A mechanical engineering team from the University of Rochester has been working to help a Major League Baseball team understand the energy transfer between a baseball and a bat. Their advisor is physics alumnus JJ Ruby ’17 MA, ’21 PhD, the senior director of research and development for the Houston Astros and a visiting assistant professor for the Department of Engineering.

The team is creating a device to launch balls at a speed ranging from 100 to 175 miles per hour to hit a half-inch radius target. The project, which will help Ruby study the inertial properties of bats, has posed an exciting challenge for the students.

“The baseball has a 500-pound force on the system as it’s rotating at these really fast speeds,” says Allison Thompson ’24. “Making a system that can handle those large forces yet have a high accuracy has been the hardest part.”

Thompson and her teammates each took turns as project manager, giving them leadership experience they can carry forward in their careers.

“The project sets up in a way that’s really similar to real-world experience,” says Thompson. “We have weekly meetings, we have deadlines we have to hit, and all of the designs are our own. We just go to the professor for help to make sure that it’s physically going to work and we’re doing the analysis properly. But we all have to own a part of this machine and we have to be confident that it’s going to work.”

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