09/02/2026
Last week, University of Michigan Mechanical Engineering PhD students Collin Treacy and Georgia McSwain presented their research at the ASME IDTEC conference in Houston, Texas!
Both Collin and Georgia are advised by Maha Haji, U-M associate professor of mechanical engineering, and conduct research in the Symbiotic Engineering and Analysis Lab.
Collin presented "End-to-End Differentiable Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of Wave Energy Converters." In collaboration with Carlos Michelen Strofer at Sandia National Laboratories, Collin's research proposes a framework that can significantly reduce the computational time for wave energy converter (WEC) design optimization.
"In this work, we developed WEC hydrodynamic and optimal control models that work well with gradient-based optimization," Collin said. "We also tested these models to optimize the geometry of a WEC, and our gradient-based approach reduced the computation time by 74% compared to the traditional gradient-free approach."
Georgia presented "Multidisciplinary Design Optimization of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle for Ocean Microplastic Removal." Her work focuses on addressing the accumulation of microplastics on the water surface by integrating a snail-inspired pumping plate with an autonomous surface vehicle.
"I have employed multidisciplinary design optimization to this design process: building and optimizing a model that describes the system's geometry, mass, stability, maneuverability, speed, plate mechanism, power, and cost," Georgia said. "This has allowed us to find designs that are predicted to collect over two orders of magnitude more microplastic particles than designs found using a traditional sequential optimization approach."
