Professor Ryan C. Cooper

About the Instructor

Office hours by appointment: Calendly

Ryan C. Cooper, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor-in-Residence
Mechanical Engineering Department
University of Connecticut
191 Auditorium rd
Engineering Building II room 315
Storrs, CT 06269

Contact Prof. Cooper

Open educational resources:

CE2120 - Applied Dynamics

Applied Mechanics II (or Dynamics) is the study of how things move and interact. We are limiting our study to Newtonian mechanics. We won’t consider quantum effects like wave-particle duality or relativistic effects. Our current interest is to describe free and constrained motion much less than the speed of light and with mass much larger than an atom, but much smaller than the sun (~1e-27 < m < 2e30 kg).

ME3255 - Computational Mechanics

This is a project-based introduction to computational mechanics. There are five modules with exercises, homeworks, and final projects. The overall goal of the course is learn to frame engineering problems as computational methods. Once we can communicate our engineering problems to Python code (or any other computer language) we can use standardized computational methods to solve those problems.

ME3263 - Introduction to Sensors and Data

This course introduces students to physical measurements, statistical analysis, and scientific writing. Engineering concepts are explored with hands-on laboratory and computational experiments.

ME3264 - Applied Measurements

ME 3264 is the second in a two-part series at UConn on one of the most central subjects in engineering, measurements, and experimentation. This laboratory course is an integral part of the mechanical engineering curriculum and places a major emphasis on gaining experience in observation and experimentation in order to illustrate and reinforce concepts covered in previous courses. Laboratory experiences include measurements in energy conversion, solid mechanics, dynamics, and fluid and thermal sciences, as well as statistical methods to analyze the experimental data.

ME5180 - Advanced Dynamics

Dynamics is the study of how things move and interact. It sets the foundation for almost every Mechanical engineering discipline: solid mechanics, fluid mechanics, controls, vibrations, etc. We are limiting our study to classical mechanics.

We have four conditions for classical mechanics:

  1. mass of objects is constant

  2. mass of objects >> mass of atomic particles

  3. velocity << speed of light

  4. time is short (less than millenia) and mass is small (less than the sun or black holes)

This course derives equations of motion for multibody systems using kinematics and kinetics. Kinematics is the study of the geometry of motion. Kinetics is the study of forces, impacts, and energy on objects. Your goal is to build general equations of motion using Lagrange equations. We will build the foundation for more advanced rigid body dynamic software in Python.