Impact Engineering

The Interdisciplinary Masters of Science Degree in Impact Engineering is a new degree approved in by WPI's Committee on Graduate Studies and Research in 2002. Impact engineers work in many types of industries including:

• Automobile and truck design,
• Surface ship and submarine design,
• Airframe design,
• Highway and roadside design
• Packaging design.

The Need

There is a need for engineers with a strong fundamental background in impact engineering. Currently, most engineers in the field develop the skills on-the-job resulting in a just-in-time education that frequently contains significant gaps in technical knowledge and experience. There is a need for more rigorous training in impact related fields. Such training would not only benefit the student but also the research and industrial communities since it would both improve and standardize the educational background for a very specialized discipline.

The number of engineers needing training in impact engineering is relatively small and are only a handful of formal programs in Impact Engineering in the world. The area of impact engineering has been growing steadily and rapidly for the past decade and will become increasingly important in coming years. Already impact engineering is an important aspect of the aerospace, automotive, highway safety, packaging and weapons industries.

Impact engineering overlaps many traditional engineering disciplines such as Engineering Mechanics, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Aerospace Engineering, Biomechanics and Material Science. In Universities across the world, faculty members with impact engineering interests can be found in academic Departments as diverse as Engineering Mechanics, Civil Engineering, Biomedical Engineering and Ocean Engineering. Academic Departments and the disciplines they represent are generally applications based. Impact Engineering, on the other-hand is skill-based. With the same basic education in mechanics, Civil Engineers design and analyze buildings and bridges whereas Mechanical and Aerospace Engineers design and analyze automobiles and airplanes. Impact Engineering uses a common suite of theoretical, analytical and experimental tools to solve problems in a variety of industrial applications. Since the techniques used in impact engineering are specialized extensions of more common engineering mechanics techniques, they seldom get the attention they deserve in traditional curricula. A Master's Degree in Impact Engineering is, therefore, inherently interdisciplinary since it combines aspects of Civil, Mechanical, Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.

For further information, please contact:
Malcolm H. Ray, P.E., Ph.D.
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Worcester, MA 01609-2280
508-831-5340 (voice)
508-831-5808 (fax)
mhray@wpi.edu

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering - Worcester Polytechnic Institute
100 Institute Road, Worcester, MA 01609-2280
Phone: +1-508-831-5294 - Fax: +1-508-831-5808 - ceegrad@wpi.edu