Four mechanical engineering professors have received a $25,000 grant from Schlumberger, a French-based oil services company, for their work to combine emerging technologies in rapid prototyping and desktop manufacturing.

Drs. Kristin Wood, Joseph Beaman, Richard Crawford and David Bourell, professors of mechanical engineering, will use the funds to merge their respective research in virtual and physical prototyping to produce tested quality products and realistic virtual models.

"The objective of the project is to fundamentally change the engineering design process," said Wood, "and dramatically shorten development times for engineering systems by breaking the design-test-tuning bottleneck."

Recent advances in physical prototyping allow the production of freeform solid objects directly from a computer model without part-specific tooling or human intervention. These technologies have been termed Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) or Rapid Prototyping (RP). Benefits of this technology include greatly reduced fabrication time and cost, and the capability to achieve, in one operation, shapes that would otherwise require multiple operations, or in some cases, are impossible to manufacture with standard techniques.

Significant advances also have been made in virtual prototyping methods, especially computational analysis of dynamic systems, solid modeling and fluid dynamics. These advances include high performance computing, virtual geometric/functional modeling and parametric/non-parametric design tools to support rapid analysis and synthesis of engineering components and systems.

"The Schlumberger grant represents the beginning of a continuing relationship with UT Austin," said Dr. Larry Schwartz, Schlumberger manager of university relations. "A senior executive has been assigned as Schlumberger’s 'ambassador' to UT. He will visit the university about twice each year, meet with faculty in research programs of interest to Schlumberger to stay current on the university's research activities and make UT researchers aware of Schlumberger's long-term strategies, technology needs and business directions."