By the end of the internship, the students should be able to provide Lancaster Sheet metal (sponsor company) with a valid design for a collapsible intermodal container in order to minimize their shipping costs. As understood from Lancaster Sheet Metal, the company ships its products in intermodal containers, and then the containers are sent back empty. Hence, if 2 or 3 containers can be collapses and sent back with cost of one, it will help Lancaster Sheet Metal reduce shipping costs and achieve higher profits.

Based on the recent summit in Copenhagen, it is obvious that all nations are taking climate change seriously. One of the areas that countries are focusing on is reducing their greenhouse gas emissions by reducing their overall energy consumption. Industrial Countries are encouraging consumers to buy appliances that are deemed energy efficient using an Energy Star rating.

Many industrial processes require materials that combine high strength at elevated temperatures with good corrosion and wear resistance. Superalloys are the only materials which can serve in such conditions, because of their outstanding high-temperature properties and excellent corrosion and wear resistance. However, due to limitation of testing facilities and difficulty of experimental operations, the data of these properties at elevated temperatures for these alloys are very limited, which has limited the application of these high temperature materials.

Vehicle electrification poses considerable challenges on chassis architecture, design of vehicle control and power management systems. Moreover, it tends to induce variations in the sprung and unsprung masses and load distributions. A combination of these has a significant impact on vehicle system dynamics and stability. Thus, development of next-generation electric vehicles

The conventional continuum-based physical relations that describe heat and fluid flow in bulk materials, such as the Navier-Stokes and Fourier equations, break down at sub-continuum scales. The failure of these relations, along with the current trend of miniaturization in man-made devices and wide spread use of nano-structured systems, urge for development of new computational techniques capable of modelling sub-continuum physical phenomena. This project specifically studies the thermal transport modelling in nano‐structured systems.

Anaerobic digestion is an environmentally-friendly process that breaks down biomass into simpler, more stable components, while simultaneously capturing energy in the form of a methane-rich biogas.  Digesters are usually used to treat wastes, such as at municipal waste facilities, or from livestock farms.  However, anaerobic digesters are not very reliable, suffering from occasional “digester upsets”.  Consequently, anaerobic digestion is less attractive to industry as compared to other less environmental alternatives.  The reason behind this unreliability lies in the complexities of anaero