Mechanical Engineering and Resource Sustainability Center (MEtRICs)

Jose Carlos Teixeira
METRICS, University of Minho 

The European Strategic document, known as Horizon 2020, clearly identifies sustainability as a core concept for the near future development, to assure a sustainable use of resources and energy as well as a sustainable development of products and processes and to achieve a sustainable environment. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) anticipates that mechanical engineering "will evolve and collaborate as a global profession over the next 20 years through a shared vision to develop engineering solutions that foster a cleaner, healthier, safer and sustainable world by developing new technologies to address energy, environment, food, housing, water, transportation, safety, and health".

Mechanical Engineering should play a key role in shaping the future. It requires a refocusing of its objectives, bringing new competences to solving problems and challenges in a multidisciplinary manner. In brief, Mechanical engineers are critical to technologies that serve people.

The Mechanical Engineering and Resource Sustainability Center (MEtRICs) mission is to provide technical solutions for a cleaner, safer and sustainable world and we aim to be a leading institution in this field.

The center presently includes 24 integrated members (IM) with PhD from two managing institutions (University of Minho and New University of Lisbon), with a third participating institution (CVR). The number of PhD students has been increasing and currently 42 students are supervised by integrated members. In 2019 the publication ratio in journals was over 2.1/IM. The number of publications in conferenced yielded a ratio of 4.9 in 2017. The funding secured for 2019 amounts to 1.5 M€.

The research activities are organized along 4 research topics: Energy Conversion; Advanced Engineering Systems; Structures and Vehicle Engineering; Food Technology and Wellbeing.