By day, Matt Schmotzer (BSME '12) works at Ford Motor Company. At night, he becomes amateur roller coaster designer! His latest creation is an entirely CAD-designed, 3D-printed, and fully functional 1/25th scale version of Invertigo, an inverse boomerang coaster at Kings Island in Ohio. Matt recently shared his creation with Purdue's Theme Park Engineering and Design group (TPED).

James Gibert is working to develop smart packaging: for example, a cardboard box that generates its own electricity in transit, using triboelectric harvesters. James, assistant professor of Mechanical Engineering, recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF), in conjunction with Clemson University's College of Agriculture, Forestry, and Life Sciences.

Congratulations to Daniel Dumbacher, who has been appointed executive director of the AIAA, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics. Daniel is a graduate of Purdue ME, a professor at the School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and has decades of experience at NASA.

The faster computers get, the more heat they generate. Purdue ME students have solved this problem by building liquid-cooled microchannels directly into the chips themselves. The device was designed by PhD candidate Kevin Drummond, under the direction of Suresh Garimella and Justin Weibel.

A new type of tactile sensor can be easily embedded into fabrics, potentially enabling anything in the real world to become an interactive device. iSoft uses multimodal sensing on piezoresistive elastomer, which can then be customized by the user to form any shape or function. The technology was developed at Karthik Ramani's C Design Lab.

We have a faculty opening in Mechanical Engineering: Professor of Engineering Practice, who will also serve as Director of Senior Design, guiding students through their capstone projects.

More than 300,000 lumbar discectomies are performed in the US every year -- with rigid tools, in a tiny, difficult workspace. David Cappelleri has developed a flexible, 3D-printed micro-robotic tool that can help surgeons perform the procedure more safely and effectively -- even from thousands of miles away!

Congrats to Chris Goldenstein and Carlo Scalo, who received grants from the AFOSR, Air Force Office of Scientific Research. Each grant is $450,000 over three years.
Chris will study Characterization of Nanopropellant Combustion and Agglomerate-breakup Physics via Infrared Laser-absorption Imaging. Carlo's research area is Direct Numerical Simulation of Hypersonic Boundary Layer Transition over Distributed Surface Porosity.

It's harvest time at Apolloni Vineyards, in Oregon's Willamette Valley. Learn how Laurine Apolloni (BSME '90) uses her engineering skills to organize which grapes to pick and when, what chemicals to add, what machinery to use, and which wines are best to serve with which meal.

IEEE Spectrum just featured an article on PathVis, the smartphone-based lab working to detect cholera in Haiti. PathVis was developed by Purdue ME grad Katie Clayton, advised by Steve Wereley.