Category: News

Leadership from the U.S. Army Aviation & Missile Command in Huntsville, Alabama visited UTARI on March 2. The tour focused on UTARI’s research in the predictive performance analysis of composite materials. Dr. Rassel Raihan (pictured) led a presentation and lab tour of UTARI’s Institute for Predictive Performance Methodologies. Army officials included Major General Todd Royar, Commanding General of the Army Aviation and Missile Command, Command Sergeant Major Bradford Smith, Captain Joshua Pcsolyar, Aide to the Commanding General, and Chief Warrant Officer 5 Patrick O’Neill, Aviation Branch Maintenance Officer.

2021 was a strong year for UTARI innovation with four new patents issued within the year. The Biomedical Technologies Division, led by Principal Research Scientist, Dr. Muthu Wijesundara, received two patents for their rehabilitation and preventative care devices: one relating to fluid-driven actuators , and the other relating to apparatuses for diabetic foot lesion prevention.

The Institute for Predictive Performance Methodologies (IPPM) was issued two patents as well. IPPM Founding Director and National Academy of Engineering Member, Dr. Kenneth Reifsnider, along with Dr. Rassel Rainhan, Dr. Vamsee Vadlamudi and others received patents relating to assessing the quality of adhesive bonds in composite structures , as well as methods for wireless strain testing .

2021’s success continued into 2022 with the recent announcement of Dr. Wijesundara’s election as a senior member in the National Academy of Inventors. See the full story here.

The National Academy of Inventors (NAI) has elected two engineers from The University of Texas at Arlington as senior members of the organization.

NAI senior members are active faculty, scientists and administrators who have demonstrated remarkable innovation by producing technologies that have the potential to significantly impact the welfare of society.

The new members are Yi Hong, associate professor of bioengineering, and Muthu Wijesundara, principal research scientist and head of the Biomedical Technologies Division at the University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute (UTARI).

Entire story here.

Serious hand and finger injuries provided the impetus for three individual innovators to connect, collaborate, and investigate over the past 10 years. The result is a promising prototype device called the ReHeal Glove, which will be pilot tested with patients in the next few months using a combination of funding and support from WE-REACH (the Washington Entrepreneurial Research, Evaluation, and Commercialization Hub) and the Department of Defense.

UW physician and researcher Dr. Chris Allan, research partner Professor Muthu Wijesundara, PhD, Division Head of Biomedical Device Technology at UTARI (the University of Texas at Arlington Research Institute), and patient turned research engineer, Brandon Bowman have been on a mission, never wavering in their commitment to provide a better healing solution to patients. Full University of Washington story here.

The University of Central Florida (UCF) was awarded a National Science Foundation CCRI for “Planning: InfraStructure for Photorealistic Image and Environment Synthesis (I-SPIES).” UCF selected UTARI and UTD as its collaborators. Dr. Nick Gans, UTARI Principal Research Scientist and Division Head, Automation & Intelligent Systems, will lead the Research Institute on the project.

From the NSF award page website – “Numerous Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE) research communities leverage datasets comprised of visual images or 3D virtual environments to conduct research in computer vision, robotics, multimedia systems, virtual reality, and mixed reality. Many of these datasets consist of either images previously captured with cameras and other optical sensors, or synthetic images previously rendered from 3D virtual environments. The static nature of these datasets limits their usefulness and potential applications. Recently, some researchers have provided datasets and tools for synthesizing new images from 3D virtual environments using customizable virtual camera positions, which broadens their research applications. However, many of these datasets consist of lower-fidelity indoor virtual environments that yield non-photorealistic images. Furthermore, such datasets are missing outdoor virtual environments, and tools for sharing custom camera positions within the research community are not currently available.”

This planning project prepares to address the limitations of prior datasets by investigating the feasibility of using high-quality terrestrial laser scanners to capture and create high-fidelity, photorealistic virtual environments of real-world locations, both indoor and outdoor. This will be coupled with surveys of the relevant CISE research communities through workshops held at top academic conferences. This project will result in the development of two preliminary datasets, one indoor and one outdoor, using the proposed laser-scanner methodology, and the identification of community needs, priorities, and support for the proposed InfraStructure for Photorealistic Images and Environment Synthesis (I-SPIES).

The project commenced October 1, 2021. More information can be found here.

Dr. Frank Lewis, Professor, Moncrief-O’Donnell Endowed Chair, was awarded the elite Clarivate Highly Cited Researcher recognition. Each year, Clarivate™ identifies the world’s most influential researchers ─ the select few who have been most frequently cited by their peers over the last decade. In 2021, fewer than 6,700, or about 0.1%, of the world’s researchers, in 21 research fields and across multiple fields, have earned this exclusive distinction.

Clarivate is a global leader in providing trusted insights and analytics to accelerate the pace of innovation. Clarivate’s vision is to improve the way the world creates, protects and advances innovation. List of recognized researchers can be found here.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent for Dr. Muthu Wijesundara, Principal Research Scientist and Division Head, Biomedical Technologies, for “Dual-Labor Insole Apparatuses for Diabetic Foot Lesion Prevention and Realted Methods.”

Applicants included the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System and the University of North Texas Health Science at Fort Worth. Researchers include Dr. Muthu Wijesundara, Dr. Wei Carrigan, Ryan Landrith, Dr. Metin Yavus. A copy of the patent can accessed here.

The American Society of Mechanical Engineers hosted their International Mechanical Engineering Congress & Exposition (IMECE) Conference Nov. 1-5, 2021. IMECE is ASME’s largest research and development conference focused primarily on mechanical engineering but encompasses perspectives from many engineering disciplines.

Dr. Xin Liu, Assistant Professor at the Industrial, Manufacturing, & Systems Engineering (IMSE) Department at UTA and a member of the Institute for Predictive Performance Methodologies (IPPM) at the UTA Research Institute, hosted a roundtable discussion on the topic of “Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in the Simulations of Process-Structure-Property-Performance Relationships of Advanced Materials”. Several popular topics such as physics-informed neural networks, data-driven multiscale modeling, and combination of neural network and finite element modeling have been discussed.

Affordable space exploration beyond the lower Earth orbit will require innovative lightweight structural concepts. Lightweighting potential stemming from the application of composite materials oftentimes fails to fully exploit the potential for reducing mass due to the lack of design tools tailored to yield designs with optimal load paths. Consequently, highly tailorable material systems are commonly used to produce quasi-isotropic or otherwise off-optimal designs. This project seeks to advance the design capabilities for tow-steered composite laminates. 

Dr. Liu’s team is working on developing a design tool based on the commercial finite element software as the “plug-ins”, which provides an integrated computational design framework to enable engineers to leverage the power of commercially available tools for real structures made of tailorable composites. This research will benefit NASA by exploiting the potential of tailorable composites for designing better space structures. Such a tool will reduce the cost associated with tailorable composites and accelerate affordable space exploration by NASA and the private sectors.

“Advanced composite materials like tow-steered composite laminates are highly customizable, and therefore have a great potential to reduce the mass and energy consumption for lightweight structures. Collaborating with AnalySwift and Purdue, we are implementing advanced multiscale plate theory into the graphical user interfaces in Abaqus and MSC.Patran/Nastran. The software packages to be developed will offer a user-friendly, high-fidelity design framework for tow-steered composite laminates, which can be applied to many space structures such as satellite buses, landers, rovers, and other exploration vehicles, solar arrays, and antennas.”

The paper “Assistive power buffer control via adaptive dynamic programming,” has been selected by the IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion editorial board as one of the best papers published in the journal for the period 2019-2020 for the category “Energy Storage.”

UTA Research Team included Dr. Frank Lewis, Dr. Ali Davoudi, in partnership with Dr. David Naso and Paolo Roberto Massenio from the Polytechnic University of Bari, Italy.

The paper was originally published in IEEE Transactions on Energy Conversion ( Volume: 35, Issue: 3, Sept. 2020)