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...

Elisa Franco, associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, has received a $711,000 research grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to continue developing DNA-based synthetic molecules. Such molecules could be...

Above image: Dexterous underwater robot developed by RE2 Robotics for handling dangerous devices. (RE2 Robotics.) UCLA MAE Associate Professor Veronica Santos, along with her University of Washington ME collaborator Professor Jonathan Posner, was awarded part of $3M...