Department of Mechanical Engineering

E.H. Yang, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a United States patent for the invention of a surface robot designed to aid in cleaning up aquatic oil spills. The patent, titled “In Situ Oil Cleanup and Recovery Using Smart Polymer Integrated Surface Vessels,” was issued on Aug. 6, 2024 and will remain in effect through April 14, 2039. Fellow Mechanical Engineering professors Brendan Englot and Chang-Hwan Choi are co-inventors on the patent, as well as former faculty member Ron Besser.

This invention integrates smart membranes into a small, unmanned surface vessel to enable the efficient, automated cleanup of oil spills. Smart membranes are circulated on the surface of a conveyor belt through the surrounding body of water. Low-voltage commands across the conveyor built are designed to attract and repel oil while an internal reduction chamber releases the oil.

Yang’s idea for the invention is a low-cost and repeatable solution for oil cleanup that works particularly well in confined aquatic areas such as under piers and the small sections between piers and marine vessels. Persistent oil spillage from the petroleum industry from boats, marine installations and urban runoff accounts for approximately 350,000 barrels of oil spillage per year. Unlike current cleanup solutions, such as skimmers, which pump large volumes of oily water by hose into storage barges, Yang incorporates conjugated polymer surfaces into a small, untethered automated surface vessel, enabling efficient and continuous collection of oil from the water’s surface.

Shima Hajimirza, an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, has been appointed as an associate editor for the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) Journal of Solar Energy Engineering – Including Wind Energy and Building Energy Conservation. Dr. Hajimirza co-edits the "Solar Optics, Metamaterials, and Scattering" section of the journal, and her three-year term began on Oct. 1, 2024.

A bimonthly publication that has existed since 1980, The ASME Journal of Solar Energy Engineering - Including Wind Energy and Building Energy Conservation - publishes research papers that contain original work of permanent interest in all areas of solar energy, wind energy and energy conservation, as well as discussions of policy and regulatory issues that affect renewable energy technologies and their implementation. The journal covers a variety of topics, including solar thermal power, solar chemistry and bioconversion, solar space applications, heating and cooling, and energy policy.

Hajimirza, an ASME Fellow, has been a faculty member at Stevens since 2020 and was promoted to associate professor in Fall 2024. In Spring 2024, she was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award for her project, “Precise Mathematical Modeling and Experimental Validation of Radiation Heat Transfer in Complex Porous Media Using Analytical Renewal Theory.” Dr. Hajimirza also serves as the director of the Energy Control and Optimization (ECO) Lab at Stevens.

Visit the journal’s website at https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/solarenergyengineering.

E.H. Yang, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has been named associate editor-in-chief of a new journal, IEEE Sensors Reviews. This new journal under the umbrella of the Institute of the Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) will publish papers in all areas of interest of the IEEE Sensors Council regarding devices for sensing and transducing physical, chemical and biological phenomena.

The associate editor-in-chief will play a pivotal role in shaping the journal's vision, ensuring the publication of high-quality, impactful content that reflects cutting-edge advancements in sensor technologies. The associate editor-in-chief will provide comprehensive insights, foster innovative perspectives and work closely with the editorial team to set the strategic direction of the journal. This leadership position requires a deep understanding of emerging trends in the field and a commitment to maintaining the journal’s excellence through rigorous editorial oversight and decision-making that drives its growth and influence in the academic and industrial communities.

A completely open-access technical journal, IEEE Sensors Reviews is built exclusively from papers on selected topics of current interest to the sensors community. Yang, along with the editor-in-chief, leads the editorial team. He is the only representative from an American college or university.

"The objective of this journal is to achieve a high impact factor, thereby maintaining a selective acceptance rate to enhance the journal's impact factor upon indexing," said Yang. "In collaboration with the IEEE Sensors Council, our goal is to attain an impact factor of at least 15.”

Visit the website at https://reviews.ieee-sensors.org/.

Brendan Englot, professor in Stevens’ Department of Mechanical Engineering and director of the Stevens Institute for Artificial Intelligence, has secured a $1,900,885 grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research for his five-year project, “Advanced Autonomy for Unmanned Surface Vehicles via Distributional Reinforcement Learning.”

Englot, the principal investigator on the project, is looking to build upon the success of reinforcement learning methods as they pertain to autonomous vehicles. While traditional reinforcement learning makes decisions based solely on the expected outcomes, distributional reinforcement learning adopts a more expansive view that has shown the potential to learn safe and efficient behaviors in complex, disturbance-filled environments.

Ideally, distributional reinforcement learning will allow unmanned surface vehicles to safely and efficiently complete complex tasks while navigating densely packed obstacles and multi-vehicle environments.

The five-year project will operate in three phases. In the first phase, systems will learn diverse policies capable of safely executing complex tasks in uncertain environments. In the second phase, an infrastructure will be established for centralized mission planning and task allocation to address multi-vehicle missions. And in the final phase, experiments will be performed in a low-fidelity simulator, then a high-fidelity simulator before eventually progressing to physical experiments with real unmanned vehicles.