Mechanical Engineering

A simulation for a proposed air transport system among University of California campuses earned an award for a team of UC Merced students.

Imagine you're a farmer who uses a drip irrigation system on your crops. On watering day, you open the valve from the canal, then go to your orchard, maybe a few acres away, and wait. Once enough water arrives, you walk back and shut the valve. But that takes a long time and wastes water, a precious commodity in the northern San Joaquin Valley.

UC Merced’s School of Engineering and its programs continue to be recognized by U.S. News & World Report as demonstrated in the release today of its 2025 Best Graduate Schools rankings.

The R1 school advanced three spots in the latest Best Overall Engineering Schools rankings, inching closer to the nation’s top 100.

“We will continue to strive for even greater heights and to make impactful contributions to the field,” School of Engineering Dean Rakesh Goel said.

Electrical engineering and computer science Professor Pengfei Su has received a CAREER award for his research on cross-layer performance tuning to enhance deep learning model efficiency.

He is the 41st researcher from UC Merced to earn a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Many people with electric vehicles drive them to work during the day and then charge them overnight after returning home. But a simple reversal of that schedule could make it cheaper and easier to charge your electric car.

That was the conclusion reached by a team of UC Merced researchers, who recently published a paper in the Electricity Journal on "Aligning Electric Vehicle Charging with the Sun: An Opportunity for Daytime Charging?"

UC Merced researchers are taking part in a comprehensive, multi-agency effort aimed at efficiently measuring and mitigating methane emissions.

IBM and Los Alamos National Laboratory are leading the effort, which earned a $20 million award from the U.S. Department of Energy in December.

Helping diplomats navigate new cultures, removing mircroplastics from stormwater and automating raisin processing: These are some of the projects awarded winning scores at UC Merced's fall Innovate to Grow event.

Innovate to Grow, or I2G as it's known on campus, is a twice-a-year showcase for UC Merced engineering and computer science students to demonstrate projects they have been developing.

Teams of students work to address challenges presented to them by clients, then present their results to judges who are experts from around California.

Mushrooms are pretty amazing. They are light and porous yet have a high strength-to-weight ratio. They are absorbent. They can serve as filters.

Manufacturing a material that mimics mushrooms and other fungal structures could provide opportunities in any number of areas, ranging from aerospace engineering to clothing production.

This is part of a series of profiles of new UC Merced Bobcats enrolled for the fall 2024 semester.

After diving into robotics in high school, Antonio "Tony" Lopez-Blanco is eager to attend UC Merced in pursuit of a career that reaches for the sky. Lopez says he is “ready to learn, ready to work and ready to have fun.”

California high-speed rail, a multibillion-dollar project designed to connect the Central Valley to Los Angeles and the Bay Area, promises swift transportation, the protection of agricultural land and contributions to a cleaner environment.

It's also providing a lot of jobs - from design to construction to, eventually, operation.