Disclaimer: This document consists merely of opinions of the people involved in writing it, and the contents should not be treated as the gospel truth. The sole purpose is to improve the perspective of an interested applicant. Although, every attempt will be made to make this document general in nature, the contents can get outdated quite rapidly. There is no intention here to highlight any specific "hot topic".

Graduate study in Mechanical Engineering improves ones understanding of the subject and problem solving abilities substantially, beyond the undergraduate level. Master's (thesis) student is expected to have a substantially better understanding of his/her area of specialization, and because of working on a thesis, the ability to analyze and execute successfully, an engineering project. A doctoral program is aimed at teaching one problem solving skills and the ability to independently define and perform an in-depth analysis of an engineering problem. Traditionally, Mechanical Engineering has been divided into three areas. Machine Sciences, Thermal Sciences and Design. The breadth of each of these areas of work that can be included under any of these divisions is enormous. Then there are areas like automatic controls that can really come under any of these categories.

This document focuses on thermal and fluids engineering. The general areas that come under Thermal and Fluids engineering include Thermodynamics, Energy Conversion, Combustion, HVAC, Heat and Mass Transfer, Experimental and Computational Fluid Dynamics etc.

http://mems.isi.edu
http://www.memsnet.org

Nanotechnology

If one tries to go even smaller in length scales (10-100 nanometers), we land up in a regime that has been deemed by the experts to be the next frontier. The federal government declared a national nanotechnology initiative a few years back. Since then a whole bunch of technological societies have been actively promoting nanotechnology and NEMS (guess what that stands for!). ASME has particularly been pushing nanotechnology and it is a major part of the 2001 winter meeting in November, in New York. There are probably not too many Mechanical engineering research groups working in the nanotechnology area currently, but there should be some change in that situation in the years to come.

Fuel Cells

An interesting area of energy conversion that appears to be quite promising right now is fuel cells. One of the applications, or at least a sector that shows interest in this technology, is the automobile industry. With the deadlines for the adoption of stricter emission criteria in states such as California coming up, there is a demand for cleaner technologies. Since power sources such as solar energy are really not practical for vehicles, fuel cells seems to be a feasible alternative. Several automobile companies (Toyota, Honda, Ford, Mercedes Benz etc.) are actively working on fuel cell powered vehicles and some even have prototypes. Fuel cell powered buses are also being looked at by several companies. The city of Chicago has prototype fuel cell buses plying in the CTA system. Research work is active in trying to develop improved and compact fuel cells. Another area of concern is to develop a way of providing the hydrogen fuel needed for the fuel cells. At the University of Florida, the reforming of hydrogen from methanol is one of the thrust areas of research. The national fuel cell center is based out of the University of California, Irvine (add website). The University of Connecticut is trying to set up an interdisciplinary fuel cell center and is actively trying to recruit professors to staff the place.

Boiling Heat Transfer

Boiling heat transfer study was huge a decade ago. Vast amounts of money were sunk into this area primarily because boiling is such an attractive regime of hear transfer. The heat transfer coefficients are several orders of magnitude higher than those in typical convective heat transfer conditions. This allows the heat exchangers to be compact,which is economically advantageous. On the other hand, predicting heat transfer in the boiling heat transfer regime is a very difficult thing to do. NASA works with the single-phase heat transfer in its heat exchangers just because of this reason, because it is more predictable. Reliability in performance is more important in space applications. them. Anyway, there are still people working on this very challenging area.

Fluid Dynamics

Fluid dynamics is a vast, incredibly interesting area of research. Fluid dynamics is needed to analyze so many engineering situations ranging from oil pipelines to turbines to the airflow around an automobile. Despite all the incredible advancements in technology, the flow of a fluid is still a relatively less understood problem. Turbulent flow is still very vigorously investigated. There are generally two approaches to fluid mechanics. One approach is to computationally analyze flows, which is known as CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics). The other approach is good old painstaking experimental work. The way we are taught fluids in Roorkee leaves us rather ill-prepared to handle this subject. In this country, everything revolves around the famous Navier-Stokes equation. Most of us, after Roorkee, have only heard of this equation. The Navier-Stokes equation is a powerful general differential equation, which can be used to analyze pretty much any flow situation. Very few analytical solutions of the Navier Stokes equations exist. On the other hand, numerical solutions of many flow situations are easier to do. With the incredible development in the area of processors and memory, computational costs have come down substantially (when compared to 10 years ago). That is not to say though that computational capacity is not a constraint, it still very much is.

Heat Transfer Research

Couple the Navier-Stokes equation with the energy equation and voila!, you can start solving convection heat transfer problems. OK, it is a lot more difficult than it sounds here. Nevertheless, there's a lot of interesting work possible in this area. In the area of radiation heat transfer, some work being done is in developing radiation thermometry systems (figure out temperature by looking at the emissions from a surface), and in predicting emissive properties of surfaces. One of the applications is in radiation furnaces for silicon chip processing. Radiant heating allows quick heating of the semiconductor (helps in better management of the thermal budget). It is important to measure the chip temperature in these furnaces. Micro scale heat transfer and fluid flow have also gained importance, with the development of MEMS area.

Biomedical Engineering

Another industry that offers a lot of promise for the future is the biomedical industry. This area includes developing better diagnosis tools to detect diseases, modeling flow in blood vessels, modeling human motion, developing artificial hearts (hear of the man in Kentucky, with the first successful artificial heart transplant?), developing materials for biomedical use etc. The prediction is that the 21st century is going to be the age of the life sciences. Many universities have already set up or are in the process of setting up a biomedical engineering department. Look for a college with a good medical school if you decide to apply to a biomedical engineering department.

Other Areas:
Other than the areas covered above, there are several other traditional and non traditional areas of research that are very exciting. This document does not even begin to cover the machine sciences, manufacturing and design areas. The only way to find out about these is to do some hard work and search using the resources at your disposal, including the Internet, Peterson's guides, the USEFI etc.

What do I look for?

When researching graduate school, often, most of us are unsure as to what to look for. Here are some things to look for. Narrow down your interests (at least broadly, as machine or thermal sciences, design, manufacturing, controls etc.), shortlist some Universities you are interested in, and look for the strengths of the department. Here are some things to look for

• How big is the department?
  In Mechanical Engineering, you might have anything from 10 to 60 faculty members. Obviously, the more the people there are, better the chance of finding a professor whose research interests match yours. Further, more faculty implies more variety in courses. Another interesting statistic is the number/ratio of full professors. It is an indication of the experience of the faculty. At the University of Florida, where I am, the mechanical engineering department has about 28 faculty members. That would be a relatively small sized department. By Fall 2002, the department is expected to merge with the department of aerospace, engineering mechanics and engineering sciences to form the department of mechanical and aerospace engineering. With around 45 - 50 faculty and a projected 350 odd graduate students, this would be a big department.

• How big is the University?
  Big engineering schools will mean that there are more departments. At the graduate level, you might find courses in other departments that could be useful in your education. Chances of working on an interdisciplinary type of project could be higher in such schools.

• What courses are offered in the department?
  Most Universities have a graduate catalog or equivalent, listing the courses that are offered. This is just a list of all the courses, not all of them would be offered regularly. Nevertheless, reading the description would give one an idea of the strengths of the departments. There will also be course catalogs for each semester, listing courses that are currently offered. Many courses have webpages too. Look them up, get a feel for things.

• Are there Profs. working in your area of interest?
  Look for different professors working in the general area(s) that interests you. The way an academic department is organized can mean a lot of difference in the department atmosphere. In some departments, the profs. work almost independently, with some collaboration. In other instances, you will find departments organized by area. This often means that people with similar interests end up working closely and sort of having a department within a department. Each style has its own advantages. The latter system helps in that you could end up being exposed to lot more people and projects. Note that the intention here, is not to say one system is better than the other.
  
  These are simply some tips. Eventually, it is up to the person applying to research departments, talk to/email people and make decisions on applying. Hopefully, by reading this you are a little better informed in how to go about deciding departments and such.