharr’s project, "Electro-chemo-mechanics of Lithium Metal Anodes for High-capacity Batteries," is to construct a stable metallic lithium anode, which Pharr said will enable higher energy and power capabilities in batteries while reducing weight and volume.

“From a scientific perspective, despite being the third element on the periodic table, little is known regarding the mechanical behavior of lithium,” Pharr said. “From an engineering perspective, lithium metal is known as the ‘holy grail’ of anode materials, as it has the highest theoretical capacity, lowest density and most negative electrochemical potential.”

Pharr’s research interests include materials for energy storage and conversion, mechanics of flexible/wearable electronic devices and deformation and fracture of soft materials.