New shape could make blades lighter, larger and more efficient Biplanes, the fixed-wing aircraft with two wings, one above the other, exist today mostly in aviation museums, World War I movies and black-and-white photos. But thanks to an innovation by UCLA engineers,...

MAE Professor Richard Wirz and his research group had their sulfur thermal energy storage (TES) research featured in Advances in Engineering. From the research summary: Professor Richard Wirz at UCLA proposed a novel high-temperature thermal storage solution...

Smaller electronic components offer us more power in our pockets. But thinner and thinner components pose engineering problems. Anisotropic materials—those with properties that vary in direction—hold promise for being unusually versatile. Still, their properties,...

Mechanical engineers at UCLA and China’s Tsinghua University have opened a new path toward reusable energy-absorbing materials – ones designed to take an impact, then bounce back to their original shape and strength. The study was published in Advanced Functional...

MAE Professor Xiaochun Li's research paper "Aluminum with dispersed nanoparticles by laser additive manufacturing" was published in Nature Communications. The paper discusses how the laser printed nanocomposite delivers a record-high yield strength of up to 1000 MPa,...

Dennis Hong's new robot ALPHRED 2 was featured in IEEE Spectrum article "RoMeLa's Newest Robot Is a Curiously Symmetrical Dynamic Quadruped". Excerpt: As it turns out, bipeds aren’t the only robots that can potentially benefit from a bit of a kinematic rethink. RoMeLa...

The advance – using an electrical push rather than a pull – could lead to more reliable medical diagnostic tools When medical laboratories analyze blood samples for signs of disease, they sometimes use instruments that rely on a technology called digital...

Casting super strong metals with grain sizes down to nanometers during slow cooling. The study was published in Science Advances For several years, Professor Xiaochun Li has been incorporating dense nanoparticles to make materials stronger and tougher – for...

Process could be useful for applications in manufacturing and architecture UCLA mechanical engineers and materials scientists have developed a process that uses nanoparticles to strengthen the atomic structure of glass. The result is a product that’s at least five...