William Flaherty: the Olympic skiing rocketeer
Which is more difficult: slaloming down a ski slope at 50 miles an hour, or designing a rocket to travel 1,000 miles an hour? William Flaherty, a Purdue mechanical engineering student, has done both!
Which is more difficult: slaloming down a ski slope at 50 miles an hour, or designing a rocket to travel 1,000 miles an hour? William Flaherty, a Purdue mechanical engineering student, has done both!
Ajay Malshe has been elected as a 2025 International Director for the Society of Manufacturing Engineers (SME).
Purdue engineers are famous for launching into space — but only one Boilermaker has built spaceships for Captain Marvel!
David Altenau (BSME 1988) is the founder and chairman of the Pitch Black Company, a visual effects powerhouse whose empire stretches from Star Wars to Barbie to Indiana Jones.
Sustainable energy sources like wind and solar present a challenge: how do you store excess energy during periods of overproduction for when you really need it? Some large-scale utilities have turned to mechanical energy storage: lifting heavy weights or pumping water uphill into a reservoir. Once that energy is needed, the weight is released and its mechanical energy powers a generator that produces electricity.
These mechanical batteries have been proven to work on a large scale, but never at the scale of a single residential home. A team of Purdue University undergraduates undertook a study to investigate whether a “gravity battery” could be made small enough to fit into a single-family home.
Katherine Rumsey, a junior in mechanical engineering at Purdue, spends her time balancing an ME student workload, and running around 45 miles a week.
Neera Jain and George Chiu have each been recognized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) at the 2024 Modeling, Estimation, and Control Conference in Chicago.