Mechanical Engineering

Welcome

Mechanical Engineering plays a major role in meeting the needs of modern and developing societies towards, in particular, an increased mobility, an improved comfort, and the provision of services, goods and artifacts, while respecting the natural resources and the environment.

The general objective of the research and the teaching is the design, modeling and optimization of complex systems for sustainability.

Activities are targeted at providing a major contribution to advances in key engineering sciences with a strong focus on solid and fluid mechanics, thermodynamics and heat and mass transfer, as well as control theory. A major emphasis is also put on systemic multiphysics and multiscale approaches in particular in advanced energy systems, processes and technology; multi-scale dynamics; sustainable product design and production; mechatronics, the science and technology of interfaces and new materials.

Computational engineering, information technology, high performance instrumentation and experimental facilities are key enabling elements of the activities of the institute, which includes 11 different laboratories.

Open position for a Tenure Track Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering

News

International prizes

Professor Dominique Pioletti of the Biomechanical Orthopedics Laboratory EPFL-HOSR received the Price 2008 of the Society of Biomechanics of the French-speaking countries for his works. These concern the biomechanical aspects of the musculosquelettal system and the phenomena coupling the biological answer of tissues to mechanical simulations. These works are used in the elaboration of new implants for tissues such as the bone, the cartilage or the intervertebral disks.

Roland Bouffanais has won the 2008 IBM prize. In order to promote research in modelling and simulation in different domains of engineering and science (physics, chemistry, material sciences, life sciences), IBM Research GmbH, Zurich Research Laboratory, has established a special prize at the EPFL. The prize awards exceptional quality in presented work and, specifically, the originality of method in calculation used and/or the scientific results obtained.
Roland Bouffanais has implemented an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian approach in the spectral element method, hence adding to it moving-grid capabilities. He examined thoroughly subgrid modeling in large-eddy simulations of turbulent flows. By completely solving the free-surface swirling flow in a cylindrical cavity driven by the rotation of its bottom end-wall over a wide range of Reynolds numbers (up to 6'000), Roland Bouffanais made a real breakthrough in this research area. All this was made possible by performing efficient large-scale computations on highly-parallelized computer clusters.

PhD student Jurg Schiffmann who completed his thesis last July in LENI has been awarded the 2nd SwissElectric Research Award (Frs 25'000.-) last Friday. The topic of Schiffmann is "electrically driven miniature heat pump compressor (210000rpm, 2kW)". A movie has been made for this opportunity that can be seen here.

AGENDA