 Vegetable-Based Cutting Fluids
College of Engineering Researchers Find a Better Way for Industry to Work with Metals
In 1882, just about the time the University of Michigan was building its first Mechanical Engineering laboratory, an engineer named Frederick Taylor was in a Philadelphia steel plant, spraying water on a metal-cutting tool. He found that water was a good coolant but a terrible lubricant and caused a great deal of rusting. He tested vegetable fats as lubricants, but couldn’t make them work. A little over 120 years later, Steve Skerlos, assistant professor, Mechanical Engineering, and Kim Hayes, professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, revisited the idea and have succeeded in developing vegetable-based metalworking fluids (MWFs) that are a viable alternative to petroleum-based products.
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 A New Dimension in Research
How Holography Took a Giant Step Forward at the College of Engineering
As we begin Michigan Engineering's 150th-anniversary year, it's fitting to look back at the milestones that so many CoE researchers and alumni have left along the road from yesterday to today. When college of Engineering researchers Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks (MSE EE '65) displayed their revolutionary laser transmission hologram of a toy train at the Optical Society's 1964 Spring Conference, they shed new light on a nascent scientific principle that, in the following years, has found numerous applications in aerospace, archaeology, credit-card security and popular art, to name just a few.
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