Engineers all have their specialties, but few overlap with that of Adjunct Thayer Professor Robert Collier.
For some, engineering connotes lab coats and circuitry, but Collier's interests are more down to earth. "I love wood," Canada native Collier said. "I think it's the most remarkable material nature gave us."
Major League Baseball noticed Collier's fascination in its search for a sturdy replacement for the traditional -- yet breakable -- wooden bat.
Since a chance meeting at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1989, Collier and his partner Steve Baum have been developing bats made out of composites, or a mixture of materials, that behave exactly like wood but resist shattering under pressure.
Collier and Baum tested their breakthrough at Tiger Stadium in Detroit with the help of then MLB star George Brett.
After hours of rigorous inspection, Brett gave Collier and Baum his verdict.
"He says, 'Okay, it's a wood bat' -- and we were just elated," Collier said. Thebats are now widely used in the minor leagues and college ranks as an alternative to the more prevalent but problematic aluminum bats.
"The idea was that a lot of players on that level were not as skilled as those at the professional level, so they break more bats," Collier said. Aluminum bats, which replaced wood to save money in the pre-MLB leagues, have been accused of accelerating play and causing abnormal offensive outputs.
Bat ideas are not the only thing flying around in Collier's head. During his eight years at the Thayer School of Engineering, Collier has been involved in extensive research in acoustical studies.
Over the last three years, Collier and Professor Laura Ray have been developing headsets to alleviate health and communication problems of noisy environments by "active noise reduction." Inside the headset, a device reacts to an interfering and dangerous noise by producing a diametrically opposed sound, effectively canceling the interference and even enabling the wearer to verbally communicate.
Collier said that current headsets do not sufficiently eliminate low-frequency sounds, such as the rumble of a jet engine. Exposure to these sounds can often lead to hearing damage or deafness.
"It's a huge problem. The largest disability payment in our society goes to hearing-impaired people," Collier said, adding that the military, which is providing funds for Collier's research, is particularly in need of hearing protection for pilots and others who work with planes.
Military work is not unfamiliar territory for Collier. After graduating from McGill University in Canada and completing graduate work at the University of Connecticut and Yale, Collier began his engineering career aboard cold-war era submarines. As his first foray into acoustical engineering, Collier was charged with making undersea missile systems undetectable to audio monitors.
"We were not trying to create something to blow up the world, we were trying to establish a system so that any nuclear world war would be avoided," Collier said.
Stints at an engineering firm and in medical ultrasonics preceded his joining the faculty at Tufts University, where he taught mechanical engineering and specialized in composite materials for 10 years.
A background in composites and acoustics proved to be essential for Collier's work with Major League Baseball. In response to player concern, Collier modified the original Baum bat to sound exactly like a wooden bat's "crack" upon contact.
Players said that there is a distinction between the sound made by balls hit on the "sweet spot" and elsewhere on the bat. This sound enables fielders to judge the magnitude and direction of a hit and presuppose an optimal fielding position.
Aluminum bats, which are used by college and minor league teams, make a uniform "ping" sound despite the contact zone, posing an added challenge for the defense.
As with the institution of the aluminum bat, technological innovations that have changed the face of baseball concerned Collier and MLB officials.
To evaluate new technology and mitigate its effect on the game, Collier assisted in establishing the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts- Lowell in 1999.
The lure of engineering glory in his high-profile baseball work, attracting attention from New Hampshire Public Radio and other news sources, has not distracted Collier from his duties to his students in Engineering 9: The Technology of Sound.
The class and Collier's work with graduates has spawned many student projects in acoustics, some of which are under consideration for patents.
Collier is currently advising a group that is developing an alternative system for emergency vehicles to alert unresponsive motorists.
While consulting with the Lebanon Fire Department, Collier unearthed the hearing dangers faced by firemen who must be near the firetruck's siren for long periods of time.
"I betcha next fall I'm going to get a new project helping these firemen. My gosh, you keep finding out new places for this technology," Collier said.
Collier is also invested in projects to improve the acoustics of the Lebanon Opera House and is guiding a student's independent study of the acoustics of Spaulding Auditorium.
"The problem in Spaulding is that it's pretty good for large musical ensembles, but it has so much reverb coming off the side walls, which interferes with speech articulation," Collier said.
Collier also enthusiastically pointed out an award-winning student project he supervised that granted a hearing-impaired Dartmouth Medical School student Rob Nutt '98 the ability to hear readings from a stethoscope.
"Its one of the most successful projects I've ever been involved with. They made music together -- it was just simply thrilling to hear Rob Nutt say, 'My god, I can hear it, I can hear it,'" Collier said.
Other projects would help Nutt to pinpoint sound direction and assign voices to specific people.
"I love to work with students to solve real problems. I'm the ultimate human engineer. My work is motivated by how can I do a better job to help people protect themselves," Collier said.
