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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...

On May 2 the second class was inducted into the Mechanical Engineering Society of Distinguished Alumni during a ceremony at the Inn at Virginia Tech. The society was created in 2018 to formally recognize alumni who demonstrated extraordinary achievement in their careers, and to promote greater interaction between alumni, faculty, staff, and students. Class of 2019 inductees are: John C. Blanton BSME, 1976; MSME, 1977; PhD, 1981 An internationally known and respected leader in the field of gas turbine design and technology, Dr. John Blanton has maintained life-long commitments to the sound fundamental practice of mechanical engineering and to his alma mater. Starting as a student and continuing throughout his lengthy career with General Electric and now as a consultant, Blanton excelled at complementing corporate engineering...

Wing Ng, the Christopher C. Kraft Endowed Professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering, has been named an Alumni Distinguished Professor by the Virginia Tech Board of Visitors. The professorship is a pre-eminent appointment, recognizing remarkable scholarship and service, as well as extraordinary teaching that has influenced the lives of generations of students. The Board of Visitors appoints Alumni Distinguished Professors on a 10-year appointment to fewer than 1 percent of university faculty to recognize outstanding contributions to the instructional program of the university. “I congratulate Dr. Ng for his outstanding service to Virginia Tech as an exemplary educator and researcher,” said Cyril Clarke, Virginia Tech executive vice president and provost. “Both a pioneer in his field of research and an entrepreneur, Dr. Ng...

Walter F. O’Brien Jr., the J. Bernard Jones Professor of Mechanical Engineering, passed away July 25 surrounded by his family. O'Brien, who was born in Roanoke in 1937, received his B.S. and Ph.D. from Virginia Tech in 1960 and 1968, respectively, and he earned his M.S. from Purdue University. He was a member of the Virginia Tech faculty for more than 52 years, and was the first faculty member from the department to receive a named professorship. O'Brien served as an assistant, associate, and professor of mechanical engineering, and in 1987 was a visiting scientist in the Aero Propulsion Laboratory at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. In 1990 he was appointed Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies for the College of...

A decade ago a new idea was brought into the general scientific community – shedding water from condensers was more efficient by using surface tension to make microscopic water droplets ‘jump’ off the surface. The idea took the research community by storm. “In the last decade since I discovered the jumping droplets, the debate has been using gravity versus jumping,” said Jonathan Boreyko, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the College of Engineering. The problem was, because the jumping itself occurs independent of gravity, what happened after the jump wasn’t being considered.  Five years after his original paper, Boreyko went back to the lab to discover that for efficiency, jumping and gravity should not be mutually exclusive. Using superhydrophobic surfaces which have nano-pillars...