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Mechanical Engineering

Labs and Facilities

Interdisciplinary Research

The Department of Mechanical Engineering facilities include experimental, computational, design, material processing, teaching and undergraduate laboratories, plus additional research-focused laboratories. There are currently thirteen main research laboratories on campus. Helmed by faculty members, graduate and undergraduate students can request to assist in the research.

Man using robotic assistive technology on the job

Assistive Robotics Laboratory

The Assistive Robotics Laboratory has a mission to develop agile wearable robots to enhance locomotor abilities across daily activities and further the quality of life for humans. To achieve this goal, we are investigating control and optimization techniques to design and optimize assistive strategies that are invariant across users and tasks, and implementing these strategies on self-designed, user-friendly wearable devices for experimental verifications.

CAMMP Lab

Clemson Advanced Manufacturing and Materials Processing lab focuses on interdisciplinary research integrating experimental studies and physical modeling of advanced manufacturing and materials processing. The goal is to enable smart manufacturing with intelligent devices integrated with sensor networks for self-diagnostic capability.

CMERL

The Cardiovascular Modeling & Experimentation Research Laboratory (CMERL) at Clemson University focuses on translational research, which develops and integrates experimental and computational tools to help advance cardiovascular medical devices, diagnostics, and clinical procedures. Our interdisciplinary research involves close collaborations with clinicians and broad areas of Electrical, Biomedical, and Mechanical Engineering. The lab is located in the Fluor Daniel Engineering Innovation Building.

DICE Laboratory

The Design Innovation and Computational Engineering (DICE) Laboratory focuses on using emerging computational capabilities to advance design and manufacturing capabilities. Our research enables fundamental advances in our ability to design and manage the complexities inherent in the design of complex cyber-physical systems with engineered materials. In this environment of Variable, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) technologies and constraints, we develop and employ agile design methodologies to enable us to make research contributions in a diverse set of multidisciplinary engineering areas.

FRAME Lab

The Fracture Mechanics Lab focuses on experimental solid mechanics and material characterization. The two main areas of research are focused on understanding microstructural-induced phenomena during fracture and fatigue and the deformation mechanisms in additive manufactured materials. The laboratory contains a full collection of low-magnification DIC equipment (digital cameras, lenses, tripods, lights, etc) for 2D or 3D experiments.

Interfacial Fluid Mechanics

The Interfacial Fluid Mechanics Laboratory provides a collaborative and inclusive atmosphere where lab members can advance the leading edge of research on interfacial phenomena and soft matter physics. Complex liquids are ubiquitous in these areas and often present challenging interfacial and bulk properties to characterize. To this end, the lab space is outfitted with state-of-the-art equipment to characterize material properties.

Interfacial Hydrodynamics Research

The Interfacial Hydrodynamics Research Laboratory studies the process that occurs at an air-water interface. Topics studied include drops, bubbles, water waves, evaporation, and gels. An important aspect of the research concerns how particles are removed by drops such as raindrops in the environment, or fog drops in the built environment. In healthcare facilities, this approach has the potential to remove suspended bioaerosols and may protect patients and healthcare workers from infection by viruses that are transmitted via the respiratory route.

I2R Laboratory

The Interdisciplinary Intelligent Research Laboratory (I2R) focuses on the modeling, learning, and control of autonomy and human-robot interaction systems. Their motivation is to understand the dynamic interaction of robots with their complex and uncertain environments to realize intelligent robot control in real-time and provide system-level performance guarantees such as safety, optimality, quality, and balanced human experience.

LAM2

Laser-Based Manufacturing and Materials Processing Laboratory is particularly interested in materials processing at extreme conditions, such as extremely high temperature and pressure, severe deformation, high precision and throughput. Our interdisciplinary research topics include laser ablation, laser-induced shock waves, laser-induced plasma, multi-scale surface structuring, and dissimilar materials joining. Combined approaches, including both experimental study and physics-based modeling, are employed to unveil the underlying mechanisms of different processes.

Mechatronics and Systems Research

The Mechatronics and Systems Research Laboratory, located in Fluor Daniel, conducts research in nonlinear & intelligent controls, virtual design, mechatronic systems, and diagnostic & prognostic strategies with application to energy, smart products, and transportation systems. The laboratory has access to the departmental machine shop, which has full-time technicians to support research activities.

SMART Laboratory

The SMART Laboratory works in the design and research space of multifunctional materials. This includes multifunctional materials, multifunctional composites, non-destructive evaluation of composites, and multi-stable composites.

Turbulent Combustion Laboratory

The Turbulent Combustion Laboratory is a facility for making measurements of turbulent flames. It consists of a flame facility, and a laser diagnostic system, and can also be used to conduct experiments in non-reactive flows. The research on turbulent combustion focuses on subgrid-scale mixing and turbulence-chemistry interaction, especially on the SGS physics related to filtered density function methods for large-eddy simulation of turbulent combustion.

Xuan Microfluidic Laboratory

The Xuan Microfluidic Laboratory specializes in micro/nanoscale fluid mechanics and microfluidic system design. Our research includes the investigation (both theoretical and experimental) of hydrodynamic, electrokinetic, and magnetophoretic transport phenomena in microfluidic devices, and the development of lab-on-a-chip devices for the manipulation of liquids and species (ions, molecules, particles, and cells) involving pumping, mixing, focusing, concentration, and separation etc.

Graduate Studies

The Department of Mechanical Engineering, one of the largest academic departments in South Carolina, is offering the following high-quality graduate-level programs in Mechanical Engineering: M.S. Thesis, M.S. Non-Thesis, Ph.D., and certificates. The department has significant strengths in the theoretical and applied, computational and experimental areas of mechanical engineering and many interdisciplinary areas.

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Student in Wang laboratory