Upcoming Seminars
Golf Club R&D Process
April 23, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Todd Beach
Golf equipment research and development (R&D) has evolved into a sophisticated process which uses some of the best available materials and manufacturing methods to create products that enhance performance every year for both high level tour professionals and amateurs alike. The Physics of golf can be very challenging to model, test and optimize as the ball goes from 0 to 190 mph in 0.5 milliseconds for a top professional driver. The golf club engineer needs to deeply understand all the key parameters (both club and ball) during this violent collision to design them to have the proper speed, launch angle, spin, sound, feel, aesthetics, durability and cost/producibility. The golf equipment industry is a multi-billion dollar global industry, with millions of clubs and balls manufactured and sold every year. Golf companies need to have a specialized team and a development process that allows them to be competitive in this industry. The most successful companies manage to have their products validated by key influencers and top professionals (pyramid of influence), and must stand up against competition under camparison testing or fitting using readily available launch monitors. The products are sourced globally, produced in high volume and sold into a seasonal market. Marketing helps drive demand, and the process needs to be agile enough to react to market feedback, new technologies, intellectual property (IP) and any new rule changes (USGA) each year. This seminar will give an overview of these challenges and associated product development process that can be used to successfully develop products for this industry.
Past Seminars
Large Scale 3D Printing - Past, Present and Future Prospects
April 16, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Berok Khoshnevis
Every year, countless new innovations are introduced; however, truly disruptive technologies arise only rarely. When they do, they often create groundbreaking impacts and trigger a cascade of transformative changes across their application domains. This presentation offers an exploration of construction 3D printing technology—its origins, evolution, and envisioned future—as recounted by the speaker, a pioneer who embarked on this journey three decades ago. What started as a mere curiosity has blossomed into an entirely new industry with immense promise in the construction sector.
Integration and Control of Dynamics and Pattern Recognition with Immersive Platforms
April 09, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Fernando Moreu
This seminar summarizes human-computer interfaces for quality inspection aided by robotics applications. The objective of this research is to enhance human decision-making with Artificial-Intelligence (AI) and machine-enabled visual analysis. Applications include using Augmented Reality (AR) systems to enable a standalone human interface for automatic defect detection integrating an image-based pattern recognition algorithm in the headset’s platform.
Risk-informed, performance-based seismic design of next generation nuclear energy facilities
April 02, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Andrew Whittaker
Risk-informed pathways for the design and licensing of next generation nuclear facilities are being developed by standards development organizations (e.g., AMSE, ANS, ASCE), power utilities, reactor developers, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and its consultants. The presentation will focus on recent work to develop and document a technical basis for risk-informed, performance-based seismic design procedures for conventionally founded and base-isolated nuclear civil structures.
Towards Patient-Specific Endovascular Treatment of Unruptured Intracranial Aneurysms
March 12, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Chung-Hao Lee
Intracranial aneurysms (or brain aneurysms) are a focal dilation of brain artery vessels that affect about 1.3 million Americans. The aneurysms, left untreated, can progressively grow, weaken the vessel wall, and eventually rupture, causing devastating hemorrhagic strokes. Despite recent advancements in minimally invasive endovascular procedures, such as coiling and flow diversion, the long-term outcomes still remain suboptimal.
Overview of Chemo-Mechanical Modeling of Lithium-ion Batteries
March 10, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Jeff Allen
One of the main goals in modeling lithium-ion batteries is to improve/predict longevity and resilience of new chemistries. To that end, this talk investigates the formation of stress-induced fracture within polycrystalline cathode particles and the impact on capacity loss. The model captures anisotropic Li diffusion within a single polycrystalline particle comprised of hundreds to thousands of randomly oriented grains. Fracture is primarily due to non-ideal grain interactions with slight dependence on high-rate charge demands.
Peeking into a Radioactive Box
February 26, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Roger Ghanem
Condition assessment of spent nuclear fuel prior to permanent storage is an important component of their life cycle assessment. Given their radioactive nature, only external inspection is possible for these systems while damage and conditions of interest are unobserved.
Tipping - Alec Zavala
February 12, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Alec Zavala
Tipping is a structural engineering firm based in Berkeley, California that specializes in the seismic design and retrofit of new and existing residential, commercial, and educational buildings. Our firm was founded in 1983 by Steve Tipping who instilled an approach of curiosity and innovation into the firm that carries on his legacy.
A Quasi-meshfree Method for Nonlinear Solid Mechanics: A Synergistic Combination of Element-based and Element-free Technologies
February 10, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Joe Bishop
There is now a long history of using both element-based and element-free discretizations for solving governing field equations. By combining these two approaches, we can obtain a new, versatile, multiscale, discretization technique. In many engineering applications, domains of interest are geometrically complex containing numerous small features. These features are typically removed in a manual process to facilitate a conventional element-based meshing process. This manual defeaturing process is dependent upon the goals of the simulation and typically involves subjective heuristics.
Making the Most Perfect of Imperfect Choices
February 05, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Matt Barnard and Chad Closs
We are constantly faced with opportunities to make decisions both small and big. Many of these decisions are easy and you make them without hesitation. But there are some decisions that are difficult with no clear right answer and with potentially massive implications for you and others. Fortunately, you can use a Choosing by Advantage process to help you identify what really matters and make those tough decisions.
Equatic: The development of a seawater-based atmospheric carbon removal and hydrogen co-production platform
February 03, 2025 - 12:00 pm
Speaker: Gaurav N. Sant
The trapping of carbon dioxide (CO2) as aqueous (bi)carbonates or as mineral solids is attractive because of favorable thermodynamics, and the durability and permanence of storage. Here, I will describe an approach to rapidly precipitate Ca- and Mg- carbonates and hydroxides from seawater to achieve large-scale, cost-effective CO2 removal.