Overview
Innovation in product design and manufacturing has become a major driver for industrial competitiveness and profitability in recent years. As enabling technologies to become more easily accessible, engineers are faced with increasing demands for designing and producing more complex mechanical devices to serve the needs of society. Next-generation engineering products will be ‘smart' with many functionalities; they will be made of new materials; they will increase energy efficiency and reduce environmental impact; they will vary in size from nano to mega scales, and they will be more closely integrated with information processing systems. Also as mechanical systems are becoming increasingly complex to analyze and expensive to experiment with, more emphasis will have to be placed on computer-aided analysis, design, verification, and manufacturing.
Our research program in mechanical engineering responds to these trends and focuses on basic research related to materials science and process engineering, product design, and information integrated manufacturing processes. In doing so applications to different physical processes are studied (e.g. energy systems, bioengineering, metal forming, polymer processing, discrete part manufacturing to name a few).