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Niko Simpkins: At the nexus of engineering and music
Niko Simpkins sitting with arms folded, smiling

Penn Engineering undergraduate Niko Simpkins. (Image: Penn Engineering Today)

Niko Simpkins: At the nexus of engineering and music

For Niko Simpkins, a musician who performs, produces, and engineers his own tracks, the most exciting processes combine structure and flexibility, creativity, and rigor. As a third-year student in the School of Engineering and Applied Science, he sees his mechanical engineering education as a framework for problem solving that might serve him across a broad set of endeavors, and for now, he’s more interested in learning than narrowing to any one particular career path.

Evan Lerner

Using stress to shape microlevel structures
a trapezoid with gray dots on the left and colored dots on the right representing atoms in a disordered material

Using stress to shape microlevel structures

A new study describes how external forces drive the rearrangement of individual particles in disordered solids, enabling new ways to imbue materials with unique mechanical properties.

Erica K. Brockmeier

‘Nanocardboard’ flyers could serve as Martian atmospheric probes
Graphic rendering of nanocardboard

In this artist’s conception, fleets of flyers could be launched from ground-based rovers and steered with lasers to collect samples. Planets and moons with thin atmospheres and low gravities would enhance these flyers’ ability to levitate by shooting air through their corrugated channels. (Image: Penn Engineering)

‘Nanocardboard’ flyers could serve as Martian atmospheric probes

As NASA plans to launch its next Mars rover, Perseverance, this summer, Penn Engineers are now testing their ‘nanocardboard flyers’ ability to lift payloads.

From Penn Engineering Today

New scavenger technology allows robots to ‘eat’ metal for energy
A robot resembling a toy car attached to a pole turns round and round over a surface covered in hydrogel.

Rather than a battery, the researchers’ metal-air scavenger vehicle gets energy from breaking chemical bonds in the aluminum surface it travels over. The vehicle keeps going until the hydrogel slab it’s dragging dries out or the surface is completely corroded, but a freely moving robot could seek out new sources of water and metal.

New scavenger technology allows robots to ‘eat’ metal for energy

Penn Engineering researchers’ new metal-air scavenger vehicle gets energy from breaking chemical bonds in the aluminum surface it travels over, rather than from batteries.

From Penn Engineering Today

Scrap metal-powered lights win Y-Prize 2020
Yumin Gao, Leo Li, Minhal Dhanjy, Darsham Bhosale, Kateryna Kharenko and Ryan Goethals (clockwise from top left) pose with their prototypes and trophies.

Yumin Gao, Leo Li, Minhal Dhanjy, Darsham Bhosale, Kateryna Kharenko and Ryan Goethals (clockwise from top left) pose with their prototypes and trophies. Their proposal, Metal Light, would use Penn Engineering technology to provide illumination for houses not connected to electrical grids.

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

Looking to mud to study how particles become sticky
Gif of water moving across a microscope plate, leaving behind several particles

Using a model system of glass particles, researchers from Penn found "solid bridges" formed by smaller-size particles between larger ones. The same bridges were present in suspensions of clay, a common component of natural soils. These structures provided stability, the team found, even when a moving channel of water threatened to wash the particle clumps away. (Video: Jerolmack laboratory)

Looking to mud to study how particles become sticky

A collaboration of geophysicists and fluid mechanics experts led to a fundamental new insight into how tiny ‘bridges’ help particles of all kinds form aggregates.

Katherine Unger Baillie

Engineers collaborate to create electroadhesive grippers
Hand holding a magnifying glass over back of disassembled smartphone

Engineers collaborate to create electroadhesive grippers

A collaborative team has developed a method for electroadhesion—which exploits the same phenomenon as static cling—to manipulate microscale objects.

Penn Today Staff