Mechanical Engineering

Yumin Gao, Leo Li, Minhal Dhanjy, Darsham Bhosale, Kateryna Kharenko and Ryan Goethals (clockwise from top left) pose with their prototypes and trophies.

Scrap metal-powered lights win Y-Prize 2020

The winning team of this year’s Y-Prize, an invention competition in which entrants are challenged to pitch an innovative business plan for a technology developed at Penn Engineering, Metal Light, proposes technology to provide illumination for houses not connected to electrical grids.

Penn Today Staff ・

Kathie Jin adjusts her helmet inside a Penn Electric Racing car.

Kathie Jin races towards the future with Penn Electric Racing

As the mechanical co-lead and operations lead for Penn Electric Racing (PER), a Formula SAE Electric Racing team, Engineering junior Kathie Jin leads a group of eighty students to design, build and race electric cars.

Penn Today Staff ・

A dish of bespoke 3D printed chocolates

Evan and the chocolate factory

Engineering student Evan Weinstein fixated on the idea of liberating bespoke chocolates from the confines of both the bar and the mold. Rather than cast a chocolate shape, why not build it? Cocoa Press is his solution. 

Tina Rodia ・

a group of people seated at a circle of chairs talking to each other

Inspiring young women in STEM

Over two days, nearly two dozen female STEM role models at Penn welcomed more than 100 high school students and teachers to campus as part of the Girls Advancing in STEM (GAINS) Initiative Conference on campus.

Erica K. Brockmeier ・

a round disk making a slow-motion wave over a field of small metal balls

Making waves with metamaterials

Penn engineers are using a custom mechanical metamaterial, an artificial structure with properties that are defined by its geometry instead of its composition, to study how non-linear waves move in a soft, 2D system to better understand how mechanical metamaterials could be used in the future.

Penn Today Staff ・



Media Contact


Erica K. Brockmeier

Erica K. Brockmeier Science News Officer
ekbrock@upenn.edu

In the News


Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Why not fly over it?’ Uber picks New Jersey firms in ambitious bid to beat traffic congestion

Rahul Mangharam of the School of Engineering and Applied Science commented on Uber’s new air taxi venture. “It’s going to be a very congested sky,” he said. “You want to make sure that each flight plan is safe by design, and that even if they do mess up for some reason, they have a fallback option.”

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Gizmodo

This freaky robotic fish is powered by ‘blood’

James Pikul of the School of Engineering and Applied Science co-authored a study in which researchers developed a soft, robotic lionfish powered by a blood-like compound. “This robot blood is our first demonstration of storing energy in a fluid that is normally only used for actuation,” he said.

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The New York Times

The microbots are on their way

Marc Miskin of the School of Engineering and Applied Science spoke about his cell-sized microbots, which may one day be used for a variety of purposes ranging from measuring brain networks to cleaning cellphone batteries.

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Philadelphia Inquirer

Not ‘a snowball’s chance in you-know-where’: The $1.2 billion King of Prussia rail line is a longshot

Vukan Vuchic of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences said the probability of advancing a King of Prussia train line proposal “strongly depends on who controls the U.S. House and Senate. I think elections next year will be drastically important.”

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The Economist

Autonomous weapons and the new laws of war

The School of Arts and Sciences’ Michael Horowitz weighed in on the downsides of requiring arms control for the use of autonomous weaponry, saying it would be “extremely hard to verify using traditional arms-control techniques.”

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Technical.ly Philly

For a glimpse into the future, look at aerial robotics

An event about aerial robotics with the School of Engineering and Applied Science’s dean Vijay Kumar is featured.

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