Dr. Zhenghui Sha received the national-level award at the ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conference this month.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers held its annual International Design Engineering Technical Conference in St. Louis, Missouri.

Sha, assistant professor in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the Young Engineer Award, which recognizes a promising young investigator who is making outstanding contributions to the progress in the application of computers in engineering.

The ASME SEIKM Technical Committee and the ASME CIE Hackathon Committee co-organized this year’s SEIKM Panel on the topic of “The Role of Hackathon Mechanism in Promoting Data Science in Mechanical Engineering Research and Education: Perspectives from Academia and Industry.” This panellists are Zhenghui Sha (UT Austin), Yan Lu (NIST), Ye Wang (Autodesk), and Daniele Grandi (Autodesk). They discussed 1) the ways and mechanisms to build academia-industry relationships in providing ME students with practical data-driven engineering problems and hands-on experiences, 2) how to train the data-literate mechanical engineers that can harness the data revolution in different engineering fields, and 3) the connection/gaps between data science education in the classroom and data science applications in industry.

The motivation of the ASME Hackathon initiative is to support an engaging and inclusive platform for researchers to practice data-driven discovery and explore new statistical and machine-learning techniques appropriate for the use of unstructured data that would be beneficial to mechanical engineering, and developing pathways to train the data-literate mechanical engineers that can harness the data revolution in different engineering fields.

Three graduate students, Yinshuang Xiao, Xingang Li, and Daniel Weber, recently attended the 2022 IDETC/CIE conference in St. Louis, Missouri in person. Check their papers, posters and video presentations below.

Y. Xiao, F. Ahmed, Z. Sha, “Travel Links Prediction In Shared Mobility Networks Using Graph Neural Network Models,” ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

X. Li, Y. Wang, Z. Sha, “Deep Learning of Cross-Modal Tasks for Conceptual Design of Engineered Products: A Review,” ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

D. Weber, Z. Sha, “Z-Chunking for Cooperative 3D Printing of Large and Tall Objects,” CIE Graduate Research Poster Competition, ASME 2022 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, St. Louis, Missouri, Aug. 14-17, 2022.

Some pictures taken during their presentations:

Check our recent work on hybrid swarm manufacturing, collaborated with our partners at AMBOTS and Dr. Wenchao Zhou. This is a challenging topic that integrates knowledge from design for assembly (DfA), design for additive manufacturing (DfAM), manufacturing scheduling, and multi-robot path planning. The work was presented at the 2022 Symposium on Freefrom Fabrication (SFF) on Wednesday 07/27/2022. 

The M.S. student, Daniel Weber, presented his first conference paper “Z-Chunking for Cooperative 3D Printing (C3DP) of Large and Tall Objects” at the 2022 Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) Symposium. Check out the short video below.

Abstract: Cooperative 3D Printing (C3DP) is an emerging technology designed to address the size and printing speed limitations of conventional gantry-based 3D printers. To print large-scale objects, C3DP divides a job into chunks to be printed by a swarm of mobile robots. Previously, we developed a Chunker algorithm to partition jobs into printable parts in the XY direction, which theoretically enables the printing of objects of unlimited size in XY dimensions. However, print size is limited in the Z direction due to the physical constraints of the printer. In this paper, we introduce the first working strategy and rules of Z-Chunking for C3DP, such as where and how to place chunk boundaries along the Z direction and alignment geometries for easy post-assembly. Additional challenges of interfacing with XY chunking and facilitating re-assembly of the job are also considered. We conduct two case studies on objects of varying geometric complexity (e.g., simple solids vs. hollow structures) in which the object is chunked, printed, and assembled.

Two Ph.D. students and one M.S. student from SiDi Lab recently received several awards and recognition from several international conferences and the University of Texas at Austin.

First, congratulate Daniel Weber, an MS student in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, on receiving the 2022 NSF SFF Student Award and the H. Grady Rylander Longhorn Mechanical Engineering Club Excellence in Teaching Fellowship from Cockrell School of Engineering to recognize the Teaching Assitant “Who excels as a leader and effective communicator in classroom teaching.”

Second, congratulate Xingang Li, a Ph.D. student in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, on receiving the NSF support to attend the 2022 Frontiers in Design Representation Summer School at the University of Maryland.

Finally, congratulate both Xingang Li and Yinshuang Xiao, both are Ph.D. student in the Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering at UT Austin, on being selected to present their work on the 34th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM) during the 2022 IDETC/CIE conference. Each of them will receive a $1,000 stipend in support of their travels.

All the awards are very competitive this year and congratulations again to all of them!

Dr. Sha recently jointly presented SiDi Lab’s research on Swarm Manufacturing with Dr. Wenchao Zhou, an Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the University of Arkansas and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of AMBOTS Inc. at the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation (CAMDI) of UT Austin. The talk was recorded and is now available.

Our paper titled “Robust design of complex socio-technical systems (STS) against seasonal effects: a network motif-based approach” is now published on Design Science. In this paper, we developed a design approach to robust STS by modeling complex systems as complex networks and investigating the significant motifs within the network. The network motifs are critical building blocks of the target system and the motif-based design for desired system property provides a new perspective on the STS engineering and design. Check here to read our article: https://www.doi.org/10.1017/dsj.2021.27.