Eight Mechanical Engineering Faculty Present at ASME Conference

Eight faculty members from the Department of Mechanical Engineering attended, presented, and were divisional chairs at the 2001 ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. These conferences included the following:

1. 18th Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise

2. 27th Design Automation Conference

3. 13th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology

4. 15th Reliability, Stress Analysis, and Failure Prevention Conference

5. 6th Design for Manufacturing Conference

6. 21st Computers and Information in Engineering Conference

7. International Issues in Engineering Design

Associate Professor Balakumar Balachandran served as the Technical Program Chair of the Conference. He was also the Program Chair for the 18th Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise and served as its Co-Chair of the Non-Smooth Systems I session and the Stability and Control of Piecewise Linear Systems session. He was also the Co-Organizer of the symposium "Nonlinear Dynamics and Control of Engineering Systems."

Professor Shapour Azarm served as the Chair of the Optimization Algorithms session of the 27th Design Automation Conference and presented two papers: "Product Line Design Selection Under Uncertainty and with Competitive Advantage" co-authored with his former Ph.D. student Dr. Hui Li; and "Some Preliminary Results on the Development and Comparison of a New Multiobjective Genetic Algorithms," coauthored with Ali Farhang-Mehr and Dr. Jin Wu (a former Ph.D. student of Dr. Azarm). Dr. Azarm also served as a Panelist in the NSF Workshop on Decision Based Design. As a panelist, he gave a talk in the workshop on "Product Design Selection Methods with Few and Many Customers."

Professor Amr Baz served as the Co-Chair of the Smart Mechanical Systems I, II, & III sessions of the 18th Biennial Conference on Mechanical Vibration and Noise, and was the Co-Organizer of the symposium on Smart Mechanical Systems. He was a panelist on "Noise Control with Simulation Based Design" and presented three papers: "Newtonian and Variational Formulations of the Vibrations of Plates with Active Constrained Layer Dumping" with Chul H. Park; "Localization and Control of Wave Propagation in Active Periodic Fluid-Loaded Shells" with M. Ruzzene of the Catholic University of America; and "Optimal Design of Underwater Shells with Active Stiffeners" with W. Akl (UM) and M. Ruzzene (CUA). In addition, Dr. Baz gave a short course on "Active & Passive Damping."

Professor Ashwani K. Gupta served as the Co-Chair of the Energy Systems session of the 21st Computers and Information in Engineering Conference and presented the technical paper "Swirl Distribution Effects on Thermal Characteristics of Premixed Flames" with Sean Archer. Dr. Gupta also serves as the Vice Chair of the ASME Computers and Information in Engineering Division.

Assistant Professor Satyndra K. Gupta served as Paper Review Coordinator and Chair of the Design and Manufacturing Representation session of the 6th Design for Manufacturing Conference, as well as the Chair of the Design Approaches for Assemblies and Tooling session and the Tool Path Planning for Freeform Surfaces and Pocket Features session of the 21st Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. Dr. Gupta also presented the following technical papers: "An Efficient Geometric Algorithm for Extracting Mechanical Elements: A Step Towards Developing an Automated Extracting Tool for MEMS" with Sashidhar Bellam; "Integrating Market Research with the Product Development Process: A Step Toward Design for Profit" with Anoop K. Samuel; "A Mixed Integer Programming Formulation for Generating Shared Press-Brake Setups" with Deepak Rajagopal; and "An Algorithm to Generate Efficient Cutter Path for Pocket Milling Operations Using Modified Zigzag Strategy" with Sumil K. Saini and Zhiyang Yao. In addition, Dr. Gupta has been elected to serve as program chair for 7th Design for Manufacturing Conference. Details can be found at http://ic.arc.nasa.gov/ic/directory/people/itumer/DFM.html.

Associate Professor Jeffrey Herrmann served as Review Coordinator for the 6th Design for Manufacturing Conference, as well as Chair of its Design for Cost session. He was also the Chair of the Internet-centric Data Models and Knowledge Management session of the 21st Computers and Information in Engineering Conference. In addition, he presented the papers "Affordable Space Systems Manufacturing: Intelligent Synthesis Technology, Process Planning, and Production Scheduling" with Mark Fleischer, Edward Lin, and Vidit Mathur; and "Incorporating Manufacturing Cycle Time Cost in New Product Development" with co-author Mandar Chincholkar.

Associate Professor Peter Sandborn presented the paper "Using Yielded Cost as a Metric for Modeling Manufacturing Processes" with Daniel V. Becker in the Design for Cost session.

Associate Professor Linda Schmidt served as Chair of the Making Decisions on Design session of the 13th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology. She also presented the technical paper "Transformation of an EGT Grammar: New Grammar, New Designs" with Xin Li (UM) and Weidong He, Lixing Li, and Yuanmei Qian of the Dalian Railway Institute. This paper was also one of six papers nominated for the Conference's Xerox Best Paper Award. In addition, Dr. Schmidt was a Co-Convenor of Tutorial 3: NSF Open Workshop on Decision-Based Design. This effort, now in its fifth year, is a collaboration between the University of Maryland, SUNY Buffalo, and University of Illinois at Chicago. It is the 12th in a series of meetings hosted at conferences, and can be found on the web at http://dbd.eng.buffalo.edu. There were over 50 participants in the workshop during this conference. Dr. Schmidt was also selected as the Program Chair for the 15th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) . It will be held in Chicago September 2-6, 2003 as part of the 2003 ASME Design Technical Conferences.

In all, there were a total of over 700 presentations given during the four-day conference.

Published September 15, 2001