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BLACKSBURG, Va., April 8, 2011 – Three Virginia Tech College of Engineering faculty members will assume director positions with the new Commonwealth Centers for Advanced Manufacturing and for Advanced Propulsion Systems.

The commonwealth centers are unique research collaborations between Virginia’s leading engineering universities, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and global industrial partners. 

The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Propulsion Systems is a collaboration between Virginia Tech; the University of Virginia; and Rolls-Royce, North America. It focuses on the development of innovative technologies for land, air, and sea-based power systems. The Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing is a partnership between Virginia Tech, the University of Virginia, Virginia State University, and several global industrial corporations aimed at accelerating the transfer of laboratory innovations to manufacturing processes.

The three appointments are

• Jaime Camelio, director of manufacturing systems at the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing;
• Gary Pickrell, director of surface engineering at the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing; and 
• Srinath Ekkad, director of advanced propulsion systems for the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Propulsion Systems.

The three professors will be working with their counterparts at partner institutions and member companies in the development of collaborative facilities and collaborative research opportunities. The companies for the manufacturing efforts will be named at the groundbreaking ceremony for the Commonwealth Center for Advanced Manufacturing on March 31 in Disputanta, Va.

Camelio, who won the Outstanding Young Manufacturing Engineer Award in 2007 from the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, is a former consultant to the Automotive/Operations Practice at A.T. Kearney Inc. in its Southfield, Mich., office. He conducted management/engineering consulting, with an emphasis on operations management, product development, product commonality, and design for cost reduction.

Camelio, a member of the industrial and systems engineering department, has a high number of publications in top-tier journals in manufacturing such as the American Society of Manufacturing Engineers’ Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering and its Journal of Mechanical Design. His paper “Modeling Variation Propagation of Multi-Station Assembly Systems with Compliant Parts” addresses a novel approach for dealing with contact effects in assemblies.

He has obtained $2.53 million in external funding from a variety of sources, including the National Science Foundation and industrial sources such as Volvo Trucks and Northrop Grumman.

As a post-doctoral researcher, he served as the leader on a collaborative project with General Motors and the University of Michigan. The project focused on variation propagation modeling for compliant assembly lines with a particular emphasis in the impact of new materials such as aluminum.

Pickrell is a past recipient of a Research and Development (R&D) 100 Award in 2004 from R&D magazine for a fiber optic sensor technology, considered one of the top products developed worldwide. He also received the college of engineering’s  outstanding assistant professor award in 2005 and a faculty fellow award in 2007.

He currently sits on the editorial board of the international journal of Lean Six Sigma, and is a consultant in the area of Six Sigma and Lean Six Sigma. He has held industrial positions including technical director, general manager, glass technologist and member of the board of directors for various companies including Corning, Porvair Advanced Materials and OI-NEG, before joining Virginia Tech in 1999. He is the associate director of the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s Center for Photonics Technology.

Pickrell, a faculty member in the materials science and engineering department, has over 100 journal and conference publications and has 14 patents. He has been a principal or co-principal investigator on projects totaling over $5 million while at Virginia Tech. His research primarily focuses on holey optical fibers, optical sensors, thermal spray processing, nanoparticulate drug delivery, porous materials, high temperature corrosion, and material processing and property optimization.

He has been the editor of two special issues of the journal Sensors, has chaired several international conferences including Nanotechnology for Energy, Health Care, and Industry, and has been an invited speaker in venues including China, Japan, France, and the United States.

Ekkad, an American Society of Mechanical Engineers’ Fellow, is an expert in the areas of experimental heat transfer methods, enhanced heat transfer, external surface heat transfer and film cooling for turbine blades, electronic cooling, coal gasification, combustion, and micro-channel heat exchangers.

He also serves as a director of the Center for Clean Coal Energy, part of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, and is co-directing the institute’s Global Laboratory for Thermal Phenomena. He has worked with a variety of industrial entities and has generated more then $5 million in research funding during his career.

He received the Journal of Heat Transfer’s Outstanding Reviewer Award in 2006 and the Bergles-Rohsenow Young Investigator Award in Heat Transfer in 2004.

Ekkad joined the mechanical engineering faculty in 2007 after nine years at Louisiana State University and two years as a senior project engineer in the turbines department at Rolls-Royce in Indianapolis. He has published more than 110 peer reviewed journal and conference publications, and is the co-author of “Gas Turbine Heat Transfer and Cooling Technology,” an influential book in his field of study.  In addition, he is also the associate editor of three journals.

Related Links

• A complete listing of the faculty, facilities and research of the Center for Turbomachinery and Propulsion Research can be found online.
• American Society of Mechanical Engineers honors Srinath Ekkad with Fellowship