Mechanical Engineering Professor Kwun-Lon Ting was recently elected a Fellow of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, an honor given to ASME members who meet strict criteria demonstrating their sustained leadership in the field of mechanical engineering.

Internationally known for his contribution to machines and mechanisms theory, Ting has received $1.4 million through nine research grants from the National Science Foundation. His success in competing for NSF awards is evidenced by the fact that only 10 to 15 percent of submitted research proposals across the nation are funded.

Among his awards, research projects, and publications, Ting says he particularly loves the discovery of his N-bar rotatability laws that recently have been adopted in a popular undergraduate machinery textbook. To explain the laws that made a landmark contribution to his field, he waves his arms separately, demonstrating the range of motion each arm has, using the shoulder, elbow, and wrist as links and joints.

“As these arms form a loop, their mobility becomes restricted,” he says. “The N-bar rotatability laws govern and explain the fundamental mobility of each arm in a chain of robot arms or mechanisms.

“Discovering the extreme order, simplicity, and beauty buried in a seemingly disordered situation is an awesome experience. It is also humbling because this represents only a tiny window in the universe.”

Ting, a two-time winner of the College of Engineering's Kinslow Research Award who joined the university in 1982, has received several other honors including the South-Point Chariot Award from the Applied Mechanisms and Robotics Conference, which recognizes top researchers and their contribution to applied mechanisms and robotics. He also received the conference’s Bernard Roth Award and Service Award.

Recently, Ting directed a major grant proposal establishing a lab containing more than $300,000 worth of state-of-the-art equipment. The lab will offer a one-stop design and machining center to the entire university community as well as related regional industry.

Currently, Ting and doctoral student Yi Zhang are working on a $243,000 NSF project exploring the modeling, design, control and programming of machining tool motions. One of their goals is to make machining programming jobs more knowledge-based than experience- and labor-based, therefore bypassing the skill shortage problem and keeping more machining jobs in this country.

Ting says he especially enjoys the time he spends working with graduate students. He has graduated six doctoral students and 15 master’s degree students at TTU. He currently directs three doctoral students — Lidong Wang, Hong Zhou, and Chunjin Lu — and co-directs doctoral student Ling Zhou and master’s candidate Changyu Xue.

“A professor cannot succeed without good students,” says Ting. “It is a blessing to have these excellent graduate students. They are the best.”

Ting has served as the technical editor of the Journal of Applied Mechanisms and Robotics and as a consultant to several national companies. He also has been elected a member of the Mechanism Committee of the Chinese Academy of Mechanical Engineering. Ting earned a doctorate from Oklahoma State University, a master’s from Clemson University, and a bachelor’s from National Taiwan University.