Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 1 No. 3 | Page 8

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ME a strong presence at ASME IDETC 2016
The Mechanical Engineering Department had a
strong presence at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers International Design Technical Conference, organized by the ASME Design Engineering
Division (DED) in Charlotte, North Carolina in August.
IDECT is the DED's primary conference.

She is past chair of the VDC and has chaired the
Advanced Vehicle Technologies conference for
several years as well as the 2nd Biennial Conference
on Dynamics for Design. Two Sandu lab students also
attended the conference including the co-author of a
paper at AVT.

- Professor Corina Sandu, L.S. Randolph Professor Robert Parker, and John
R. Jones III Associate Professor Lei Zuo
attended the joint DED Executive Committee and Design, Materials, and Manufacturing Segment Leadership Team and
general DED meetings.

- Parker serves as the Chair of Technical Committee
of Vibration and Sound of the ASME DED.

- Sandu is DED Executive Committee
vice-chair and treasurer for 2016-2017
and a member of two DED Technical
Committees. She co-organized and
co-chaired two symposia at the 18th
International Conference on Advanced
Vehicle Dynamics conference of the VDC
at IDETC: Advances in Ground Vehicles
Dynamics and Controls, and Advances in
Methods for Tire Design and Mechanics.

Sandu

Parker

- Zuo is a member of two DED Technical Committees and has served as the Program Chair for the
18th International Conference on AVT, and as travel
award chair for the 28th Conference on Mechanical
Vibration and Noise. He also served as the judge
panelist for the ASME Innovative Design Simulation
Challenge. Zuo is one of four founding members of
the IDSC. Several students and post-docs in the Zuo
lab attended and presented papers.
- Associate Professor Chris Williams gave an
invited talk as part of keynote panel on Design for
Additive Manufacturing, Exploring an Expanding
Design Space.

Zuo

- Professor Tomonori Furukawa had two students
attend and present papers at the AVT.

Haghighat addresses Virginia nuclear energy summit

Virginia is a
top-10 state in
nuclear-generated electricity. Dominion
Generation’s
four reactors
at its North
Haghighat
Anna and
Surry power
stations generate 96 percent of
the state’s carbon-free electricity.
That is part of what more than
100 government officials and
industry and education leaders
heard at the Virginia Nuclear Energy Summit, recently this summer
in Richmond.
Co-sponsored by the Nuclear
Energy Institute (NEI) and the Vir-

ginia Nuclear Energy Consortium
(VNEC) the summit galvanized
efforts among the state’s nuclear-related stakeholders to more
consistently promote the technology and its benefits.

Alireza Haghighat, professor and
director of the Nuclear Science
and Engineering Lab (NSEL) at the
Virginia Tech Research Center ─
Arlington, served as chair of the
NEI-VNEC Joint Nuclear Summit.
Haghighat said while Virginia
has a strong industry, its nuclear
engineering education is new and
he pointed out that nationally, a
number of initiatives have recently
begun which can be attributed to
the COP-21 conference in Paris on
Climate Change challenges.

These initiatives include two
Department of Energy (DOE) public-private partnerships: Gateway
for Accelerated Innovation in
Nuclear (GAIN) program, whic h
provides the nuclear community
access to government resources
for moving concepts to commercial readiness; and a funding
opportunity in Advanced Reactor
Concept Development (two
consortia led by startups received
five-year awards of $40 million
each with $10 million matching).
Two new private capital investments are also among the
initiatives, according to Haghighat.
They include Bill Gate’s Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a major
See Energy on Page 10