Motorsports Research, the new building for UNC Charlotte’s North Carolina Motorsports and Automotive Research Center (NCMARC) has opened.

The purpose of the project was to design, build and test a modular and transportable electricity micro-source unit composed of a hybrid photovoltaic-fuel cell system with energy storage.  The project was so successful that it won two very prestigious awards.

On Dec. 12, 2011, Westinghouse Electric Co. and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte jointly announced Westinghouse’s commitment of more than $3 million in donated equipment, services and scholarship funding to provide support for the university’s Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC).

Timothy Dinsmore believes in a balanced life. As a double major in Civil Engineering and Music Performance at UNC Charlotte, Dinsmore wants to be a master builder involved in all aspects of structures projects, while still making sure music and his guitar are important parts of his life.

With the goal of creating strong community leaders, the Levine Scholars Program at UNC Charlotte is educating some of the top students in the country through special classes, civic engagement projects, summer internships and international travel. This is all after they start the program with some outdoor adventure.

An engineer’s cake recipe

Start with 50 cake mixes, stir in 162 eggs and three gallons of vegetable oil, then add 32 thermocouples and bake at 350 degrees until you get the data needed to verify your computational fluid dynamics analyses.

Helping a local utility solve its environmental challenges and at the same time providing students with valuable field experience, researchers from UNC Charlotte’s IDEAS Center are performing sedimentation studies on Lake Howell in Cabarrus County, North Carolina.

When President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he donated the money from the prize to several charities. One of these was the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, which used the money to fund the Obama Scholars program. One of the 12 winners of the new scholarships was Lee College of Engineering junior Jenny Salgado.

The William States Lee College of Engineering presented its 2011 teaching awards on Dec. 1. Dr. Sara McMillan of Engineering Technology and Construction Management was named the Undergraduate Teacher of the Year, and Dr. Yogi Kakad of Electrical and Computer Engineering the Graduate Teacher of the Year.