Momentum - The Magazine for Virginia Tech Mechanical Engineering Vol. 3 No. 4 Winter 2018 | Page 4

From the Dept Head
Azim Eskandarian
2019 shaping up for more ME success
Happy holidays wherever this issue of
Momentum finds you. 2018 has been
another great year for the department, the
college and the university.
their accomplishments on page 9 and I
urge you to click the link to read the entire
story on VTNews.
As I'm sure many of you are aware,
Virginia Tech was instrumental in Novem-
ber's announcement that Amazon would
make northern Virginia part of a split
second headquarters for the company. As
part of the plan, Virginia Tech will develop
a 1M square foot Innovation Campus. On page 14 you can read about how our
nuclear engineers are using a new lab in
the Corporate Research Center to solidify
their place as a national leader in the field.
The new lab is one of only a handful in
the country to incorporate a large number
of tools to design our next generation of
nuclear technology.
Mechanical engineering is well posi-
tioned to be a major player in this bold step
forward, as we already have a presence in
the greater Washington D.C. area. You can
read more about the proposed campus on
page 10. On page 16 our DREAMS Lab team is
continuing to exploit their mastery of 3D
printing Kapton, and on page 18, one of
our vibrations lab has new tech on loan
courtesy of the U.S. Navy, giving us more
capacity for leading-edge research.
While things are going to start gearing
up in northern Virginia, here in Blacks-
burg, our ever-increasing roster of world-
class faculty, which now numbers more
than 60, is producing ground-breaking
research across a wide variety of disciplines
within the field. Our cover story starts on page 18 and
involves a collaborative effort with Virgin-
ia Tech and several other universities using
bats to understand, and improve upon
sonar signal processing. The applications
of this work include national security,
drone research and much more.
In Dubai, mechanical engineers were
part of a team that built the international
award-winning FutureHaus as part of the
2018 Solar Decathlon. You can read about As always, we present some of the great
work of our department, so please take a
few minutes, click some links, watch some
videos, and enjoy your ME department.
MOMENTUM
FALL 2018
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