technizzel

In May 2007, the UW-Madison Formula SAE Racing Team battled 129 schools from 11 countries and won the prestigious SAE Foundation Cup, pictured with team member Gianluca Mantovano. (large image)

Gianluca Mantovano’s favorite part of the tours he gives prospective students is what he calls the “grand finale.” It’s a look at the Myers Student Automotive Center in the Engineering Centers Building—home to the six University of Wisconsin-Madison vehicle teams and a major part of Mantovano’s daily life.

“This is the team I’m on,” the mechanical engineering student tells nine high school students and their families, gesturing at the Formula SAE car engine Mantovano tests.

A couple of the high school students hover around the 2007 world-champion formula car, and their interest in the vehicle is reminiscent of Mantovano’s high school days. The Chicago, Illinois, native spent a lot of time in his school auto shop and even started a high-mileage vehicle club to design and build a fuel-efficient car.

“I really wanted to continue that type of extracurricular activity in college, so that’s how I started looking at different universities,” Mantovano says.

During Mantovano’s senior year in high school, the UW-Madison Formula SAE team ranked third in the world, and Mantovano was impressed. After touring the auto shop and meeting some of the students, he thought UW-Madison was the place for him.

As a freshman, Mantovano joined the Formula SAE team; student members design, build and race a formula-style car for a collegiate competition sponsored by the Society of Automotive Engineers.

In May 2007, Mantovano’s sophomore year, the team traveled to Romeo, Michigan, and claimed the world championship for the first time in UW-Madison history. Afterward, team membership skyrocketed to more than 100 students, and Mantovano, who had been the group leader’s “right-hand man,” found himself mentoring newer members.
 During the 2007-2008 school year, Mantovano was the powertrain group leader. He says the team has evolved substantially since his freshman year: Team leaders are more focused on training new members, and Mantovano says their self-sufficiency lets him focus on designing the powertrain system and testing engine parts.

Team dedication is evident in the amount of time members spend in the shop. “It’s like a job,” Mantovano says.

Gianluca Mantovano’s passion for race cars led to a scholarship from Castrol, which he traveled to California to receive. While there, he toured drag racer John Force’s garage and poses here with a drag car engine. (large image)

In the fall semester, he works on the car 20 hours a week; the time commitment jumps to almost 50 hours a week in the spring months before competition. “People don’t understand how I do it. I work twice a week, take four or five classes, and I’m at the gym right when it opens—I’m always running around,” says Mantovano with a laugh. “It’s worth it—it definitely pays off,” he adds. “You get what you put into the team. The more time you put in, the more you get out of it.”

Mantovano credits his family for the discipline it takes to balance all of his responsibilities. Both of his parents are originally from Italy, and Mantovano speaks fluent Italian. “They grew up pretty disciplined themselves, and some of that rubbed off on me,” he says.

His family is also the source of his passion for all things automotive. “When I was 5 years old, we used to go to Florida to visit my uncle. He’d have a few Ferrari model cars running around, so I’d play with them and take them apart, but try not to crash them because they’re kind of expensive,” Mantovano says.

His father, an avionics technician who originally aspired to be an engineer, taught Mantovano how to be hands-on around the house and in the garage. The result, Mantovano says, is that he’s a “fixer.”

His experience has led to several internships. In summer 2007, he worked at Goodyear in Akron, Ohio, on massive off-road tires that stand 12 feet tall. This summer, he’ll move to Iowa to work for John Deere on powertrains and engine control. In the fall, he’ll switch tracks and work on jet engine turbines for GE Aviation.

In the future, Mantovano says he would like to own his own company. He’s earning a business certificate at UW-Madison with that goal in mind. “If I could work for Ferrari, that’d be my dream job,” he adds.

In addition to his vehicle experiences, Mantovano has helped Assistant Dean for Engineering General Resources Don Woolston give presentations to prospective engineering students. After the presentations, Mantovano leads the students and their families on a tour of the engineering campus.

“I show them the shop as the last part because a lot of students want to see the hands-on stuff, and the shop is an easy way to give them a good representation of what students can get involved in here,” he says.

Involvement, in the end, is what Mantovano stresses to prospective students. “When you come to college, no matter what you do, get involved. Do something you love,” he says. “If it weren’t for my involvement in the organizations I’m in, I wouldn’t be where I’m at today.”

For the 10th consecutive year, University of Wisconsin-Madison students have found themselves floating upside down over the Gulf of Mexico.

Seven students from the UW-Madison ZeroG team spent a week in April at the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. The team participated in the annual NASA Reduced Gravity Student Program, which allows students to propose, design and test an experiment of their choice in varying gravity conditions.

The results from the UW-Madison experiment show a particular spray cooling method is not dependent on gravity—a significant finding that means spray cooling could be used in airplane and other high-heat electronics.

The experiment was based on the work of team adviser Mechanical Engineering Associate Professor Timothy Shedd.

Circuits on a computer chip have temperature-dependent performances—when chips get too hot, they slow down. Air-cooling methods, which use fans to blow air across the chips, are not ideal for supercomputers or large server banks, such as the racks of computers that support Yahoo or many financial institutions.

Shedd and his team have developed a system that sprays dielectric liquid in a linear array directly onto the chips. The liquid won’t damage the electronics, and the direct contact maximizes the amount of heat transferred from the chip to the liquid.

Traditional spray cooling methods direct the liquid upward, relying on gravity to drain the liquid away. However, this method won’t work in laptops since users move the computer in many directions. The method also won’t work in airplanes or spacecraft, which go through varying gravity conditions.

“To be reliable, spray cooling has to not be gravity dependent,” Shedd says.

Shedd thought his linear spray array could be the answer, but testing was difficult.

That’s where ZeroG came in.

The team spent the winter designing and building the experiment, resulting in a12-cubic- square-foot Plexiglas box capable of videotaping the spray and measuring how well it cools electronics.

The team was in Houston from April 17 through 25 and allowed two flights on the “Weightless Wonder,” a C-9 aircraft that flies in a parabola. The plane creates a 30- second period of weightlessness at its peak and a 60 second period of double gravity when it dips and ascends again to the next peak.

The transition between the double gravity and zero gravity periods is difficult for some passengers—the team was kindly forewarned that a third of passengers are fine on the flight, another third get sick and the final third get violently sick without anti-nausea medication.

However, the five UW-Madison students who flew were more than fine. “When you get to the point of realizing, man, we’re really doing this, it blows your mind,” says engineering mechanics undergraduate John Springmann. The plane makes multiple passes over the Gulf of Mexico. In addition to the spray cooling experiment, the students tested what their bodies could do in zero gravity as the plane went up and down.

Engineering students Lisa McGill (front) and Jessica Rybicki, along with physics student Adam Beardsley, work on their experiment in zero-gravity onboard NASA’s Weightless Wonder. (large image)

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Physics and mathematics student Adam Beardsley wandered around on the ceiling. Since blood doesn’t rush to the brain while upside down in zero gravity, he felt normal—the others looked like they were the ones upside down.

When the plane landed, the trip wasn’t over. The students toured historic mission control, sitting in the chairs that belonged to scientists from the original Apollo missions in the 1960s. They walked through a life-size mock-up of the International Space Station and watched as astronauts trained in giant swimming pools.

Back in Wisconsin, the students still have plenty of work to do. Team members will try publishing their research and will speak to a variety of groups ranging from elementary classrooms to the Wisconsin Space Conference in August.

Two team members are active with NASA this summer. Springmann is participating in the NASA Academy, a residential internship program in Greenbelt, Maryland that allows students to conduct laboratory research.

Lisa McGill, an engineering mechanics and astronautics undergraduate, is working on web technology at the NASA Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California as part of the Education Associates Program.

For Shedd, the ZeroGteam provided valuable data. The team found that linear spray cooling is effective in both zero gravity and double gravity conditions.

“I thought they did a nice job—this experiment is hard enough to do on the ground, much less in a container they’ve shipped to Houston and put on a plane,” he says.

—Sandra Knisely

(For photos and a video of the students, visit the UW-Madison College of Engineering homepage or check out the students’ website here.

Lunar dust is sharp stuff. Created when micro-meteorites hit the moon’s surface and shatter into razor-blade-like bits of melted glass, the abrasive dust can cause a multitude of problems for astronauts and machinery.

Within a decade, NASA plans to begin building a permanent lunar colony to serve as an outpost en route to Mars.

So, the lunar dust needs to be cleared—and one University of Wisconsin-Madison mechanical engineering student is helping to develop the robotic equipment needed for the task.

Mechanical engineering student Joshua Figuered works on part of the latest NASA lunar rover project. (large image)

Josh Figuered is a NASA co-op, working for the robotics systems technology branch of the NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

“It’s something I’ve always been super interested in,” he says of NASA. “As a co-op it’s amazing because they really try to put you through all the processes of engineering. It’s a cool opportunity.”

Figuered is no stranger to the design and manufacturing processes. Originally from a farm in Bloomington, Indiana, Figuered spent his high school years working as late as 3 a.m. on cars and bikes for the school solar racing team. The hard work paid off, rewarding Figuered and his teammates with multiple trips to Japan to claim world championship victories.

When he started college at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia, Figuered continued working for the institute Baja team.

However, he soon focused his skills on vehicles of a different sort. As a sophomore, he began working for NASA as a co-op student in spring 2006. He transferred to UW-Madison in time for the spring 2007 semester.

After spending a semester adjusting to UW-Madison, Figuered followed his pattern of alternating his semesters between school and work. He again piled his belongings into his car and moved back to Houston. “It was January the first time I went down. I left my house and it was 14 degrees,” Figuered recalls. “I drove down there, got out of the car and it was 70 degrees. That’s a perk.”

Figuered test drives Chariot, a new prototype for future lunar trucks. (large image)

A bigger perk is the chance to work on a new major project each year. In 2007 he designed the transmission for the Chariot lunar rover, a prototype that includes several advanced vehicle concepts and is the first step in a new era of lunar rovers. Chariot was designed, manufactured, assembled and tested in 11 months—an intense pace, Figuered says.

“What we’ve done with Chariot is design a concept in advanced mobility,” says Figuered.

In 2008, the robotics branch will tackle another rover, which will build on some of the elements developed for Chariot.

Figuered sees his work at NASA as beneficial to earthlings as much as to astronauts.

“The technologies that were developed in order to get to the moon originally really benefited mankind in a variety of ways,” he says. “To set up a sustained colony, you face a lot of huge problems that have solutions that can really be used to benefit people.”

Many of his co-workers, who come from a variety of engineering and non-engineering backgrounds, also are college students on co-op. (NASA takes approximately 50 co-ops per semester.)

“It’s almost like a college campus in a way,” he says of the NASA facilities and co-op culture. “It’s similar except you don’t have homework and you’re paid to be there!”

Andy Potts is known as the best triathlete in America. In less than 5 years, he has transformed from an overweight swimmer into one of the top athletes in the country.

How? By working with top scientists and engineers to develop his training regiment into an exact science. Potts and his coaching staff monitor everything from his heart rate, his energy output, his breathing patterns and oxygen levels to his acceleration in order to insure he remains at the top of his game.
This is just one of many examples of how engineering can help an athlete perfect his/her game. Just think of the curvature on David Beckham’s free kicks, or consider Tiger Wood’s adjusting his stroke to chip out of a sand trap.

To read more about Pott’s engineered training, read Popular Science’s new article:

Popular Science: Potts

The Princeton Autonomous Vehicle Engineering (PAVE) team won “rookie of the year,” third place overall out of 47 teams and first place in the design challenge portion of the 16th Annual Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition, held May 30 to June 2 at Oakland University in Rochester, Mich.

The competition required student teams to design and create small, unmanned outdoor vehicles capable of negotiating obstacles and navigating with the use of GPS. Teams also were judged on their robot’s ability to understand and respond to a standardized messaging system called Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems. A number of organizations, including the U.S. Army and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, sponsored the competition.

PAVE’s winning entry, Kratos, was named after a son of Zeus in Greek mythology. Featuring two cameras as “eyes” and a GPS navigational system, Kratos is able to “see” objects surrounding it and determine its position relative to those obstacles. Kratos can then choose the best path to follow in order to avoid collision or stay within defined lane boundaries.

Kratos won fourth place in the navigation portion of the IGVC, reaching seven GPS waypoints in a field filled with obstacles in just over three and a half minutes. The robot placed sixth in the lane-following and obstacle avoidance segment, traveling 223 feet on a course that at times required the robot to navigate around a center island in the path and even double back on itself. Videos from all three days of the competition are available on the PAVE website.

The Kratos technology was based on systems PAVE designed for Prospect 12, their entry in this year’s Urban Challenge competition of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. A disappointing finish at the Urban Challenge competition semifinals inspired nine members of the team to enter the IGVC.

“Technically, the hardest part of the IGVC for us was taking the technology from the Urban Challenge and changing the decision-making logic to help the robot see objects,” said Andrew Saxe ’08, who received regular text message updates from his teammates at the competition since his graduation from Princeton conflicted with the IGVC. Even after overcoming technical obstacles, the students had quite a long journey ahead of them — the 640 mile drive they made from Princeton to Michigan in a rental van large enough to accommodate Kratos.

The nine members of the team are “an extremely talented and motivated group of undergraduates,” said computer science professor Robert Schapire. “I am officially their advisor, but I can assure you that the project was entirely theirs from start to finish.”

The opportunity to take ownership of the robot design and creation was one of the most valuable aspects of the experience, Saxe said. “It teaches you to do all the ‘under the hood’ things. It is very different to learn about something in class and to implement it on a robot that has to work.”

His teammate Gordon Franken, a junior mechanical and aerospace engineering major, agreed.

“This competition highlights the difference between academic and professional knowledge, between the classroom and the real world,” Franken said. “We get to have the opportunity to develop real-world knowledge at the undergraduate level, as opposed to waiting for graduate school or getting into industry.”

PAVE, the University’s only student-run research team with its own laboratory space, will be seeking new members in the fall and hopes to enter next year’s IGVC.

Ever since the birth of the internet and the discovery of Google^®, the trip to the library seems ever too taxing if not out of the way in our extremely hectic lives. Despite the wealth of knowledge and plethora of books, we find the information from Wikipedia able to suffice our curiosity. Well, enough of making such hard choices, it’s time we take the best of both worlds and merge it together: introducing the Readius^®!

As the New York Times commented in a recent article, people these days like to read emails and articles on a large screen with ease, but at the same time, want these devices to fit in the palm of their hands. As the iPhone^® has accomplished this feat through touch features that increase the font size of letters, the Readius^® unfolds into a 5 inch screen that can accommodate about 22 lines of text!

Though primarily used to store books, texts, and other old-fashioned forms of information in its 8 GB memory, this intriguing device is naturally equipped with 3.5G HSPDA Tri band that allows for global wireless connectivity. Between downloading articles from HowStuffWorks.com and importing eTexts through its USB port, this little tech-toy allows up to thirty hours of usage before having to charge it. That’s plenty of time to catch up with a little light reading!

Equipped with a powerful processing engine for high speeds, this machine is already ahead of the game with little known competition in the market. Ultra light, weighing no more than 115 grams, this eReader is also built with Blue Tooth capabilities along with a headphone port for mp3 and other audio formats. The classic evening is thus all encased in this gadget- a quiet night next to the fireplace with a book to read and light music in the background.

But while this form of perfection seems somewhat good for the archetypal reader lets mention the state of the art technology that backs this device. The most unique feature is its ability to flex and roll- it can actually wrap around a finger! Unlike past flexible screens acting on a low resolution viewing, the Readius^® operates via a high resolution screen produced by a technology termed ‘active matrix’. The active matrix consists of, as the same NYT article explains, “transistors behind each pixel that can potentially provide fast switching and high performance”. This same high performance allows for 16 grayscale shades to accommodate for high picture quality; though while our world is in color, a prototype will be constructed that will adjust for websites and books in color, coming this May. These screens are just as clear as an LCD or plasma screen and yet are more durable than the typical Blackberry^® screen, having been tested with hammers.

The product is still not out in the market, but will be released to England, Italy and Germany this coming fall and to the United States next year. The projected price is a ballpark figure of $359 which rivals of course, the price of the iPhone^® and the Blackberry^®. The novel technology of flexible screens is a step toward a new technology market hoping to make companies like iSuppli Corporations, makers of these screens, a projected 2.8 billion dollars in the coming years.

While we still have some time until the Readius^® becomes a reality, we can still appreciate the circuitry involved to create high speeds in turning pages of eTexts and switching between book and music. The ability to still have Google^® at your fingertips, of course, will be an asset that cannot be ignored. The deathly combination of internet and a library all in one place and all mobile makes it the ideal device for the well read person always on the go!

For more information please visit www.readius.com and the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/06/technology/06novelties.html?_r=1&ref=technology&oref=slogin