College of Engineering 50th Anniversary
To celebrate the College of Engineering’s Golden 50th Anniversary in 2012, a series of events are planned on the Davis campus and in the Bay Area. Exhibitions at UC Davis, website features, and special events will celebrate the first 50 years of the College of Engineering, and enlarge the vision for our success in the next half-century.
College of Engineering Notable Biographies
ANDREW FRANK
Not many university professors get significant face time in well-received and critically lauded big-screen films.
Andrew Frank, a professor in the UC Davis Department of Mechanical and Aeronautical Engineering, is among those few; he popped up as a technological sage — definitely one of the good guys in white hats, fighting the close-minded automobile industry — in documentarian Chris Paine's humorously caustic 2006 film, Who Killed the Electric Car?
Frank also was profiled by Tom and Ray Magliozzi, the beloved stars of National Public Radio's Car Talk, when they hosted a 2008 "Car of the Future" episode of the PBS series Nova.
Flash-forward to 2011. Paine and the electric vehicle (EV) movement have been vindicated in his follow-up film, Revenge of the Electric Car; Frank is named one of Automotive News' "Electrifying 100," as one of the most influential people behind the vehicle electrification movement. And this is merely Frank's most recent honorific; he has been dubbed "the father of the plug-in hybrid" for years.
Half a year earlier, in December 2010, Frank took delivery of one of the first mass-produced plug-in hybrids: the Chevrolet Volt. Only one thing could have made that moment sweeter, and that was the knowledge that several of his former students had helped design the Volt.
Satisfaction has been a long time coming.
Frank — who obtained degrees at UC Berkeley and USC, and then spent 10 years in aerospace engineering, working on the X15 hypersonic flight research project — was contemplating the notion of plug-in hybrids back in the 1970s, but technology hadn't yet matched inspiration. He joined the UC Davis faculty in 1985; he and a team of students finally completed their first plug-in car in 1991. It was dubbed AfterShock, and it took top honors in alternative fuel contests sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. With its combined electric motor and high-efficiency gasoline engine, AfterShock had a cruising range of 550 miles on a charge and a tank.
During the next two decades, Frank and his student teams built a dozen such cars, becoming famous in college engineering circles for being the only team that brought hybrids to Detroit's "car of the future" competitions. In 1997, they won the final round of the FutureCar competition with a modified, 57mpg hybrid gas-electric Ford Taurus; they took another top prize in 2001, this time in the FutureTruck category, with a Chevy Suburban dubbed Sequoia. It achieved super-ultra-low-emission vehicle status, with a traveling range of 60 miles in zero-emission, all-electric mode.
Best of all? In a research field laced with plenty of frustration, Frank always retains his sense of humor. His UC Davis vehicle design group is known as Team Fate, the name taken from the character Jack Lemmon played in the 1965 film The Great Race: a madcap inventor who forever tries to thwart his opposition, never giving up, no matter what the odds.
For more information on the College of Engineering's 50th Anniversary Celebration, please email Oliver Ramsey.