News

In an article published June 19 on the cover of the Journal of the Royal Society Interface, Virginia Tech researchers have found that wheat plants ‘sneezing’ off condensation can vastly impact the spread of spore-borne diseases such as wheat leaf rust which can cause yield losses of up to 20 percent or more in the United States, and higher average losses in less developed agricultural nations. The study is part of a three-year grant obtained in 2017 from the US Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture to study the dispersal of wheat pathogens by rain splash and jumping-droplet condensation. Jonathan Boreyko, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering is a co-PI on the grant. David...

Two years ago, Kaveh Hamed saw his son Nikaan take his first steps on his own. He watched Nikaan’s one-year-old body teeter on wobbly legs as the baby walked. Nikaan would go from crawling on his belly to standing with a sway, to the first walks, to taking off across the room on two sure feet. These memories make Hamed think about math, as he does when he watches his dog Telli run. When he sees her bound toward him and switch to a trot, he starts to wonder again about the ways he might impart her agility to a robot. For more than 10 years, Hamed has developed control algorithms that enable legged robots to walk and run more like...

For the second time in three years, a mechanical engineering doctoral student has earned the Paul Torgersen Graduate Student Research Excellence Award. The award recognizes the top research done by a graduate student. The first place award, presented in the spring, was given to Sheyda Davaria, a student working in the Vibration, Adaptive Structures and Testing Lab with advisor Pablo Tarazaga, associate professor of mechanical engineering and John R. Jones III Faculty Fellow. Born in Maryland but raised in Iran, Davaria graduated from the University of Tehran with bachelors and master’s degrees in mechanical engineering, and arrived at Virginia Tech in 2015. “During my first year here, I was a teaching assistant and I took a vibrations class with Dr. Tarazaga and at...

The U.S. Department of Energy has a goal of carbon filtration using solid sorbents by 2030. In June, Virginia Tech’s Advanced Power and Propulsion Laboratory became home to a proof-of-concept experiment that could help launch a billion-dollar business that will have enormous implications for fossil fuel burning power plants, specifically how pollutants are collected and recycled, and thus impact the long-term goal. Partnering with MOVA Technologies based in Pulaski, Virginia, Joseph Meadows, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering will analyze the company’s panel-bed filters at his test cell in the lab. With Meadows, Stephen Martin, an associate professor of chemical engineering, will serve as the subject-matter-expert in the field of solid sorbents. “Working with MOVA, we will measure the efficacy of the...

For the second time in two years, Virginia Tech’s agBOT student team came home from Indiana with a first-place trophy. The 4th annual agBOT competition, hosted by Purdue University’s College of Agriculture and Gerrish Farms, was held in West Lafayette, Indiana, May 16-18. It consisted of two separate competitions: a weed and seed event and a competition to design an autonomous system that can collect, store, and prepare a soil sample for analysis. The team, made up of 35 students from mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering, and computer science, all in the College of Engineering, were divided into five sub-teams. Hongxu ‘Howard’ Guo, a spring 2019 graduate and a double major in mechanical engineering and electrical engineering, was the project manager and overall...