Engineering Student Wins International MEMS Design Contest

Acar, a Ph.D. student in the mechanical and aerospace engineering department's MicroSystems Lab, entered a distributed-mass micro-machined gyroscope design with potential uses in aerospace, military, automotive and consumer electronics systems. For winning first place, he also will receive a prototype of his design and a SolidWorks Office 2003 3-D CAD package.

Acar's winning design was chosen out of 132 applications from 24 countries. Second place went to Jason Clark, from UC Berkeley, and third place to Said Emre Alper and Tayfun Akin, both from Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey.

Submissions were judged by a panel of experts, including Al Pisano, Ph.D., of UC Berkeley and Elliott Brown, Ph.D., of UCLA. Winners were chosen based on factors like design novelty and commercial utility.

The competition ran from January 13 through to April 30, 2003, and winners were announced on June 9, 2003.

To learn more about the MicroSystems Lab and Acar's work, visit http://mems.eng.uci.edu.

click image to open high-resolution version