Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water

Teresa Donnellan — Thu, 25 Jan 2024 19:03:14 +0000

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water Teresa Donnellan Thu, 01/25/2024 - 14:03

The most elegant solutions are sometimes the simplest, like using one waste product to eliminate another. By combining spent coffee grounds with iron oxide (aka rust), Mason engineers have created CoffeeBots, which can bind to several different pollutants in seawater before being removed via magnets.

From left to right: Jeff Moran, Amit Kumar Singh, and Tarini Basireddy pose with CoffeeBot samples.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

High school lab assistant Tarini Basireddy, post-doc Amit Kumar Singh, and assistant professor Jeff Moran recently published their findings in Nanoscale demonstrating how their invention, which they call “CoffeeBots,” can effectively remove three types of pollutants from seawater: oil, microplastics, and methylene blue.

Singh proposed creating CoffeeBots as a way for Basireddy to gain hands-on experience without having to interact with the many dangerous chemicals in Moran’s laboratory, which focuses mainly on developing artificial, self-propelled microparticles for different medical and environmental applications.

“Tarini and Amit developed a simple strategy to coat spent coffee grounds, which I brought from home after brewing my morning coffee, with iron oxide nanoparticles,” said Moran.

Coffee grounds have a porous, irregular surface, so they have ample surface area to which pollutants can bind, even with much smaller iron oxide nanoparticles attached, he explained. Moreover, because iron oxide is magnetic, a simple handheld magnet can both drive CoffeeBots through polluted water and remove them once they have absorbed the pollutants. Basireddy used Fourier transform infrared (FTIR) spectroscopy to confirm that the iron oxide nanoparticles had bonded to the coffee grounds.

“Tarini’s extensive research experience and skillset were crucial to the success of this project," Moran noted. She’s way ahead of where I was at her age.”

While using coffee grounds to clean up oil spills is not entirely new, this team is the first to show that moving CoffeeBots outperform stationary ones at removing pollutants, since moving CoffeeBots encounter pollutant molecules more often than stationary coffee grounds do. Making the coffee grounds magnetic has another benefit: Once the CoffeeBots are recovered, they can be reused several times with little loss in water-cleaning efficacy.

Methylene blue

The team demonstrates that
CoffeeBots are drawn to magnets.
Photo by Teresa Donnellan.

The team assessed how CoffeeBots fare in seawater polluted with methylene blue, a dye commonly used in textile production. In addition to being a carcinogen, Basireddy explained, methylene blue can cause serious health problems: “It can cause skin irritation, if there's too much in the water; it can cause a lot of digestive problems; it can cause nausea, fever, lots of symptoms.” She added that it can negatively impact marine life as well.

The team found CoffeeBots can be an effective solution for cleaning methylene blue from seawater, especially when they are first also loaded with ascorbic acid, which helps break down the dye and render it nontoxic. Basireddy noted the potential simplicity of a CoffeeBots-based solution to methylene blue pollution, saying, “It's cool because the countries that are big textile producers also happen to be the countries that are big in coffee production.” The team cited Brazil, Colombia, Ethiopia, India, Peru, and Vietnam as countries that produce both dyed textiles and coffee and struggle with water pollution.

Oil and microplastics

The final pollutant tested is perhaps the most exciting, as it’s been a burgeoning topic of concern in recent years: microplastics. In water, microplastics cling to coffee grounds for the same reason that oil does: each substance is hydrophobic.

“One reason why microplastics and nanoplastics are such a tricky environmental problem is that they're so small, and that makes it difficult to locate them just to remove them,” said Moran. “By driving the CoffeeBots through the water, the hydrophobic interactions cause the microplastic particles to build up and accumulate on the surface of the coffee grounds.”

Singh noted that, while other (perhaps more expensive) techniques exist for remediating oil spills and removing chemical pollutants from water, developing a technique to make microplastic removal more efficient is an exciting new development.

Further plans

The team has applied for a patent to protect the technology and are excited to determine the full capabilities of CoffeeBots. They are optimistic because CoffeeBots are potentially a simple, inexpensive solution to water pollution.

While Basireddy has moved on to her freshman year at Johns Hopkins University, Singh and Moran look forward to finding further applications for CoffeeBots and possibly improving their technology. For example, Singh hopes to find a way to make CoffeeBots move when activated by sunlight, which would enable them to propel themselves through the water without the need for an external magnet. In addition, the team plans to explore the full range of pollutants that can be removed by CoffeeBots and characterize the efficacy of different coffee types.

Get a more detailed look at the team's experiments by reading their paper in Nanoscale, “Eliminating waste with waste: transforming spent coffee grounds into microrobots for water treatment,” which includes several videos of CoffeeBots in action, such as the one below. In addition, Singh created a video to promote CoffeeBots on YouTube.

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Jeffrey Moran

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College of Engineering and Computing student receives top OSCAR award

Martha Bushong — Thu, 13 May 2021 15:03:20 +0000

College of Engineering and Computing student receives top OSCAR award Martha Bushong Thu, 05/13/2021 - 11:03

The Office of Student Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR) recently hosted the Spring 2021 Virtual OSCAR Celebration of Student Scholarship and Impact. Since its inception in 2011, OSCAR has highlighted undergraduate student work in various disciplines.

This year, the College of Engineering and Computing had the honor of having one of our very own named as a Student Excellence Award Winner. Daniel Mitchell, a senior majoring in mechanical engineering, designs inspection robots. He has also worked on nanomaterial sensors to detect hazardous gas and nanomaterial-based nerve stimulation electrodes. Mitchell is a Mason Gordon Scholar, a Society of Military Engineers Student Leader award winner, and an American Society of Civil Engineering Multidisciplinary Competition winner. Additionally, he served as student chair of the Patriot Green Fund, a staff writer for the IV Estate, has had several internships, and has presented his work at nine conferences.

“The most valuable takeaway for me is finding a way to apply the scientific method to get problems solved and to find out new things,” says Mitchell.

OSCAR sponsors two awards each academic year, one that recognizes student excellence in undergraduate scholarship, creative activities, and research and another that recognizes the outstanding contributions of the faculty and staff who mentor undergraduates on their projects. This past celebration displayed Mason’s standout students and faculty and their numerous accomplishments.

“I could not be prouder of the OSCAR scene over the years and the number of students we’ve been able to help with their projects,” says Associate Provost for Undergraduate Education Bethany Usher. “Over 2,900 students have been supported by an OSCAR program. OSCAR students have had an impact on Mason, in Virginia, and around the world.”

Through the years, OSCAR has helped students see their education as a process of discovery, inquiry, and synthesis—the core values of the Mason student experience.

“Research is about the generation of understanding. One of the values of the OSCAR program is to provide our outstanding students with the opportunity to experience the wonder of discovery. Congratulations to all our students and faculty.”

Provost Mark R. Ginsburg

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Office of Student Scholarship Creative Activities and Research (OSCAR)

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Honors College

Fairfax Police land helicopter on campus to explain the rotorcraft’s mechanics to engineering students

Martha Bushong — Mon, 08 Mar 2021 12:35:32 +0000

Fairfax Police land helicopter on campus to explain the rotorcraft’s mechanics to engineering students Martha Bushong Mon, 03/08/2021 - 07:35

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Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

aeronautics

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Gregory Washington

Kenneth Ball

Leigh McCue-Weil

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Mechanical engineering students get a close-up look at the Bell 429 helicopter.

Students studying aeronautics in the Department of Mechanical Engineering got an up-close look at how a helicopter works when the Fairfax Police landed one on campus recently and explained its functionality.

Mason Engineering’s second-semester senior aeronautics class (ME 499) focuses on rotary-wing flight vehicle performance, stability/control, and unmanned aircraft systems.

To bring some of the ideas of the class to life, adjunct professor Robert Gallo asked Captain Michael Shamblin, Helicopter Division Commander of the Fairfax County Police Department, to provide a practical demonstration of vertical lift with their Bell 429 helicopter.

The helicopter landed on the lawn outside Merten Hall one afternoon in late February, and the police flight crew demonstrated how the cyclic and collective flight systems affect motion and control of the rotor blades.

Among those attending the class with the aeronautics students were: Mason president Gregory Washington, Provost and Executive Vice President Mark Ginsberg, Volgenau School of Engineering Dean Ken Ball, and Mechanical Engineering Department Chair Leigh McCue.

“YouTube videos and PowerPoints only go so far in explaining the complexities of vertical lift,” Gallo says, “so having the Fairfax Police here helped our students understand how the helicopter rotor generates lift and allows it to fly in all directions.”

Mechanical engineering senior Mason Chee agrees. “We were able to look inside at the controls that they use to pilot a helicopter, and we learned about some of the effects the helicopter encounters during its flight. You can read about the theories and watch videos about them, but nothing comes as close as seeing it live.”

Vanessa Barth, a mechanical engineering senior, adds, “They were teaching us about the mechanical components and systems that control a helicopter. It was all information we talked about in class, but to see it in person was helpful.”

Gallo says the Fairfax Police were highly engaging and did an outstanding job answering questions, not only from our students but also from the faculty and staff in attendance.

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments

Martha Bushong — Fri, 26 Feb 2021 13:32:56 +0000

New research on artificial microswimmers uncovers a possible solution for delivering targeted cancer treatments Martha Bushong Fri, 02/26/2021 - 08:32

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Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Healthcare Technology

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Jeffrey Moran

A Mason Engineering researcher has discovered that artificial microswimmers accumulate where their speed is minimized, an idea that could have implications for improving the efficacy of targeted cancer therapy.

Jeff Moran, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Volgenau School of Engineering, and colleagues from the University of Washington in Seattle studied self-propelled half-platinum/half-gold rods that “swim” in water using hydrogen peroxide as a fuel. The more peroxide there is, the faster the swimming; without peroxide in pure water, the rods don’t swim.

In this work, they set out to understand what happens when these artificial microswimmers are placed in a fluid reservoir containing a gradient of hydrogen peroxide––lots of peroxide on one side, not much on the other side.

They found that, predictably, the microswimmers swam faster in regions with high peroxide concentration, says Moran, whose research was published in the new issue of Scientific Reports.

As others had observed, the direction of swimming varied randomly in time as the swimmers explored their surroundings. In contrast, in the low-concentration regions, the rods slowed down and accumulated in these regions over the course of a few minutes.

The results suggest a simple strategy to make microswimmers passively accumulate in specific regions, an idea that might have useful, practical applications, he says.

Swimming at the microscopic scale is a ubiquitous phenomenon in biology, Moran says. “Lots of cells and microorganisms, such as bacteria, can autonomously swim toward higher or lower concentrations of chemicals that benefit or harm the cell, respectively.”

This behavior is called chemotaxis, and it’s both common and important, he says. “For example, your immune cells use chemotaxis to detect and swim toward sites of injury, so they can initiate tissue repair.”

Moran and colleagues, like others in the field, have long been curious whether artificial microswimmers can mimic cells by performing chemotaxis, continuously swimming toward higher chemical concentrations. Some had claimed that the platinum/gold rods, in particular, could swim autonomously toward peroxide-rich regions.

“We were skeptical of these claims since the rods aren’t alive, and therefore they don’t have the sensing and response capabilities that are necessary for cells to execute this behavior,” he says.

“Instead, we found the opposite: the rods built up in the lower concentration regions. This is the opposite of what one would expect from chemotaxis,” Moran says.

The researchers conducted computer simulations that predicted this and validated them with experiments, he says.

“We propose a simple explanation for this behavior: Wherever they are, the rods move in randomly varying directions, exploring their surroundings. When they get to a low-fuel region, they can’t explore as vigorously. In a sense, they get trapped in their comfort zones,” Moran says.

“Conversely, in the high-peroxide regions, they move at higher speeds and, because their direction is constantly changing, escape from these regions more often. Over time, the net result is that rods accumulate in low-concentration regions,” he says. “They don’t have any intelligence. They end up where their mobility is the lowest.”

Moran says this research is promising from a technical standpoint because it suggests a new strategy to make chemicals accumulate in a highly acidic area.

“Due to their abnormal metabolic processes, cancer cells cause their immediate surroundings to become acidic. These are the cells that need the most drugs because the acidic environment is known to promote metastasis and confer resistance to drugs. Thus, the cells in these regions are a major target of many cancer therapies.”

Moran and colleagues are now designing microswimmers that move slowly in acidic regions and fast in neutral or basic regions. Through the mechanism they discovered here, they hypothesize that acid-dependent swimmers will accumulate and release their cargo preferentially where their speeds are minimized, namely the most acidic and hypoxic regions of the tumor, where the most problematic cells reside.

There is much more research to be conducted, but “these rods may have the ability to deliver chemotherapy drugs to the cancer cells that need them the most,” Moran says.

“To be clear, our study doesn’t prove that chemotaxis is impossible in artificial microswimmers, period; just that these particular microswimmers don’t undergo chemotaxis.

“Instead, we’ve identified an elegantly simple method of causing unguided microswimmers to accumulate and deliver drugs to the most problematic cancer cells, which could have implications for the treatment of many cancers, as well as other diseases like fibrosis. We’re excited to see where this goes.”

First-ever Mason satellite begins its mission

Martha Bushong — Wed, 10 Feb 2021 15:09:50 +0000

First-ever Mason satellite begins its mission Martha Bushong Wed, 02/10/2021 - 10:09

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Electrical and Computer Engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Signals and Communication

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CEC faculty research

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Peter Pachowicz

Join the Launch Party

��AV’s first satellite "ASTERIA," part of Mason Engineering’s ThinSat program, successfully passed environmental testing at the Northrop Grumman facility on Wallops Island and was integrated into a deployer. ASTERIA is now ready for launch.

The satellite will be launched on Saturday, February 20 at 12:36 p.m. from NASA’s facility on Wallops Island. Hitching a ride on the Northrop Grumman Antares rocket that is on its way to the International Space Station, the ThinSats will be released from the second stage at around 200 miles altitude. For approximately six days, the ThinSats will orbit Earth before they burn in the atmosphere.

“We have two experiments aboard a single ThinSat as part of mission NG-15,” says Piotr Pachowicz, associate professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “The first experiment will compare two methods for shielding batteries against freezing temperatures in space. The second experiment will compare the efficiency of two power architectures when influenced by satellite spin.”

ASTERIA was a senior design project involving 14 undergraduate students from the Departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Systems Engineering.

Computer engineering student Jay Deorukhkar worked on several issues that had to be resolved or modified, as well as on system testing. “It was a challenge to ensure all experiments ran correctly and the data was accurate. However, the experience was rewarding,” says Deorukhkar.

Pachowicz has other aspirations for future engineering students. “The long-term goal is to engage senior design students in designing their own satellite and their own path to space,” he says.

The ThinSats will travel aboard an Antares rocket like this when they lift-off on February 20.

The NG-15 ThinSat Virtual Launch Party, organized by Virginia Space, will be held on February 20 at 11 a.m. The virtual event will include presentations from program representatives, a live stream of the launch, and space data dashboard live data monitoring after deployment of ThinSats.

First Mason student wins prestigious commercial spaceflight fellowship

Anonymous — Mon, 08 Feb 2021 14:47:06 +0000

First Mason student wins prestigious commercial spaceflight fellowship Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 02/08/2021 - 09:47

Learn about Mechanical Engineering at Mason

“I am incredibly honored to be the first Mason student in the Matthew Isakowitz program,” says Boakye. “I have dreamed of becoming a rocket engineer since I was 10.”

Photo credit:

Ron Aria / ��AV

The Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship is an internship, mentorship, and networking opportunity awarded to exceptional college juniors, seniors, and graduate students pursuing careers in the commercial spaceflight industry.

Many people dream of being an astronaut and rocketing into outer space, but senior Sidney Boakye just landed an opportunity that launches him closer to that long-standing dream.

Boakye, a mechanical engineering major, is the first ��AV student to be awarded the Matthew Isakowitz Fellowship, a highly selective internship, mentorship, and networking program for students interested in spaceflight.

“I am incredibly honored to be the first Mason student in the Matthew Isakowitz program,” says Boakye. “I have dreamed of becoming a rocket engineer since I was 10.”

Former recipients of the fellowship have hailed from schools across the country such as Columbia University, MIT, Princeton University, Georgia Tech, and more. “The list of former fellows is impressive, and I’m excited to be a part of the 2021 group of fellows,” says Boakye. Once selected, fellows receive a paid summer internship at one of the program’s host companies. They are also paired with a notable commercial space industry leader who provides mentorship.

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What drew Boakye to this fellowship was how the program embeds recipients within the commercial space industry by providing mentors, internships, and networking opportunities. “I know I will learn a lot from this experience,” he says. “This is a unique opportunity to learn a lot and apply your knowledge. At the end of the summer, there is also a big networking event where we get to meet other fellows and commercial spaceflight professionals, so I will also get to meet like-minded people."

Boakye has dreamed of being an astronaut since he was 3 years old, and when he came to Mason, he knew he wanted to pursue mechanical engineering. Since freshman year, he has immersed himself in Mason Nation through student organizations and community involvement.

“I am graduating in three years instead of the traditional four years, but it was important for me to plan in time to get involved in clubs,” he says. In addition to being a community assistant for Mason Housing, he has served on five different executive boards across organizations like Mason’s collegiate chapters of the American Society for Mechanical Engineers, National Society of Black Engineers, and for Engineers for International Development, and SatCom GMU.

As a project lead for SatCom GMU, Boakye channeled his fascination with space into devising and building a CubeSat. “Large satellites have a lot of functions, but CubeSats are much smaller and have more limited capabilities,” says Boakye. “We got to design and build one that actually hitched a ride into space on NASA’s NG014 in October 2020.”

Boakye hopes that through the Matthew Isakowitz fellowship, he can gain more experiences like this, and he urges all students to seek out opportunities on and off the Mason campus. “I hope that I’m not the only Mason student to receive this amazing fellowship, but there are plenty of opportunities like this out there to go for,” he says. “And if you dig a little at Mason, you can find clubs and opportunities that can also give you experience in what you enjoy and expose you to new things.”

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mechanical engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Entrepreneurial engineering student forges his own path

Anonymous — Thu, 04 Feb 2021 19:11:03 +0000

Entrepreneurial engineering student forges his own path Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 02/04/2021 - 14:11

Entrepreneur and senior mechanical engineering major Daniel Scott Mitchell came to ��AV with a mission to build a toolkit of experiences and problem-solving skills to prepare him for his career. By taking chances on himself, he has more than achieved his goal.

Mitchell, an Honors College student, completed a variety of internships and research assistantships, but his success at starting his own business ventures across the engineering and technology landscape sets him apart. Most notably, he took a leave of absence for the 2019-20 academic year to complete three internships at companies across the United States.

“I have always felt that I learn better by applying knowledge in practice,” he says. “I did different things at each internship, and it was a unique opportunity to work in different areas with different problem-solving skills and mindsets.”

He crisscrossed the continent by first moving to San Francisco to intern at Tesla in fall 2019, then traveled to Boston to intern at a 3D printing company called Formlabs, and finally, he worked remotely for a company called Rivian that makes electric vehicles.

Mitchell sees internships as an opportunity to not only apply your knowledge but to discover what you enjoy, and that is part of the reason why he deferred his formal education.

“Internships are a great opportunity for students to try things out. It is an established agreement between you and a company to learn as much as you can, try and do a good job, and walk away having learned something in a short period of time,” says Mitchell. “You can’t do that with a full-time job.”

Aside from his impressive list of internships in his time away from Mason, Mitchell has always been solving problems and maximizing his time learning and innovating. He enjoys many other entrepreneurial ventures, and he is always looking for a new challenge.

“My motto is ‘I make therefore I am.’ For me, I see a need and I don’t want to wait around for a solution to appear, I want to tackle it myself,” says Mitchell.

It was this mindset that also pushed Mitchell to start a podcast with Mason Engineering alum Farbod Moghaddam, BS ME ‘19. Their podcast—Next Byte—is sponsored by Wevolver, an online knowledge repository and community for cutting edge information on engineering and technology.

“I’m an avid podcast listener, and I saw the need for a podcast that talks about the cutting edge of different fields in engineering and tech that didn’t go into granular details. My friend Farbod and I decided to take it on ourselves. We pitched Wevolver, and they loved the idea. It was in the works for a few months, but we are releasing podcasts weekly now,” says Mitchell.

Mitchell’s interests span the technology and engineering space, but he originally chose mechanical engineering because of its versatility. “It is very interdisciplinary, and I wanted a degree that I thought could give me the skill set I need to solve problems. Mechanical engineering here at Mason has definitely lived up to that,” says Mitchell, who has also served as president of Mason’s chapter of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers and the Society of American Military Engineers.

Long-term, Mitchell aspires to own and run his own company, but he will take all that he has learned at Mason and in his research, business, and internship opportunities into whatever opportunity comes his way.

“I have a lot of hobbies, passions, and interests,” says Mitchell. “But the one thing I always fervently pursue is to build new things and solve problems.”

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entrepreneurship

mechanical engineering

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

internships

Honors College

Freshman ready to build his résumé in class and on the mat

Colleen Rich — Fri, 30 Aug 2019 16:02:10 +0000

Freshman ready to build his résumé in class and on the mat Colleen Rich Fri, 08/30/2019 - 12:02

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Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Mason and the U.S. Navy partner to promote STEM activities

Melanie Balog — Fri, 18 Jan 2019 10:00:46 +0000

Mason and the U.S. Navy partner to promote STEM activities Melanie Balog Fri, 01/18/2019 - 05:00

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Quality

Impact

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

��AV U.S. Navy Ambassadors Program

senior capstone projects

U.S. Department of the Navy

Engineers on Deck

Campus News

'Artificial blubber' will allow divers extended time in frigid waters

Melanie Balog — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 10:00:32 +0000

'Artificial blubber' will allow divers extended time in frigid waters Melanie Balog Thu, 01/10/2019 - 05:00

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Jeffrey Moran

Jeff Moran, assistant professor of mechanical engineering in the Volgenau School of Engineering, is working to make wetsuits more effective and keep divers warmer longer. Photo by Lathan Goumas/Strategic Communications.

A ��AV researcher is part of a team of scientists who have devised a wetsuit treatment that greatly increases the amount of time divers can safely spend in bitterly cold water.

Jeff Moran, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering within the Volgenau School of Engineering, and researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have come up with a plan to triple the survival time for swimmers in wetsuits in unforgiving environments, including Arctic waters. The team, which worked on the project in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Defense and the U.S. Navy SEALs, published their findings in the June 2018 edition of the journal RSC Advances.

The development comes at a critical time as the U.S. military is seeking to expand its presence in the Arctic. Continued melting of the polar ice caps means the region will see increased shipping traffic, commercial fishing and efforts by various nations to tap the region’s many resources, including oil.

“Current wetsuits—current solutions that we have for diving in super-cold water and very cold conditions—are fundamentally limited,” Moran said. “Hypothermia becomes a serious risk after 20 to 30 minutes. We saw room for improvement.”

The wetsuit treatment will also have applications for swimmers, athletes, surfers and recreational divers.

Standard wetsuits are made of neoprene, a stretchy type of synthetic rubber that is filled with pockets of air that account for most of the material’s volume and half of the heat that escapes. When the wetsuit is placed inside a five-gallon pressure tank—no bigger than a beer keg—filled with a heavy, inert gas such as xenon or krypton for one to five days, the heavier gas replaces the air within the neoprene. The process creates an artificial blubber-type substance that greatly enhances the wetsuit’s thermal insulation properties.

“The fundamental idea of the project is to replace air with a better insulating gas,” said Moran, who worked closely on the project with Jacopo Buongiorno and Michael Strano, the MIT professors whose visit to the Defense Science Study Group inspired the project.

The breakthrough could have significant national security implications for U.S. military personnel operating in water colder than 10 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit) by increasing survivability in those conditions from less than an hour to as long as three hours.

“The main impact of this materials technology is delaying the onset of hypothermia for the warfighter,” said Anton Cottrill, an MIT graduate student and coauthor of the journal article. “You can modify a current wetsuit using the process that we have developed to essentially double the time that a diver can spend in frigid, arctic waters before the onset of hypothermia.”

The innovation makes the treated wetsuit’s material a better insulator, but it also makes the suit easier to put on, move around in and take off than conventional suits because the treated versions are 40 percent thinner, said Moran, himself an amateur diver.

Oscar Barton, the chair of Mason’s Mechanical Engineering Department who taught at the U.S. Naval Academy for more than 20 years before coming to Mason, lauded the breakthrough for its potential contributions to the U.S. military.

“There’s always an effort to push the envelope for anything that involves man and machine,” Barton said. “In my mind, it’s taking what we do in the classroom, developing the technology and getting it to market.”

Moran and his team hope to soon complete a stable long-term version of the wetsuit and begin human trials. They’ve already applied for a patent to protect their work.

“The goal is to make diving in cold water a less miserable experience,” Moran said.

Volgenau School of Engineering Department of Mechanical Engineering

Mason engineers develop “rusty” coffee grounds to remove pollutants from water

Methylene blue

Oil and microplastics

Further plans

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College of Engineering and Computing student receives top OSCAR award

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First-ever Mason satellite begins its mission

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First Mason student wins prestigious commercial spaceflight fellowship

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'Artificial blubber' will allow divers extended time in frigid waters