- Congratulations to Angad Paintal who graduated with an MS in Industrial Engineering December 2018. He contributed to ESDL wind energy projects, including shape optimization of diffusers for small-scale wind turbines.
- Congratualtions to Madhav Arora who graduated with an MS in Industrial Engineering on December 16, 2017. His thesis was "Active Suspension Co-Design for Lateral Stability of Rail Vehicles".
- James Allison has been awarded a $61,020 research grant by the NSF POETS ERC Industry Advisory Board for the project "EMI Mitigation for Dense DC-AC Converters via Structured Topological Design Exploration", that is a collaborative project with Prof. Alan Mantooth at the University of Arkansas.
- Congratulations to Dan Herber who defended his PhD dissertation successfully on November 17, 2017 entitled "Advances in Combined Architecture, Plant, and Control Design", and graduated on December 16, 2017.
- Congratualtions to Shangting Li who was awarded an ISE department REU scholarship in Fall 2017 for his project on enumeration algorithms for system architectures with structured components, mentored by Dan Herber.
- ESDL contributions to an ongoing CubeSat project and upcoming flight test of SASA attitude control technology (see J21, C55) was featured in a recent ISE news article, featuring Vedant, Yukti Kathuria, and Dan Herber.
- The ESDL presented several papers (C44-C52 on the publications page) at the 2017 ASME IDETC Conference, held August 6-9 in Cleveland Ohio. Presenters include: Tinghao Guo, Yong Hoon Lee, Madhav Arora, Siyao Luan, Danny Lohan, Dan Herber, Satya Peddada, and James Allison. Additional co-authors include: Anand Deshmukh, Rebecca Corman, Randy Ewoldt, Deborah Thurston, Neal Davis, Jiarui Xu, Yue Sun, and Yilin Dong.
- Several graduate students from the ESDL participated in the 2017 Topology Optimization and Additive Manufacturing Workshop, hosted by the ERSL at the University of Wisconsin in June 2017. Participants include: Albert Patterson, Yong Hoon Lee, Siyao Luan, and Chendi Lin.
- Danny Lohan and James Allison presented research papers at the 2017 World Congress on Structural and Multidisciplinary Optimization, held June 5-9 in Braunschweig, Germany.
- Welcome to Michael Gary who joined the ESDL in May 2017 to work in the area of computer aided design.
- James Allison, in collaboration with CU Aerospace, was awarded a Phase 1 NASA SBIR grant ($125,000) for the development of 'Strain-Actuated Solar Arrays', a new technology for spacecraft attitude control with possible extension to other applications requiring ultra-quiet pointing and precise motion control.
- Welcome to Chen Zhang who joined the ESDL in April 2017 to work in the area of wind energy system design.
- Madhav Arora received an honorable mention award for his research poster at the April 2017 ISE graduate student poster competition.
- For the 5th year in a row, ESDL group members visited Yankee Ridge Elementary School (Urbana IL) to give a hands-on demonstration of trebuchets to K-5 students as part of the Urbana School District Junior Scientist Day on April 7th, 2017.
- James Allison received the NSF CAREER Award for his proposal 'Integrated Design of Intelligent Structures with Tailored Distributed Damping'. It includes a $500,000, five-year grant that begins May 2017. NSF News Release. UIUC Engineering News Release 1, News Release 2.
- Welcome to Jialing Niu, who joined the ESDL in April 2017 to work in the area of spacecraft design and control.
- Congratulations to Danny Lohan who has accepted an internship at the Toyota Research Institute of North America in Ann Arbor Michigan during Summer 2017.
- Congratulations to Andrew Blanco who has accepted an internship at Deere & Co. during Summer 2017.
- Welcome to Nick Lindsey who joined the ESDL in January 2017 to work in the area of wind energy system design.
- James Allison presented the poster "Toward a Method for Achieving Synergy between Heuristic Rules of Thumb and Quantitative Methods in Engineering Design" at the 2017 NSF ESD/SYS Program Workshop and Grantees Meeting in Atlanta, GA held January 20-22, 2017.
- Welcome to Yogesh Bhandari and Angad Paintal, who joined the ESDL in January 2017 to work in the area of wind energy system design.