Virginia Engineering Magazine, Spring 2005 Faculty Notes

Virginia Engineering
Spring 2005, Volume 17, No. 2

Faculty Notes & Briefs

Professor Works to Replace Petroleum with Carbohydrates

Since the 1973 oil crisis, when the OPEC cartel squeezed production of crude oil to drive up prices worldwide, experts have recognized the vital need to develop alternative sources of energy.

In recent years, researchers in the chemical industry have begun to shoulder this challenge and are working to develop new processes and products that use renewable, carbon-based materials, such as plant-based carbohydrates, rather than petroleum. Among these researchers is Robert J. Davis (ChE).

Davis received a three-year, $290,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to study ways that the structure of sugar molecules can be manipulated to produce carbon-based molecules from which plastics, paints, solvents and fibers can be made.

Davis said that the use of water-soluble carbohydrates also may lead to advances in chemical technology and the adoption of more environmentally sound practices that are not possible using traditional petrochemistry.

In particular, Davis and his research team, Erin McKoon and William Ketchie, are working to understand how certain factors, such as temperature and solutions' alkaline levels, affect the action of ruthenium catalysts in controlling the rate of reaction and development of desired products during carbohydrate conversion. Their goal is to be able to control the reactions to create various intermediate chemical products. Read more: www.che.virginia.edu/davis.html.

SIE Researcher Designs Web-based Crime Analysis Toolkit

Donald Brown (SIE) won a research award from the Commonwealth of Virginia to investigate the creation of a statewide crime-reporting system that will provide all local jurisdictions with access to criminal incident reports. The team is working on a new approach to data-sharing known as Web-based Crime Analysis Toolkit (WebCAT). This statewide system will link all jurisdictions in the Commonwealth using National Incident-Based Reporting System data and enable them to share spatially referenced data on crimes and improve their analytical and crime-prevention capabilities.

Glass Coating Proven Corrosion Inhibitor

Gary J. Shiflet (MSE), shown above, and John R. Scully (MSE) have invented a unique metallic glass coating with tunable electrochemical properties that can be tailored in very controlled ways. The glass can provide triggered release of alloying elements that serve as corrosion inhibitors to protect another metal, such as when there is a scratch in a coating. The release is triggered by pH change, which is a tell-tale sign of corrosion. The glass may have multiple functions-such as barrier, sacrificial anode and supplier of chemical inhibitors-all at the same time. Most conventional metals have only one or at most two of these features.

The researchers are working on possible routes for viable coatings, including thermal spray of powders, and laser treatment of powders or crystalline ingots.

CS Faculty Member Wins Medal for Outstanding Contribution

WILLIAM A. WULF (CS), PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF Engineering, was awarded the Ralph Coats Roe Medal from the American Society of Mechanical Engineering in November.

The medal, established in 1972, recognizes an outstanding contribution toward a better public understanding and appreciation of the engineer's worth to contemporary society.

As the medal winner, Wulf will give an authoritative lecture in his field at a general session during the International Mechanical Engineering Congress.

Ralph Coats Roe was a pioneer and innovator in the design and construction of highly efficient power plants and advanced desalting processes. He was an inspiration to his colleagues by his great achievements through self-education in highly sophisticated technologies.

Previous winners of the medal include Carl Sagan, Tracy Kidder, Lee Iacocca, and Congressman Donald L. Ritter.

University Professor Elected to the Institute of Medicine

DR. CATO T. LAURENCIN, UNIVERSITY PROFESSOR WITH APPOINTMENTS IN BME and ChE, and the Lillian T. Pratt Distinguished Professor and chair of orthopedic surgery, was elected to the Institute of Medicine, part of the National Academies, in honor of his contributions to health and medicine.

"Election to the National Academy of Sciences Institute of Medicine is a great distinction in the field of medicine. I am deeply honored to have been chosen," Laurencin said.

Laurencin is a world-renowned expert in shoulder and knee surgery and an international leader in biomaterials and tissue engineering research. He joined U.Va. as a University professor and chairman of orthopedic surgery in 2003. Laurencin is currently Speaker of the House of Delegates of the National Medical Association and a member of the National Science Board of the Food and Drug Administration. He earned his BSE in chemical engineering from Princeton University and his M.D. from Harvard Medical School, where he graduated magna cum laude. Simultaneously, he earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering/biotechnology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Laurencin has been named to America's Top Doctors for 2004 and has also been named to Who's Who in America and Who's Who in Medicine and Health Care. Most recently he has been named to the African Scientific Committee of the African Institutes of Science and Technology.

Hilary Bart-Smith Goes to the Source to Redesign Underwater Vehicles

- Charlotte Crystal

HILARY BART-SMITH (MAE) HOPES ONE DAY TO CREATE vehicles that move so gracefully through the air and water they may be mistaken for living creatures.

Science fiction?

Not for Bart-Smith, who has made this seemingly far-fetched idea her life's work-work that has garnered recognition from the David and Lucile Packard Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

A native of Scotland, Bart-Smith has been interested in engineering since high school. At 16, she participated in a math and physics program for women.

"That experience led to a fascination with understanding how things around me function," she said. "I'm the only woman I know who saw the movie 'Titanic' and was gaga not over Leonardo DiCaprio, but over the boiler room."

Bart-Smith, 30, completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Glasgow, graduating first in her class in mechanical engineering, and received her doctorate from Harvard University in 2000. She completed two years of post-doctoral work at Princeton University where she worked on ultralight materials (metallic foams), before joining the University of Virginia faculty in 2002. Her research interests include multifunctional materials, such as ultralight materials, morphing structures, and electro-active polymers.

It's the morphing structures, in particular, that fuel her imagination. For now they exist only in the laboratory, but some day, Bart-Smith expects to see morphing wings moving submarines silently through the ocean like manta rays. "Mother Nature has had the advantage of millennia to design the most efficient structures and systems," she said. "Design engineers and material scientists have a lot of catching up to do." Using new materials and techniques, Bart-Smith is borrowing from nature to create the vehicles of the future.

The Packard grant gives Bart-Smith $625,000 over five years to pursue her research. The NSF grant provides a similar level of funding. In her career, Bart-Smith has chosen to navigate between what nature has done, what humankind is doing now and what, with a little math and a lot of creativity, might be done in the years ahead. Her journey may not always be free of turbulence, but it is sure to be an interesting ride.

"I'm the only woman I know who saw the movie 'Titanic' and was gaga not over Leonardo DiCaprio, but over the boiler room."

faculty briefs

Paul Allaire (MAE) received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Symposium on Magnetic Bearings.

Raul A. Baragiola (MSE) was plenary speaker at the Workshop on Inelastic Ion-Surface Collisions and gave invited talks at the European Science Foundation Mercury Workshop, the Okayama Symposium on Ion-Surface Interactions, and Fujitsu Corporation in Japan. With Professor R. E. Johnson (MSE) and graduate students, he participated in the Cassini mission, obtaining the first scientific results after orbital insertion around Saturn.

Ellen J. Bass (SIE) was recently elected to the IEEE Systems, Man and Cybernetics Board of Governors for a three-year term.

W. Bernard Carlson's (STS) article on Nikola Tesla, titled "Inventor of Dreams," was published in the March 2005 issue of Scientific American. He is working on a biography of Tesla with support from the Sloan Foundation.

George T. Gillies (BME) was accepted as a Fellow in the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering.

The Society of Engineering Science at the University of Nebraska paid tribute to the research of Cornelius O. Horgan (CE) with a five-session symposium in his honor. The January 2004 issue of the Journal of Elasticity was dedicated to him, and a special two-issue volume of the International

Journal of Nonlinear Mechanics was published containing 23 invited papers dedicated to him.

Jim M. Howe (MSE) received the 2005 Champion H. Mathewson Award from the Minerals, Metals and Materials Society.

John L. Hudson (ChE) won the 2004 Blum Award of the Electrochemical Society National Capital Section.

Anita K. Jones (CS) was awarded the Augusta Ada Lovelace Award by the Association of Women in Computing for outstanding scientific and technical achievement. The award is named after the first computer programmer, Augusta Ada Byron Lovelace.

James H. Lambert (SIE) received a commendation from the Virginia Secretary of Transportation for his research supporting VTrans2025, the Virginia Statewide Long-Range Transportation Plan.

Zongli Lin (ECE) was appointed Associate Editor of Automatica. His book, Linear Systems Theory: A Structural Decomposition Approach, was published by Birkhauser, Boston.

Robert E. Lindberg (MAE) was chosen as an AIAA Fellow.

Pamela M. Norris (MAE) chairs the Education Committee of the ASME Nanotechnology Institute. She is in charge of organizing the annual Nano Training Bootcamp, which offers a detailed and tutorial-based account of advances in fundamentals related to nanoscience in a wide variety of fields.

Shayn Peirce-Cottler (BME) won the Rita Schaffer Young Investigator Memorial Award from the Biomedical Engineering Society.

Robert J. Ribando (MAE) received an award for curriculum innovation at the 2005 ASME International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition.

John R. Scully (MSE) received a certificate of appreciation for service as a consultant to the Columbia Accident Investigation Board.

Brian L. Smith (CE) was selected to serve as chair of the Committee on Advanced Technologies of the ASCE Transportation and Development Institute.

Alfred C. Weaver (CS) presented a paper on information security at the Workshop on Factory Communications Systems (WFCS 2004), which was held in Vienna, Austria, in September 2004.