Posts filed under ‘College of Engineering’
Fully Charged, Free of Charge
So I just took my first spin in a Chevy Volt. I was one of a few dozen people who got that chance Thursday afternoon, when Penn State’s Center for Sustainability unveiled its very own Volt, donated to the center by General Motors. Penn State is one of just two schools in the country (the other is Michigan Tech) to receive the vehicle, which will be used by students and researchers working on measuring and improving energy efficiency in cars.
It’s no accident that Penn State got its own Volt. Gregory Slusher ’85, Chevy’s Engineering Group Manager of Body Structures, was on hand to present the car to Center for Sustainability executive director David Riley ’91, ’94g and College of Engineering dean David Wormley. And as we pointed out on our blog a couple of years ago, one of the people who has helped make this environmentally friendlier vehicle come to fruition is Mel Fox ’05, a GM battery engineer.
The folks from GM brought three Volts to State College for a ceremony at Foundry Park, right behind our offices in the Hintz Family Alumni Center. One was the actual donated vehicle; the other two were made available for test drives, which, after showing my license and taking my very first breathalyzer, I lined up for. I took a five-minute ride around campus and up College Avenue, finding out that driving a Volt feels (refreshingly) like driving pretty much any other car. The big difference? Man, is that thing quiet. I’m hoping to get behind the wheel of one of these again soon. I’ll keep you posted.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Look for the Pink Hardhat
A year ago in our Class Notes section we profiled Lynda Tollner ’84, an architectural engineering grad who’s overseeing the construction on 1 World Trade Center, being built where the twin towers once stood.
Not surprisingly, Tollner has been in the news a good bit in the past week or so, in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks at that site.
She’s quoted in an Inside Edition story about the project, also known as the Freedom Tower. You can also read about her at ABC2 news—and be sure to watch the video at that site; she’s featured prominently in it.
When you watch that video, be sure to note not only her hot-pink hardhat, but also the small blue sticker on it. It’s a Penn State sticker. You can see it even better in this photo at the New York Times site—if there’s any doubt as to where Lynda’s school loyalties lie, just click on that photo.
Tina Hay, editor
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A Closer Look at the Millennium Building
As Lori Shontz mentioned the week before last, we recently had a first-hand look at the Millennium Science Complex, which should be finished sometime later this summer.
Project manager Dick Tennent from the Office of Physical Plant was nice enough to give some of the magazine staff a walk-through of the building. It’s Penn State’s largest building ever, and should be home to some pretty innovative research. It brings together together Penn State researchers in the life sciences and the materials sciences—two areas of science that have more in common than you might think.
(Research/Penn State did an excellent article a few years back that shows a good example of the intersection of the two areas: the effort to develop electrical-stimulation devices to implant into the brains of people with epilepsy, Parkinson’s, and other neurological disorders. You can read the article here.)
Jessie Knuth, our graphic designer, and I both took cameras along on the Millennium Science Complex tour, and we’ve posted a collection of photos to an album on our Facebook page. You can check it out here.
Tina Hay, editor
Millennium Science Complex Looking Good
On my way back to my office from the Playhouse Theatre on Thursday, I swung by the site of the Millennium Science Complex to see how that’s coming along. I figured since I had my camera, I’d head up to the top of the Eisenhower Parking Deck and get an updated version of the panoramic photo we posted back in November 2009, when the construction was in its early stages.
Well, that vantage point no longer works—it appears that, when I wasn’t looking, they went and practically finished the building. Actually it’s about 70% complete, according to the folks in Physical Plant, but it’s now tall enough, and filled-in enough, that the view from the top of the parking deck is pretty much nothing but solid building—the north wall of the materials-sciences wing.
So I went down closer to ground level and tried to shoot a series of images to stitch together into a panoramic in Photoshop, but for whatever reason, the stitching part didn’t work out, and the panoramas I got were all messed up.
(I’ve done panoramas a million times before, so I’m not sure what my problem is. I’m tempted to blame the new camera I just bought, or the new version of Photoshop on my computer, but I’m guessing it was operator error: I just need to work on my shooting technique to better control the exposure and the perspective.)
Anyway, I did get the shot above, which shows the part of the building where the materials-science wing and the life-sciences wing meet. There will be a plaza there and, as you can see, a pretty cool skylight over the atrium.
Sometime I need to walk over there in the morning light and get you some images of the other side of the building—the part that faces Pollock Road. It’s a really impressive building.
The Millennium Science Complex was designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, the same folks who did the IST Building at Penn State, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center, and other fancy stuff worldwide. The MSC should be completed later this summer.
Tina Hay, editor
When the Hotel State College was the ‘Nittany Inn’
I was weeding some papers in one of the many over-cluttered corners of my house this weekend, and I came across a folder called “Uncle Bill.” I had forgotten about that folder—a collection of historical tidbits that my uncle, Bill Wolfersberger ’49, has sent me over the years. In the folder I found some family tree info, a Polaroid of an antique dresser he was proposing to give me, that sort of thing.
(One particularly gruesome item was an 1892 newspaper clipping that describes in rather explicit detail the death of my great-great uncle, Ed Wolfersberger, in a railroad accident in Somerset.)
Uncle Bill has been a postcard collector for many years, and in that folder was a Penn State-related postcard he once sent me. As you can see above, it’s pretty striking. It shows a building called the “Nittany Inn,” which looks a heck of a lot like the Hotel State College to me.
You can click on the postcard above to see a larger version of it—note the pool hall on the left and the sign for “R.C. Pearce” on the right. I’m thinking that the latter might have been Pearce Dairy or a related business.
The back of the postcard is below, with a postmark from 1914:
I looked up “Roy Kerns” on our alumni database and, sure enough, we have a guy by that name who got his bachelor’s in 1917 and his master’s in 1921, both in a now-defunct major called railway mechanical engineering. He is long deceased, of course (he was born in 1895), but the last known address for him was “General Delivery, Altoona, Pa.”
Fun stuff. I wonder what other gems are lurking in my house?
Tina Hay, editor
Watch Penn State Students Making a Difference in Kenya
Got about 20 minutes of free time? If so, I urge you to take a look at this episode of a series on the Big Ten Network called Global Penn State, which shows how Penn State students and faculty are making a difference around the world.
You won’t believe what Penn Staters are doing in Kenya.
The episode features three programs. Mashavu combats the shortage of doctors in eastern Africa by enabling patients in villages to communicate with doctors who are far away. WishVast connects farmers and employers to manufacturers. And Essential Design is a class in which students built things like a greenhouse and an irrigation system with inexpensive, local materials.
It’s inspiring stuff.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Watch Penn State’s Winning Rube Goldberg Entry
The guys and their friends also put together a fun poster.
As a Liberal Arts major, I didn’t really have any idea what was going on over in the College of Engineering, sorry to say. But now I’ve got a much better idea of how engineers think, having reported the story on Penn State’s entry in the 2010 Rube Goldberg Contest. The object is to build the most complicated machine to perform a simple task–this year, dispense hand sanitizer. The Penn State entry, titled Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dirty Hanz, placed third nationally.
You can find the story on p. 20 of our July/August issue, which should be arriving in your mailbox any day now, if it hasn’t gotten there already.
I was thrilled to discover that the four members of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers chapter who spent a lot of long winter nights in Engineering Unit C were diligent about documenting their progress on the machine. Drew Taylor ’10, Michael Yanek ’10, Eric Do ’10, and Shawn Gehringer ’10 shot a lot of video, which is available here.
You can see run-throughs of the 85-second, 56-step process, complete with Indiana Jones theme music. But you can also observe some of their struggles as they put the machine together, see some up-close shots of some of the coolest steps, and watch the first time the machine worked without a push from one of the team members. They’re pretty excited, and no wonder. It’s fun to watch.
Lori Shontz, senior editor
Natural Fusion Welcomed Home
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette published a nice article today about Natural Fusion’s dedication as a conference center for Bayer MaterialScience in Robinson Township, Pa. Natural Fusion is the house that Penn State students built for the Solar Decathlon last fall; we blogged yesterday about the house getting a permanent home at Bayer’s corporate campus just outside Pittsburgh.
The building serves as an example of energy-efficient design, and in keeping with that theme, instead of the traditional ribbon cutting, the company celebrated its new conference center by planting a tree.
Amy Guyer, associate editor
Solar House Finds Its Home in Pittsburgh
Photo: Geoff Rushton ’01
The solar house that Penn State students built last fall now has a permanent home. It’s now in place at Bayer MaterialScience in Robinson Township, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh; the house was commissioned in its new location today.
Students from three colleges—Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Arts and Architecture—built the house for the 2009 Solar Decathlon, an event in which 20 schools from across the country and around the world compete to build the best solar house. The houses in the competition were on display on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. last October. The decathlon is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy.
Natural Fusion, Penn State’s entry, is a small building—just 800 sq. ft.—and is a solar-powered, zero-emission structure. We took some photos of the construction progress back in August, but if you want to check out the end result, you’ll have to head to the Bayer MaterialScience campus, where the building now serves as a conference center and a showcase for Bayer’s new EcoCommercial Building initiative. (Bayer helped to fund Natural Fusion and helped review its initial designs.) You can also check out a virtual tour at the team’s website.
Penn State students also entered the 2007 Solar Decathlon. That entry, MorningStar, is on display next to the Centre County Visitors Center, across from Beaver Stadium. It’s open for tours most Sundays between 1 and 4 p.m.
Amy Guyer, associate editor
How to Keep Nukes Away from Terrorists
One of my favorite Penn Stater articles of the past few years is “The Hungary Job,” which Jason Fagone ’01 did for our Jan-Feb 2009 issue. It was a very ambitious story for us: We sent Jason to Hungary to embed with a group of U.S. officials on a cloak-and-dagger mission to remove highly enriched uranium from a reactor and ship it to Russia for safekeeping.
The point man for the operation was a Penn Stater: Andrew Bieniawski ’89 Eng, assistant deputy administrator for the National Nuclear Security Administration. For the past 14 years, the NNSA has been conducting secret missions like that all over the world, in an attempt to secure loose nukes and keep them out of the hands of terrorists.
Why am I telling you all of this now? Because Bieniawski and his program are back in the news, in a big way.
They’re in the news for two reasons, actually. One is the nuclear summit in Washington, D.C., this week. Dealing with the worldwide nuclear threat, it seems, requires a two-pronged approach. One part is preventing proliferation—that is, trying to keep countries that don’t have nuclear-weapons capability from getting that capability. The other part is retrieving and securing the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, that’s already out there, so that terrorists can’t get at it.
President Obama has said that the latter effort is the United States’ No. 1 national-security priority. And our man Bieniawski is at the center of that. Quoting an article in this week’s Time magazine:
It is Bieniawski’s job to convince countries to give up their HEU and send it to either the U.S. or Russia. So far, the NNSA has removed a total of 5,935 lbs. (2,692 kg) of fissile material from 37 countries and has its sights on 4,190 lbs. (1,900 kg) more. To meet that goal, Obama has asked for the program’s budget to be increased by 67% percent to $560 million next year.
The other reason that Bieniawski’s work is in the news is that the Time article reveals that his most recent nuclear-removal mission took place in Chile—during the Feb. 27 earthquake. According to the article, Bieniawski’s team had just finished packing up the highly enriched uranium, or HEU, into a shipping container the night before.
So just imagine how much an earthquake could screw up a delicate operation like that: How to transport the container across earthquake-damaged roads, to a port that had been devastated by the quake, while still dealing with aftershocks? They got it done, and the tale of how they did it is well worth the read.
You might also check out Time‘s slide show of images from the Chile operation. The photos remind me a lot of the shots Jason Fagone brought back from the Hungary job. (Bieniawski is the guy in the yellow jacket in the photo above, which was taken by his agency during the Chile operation). And the Washington Post had a story about the Chile adventure on Sunday.
By the way, the Hungary operation in which Jason was embedded ran into some roadblocks and tense moments of its own; you can read our story by downloading a PDF of it here. But nothing like an earthquake.
Tina Hay, editor
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