Facilities

The Department of Mechanical Engineering manages more than 50,000 square feet of modern research and teaching facilities, and every faculty member in this program has a fully equipped state-of-the-art research laboratory. REU students will have access to the full complement of the capabilities of these laboratories and will will also use the department’s excellent computational facilities.

Facilities include

• integrated materials testing systems (tensile, compressive tests)
• an advanced manufacturing laboratory with a suite of laser systems and composite material fabrication stations
• a machine vision laboratory with a unique high-resolution 3-D imaging system
• scanning probe microscopy stations
• a Laser Diagnostics Laboratory with several Ti:sapphire (femtosecond) laser and related optics and electronics for capturing ultra-fast laser phenomena
• electron microscopy and material characterization facilities of the on-campus Department of Energy (DOE) Ames Lab
• multi-user facilities including the Virtual Reality Applications Center, Keck Laboratory for High Throughput Atom Scale Analysis, Carver Ultra-high Resolution Microscopy Laboratory, Supercomputing Facility, Chemical Instrumentation Center, and the Electron Microscopy Facility