Mechanical Engineering Magazine

In this episode of TechCast, ASME's 144th President Lester Su is joined by Dale Matthews, a technical consultant at Framatome, Inc., ASME Fellow, U.S. Marine Corps veteran, and Chair of the ASME Section III Standards Committee. Matthews brings more than 35 years of experience in nuclear engineering and has spent decades contributing to the development and implementation of ASME nuclear codes and standards.

The global energy landscape is increasingly complex. In addition to slowing demand for refined products and tightening regulatory mandates, aging infrastructure, rapid growth in competitive sectors such as LNG and nuclear, and ongoing geopolitical tensions add further uncertainty.

As a result, degreed MEs are “just quicker at knowing constraints before going in” to a project, said Meves, who works for the product development and innovation firm based in Whitehall, Ohio.

FEATURE WHEN JAMES DEWBERRY ARRIVED AT AUBURN UNIVERSITY for his freshman year, he found that he was rooming with two aspiring engineers: one mechanical, one aerospace. Discussing their respective course loads one evening, he learned that the ME was taking an ethics course, as directed by his degree plan. The aerospace major, however, was not required to do so.

Water covers more than two-thirds of the Earth’s surface, and its waves contain a natural source of energy. Much of that energy goes unused, but researchers at the University of Michigan (U-M) College of Engineering are working to change that. “Our research is motivated by the vast untapped energy available in ocean and lake waves, as well as the need for reliable power in remote coastal and island communities,” said Lei Zuo, the Herbert C. Saddler Professor of Engineering at U-M.

Engineers are at the forefront of figuring out how to best quiet things down. Ingenuity, algorithms, and metamaterials are coming together in ever more clever ways to better silence our industries and homes, both indoors and outdoors. The outside world is noisy. Increasing amounts of traffic, flights, leaf blowers, other machines, and of course, more vocal exertions from our species alone, than ever before.

This advancement over steam engines helped farmers safely and economically tend to their wheat fields. The Hart-Parr Model 3 is an ASME Historical Mechanical Engineering Landmark and resides in the National Museum of American History’s collection as the “oldest surviving internal combustion engine tractor in the United States.” Tractors were one of the driving forces that reshaped American agriculture in the 20th century. Inventors Charles W. Hart and Charles H.

Graphene has fascinated scientists and engineers for decades. How much do you know about it? Few materials have generated as much interest and curiosity as graphene. Since it burst onto the research scene in the early 2000s, it has continued to make headlines as scientists and engineers explore where it could be useful. How well do you know this material? Take this ASME quiz to find out. Graphene has fascinated scientists and engineers for decades. How much do you know about it?

On a cold surface, frost spreads from droplet to droplet in a chain reaction. When one supercooled droplet freezes, it grows a microscopic “ice bridge” that reaches across the gap to its neighbor. The moment the bridge makes contact, that droplet freezes too, and the cascade continues. For decades, researchers assumed these bridges grew along the cold surface itself; a reasonable assumption, since nearly every study observed them from directly above. That assumption told only half the story.

MIT researchers recently released research making strides against a significant barrier to sustainability—7 percent of total carbon emissions come from construction materials globally. In October 2026, Senior author Josephine Carstensen, MIT’s Gilbert W. Winslow (1937) Career Development Professor in Civil Engineering, will have published research in Automation in Construction on “topology optimization,” on how to reduce material use by as much as 90 percent in the industry.