About ME
Leadership in High Technology (1971-present)
Since its inception, ME programs have been geared to preparing students to compete in an increasingly rich field of productive enterprise. Just as steam engineering gave way to automotive and industrial engineering, a marvelous new array of specialties routinely joined the traditional fields of ME– from advanced lasers and robotics to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS).
The department's commitment to basic and applied research has only deepened in recent decades. Total research expenditures climbed from some $500,000 annually in the early 1970s to a projected $21.7 million in 2000-01, a figure that represents not only the uncovering of new knowledge but also an expanded set of learning experiences for the many students taking part in on-going research activities.
Diverse Research in Expanded Facilities
During this era, the department's research and instructional activities moved entirely to new labs, classrooms, and offices on North Campus after some eighty years in the East and West Engineering Buildings on Central Campus. Thanks largely to increased support for research, the department developed advanced laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art computing and experimental equipment for research in astonishingly diverse areas, including automotive/combustion; biomechanics; computational mechanics; cavitation and multiphase flow; transport, reaction, and phase change in porous media; variable gravity heat transfer; optical and mechanical coordinate measuring machines in manufacturing; precision machining; tribology; welding; machine tool sensing and control; mobile robotics; ceramic composites; and the tiny realm of microelectromechanical devices.
Other important new facilities were also added, including the Solar Energy Lab, established in 1973 under Professor John A. Clark; and the Office for the Study of Automotive Transportation (OSAT), which was launched in 1978 under the leadership of Professor David Cole. OSAT became the only ongoing university-based group in the U.S. to so thoroughly study the automobile industry by researching topics ranging from industry competitiveness and labor relations to forecasts of technical and market trends.
Increasing Sophistication and Breakthrough Studies
A standout development of the recent era has been the department's increasing sophistication in technology transfer. An example is the career of Milton Chace, first a doctoral student in ME in the 1960s, then a faculty member in the seventies and eighties. As a graduate student, Chace saw that problems in mechanism design could be clarified through the use of classical vector calculus. He found that the prediction and simulation of motion of planar mechanisms could be based on the solution of simple vector loop equations, and he extended those methods to three-dimensional mechanisms, which could often be represented by a limited set of four-sided spatial vector loops, which he termed "vector tetrahedrons." Next Chace discovered that these equations could be structured for solution by digital computer, and after two years at IBM, he returned to Michigan as a professor in ME, where he and his research colleagues developed a two-dimensional program called DRAM (Dynamic Response of Articulated Machinery). DRAM featured a computer language that enabled automated development of the correct differential equation set for whatever problem the user modeled, increasing its utility enormously by eliminating the error rate per problem that user-developed equations ordinarily generate. In 1977, Chace and two colleagues– Mike Korybalski and John Angell– formed a company they called Mechanical Dynamics, Inc. (MDI) to provide software for mechanical dynamic system analysis to Fortune 500 companies. Chace left ME in 1983 to concentrate on MDI, which grew to become the world's largest developer and supplier of mechanical systems simulation software, with clients in more than 30 nations.
Another thrust in ME research was the important work carried out under Professor Charles Vest, who became dean of the Engineering College, provost of the University, and eventually president of MIT. Vest's early work on holographic measurement of temperature fields in natural convection led to his experiments in computed tomography. In the early 1970s, Vest and his students began to consider the experimental information generated by multiple beams traversing fluids in many directions. They quickly realized that, given enough viewing directions, three-dimensional measurements of the density of fluids could be obtained mathematically from interferometric measurements. The mathematical procedure for obtaining these measurements is similar to the procedures used to obtain medical images from CAT and MRI scanners. Vest's work led to a powerful imaging method that could also be used to validate predictions in combustion, aerodynamics, and heat transfer.
Departmental Changes in Curriculum, Faculty, and Research
The pace of administrative change also quickened during this era. In 1979, ME merged with the department of Applied Mechanics, only to split again in 2000. In 1983, the department, with the rest of the College of Engineering, joined the personal computer revolution with the founding of the Computer-Aided Engineering Network (CAEN), which grew to become one of the largest integrated, multi-vendor workstation networks in all of academe.
Under department chair Panos Papalambros, a comprehensive review of the curriculum, beginning in 1992-93, led to several significant improvements. The department's strong core in engineering science was augmented by an increased emphasis on hands-on experience, creative problem solving, communication, and teamwork. New lab requirements were implemented, as was a sophomore-level class providing every student an opportunity to actually make something, beginning with a computer-aided design and ending with a finished product in a machine shop.
Even as the curriculum was being rewritten, the department was undertaking perhaps its greatest expansion ever in faculty and research. From 1990 to 1995, twenty new professors were hired, all of them among the most promising young engineering scholars in the world, and many with experience in such crossover disciplines as astrophysics, chemical engineering, computer science, electrical engineering, and precision manufacturing. Several received the prestigious Early CAREER Development Award from the National Science Foundation. This period also saw an enormous spike in the department's funded research, from $3.6 million in 1988 to $9.3 million in 1994.
In keeping with the goal of being the world's undisputed leader in automotive engineering and manufacturing, one of every four of those new faculty members were recruited for their strengths in automotive dynamics and control systems, design, manufacturing processes, machining systems, and thermal fluid applications related to materials processing. The department's depth in automotive expertise led to the establishment of several new centers: the Automotive Research Center (ARC), funded by the U.S. Army; the Center for Dimensional Control and the Engineering Research Center in Reconfigurable Machining Systems, both supported by the National Science Foundation and corporate sponsors; and the Center for Laser Materials Processing, funded in part by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. These enhanced capabilities made it natural for the department to offer a master's degree in Automotive Engineering, as well as master's and doctoral degrees in Manufacturing Engineering.
Reaching the Apex
In the late nineties, faculty energies and talents continued to blossom in the form of new research efforts and facilities. These included the Integrated Manufacturing Systems Laboratory in the Herbert H. Dow Building; the General Motors Collaborative Research Laboratory, which was spearheaded by Professor Papalambros; the Combustion and Synthesis Kinetics and Diagnostics Laboratory, led by Professors Arvind Atreya and Volker Sick; and the Center for Laser Aided Intelligent Manufacturing (CLAIM), headed by Professors Jyoti Mazumder, Noboru Kikuchi, and Debasish Dutta.
For all its efforts, the ME department of the 1990s was consistently ranked among the five most prestigious mechanical engineering programs in the United States by U.S. News and World Report.