The overall goal for the Active Worker Strategy is to increase movement within the workplace. Office workers tend to be inactive within their working environment, which may cause an increased risk of developing work-related pain later in life. This investigation is going to look into creating office layout guidelines in order to promote a more active worker, and provide an early intervention to possible pain developers. Using technologies such as FitBits, we will attempt to better understand the amount of movement an office worker performs in a day.

To meet CAFE standards for fuel economy, many new projects are being undertaken. One such method being investigated to achieve these standards is vehicle lightweighting. Each lightweighting project has an associated cost and will have an impact on various functional groups of the vehicle. During this internship, the related functional benefits of lightweighting will be analyzed, with a focus on location (zone) based effects. The zones will be accessed and a value to weight reduction ratio will be assigned to each.

The proposed research project seeks to define the environmental advantages and cost challenges associated with the design of two types of alternative fuel vehicles; battery electric and bi-fuel CNG + gasoline, with respect to a changing American market. These alternative fuel vehicles will be compared to traditional internal combustion vehicles and assessed based on the environmental effects of the pollutants emitted and their capability to meet the current and future needs of consumers.

One of the main issues for automakers in today’s green economy is ensuring their vehicles have the highest fuel economy possible in order to deal with constantly increasing fuel costs. The improved fuel efficiency of vehicles provides money savings for customers, reduced carbon dioxide emissions, less dependency on oil, and lastly increased energy sustainability. The compressor load optimization project aims at improving the efficiency of the refrigerant cycle inside of a vehicle leading to improved fuel economy, reduced emissions, and lastly an extended comfort time in stop/start vehicle.

The objective of this research project is to determine if athletes who use the Flexkor device to facilitate stretching after their workouts will result in comparable gains in hamstring flexibility and strength as would be obtained by athletes who use a trained therapist. Many elite athletes in a team environment rely heavily on therapists to conduct stretching after practicing, as part of their cool-down period.

It has been a common practice to discharge water, wastewater and industrial effluents into open channels such as rivers and streams.   Such discharges, in the form of jets, often enter shallow bodies of water typically found in rivers and coastal bays.  In contrast to the existing body of knowledge on unconfined turbulent jets in which the influence of the bounding surface is either absent or minimal, shallowness has a dramatic effect on the flow field of shallow jets.  To better understand and control the a flows/processes, knowledge of the velocity field is an essential ingredient.