Category archives: Mechanical Engineering

Materials for fusion reactors that mimick the structure of nacre

Materials for fusion reactors that mimick the structure of nacre

ChemistryMaterialsMechanical Engineering

By César Tomé

At the end of 2022, researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced they had observed a net energy gain through nuclear fusion for the very first time. This monumental milestone toward fusion energy represents a huge leap forward in powering our homes and businesses with the carbon-neutral energy source. But converting this scientific achievement into […]

Learning from nature: a new flapping drone can take off, hover and swoop like a bird

Learning from nature: a new flapping drone can take off, hover and swoop like a bird

Mechanical EngineeringRobotics

By Invited Researcher

Photo: Gary Bendig / Unsplash We have developed four-winged bird-like robots , called ornithopters, that can take off and fly with the agility of swifts, hummingbirds and insects. We did this by reverse engineering the aerodynamics and biomechanics of these creatures. Our ornithopters have the potential to outperform and outmanoeuvre existing drone configurations with static […]

Soft robots of the future may depend on new materials that conduct electricity, sense damage and self-heal

Soft robots of the future may depend on new materials that conduct electricity, sense damage and self-heal

MaterialsMechanical EngineeringRobotics

By Invited Researcher

Robots used to be restricted to heavy lifting or fine detail work in factories. Now Boston Dynamics’ nimble four-legged robot, Spot, is available for companies to lease to carry out various real-world jobs, a sign of just how common interactions between humans and machines have become in recent years. And while Spot is versatile and […]

Cost of energy and its variability can be reduced in tidal power

Cost of energy and its variability can be reduced in tidal power

EconomicsEnergyMechanical Engineering

By BCAM

Tides are more predictable than winds or sunshine. Then, why are not they already widely used as a source of renewable energy? The simple answer is that designing and building an ocean energy array is quite complex. This complexity has an associated variability in the cost of energy that makes projects difficult to evaluate from […]

Finding collision-free tangential cutting directions when machining

Finding collision-free tangential cutting directions when machining

Computer scienceMathematicsMechanical EngineeringRobotics

By BCAM

One thing is designing an object in a computer, and another, quite different, is producing it as a real 3D object. All other things being equal, in general the more curves the designed object has, the more difficult it is to produce. Mathematics can be very helpful in this task. The geometric modeling of a […]

Open-sea experiments on a spar floating support for offshore wind turbines

Open-sea experiments on a spar floating support for offshore wind turbines

MathematicsMechanical Engineering

By BCAM

Floating structures are becoming increasingly popular. They are used by several industries, some have been in business for decades, like those dedicated to oil and gas, some are newer, like renewables (wind, wave, tidal), and there are still some other uses, like ports, while there is a constant flow of new ideas that imply their […]

System of quadrotors for the transportation of deformable linear objects

System of quadrotors for the transportation of deformable linear objects

Computer scienceMechanical EngineeringRobotics

By Julián Estévez

Nowadays, the industry is centering their efforts on the development of single aerial robots carrying single objects, such as the widely-known drone of Amazon for delivering packages, which was followed by some national post-office services. However, other approaches go a step further and get to transport bigger objects in a cooperative way, reducing the payload […]