School Notes: School of Engineering & Applied Science
November/December 2015

Engineering clean water

Three engineering faculty members will be part of an ambitious effort to provide clean water to millions of people and make US energy production more sustainable and cost-effective. The effort will be based out of the Nanotechnology Enabled Water Treatment Systems center (NEWT) at Rice University in Houston and funded with an $18.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Menachem Elimelech, Roberto C. Goizueta Professor of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, will serve as NEWT’s co–principal investigator and lead researcher for the center’s membrane processes research. Professors Jaehong Kim and Julie Zimmerman, both of the chemical and environmental engineering department, will also be part of the effort.

Bringing sketching into the twenty-first century

With funding from the National Science Foundation, computer science professor Julie Dorsey has developed a software program that allows the user to sketch in three dimensions. The program, developed with her software company Mental Canvas, combines traditional drawing with 3-D modeling by providing the fluidity of sketching with the ability to see the picture from all angles. The software will be released as a commercial product later this year. As an example of its capabilities, Mental Canvas released in August its first product, The Other Side in 3D, which reimagines The Other Side, a wordless print book by Connecticut illustrator Istvan Banyai.

Students win ASME design contest

For a project that used the kinetic energy of a motorcycle to generate electrical power, a team of Yale engineering students was named a cowinner of the 2015 American Society of Mechanical Engineers Design the Future Competition. The team was made up of mechanical engineering students Bernardo Saravia, Chinmay Jaju, Gordon McCambridge, and Regina Chan, and biomedical engineering student Olga Wroblewski. Over one semester, the team designed and built a generator powered by a motorcycle. The project was inspired by a student trip to Rohvitangitaa, a roughly 2,000-person community in northwestern Cameroon. There, one in four households have a motorcycle, but most residents have no steady source of electricity.