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This past fall, Dr. Hartl and a small group of students had the pleasure of meeting for several hours with Larry Schueckler, an accomplished full-time sculptor residing in the College Station area, to discuss the integration of shape memory alloy elements into artworks and architectural creations.

[Read more…] about MAESTRO Teams with Local Sculptor to Explore SMAs in Art

This Friday (12/14), six of our current research students graduated as part of the Class of 2018. As a lab that firmly believes in undergraduate research, it was a pleasure to have somehow been involved with the development of the next generation of Aerospace Engineers. Among the graduating students, Jacob, Michayal, and Madalyn have been in the lab from its conception and will continue their studies at A&M.

[Read more…] about Congratulations to Maestro graduating students!

This year, Maestro team attended en masse the SMASIS (Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures and Intelligent Systems) conference that took place at San Antonio, TX. The group consisted of Dr. Hartl, seven grad students, and Boeing Tech Fellow Jim Mabe. As the most important conference in the Adaptive Structures community, the team submitted and presented six conference proceedings (including an Invited Speaker session presented by Dr. Hartl). Furthermore, the team was involved with the yearly CASMART (Consortium of the Advancement of SHapep Memory Alloy Technology) where each member presented an overview of their research. Other activities included a high school STEM outreach event, networking with members of the community, and student competitions.

[Read more…] about Maestro Lab goes to SMASIS and is awarded ‘Ephrahim Garcia’ Best Paper Award

Dr. Darren Hartl, of the Maestro Lab at Texas A&M University, sponsored a Mechanical Engineering Senior Design team to design and build a new test section for a 2-story closed-loop wind tunnel in the basement of the Aerospace Engineering building. The new test section needed to be able to take accurate acoustic measurements for research purposes. The team spent the spring of 2018 doing research and design on the anechoic chambers, then spent the summer of 2018 fabricating the design. The finished product was installed and tested in August 2018.

Several years of effort on exploring shape memory alloys for airframe noise reduction have recently been summarized in a recent Case Study published by Software Cradle, a subsidiary of MSC Software and providers of SC/Tetra, which produces all CFD results associated with the project. 

[Read more…] about Research on SMAs for Airframe Noise Reduction Featured in MSC Software Case Study

Assistant Professor and MAESTRO Lab founder Darren Hartl was recently named a 2018 recipient of the Dean of Engineering Excellence Award

[Read more…] about Hartl Wins 2018 Dean of Engineering Excellence Award

The MAESTRO team battled through windy conditions and frigid temperatures near 65 degrees to compete in the 1st-Annual MAESTRO Masters Golf Tournament.

[Read more…] about Team Hits the Links in 1st-Annual MAESTRO Masters

On April 7, undergraduate researchers Hannah Stroud and Samuel Murley won the undergraduate student research poster portion of the University Technical Competition hosted by the South Texas division of ASME. The pair presented their poster on multiphysical characterization of avian inspired morphing wings and discussed 3D digital image correlation augmented by infrared imaging methods for obtaining shape and temperature data for a wing mounted in a wind tunnel.

Congrats Hannah and Sam!

 

Texas A&M has a campus located in Qatar and every spring break, they send a delegation to the College Station campus and facilitate interactions with them and the students in here. One of their stops on the tour this year was the Maestro VR Studio where they got to try out AR/VR, many for the first time, and understand how these emerging technologies are used in Education. They ended their visit with eating A&M themed cookies, what a sweet treat!

On February 22nd, the Maestro Lab had the opportunity to host senate and congressional staffers in the VR Studio. They were all gifted a small SMA band that would always morph back into the shape of Texas when heated. They heard about all that the Maestro Lab is doing to advance space concepts using SMAs and how we’re utilizing VR to create the next generation learning experience.