Researchers from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, in conjunction with the team from Oak Ridge National Laboratory, recently developed a novel method for producing tracer particles for turbulence research in liquid helium at temperatures just 1-2 degrees above absolute zero. The technique, which used neutrons to produce molecular tracers in liquid helium, was outlined in a paper in the April edition of Physical Review Letters and was selected as the Editor’s Suggestion. 

Senior design engineering students from the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering presented their project, Virtual Lens’ at the InNOLEvation® Challenge this spring and were honored for the “Most Viable” project during the event which earned them $4,000 for their effort.  Other honorees from the college included AirWise, Sway Aid and JAMR Modular Music Workstation.

Weston Dudley was nominated by the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering for Florida State University's 2020 President's Undergraduate Humanitarian of the Year Award. A senior mechanical engineering student with a minor in mathematics, he in a field of 11 FSU students from across the university nominated for the award.

Scientists at the Florida State University-headquartered National High Magnetic Field Laboratory have made a discovery in fluid dynamics that is truly worth uncorking a bottle of fine wine.

Wei Guo, an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, and MagLab graduate research assistant Toshiaki Kanai published a new study in the journal Physical Review Letters that sheds light on how quantum fluids – also called superfluids –merge. It turns out they use a corkscrew mechanism.

Using network science—part of a larger mathematical field called graph theory—professor of mechanical engineering William Oates, former graduate student Peter Woerner, Ph.D. and associate professor Kunihiko “Sam” Taira mapped long-range atomic forces onto an incredibly complex graph to simulate macroscopic material behavior.

If you’ve ever had a magnetic resonance imaging scan (MRI), you have benefited from the research done at the Applied Superconductivity Center (ASC), which has been part of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory (NHMFL) and the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering since 2006. In the 1980s, while at UW-Madison, David Larbalestier, an engineering professor, and Peter Lee, Ph.D., an ASC scientist, developed the technology industry still uses today to produce the Nb-Ti superconducting wire that creates the magnetic field in MRI systems.

The six-member team validated their prototype design at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, which supports the 2022 Psyche Mission—a quest to send a spacecraft to the eponymous asteroid to collect data. The team created a prototype of the Xenon Flow Controller, designed to provide efficient flow rates of xenon gas to the Hall-effect thruster, an ion thruster that will propel the spacecraft.

In May 2019, Shiran Bao, Ph.D., a postdoctoral researcher at the cryogenics lab at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory, was selected as the winner of the prestigious Peter Kapitza Award from the International Institute of Refrigeration (IIR).