Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics

Phone 215-746-1818
Email meam@seas.upenn.edu
Website http://www.me.upenn.edu/

Events from this organizer

Today

    • MEAM Seminar: MEAM Faculty Showcase

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Please join us on Tuesday, September 15 for the first of MEAM's two-part 2026 Faculty Showcase. Hosted by MEAM Department Chair, Dr. Kevin Turner, the Faculty Showcase highlights the breadth of research being done in MEAM. On September 15, we will feature the work of Drs. Michael Posa, Prashant Purohit, Jordan Raney, Celia Reina, and […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Lagrangian Stretching: A New Lens on Complex Fluid Flows”

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Viscoelastic flows are common in many natural and industrial applications, such as biofilm transport, drug delivery, and enhanced oil recovery. The stretching of polymeric chains in viscoelastic flows induces elastic instability, which manifests in symmetry-breaking, time-dependent flows, and anomalous transport properties. The knowledge of the polymeric stress field is essential for understanding transport in viscoelastic […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Dynamically Feasible Search-based Motion Planning for Computationally Constrained Robots”

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    David Rittenhouse Laboratory Building, Room 4C2 209 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Fast autonomous flight in cluttered environments such as forests requires an aerial robot to plan its motion online using a computer carried onboard. Computation is scarce, and at high speed the robot cannot follow an arbitrary collision-free path: its trajectory must also be dynamically feasible. Search-based planning with motion primitives is well suited to this […]

    MEAM Ph.D. Thesis Defense: “Integrating Statistical Physics and Data-Driven Methods for Modeling Inelastic Material Behavior”

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    Moore 216 200 S. 33rd Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    How do materials deform and flow? Answering this question requires models that can capture inelastic, non-equilibrium behavior. While continuum mechanics has been remarkably successful in describing such phenomena, fundamental questions remain: How should internal variables, namely, the hidden state descriptors that encode a material's microstructural history, be chosen? And what is the thermodynamic structure underlying […]

    MEAM Seminar: “What an Obstacle Leaves Behind: Colloidal Shadows and Faceted Ice”

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    In this talk, I will cover two problems, both about the structure a small obstacle leaves in its wake. In the first problem, hydrogel posts photopatterned in a microchannel release solute into a flow. A fluorescent solute lets us image the concentration boundary layer directly; an invisible solute leaves its record in the suspended colloids, […]

    • MEAM Seminar: “Nucleation and Growth of Cracks in Elastomers”

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    We explore the nucleation and propagation of cracks within a transparent polydimenthylsiloxane elastomer using the “poker-chip” specimen. This is accomplished not just through the usual macroscopic load and displacement data, but also with synchronized optical images at high spatial and adequate temporal resolution to resolve the evolution of the failure processes. This is augmented with […]

    MEAM Seminar: “Fractured Flows: Suspensions Pushed Too Far”

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    Wu and Chen Auditorium (Room 101), Levine Hall 3330 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA, United States

    Particle suspensions can fracture into intricate patterns as they are pushed out of equilibrium. We probe the fracture and relaxation characteristics of dense aqueous cornstarch suspensions that exhibit discontinuous shear-thickening behavior. Air injection into three-dimensional bulk suspensions can lead to smooth bubbles that rise upwards under the action of buoyancy or to sharp fractures that […]