National AgrAbility Project

Steve Swain, the assistive technology specialist with the National AgrAbility Project, and Bill Begley, with Life Essentials, conducted a training for the Alabama Vocational Rehabilitation Services supervisors in their state offices in Montgomery, Alabama. The training included an introduction to AgrAbility and assistive technology for the farm. Mr. Begley then presented the various products and customers of Life Essentials. There was a lot of interest and questions including an invitation for additional training in a VR region and the suggestion of exhibiting at the National Peanut Festival in Dothan, Alabama.

Indiana AgrAbility

Steve Swain, the rural rehabilitation specialist with the Indiana AgrAbility Project. has been invited to be a part of the Indiana Vocational Rehabilitation Services Home Modification Workgroup. The first meeting of the workgroup was on May 5, 2016, and included VR regional and area supervisors, home modification contractors, and home modification assessors. The workgroup will examine forms and procedures for VR counselors and assessors to facilitate the process of home modifications for all involved and especially for the consumer.

Random Lake High School (Wisconsin) celebrated its 100th graduating class in 2016. As part of the celebration, a new award was established: Random Like High School Distinguished Alumni Award. The inaugural recipient is Dr. John K. Schueller, PE, who graduated in 1973. Dr. Schueller (MS 1979, PhD 1983, is a Professor in the Agricultural and Biological Engineering department at the University of Florida. Congratulations, Dr. Schueller!

Dr. Timu Gallien (BS '96, MS '08), has accepted a tenure-track assistant professorship at UCLA in Civil & Environmental Engineering. Congratulations, Dr. Gallien!

Dr. Dennis Buckmaster presented on “Digital Ag Systems in the US” at the Digital Disruption in Agriculture conference held in Sydney Australia.

An article by Dr. Indrajeet Chaubey, Cibin Raj, Jeffrey Volenec, Elizabeth Trybula, and Sylvie Brouder is featured on the cover of the Global Change Biology -Bioenergy Journal. The article, "Watershed-scale impacts of bioenergy crops on hydrology and water quality using improved SWAT model" was published on June 7. Congratulations!

Mavis Owureku-Asare, a visiting scholar in ABE, was featured on GhanaWeb last week. She is working with Dr. Kingsly.

Maha Graduates:

The Maha Fluid Power Center was privileged this month to celebrate the graduation of three exceptional students: Hiral Haria, Mrudula Orpe, and Enrique Busquets. On May 16, Hiral defended her master’s thesis featuring work on Maha’s hydraulic hybrid on-highway vehicle. Her work in implementing and testing the novel transmission architecture, including the development of an engine speed controller, regenerative braking, and the corresponding DAQ system, is an important step toward bringing the advantages of power-dense hydraulic systems to ordinary on-highway vehicles.

Mrudula also defended her master’s degree on May 16^th. Her work focuses on achieving operator comfort for skid steer loader operators, who are exposed to harsh vibrations on account of the lack of suspension. In order to reduce these vibrations, Mrudula has developed a controller which uses the hydraulics on board the skid steer loader as a form of active suspension. The controller also keeps the bucket on the loader from tipping and spilling its load when it is lifted.

On May 20^th, Enrique Busquets defended his PhD. His research focused on advanced control algorithms for compact and efficient displacement-controlled (DC) multi actuator machines with pump switching and hydraulic hybrids on the actuator and the supervisory levels. Through his research, it was demonstrated that this new class of machines can achieve conventional or superior operation with reduced installed pump power and downsized engine power, which leads to substantial energy and fuel savings on top of the already efficient DC actuation configuration. Additionally, his work enabled for the first time conventional operation of a secondary-controlled hydraulic hybrid swing drive in an excavator and through the proposal of novel architectures the compactness challenge was addressed.

Hiral will go on to work as an Analytical Drivetrain Research Engineer at Ford, Mrudula as a FE/CO2 Modeling Research Engineer, also at Ford, and Enrique as a Systems Engineering Group Manager at Bosch Rexroth USA. Congratulations graduates!

New Faces at Maha:

The Maha team would like to welcome this summer’s SURF students: Rajith Weerasingh, Dan Ding, and Zechao Lu, as well as the new visiting researchers Mateus Bertolin and Raphael Seifried, a new master’s student― Pranay Banerjee― and a student joining the lab as a research assistant from the undergraduate program: Veersinh Patil.

Pam Hancock, the clerk in the ABE business office, has completed the Accomplished Clerical Excellence (ACE) program, administered by the treasurer and chief financial officer. (Second row, right end) The two-year program offers instruction in many valuable skills, as well as information about campus. Congratulations, Pam!

Bravo!

ABE continues to shine in the Bravo Awards for the College of Agriculture. This semester, the honorees were:

Yvonne Hardebeck
Scott Brand
Daniel Skelton
Micky Creech
Chad Martin
Larry Theller
Dan Taylor
Anthony Franklin
Cindy Chastain

The ABE 1/4-Scale Tractor team represented Purdue ABE at the ASABE International contest in Peoria this month. Pictures are available at their Flickr page.  For the second time, they brought home the Maneuverability Award and did well in the report and presentation categories as well. Congratulations!

The ABE Alumni ranks increased by 82 new names:

Evan Anderson
Edward Babinec
Lucas Beslow
Brittany Bezy
William Borcherding
Max Burbrink
Cole Callaway
Elizabeth Carpenter
Yiqun Chen
Maggie Del Ponte
Benjamin Embry
Alex Emenhiser
Mary-Hannah English
Jacob Feller
Ryan Fletcher
Arizona Fox
Ryan Geis
Vasupradha Girish
Tyler Gray
Alexander Gudas
Alexandra Haan
Jaycey Hardenstein
Alanie Hooton
Caitlin Hubner
Kinsey Kauffman
Jakob Keldsen
Hyunjoo Kim
Kathleen Krawczyk
Brian Layden
Justin Lewton
Elise Lund
Tamara Mamon
Megha Manjunath
Caleb Mann
Alexa Maurer
Michael Mavity
Jordyn McCord
Ian McDowell
victoria McLaurin
Danielle McNeely
Eli Metzler-Prieb
Douglas Milani
Jacob W. Miller
Tara Morton
Jared Myers
Trevor Overstreet
Rushi Patel
Candace Popp
Zachary Ratliff
Nathan Redelman
Yi Ren
Alex Reutman
Bennett Rieke
Zachary Roberts
David Rokhinson
Stephanie Schramm
Michelle Shafer
Srishti Sharma
Katherine Simons
Kathryn Smethers
Scott Snider
Dustin Stevenson
Christopher Thompson
Troy Tonner
Matthew Vale
William Vaughn
Zijian Wang
Yi Wen
Jake Wiechmann
Ethan Wiedenhoeft
Ryan Williams
Emily Wright
Lanchn Wu
Yuezhi Wu
Pei Yang
Fang Yuan
Cole Zeller
Shuangyi Zhang
Xinchen Zhang
Mingyu Zhou
Elizabeth Ziga

Congratulations to our May graduates!