The highly technical, science-based, and interdisciplinary program — approved by the Board of Regents on Feb. 12, 2019 — will prepare students to deliver fact-based policy expertise through robust analytical techniques and a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues and sustainability practices.

“This professionally focused degree will allow Georgia Tech to educate the next generation of sustainability leaders in corporate, government, and non-governmental organizations,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “Georgia Tech is proud to deliver innovative, affordable, and top-quality education in high-demand areas such as sustainability to meet the needs of our evolving workforce."

When the program begins in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts' School of Public Policy in August 2019, MSEEM students will study topics such as sustainable energy and voluntary environmental commitments, cost-benefit analysis, utility regulation and policy, Earth systems, economics of environmental policy, big data and policy analytics, climate policy, and environmental management.

They also will learn analytical techniques used to estimate and evaluate sustainability metrics, be able to expertly assess the context of energy and environmental problems, and understand environmental ethics and its implications for sustainability practice.

The program will combine professional instruction from the nationally-ranked School of Public Policy with Georgia Tech’s top-notch engineering, business, and planning faculties to educate professionals who can lead organizations toward policies consistent with a sustainable future.

“This unique interdisciplinary program takes an innovative and integrative approach to sustainability that epitomizes the commitment of the School of Public Policy to collaborate across disciplines to educate future policy analysts and leaders and turn ideas into solutions to public problems,” said Kaye Husbands Fealing, professor and chair of the school.

Faculty will be drawn from across the Georgia Tech campus, including from the School of Public Policy, the Scheller College of Business, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the School of City and Regional Planning.

Guest lecturers from Atlanta’s corporate community, government agencies, NGOs and research organizations also will participate — helping connect MSEEM students to the state of the practice and to job opportunities.

MSEEM students also will have access to Georgia Tech’s summer Program on Sustainable Development and Climate Change in Venice, Italy. The 5-week, 6-credit program features courses in climate policy and sustainable development and provides a multi-disciplinary learning experience that combines classroom lectures, guest speakers and instructional field trips.

 “The world’s energy economy is undergoing transformational change, and as the public and private sectors strengthen their commitment to green practices, the need will increase for well-trained policy experts able to design, implement, and manage responses to sustainability issues. This program will provide such leaders,” said Marilyn A. Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy.

The MSEEM program is designed to serve a broad range of students interested in sustainability issues. Students can complete the degree on campus or online as a full-time student. Students also have the option to enroll part-time and complete their degree online. The program is designed to serve working professionals and others who want to participate part-time and earn their degree over several years.

In addition to the master’s degree, Georgia Tech is also offering a Certificate in Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management. This 12-credit hour SEEM Certificate can be completed in one or two semesters and can be earned on its own or in combination with the master’s degree.

Applications are being accepted through June 15 for the inaugural class of MSEEM students, who will begin study in August 2019.

A generous philanthropic gift has enabled Georgia Tech to offer five fully funded MSEEM fellowships to the program each year for the first three years of the program.

For more information on these programs, visit https://cepl.gatech.edu/mseem, or https://cepl.gatech.edu/cseem.

With climate change becoming one of the a defining issue of the 21st century, the transition to a low-carbon energy system will solve about three-fourths of the problem, according to the fellowship’s website. At the same time, the new energy system needs to be affordable, reliable, and available to the average person.

The three-year fellowship sponsored in Stanford’s Precourt Institute of Energy and Doerr School of Sustainability aims to identify, develop, and connect the next generation of energy leaders — from science and engineering to policy and economics — to translate theoretical climate change solutions into tangible realities.

At Stanford, Athena, who is advised by Eric M. Vogel in the School of Materials Science and Engineering, will work on emerging materials and devices for energy-efficient sustainable computing. She will be working with H.-S. Philip Wong, professor of electrical engineering, and Alberto Salleo, professor of materials science and engineering.

After being selected as a finalist, she presented her current Ph.D. research on adaptive oxide devices for energy-efficient computing, as well as her proposed research to the fellowship’s advisory board.

“It was an amazing experience to go through the selection process of writing the proposal and finally getting interviewed by the honorable advisory board,” Athena said. “It was humbling to get the opportunity to discuss my research with a person I have always looked up to in Professor Steven Chu, a Nobel Laureate in Physics and former U.S. Secretary of Energy!”

Athena is just one of 10 fellows selected globally this year. The fellowship provides her the opportunity to explore new and profound postdoctoral research that is distinct from her Ph.D. work.

“I am deeply grateful to my advisor Prof. Eric M. Vogel for his constant kind support throughout my Ph.D. and for believing in me,” Athena said. “He has been a pillar of constant support throughout my journey. I am also grateful to Prof. Samuel Graham for his kind constant support, including for this fellowship. I am thankful to my respected P.I.s at Stanford, Professor H.-S. Philip Wong, and Professor Alberto Salleo for their support of my proposal. I am also grateful to my respected mentors Prof. Suman Datta, Prof. William Alan Doolittle, Dr. Takashi Ando, and Dr. Vijay Narayanan for their kind support, advice, and opportunities. Finally, I would like to thank Georgia Tech ECE for providing the platform for learning, exploration, and collaboration.”

Before her time at Georgia Tech, Athena received her undergraduate degree in materials science and engineering from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. She then spent two semesters at Purdue University as a graduate researcher, where she collaborated with the Idaho National Lab on nuclear materials for next-generation energy.

Athena’s research has been recognized with the Georgia Tech ECE Ph.D. Fellowship, 2022 Cadence Diversity in Technology Scholarship, 2023 EECS Rising Stars, 2023 Colonel Oscar P. Cleaver Award for the most outstanding Ph.D. dissertation proposal in Georgia Tech ECE, 2023 MRS Graduate Student Award, and IBM Ph.D. Fellowship from 2022-2024.

Georgia is quickly emerging as a hub for the electronic transportation industry. According to data from the Georgia Department of Economic Development, since 2018, 35 EV-related projects have contributed $23 billion in investments in the state.

South Korea-based Hyundai Motor Group recently broke ground on its first fully dedicated EV manufacturing facility in Savannah’s Bryan County. The company has also teamed up with LG Energy Solution to invest $4.3 billion in building an EV battery cell manufacturing plant at the same location.

EV manufacturer and automotive technology company Rivian, which is based on Irvine, Calif., has announced a $5 billion investment in its second U.S. plant located east of Atlanta in Morgan and Walton Counties.

Hyundai’s new facility is expected to reach full production capacity at the end of 2025, with 30 gigawatt hours (GWh) of energy anticipated to support the production of 300,000 EVs. Rivian, meanwhile, anticipates its Georgia plant will employ over 7,500 workers while producing up to 400,000 vehicles each year.

“This level of industry engagement in Georgia is unprecedented,” said Kevin Caravati, a GTRI principal research scientist, who is supporting this project. “The Hyundai plant, for example, could create tens of thousands of jobs in a very rural part of Georgia, which would be a step in the right direction for the entire state.”

The lithium-ion batteries that power EVs are seen as desirable over other battery technologies because of their high energy density, which allows electric cars to travel longer distances on a single charge. These types of batteries also have a low self-discharge rate, which means that the stored energy remains available for an extended period of time even when the vehicle is not in use. 

However, these batteries can easily turn into fire hazards – especially at the end of their life cycle. Very few batteries ever end up being recycled and those that do get recycled are often mishandled.   

“Currently, there are no recycling standards in place, which poses challenges for the entire supply chain,” said Milad Navaei, a GTRI senior research engineer, who is leading this project. “Our goal is to create circular economy for batteries in Georgia where we can reduce our dependence on raw materials that often come from overseas and can be very expensive.”  

Lithium-ion batteries use metals including lithium, nickel, manganese, and cobalt that are mined in locations such as Africa’s Democratic Republic of the Congo, Chile and Argentina. During the production process, the metals are combined with other materials to form the two key components of a battery cell – the cathode and the anode. Inside a battery, the cathode, which has a negative charge, and anode, which has a positive charge, interact to generate electrons that power the electronic device. Most lithium-ion batteries are currently made in China.  

Navaei noted that geopolitical sensitivities and lingering supply chain challenges in many of these regions makes GTRI’s work all the more crucial.

GTRI’s research consists of two parts: One, develop more advanced analytics capabilities for fleet management companies to monitor the health and performance of EV batteries, and two, optimize the recovery of raw materials from batteries at the end of their useful life.  

“The battery is the most important part of an EV, and it’s critical to know the battery’s state of health (SoH), which is the ratio of the present capacity to the initial capacity,” said Navaei. “Our goal is to utilize technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) to monitor the SoH of these batteries and estimate the life cycle, which heavily depends on the usage and the type of battery for its safe and reliable implementation in the next life application.”

GTRI aims to integrate these technologies into companies’ existing inventory management systems to streamline process management and reporting.

For the second part of the research, GTRI is utilizing a statistical technique known as parametric modeling to aggregate data about known behaviors and characteristics of EV batteries to help companies make more informed decisions about properly depowering them and repurposing their raw materials with minimal environmental impact.

“Developing a robust system-modeling approach to support our energy research is a primary focus of ours,” said GTRI Principal Research Scientist Ilan Stern, who is also supporting the project. “Since our ultimate goal is to utilize domestic sources in our supply chain, really the only way to do that is by building out strong recycling models to account for the fact that these companies are working with finite materials and many of them are coming from conflict zones.”

GTRI is working with a number of industry partners on this project, including many companies that participated in Georgia Tech Battery Day earlier this year. At the event, over 230 energy researchers and industry participants convened to discuss emerging opportunities in energy storage research. Some of the companies represented at the event included Hyundai Kia, Delta Airlines, Cox Automotive and Panasonic.

Writer: Anna Akins 
Photo Credit: iStock 
GTRI Communications
Georgia Tech Research Institute
Atlanta, Georgia

The Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) is the nonprofit, applied research division of the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech). Founded in 1934 as the Engineering Experiment Station, GTRI has grown to more than 2,900 employees, supporting eight laboratories in over 20 locations around the country and performing more than $800 million of problem-solving research annually for government and industry. GTRI's renowned researchers combine science, engineering, economics, policy, and technical expertise to solve complex problems for the U.S. federal government, state, and industry.

A recent study led by a Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) specialist in sensors and intelligent systems documented the effects of wind turbines in creating potential confusion among ship operators using marine vessel radar (MVR) as a critical navigation tool. The expert study, done for the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), also identified potential ways to address the challenges of ensuring safe maritime navigation as wind farm operations expand in the coming years.

Georgia Tech’s Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center (EPICenter), which is housed within the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI), seeks to position Georgia Tech and key regional partners as thought leaders that will inform the direction of energy and public health research. To this end, EPICenter, with help from SEI and the Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Biosciences (IBB), put out a seed funding call to solicit multidisciplinary research projects entitled, “Energy and Public Health: Building the Foundation.” The intention of this funding call is to proactively identify and mitigate new public health challenges brought on by changes in the energy system.

In May of 2021 , EPICenter, IBB, and SEI convened a workshop about the issues related to new energy systems and their impact on public health. They invited individuals from local universities, the CDC, the EPA, national laboratories, as well as other local public health professionals. Participants explored how to best leverage Atlanta’s public health ecosystem to address anticipated impacts of the coming energy transition. The attendance, participation, and diversity of disciplines represented at the meeting proved that there is much work to be done in this nascent area. In response, EPICenter established a seed funding program and asked Georgia Tech researchers to submit research proposals. The request for proposals encouraged multidisciplinary and multi-institutional teams. Faculty and researchers from EPICenter, IBB, and SEI served on the review committee. Four teams were chosen and awarded a total of $400,000 to support their projects over two years.

"Atlanta has some of the best public health assets in the world, and this seed funding has incentivized Georgia Tech researchers to form collaborations that otherwise might not have existed,” said Sharon Murphy, research associate at EPICenter and lead organizer of the seed funding program.

The seed funding program touches on several of Georgia Tech’s institutional research benchmarks. The awards help to frame key opportunities related to knowledge gaps, foster a diverse network of research partners, and are likely to bring about positive societal impacts.

“If we approach this research wisely, we will have the opportunity to inform the evolution of the coming climate-friendly energy systems, as well as the chance to avoid repeating our past mistakes of imposing the most severe public health risks onto the most marginalized communities,” said Rich Simmons, director of research and studies at EPICenter.

Moreover, research on the public health impact of energy infrastructure has traditionally been in response to the adverse and often unintended consequences of those technologies. Another of EPICenter’s objectives is to shift the energy and health paradigm from an historically reactive one to an increasingly proactive one.

“If we think about the health impacts of energy solutions on the front end, we may be able to alleviate some of the social, environmental, and health inequalities that result from energy technologies,” added Tim Lieuwen, executive director of SEI. “Our hope is that this approach results in more favorable outcomes, and facilitates stronger connections between energy engineers, public health experts, and decision-makers.”

EPICenter anticipates that there will be a growing interest in the energy, public health, and equity sphere in the U.S. By supporting multidisciplinary research in this area, EPICenter expects that the awards will help to position Georgia Tech researchers to take advantage of federal-level funding opportunities, should they become available. 

“Above all, our hope is that the seed funding will reinforce Georgia Tech’s commitment to finding multidisciplinary solutions to today’s most pressing energy and public health challenges,” said Andrés García, Executive Director of the Petit Institute of Bioengineering and Biosicience.
 

The four projects chosen for funding are listed below:

The Effects of Internal Combustion Engine Transit Systems on Health: An Interdisciplinary Research Program Linking Transit-Related Pollution to Birth Outcomes
PI’s: Dylan Brewer (ECON), Randall Guensler (CEE),
Other Investigators: Laura Taylor, (ECON), Michael Rodgers (CEE), Michael Chang (BBISS), Ted Russell (CEE)
Partners from Emory University, Rollins School of Public Health: Howard Chang (Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, and Noah Scovronick (Environmental Health) 

Climate-induced Air Quality Deterioration and Its Health Risks in the Southeastern U.S.
PI’s: Pengfei Liu (EAS), and Liuhua Shi (Environmental Health, Emory University)

Establishing Energy Efficient Indoor Air Quality Methods and Standards 
PI’s: Thomas M. Orlando (CHEM), and Sally Ng (CHBE and EAS),

Secondary Organic Aerosol High-throughput Toxicology to Enhance Epidemiological Models Used for Energy and Environmental Policy-Making
PI’s: Shuichi Takayama (BME), and Sally Ng (CHBE and EAS)

Find the paper here.

The article, “Defining Energy in Nineteenth-Century Native American Literature,” was written with Georgia Tech undergraduate students Mikaela Relford, a third year in the College of Engineering, and Julia Johnson, a third year in the School of Public Policy.

In the article, Linthicum et al. argue that nineteenth-century Native American literatures can make important contributions to the scope of the energy humanities and need to be integrated into the field to grasp the full scale of current environmental crises.

The full article is available for free on the Duke University Press website.

Lieuwen’s presentation, "Energy in an Information Age", examined the intersection of physical and digital worlds between operating platforms, data and networked energy infrastructure. Examples of this connectivity include smart outlets that turn a device or appliance off or on from a remote location. Energy used is tracked, compiled into data and personalized data is delivered. Connected cars, activity trackers and smart thermostats are also examples of the connection between energy and data. 

Traffic and wind regularly cause low frequency vibrations to ripple through bridge building materials such as steel and concrete. This energy would normally travel away from its source before dissipating — but academics at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh alongside colleagues from Georgia State University and Georgia Tech in the US have recognized an opportunity. They intend to capture and recycle this untapped source by using the principles of physics.

They have received £340,000 (about $463,000) from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), part of UK Research and Innovation, and $443,000 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to research and develop a revolutionary vibro-impact energy harvesting device.

Daniil Yurchenko, Ph.D., from Heriot-Watt University, has created a prototype called a ‘vibrant pack energy harvester’ that can be fitted at multiple locations on a bridge.

These autonomous devices, measuring around 5 – 10cm in length, do not require wiring to an electrical power source and are relatively cheap to manufacture. They work by holding a small ball housed within a tube that rolls back and forth as the device absorbs low frequency vibrations. As the ball moves, it impacts on non-conductive materials, known as dielectric membranes, located at either end of the tube. When the membrane is stretched, a brief electrical charge is applied but once it returns to its undeformed state, the generated excessive electrical charge can be harvested.

This electrical energy is stored in a battery and used to power a sensor capable of monitoring the structural integrity of a bridge. Engineers can then record multiple measurements, such as vibrations, traffic load, wind and temperature, all at the same time but without the need for specialist infrastructure to be installed at significant cost.

Yurchenko, from the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University, explains that while dielectric elastomer technology has been tried in wave energy, nothing has been done on this centimetre scale before.

“What we are doing is creating a more efficient and cost-effective solution by harvesting energy that would otherwise be lost,” he said.

“It’s something that has never been done before in this way.

“It’s a technology that can be used on any bridge anywhere in the world. There are plenty of places where these devices can be fitted to a bridge structure such as on cables, on the pillars, other side of the bridge deck, there really aren’t any limits.

“The biggest problem in energy harvesting is that the absolute amount of energy produced by a typical device is very small due to the low available level of vibrations. In fact, for the past 100 years scientists have been fighting adverse vibrations to ensure that bridges are safe. So, through this work we will try to optimise the performance of our vibro impact energy harvesting device tuning it to the bridge application.”

The team is working alongside Wenzel Consult, an independent company that specialises in bridge sensor technology in Austria and Turkey.

As the project advances, the scientists say they intend to carry our real-life testing of their prototype on a 32-meter long highway bridge in northern Austria.

The multidisciplinary project, entitled, Stochastic Nonsmooth Analysis For Energy Harvesting, is due to complete in 2024.

Rachel Kuske, professor and chair of the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech, said: “While the device has nonlinear behaviour, which is beneficial in generating more energy than is used to power the device, the same nonlinearity can result in a range of complex responses to the vibrations.  

“We will use dynamical analyses to predict the different types of responses, as well as to select design choices for responses that optimise energy output. As the bridge vibrations are also inherently noisy, the analysis will also identify how to leverage noise sources that are beneficial and mitigate effects from detrimental noise sources.”

Professor Igor Belykh, co-investigator from Georgia State University, adds: “This project seeks to provide guidelines for designing power supplies that can harvest energy from bridge oscillations. These energy harvesters can be used in bridge damage sensors thereby minimising sensor maintenance/battery replacement and decreasing the associated risks to service personnel on high suspension bridges. Moreover, this project is synergistically connected to another project supported by NSF grant (2019-2022) ‘Modern approaches to modelling and predicting bridge instabilities’ that will inform the design of energy harvesters by offering a dynamical characterisation of bridge oscillations and external perturbations to be harvested.”

The scientists say that in the future the same technology could be adapted and used to harvest energy from other vibrating man-made structures and machines.
 

Related news coverage: Edinburgh Evening News, Scottish Construction Now, FutureScot, The Herald Scotland, Digit

• Solve Big Problems by leveraging the integrated full weight of intellectual capabilities and infrastructure of both parties in a multi-disciplinary and multi-institutional manner.
• Sustain and Engage Human Capital by exposing a pipeline of talent to problems of practical importance and complex nature early in their academic programs.
• Accelerate Technology Adoption by introducing new ideas, science, and technology into the industrial and federal marketplace of jointly developed intellectual property.

“Building deep, substantive partnerships to impact society's most urgent challenges is a major priority for Georgia Tech's research enterprise,” said Chaouki Abdallah, executive vice president for research at Georgia Tech. “We are excited about the possibilities for collaborative, innovative energy-related research with NREL, which has the potential to improve human lives and the world at large."

The five-year agreement was formally acknowledged during a virtual Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signing event on June 17, jointly organized by Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) and NREL.

It is anticipated that the collaborative projects between the two institutions will:

• Support goals that are complementary to those held by both institutions
• Share and leverage specialized, or unique research facilities and equipment
• Increase inter-institutional collaborative engagement of faculty, staff, and students
• Look for opportunities for additional joint research initiatives and joint appointments.

“We are excited about this MOU, which will facilitate expanded collaboration between NREL and Georgia Tech’s esteemed faculty and first-rate students,” said Peter Green, deputy laboratory director and science and technology officer at NREL. “Together we will leverage the significant intellectual, research, and infrastructure capabilities of both institutions to address some of the critical large-scale, complex research challenges facing industry during the energy transition.”

This agreement also acknowledges that the research landscape is evolving. Energy related research problems are becoming more complex. The pipeline of research talent is changing due to shifts in academic programs related to energy and to students’ level of interest in energy related research as a career. The potential long-term benefits of creating and disseminating new energy technologies for the public good is regarded by the academic community as an increasingly important consideration for the nation’s economy and prospects for energy security. Leaders from Georgia Tech and NREL agree that the outcomes that arise from this memorandum of understanding will advance our ability to deal with these evolving issues.

“Near term focus areas of this agreement include circular economy, efficient buildings, cybersecurity, and carbon capture,” said Tim Lieuwen, director of Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute. To that end, a series of webinars are planned for the near future on each of these topics to foster ideas and muster resources as this agreement is put into action.

To learn more about this partnership, please contact Tim Lieuwen (Director, SEI – Georgia Tech) or David Glickson (Communications and Public Affairs – NREL). You can also visit NREL's research organization partners page, or Georgia Tech’s research engagement page.

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

Microgrids are self-contained power systems, co-located with the facilities they serve, that include generation resources, storage systems, and energy management systems. The Tech Square Microgrid, which was approved by the Georgia Public Service Commission, is being used to evaluate how a microgrid can effectively integrate into and operate as part of the overall electrical grid. The facility will not only provide clean power to Midtown, but it will also serve as a living laboratory in which Georgia Tech, industry, and government researchers will work collaboratively to create the next generation of clean energy solutions.

“Georgia Tech is committed to addressing the most consequential challenges of our time,” said Georgia Tech President Ángel Cabrera. “That involves advancing science and technology, developing leaders who can create and deploy new solutions, and leading by example with our own practices. This microgrid is a great illustration of the latter. In our partnership with Georgia Power and the Georgia Public Service Commission, we will be developing and adopting some of the most advanced, efficient, and responsible energy solutions available, in the hope we can serve as an example for others.”

The microgrid will provide Georgia Power with insight into how smart energy management systems, such as the one installed at the Coda data center, can interact with the grid to achieve optimal energy use. In addition, it will provide teaching and learning opportunities for Georgia Tech professors and students.

“The Tech Square Microgrid is a proven innovative project that will help us better understand microgrids to help service our customers. It brings energy storage and data front and center for research. The microgrid’s distributed energy resources are vital to enhancing grid resiliency and bringing sustainable energy solutions to Georgia’s communities,” said Chris Womack, chairman, president, and CEO of Georgia Power. “Georgia Tech is one of the nation’s leading research institutions and has been an integral partner in allowing their students and teachers to learn how these systems will interact not only with our grid but also with the Coda building on the Georgia Tech campus. It’s by collectively working together through projects like this that we will build a brighter energy future for our state.”

The installation includes fuel cells, battery storage, diesel generators, and a natural gas generator, and it is adaptive to new and additional distributed energy resources. It is designed to also accommodate microturbines, solar panels, and electric vehicle chargers in the future. All components will be placed on a platform and obscured from view with 7-foot-high fencing and gate access along Williams Street. The co-branded (Georgia Tech and Georgia Power) fencing will have a mural designed and commissioned by Atlanta-based artist George F. Baker III, to be finished later this year.

“It takes people a long time to gather their firewood,” explained Valerie Thomas, Anderson-Interface Professor of Natural Systems in the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering (ISyE).

“A lot of these areas face deforestation, which not only cuts down on wildlife but also makes it harder for people to gather firewood; as the trees get cut down, the forest gets further away from the village.”

In addition to these deforestation challenges, cooking indoors with biomass fuels (which many people do) creates air pollution, leading to negative health effects. Thomas is conducting research on solar cooking and parabolic stoves, studying how this simple technology can help people in Rwanda address both issues.

“I’m really enthusiastic about finding better ways for people to cook, especially using solar,” Thomas said. “There are limitations — for example, you can’t do your cooking when the sun isn’t out. But there are also a lot of advantages. You don’t need to gather anything, it works well, it’s very inexpensive, and there are a lot of different options.”

The cooking initiative is one part of the work Thomas has been doing in Rwanda. Since 2016, she has collaborated with industry practitioners, as well as researchers and students from ISyE, to determine the best way to bring sustainable energy to the people of rural Africa.

“There is minimal access to grid electricity in rural Africa,” said Thomas. “We’re using operations research techniques to examine future development scenarios that will help governments make better infrastructure decisions and balance supply and demand.”

In addition to the lack of energy infrastructure, Africa also faces a shortage of Ph.D.s to help solve these complex issues. To address this problem, Thomas serves as an international advisor to graduate students at the African Center of Excellence in Energy for Sustainable Development, a pan-African program at the University of Rwanda established with support from the World Bank Group. Supporting trained Ph.D.s and students in Africa who will continue to research these issues is key to the region’s future success.

The DOE is holding a report release webinar on Thursday, February 25, 2021 from 3-4pm ET. Members of the committee will present an extensive set of policy and funding recommendations aimed at modernizing the U.S. electric system. The report addresses technology development, operations, grid architectures, and business practices, as well as ways to make the electricity system secure, sustainable, equitable, and resilient. Registration is at this link.

Deepakraj Divan (NAE) is Professor and Director of the Center for Distributed Energy at the Georgia Tech. Dr. Divan is also John E. Pippin Chair and GRA Eminent Scholar. His field of research is in the areas of power electronics, power systems, smart grids, and distributed control of power systems. He has founded or seeded several new ventures including Soft Switching Technologies, Innovolt, Varentec and Smart Wires, which together have raised more than $150M in venture funding. He received his B. Tech from IIT Kanpur, and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Calgary, Canada. He has been with Georgia Tech since 2004. Read his full bio here.

AlRegib is a professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He also leads the Omni Lab for Intelligent Visual Engineering and Sciences (OLIVES) and the Center for Energy and Geo Processing. 

AlRegib discussed the current status of machine learning and how it compares to the current understanding of the human brain and the human vision system in particular. He and Eapen also talked about the robustness and usability of machine learning in applications such as autonomous vehicles, healthcare, and energy. 

Another focus of the conversation was on the future of machine learning and its deployment at scale in sectors such as healthcare, energy, transportation, and textile manufacturing. AlRegib also talked about the OLIVES Lab and its most recent work on making eye exams affordable and available anywhere and anytime using artificial intelligence and machine learning techniques.

To learn more, please listen to the podcast at https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/prof-ghassan-alregib-professor-in-school-electrical/id1515026470?i=1000508796063

Chartered by both IEEE and IEEE PES, the IEEE PES @ Georgia Tech student branch is dedicated to encouraging the development and dissemination of knowledge in the power and energy fields among the students, faculty, and staff in the Georgia Tech community. Currently, more than 190 Yellow Jackets are members of Tech’s IEEE PES chapter, covering undergraduates, master’s and Ph.D. students, and alumni. Many different events–such as technical talks by scholars and industry experts worldwide, career and scholarship information sessions, resume workshops, and picnics–are organized regularly each semester. During the fall 2020 semester, the Georgia Tech IEEE PES student branch chapter recruited 33 new members and organized 12 events. The technical talk speakers represented universities, companies, and labs such as Virginia Tech, EPFL in Switzerland, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Dominion Energy, and ABB. They gave excellent and informative talks on current topics like renewable energy, power electronics, big data applications, and smart cities.

Founded in 1970, the IEEE Power and Energy Society is the oldest society of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) focused on the scientific and engineering knowledge about electric power and energy. It is aimed to be the leading provider of scientific and engineering information on electric power and energy for the betterment of society and the preferred professional development source for its members. As of December 2016, IEEE PES had 244 professional chapters and 240 student branch chapters across the globe.

Photos are courtesy of Zheng An, chapter chair of the IEEE PES student branch and current ECE Ph.D. student. Photo descriptions are below:

1) Electrical energy faculty and students from the IEEE PES student branch chapter listen to a talk given by Ron Melton and Andy Reiman, both of Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNLL). Melton is the group leader of the Distributed Systems Group in the Electricity Infrastructure and Buildings Division of PNNL, and Reiman is a power systems engineer and project manager at PNNL.

2) Ron Melton and Andy Reiman, both of PNLL, spoke to the Georgia Tech IEEE PES student branch chapter, and Reiman is pictured with electrical energy faculty members. Melton is the group leader of the Distributed Systems Group in the Electricity Infrastructure and Buildings Division of PNNL, and Reiman is a power systems engineer and project manager at PNNL.

3) Pietro Cairoli, the director of Engineering Power Electronics at the U.S. Corporate Research Center of ABB, Inc., speaks to students and electrical energy faculty who are involved with the Georgia Tech IEEE PES student branch chapter.

Employing approximately 1,000 staff, SRNL conducts research and development for diverse federal agencies, providing practical, cost-effective solutions for the nation’s environmental, nuclear security, energy, and manufacturing challenges. As the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Environmental Management Laboratory, SRNL provides strategic scientific and technological support for the nation’s $6 billion per year waste clean-up program. 

As part of the BRSA, Georgia Tech will help manage the SRNL and guide the future growth of the lab’s core competencies while expanding collaboration with Tech’s $1 billion-per-year research program. The laboratory is located near Aiken, S.C., across the Savannah River from Augusta and Richmond County.

“We are pleased to support the national interests of the Department of Energy and the impact that the SRNL has on the Augusta area,” said Ángel Cabrera, Georgia Tech’s president. “We look forward to expanding our collaborations with the Savannah River National Laboratory, other members of the Battelle Savannah River Alliance, and the Department of Energy.”

BSRA is led by and wholly owned by Battelle, one of DOE’s leading laboratory management contractors. The BSRA Team includes five universities from the region—Clemson University, Georgia Institute of Technology, South Carolina State University, University of Georgia, and University of South Carolina—as well as small business partners, Longenecker & Associates and TechSource. 

“Our collaboration with the Battelle Savannah River Alliance and the Savannah River National Laboratory will provide new opportunities for our faculty and students in unique areas of research and education,” said Chaouki Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research.

The contract includes a five-year base with five one-year options. The estimated value of the contract is $3.8 billion over the course of 10 years if all options are exercised.

“We are honored by DOE’s decision to award the Savannah River National Laboratory management and operations contract to our team,” said Battelle President and CEO Lou Von Thaer. “We have the lab management experience to make a difference and we’re committed to ensuring the success of this important national resource.”

“We’re honored and excited to have this opportunity,” said Ron Townsend, Battelle’s Executive Vice President for Global Laboratory Operations. “BSRA’s approach will ensure the delivery of high-impact science, technology and engineering solutions into the future through a significant expansion of SRNL’s core competencies. Our team offers an exciting, compelling vision for the future of SRNL and provides DOE a leadership team that will deliver with excellence.” 

Battelle currently has a management role at seven DOE national labs including Pacific Northwest National Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Oak Ridge National Lab, National Renewable Energy Lab, Idaho National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. It also operates the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center for the Department of Homeland Security.

On faculty at Georgia Tech since 2006, Brown's deep expertise in climate and energy policy helped shape numerous reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including one that led to the organization receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.  Prior to Georgia Tech, Brown served at the Energy Department’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she managed an energy efficiency research and development program.  While there she co-led the report Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future, described by the White House as a “cornerstone of engineering-economic analysis of low-carbon energy options for the United States.”  Brown is a commissioner on the National Commission on Energy Policy and in 2006 helped launch the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance.

Her current research addresses the development and deployment of sustainable energy technologies, the design of policy options to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and the evaluation of energy programs and policies . At Georgia Tech, her research projects have included an assessment of the $3 billion/year multi-agency R&D portfolio comprising the U.S. Climate Change Technology Program, analysis of the geography of metropolitan carbon footprints, development of a national climate change technology deployment strategy, and an assessment of the cost and availability of supply- and demand-side electricity resources in the Southeast. 

The senate also confirmed to the TVA board, Barbara S. Haskew, a professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University, Neil G. McBride, a long-time public-interest lawyer, Bill Sansom, a former chairman of the TVA Board and president and chief executive officer of Knoxville-based H.T. Hackney Company.  The four join current members of the board: Current members of the TVA Board of Directors are Chairman Dennis Bottorff of Nashville, Tenn.; Mike Duncan of Inez, Ky.; Tom Gilliland, of Blairsville, Ga.; William Graves of Memphis, Tenn., and Howard Thrailkill of Huntsville, Ala.

Marilyn Brown, an international leader in clean energy policy and Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor in Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy, has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering (NAE).

Brown was chosen for her work “bridging engineering, social and behavioral sciences, and policy studies to achieve cleaner electric energy,” according to the NAE.

She is one of 87 members, including three other Georgia Institute of Technology faculty members, elected in 2020. They join Georgia Institute of Technology colleagues such as Provost Rafael L. Bras and former presidents G. Wayne Clough and Joseph M. Pettit in being elected to the NAE.

“My election to the NAE reflects the growing recognition by engineers that translating technology advances into practical solutions to solve grand challenges requires an understanding of social, behavioral, and policy sciences,” Brown said. “Whether it’s social science or engineering science, the analytical rigor and underlying methodologies are often the same. As a result, there’s a mutual understanding of what constitutes strong, defensible, and important science.”

Energy Efficiency a Focus of Brown’s Research

Brown, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Lab, is known for her pioneering work developing economic-engineering models incorporating behavioral and social science principles into policy analysis of energy systems. Her influential research quantified the “energy-efficiency gap,” highlighting the importance of promoting cost-effective energy conservation improvements as a tool to improve energy security and reduce the impact of climate change.

Brown is the principal investigator on the Georgia Drawdown project with an $800,000 grant from the Ray C. Anderson Foundation to identity the most promising solutions to reduce Georgia’s carbon footprint.

“Marilyn’s leadership role in this initiative highlights her expertise and influence in energy policy, the reason for her election to the National Academy of Engineering” said Kaye Husbands Fealing, chair of the School of Public Policy. “All of us in the School are proud of her work, and pleased to be working across Georgia Tech and with world-class experts at the University of Georgia and Emory University to propel this state into a leadership role on climate solutions.”

In addition to her appointment in the School of Public Policy, Brown also is an affiliate of the Brook Byers Institute of Sustainable Systems and the Strategic Energy Institute, both at Georgia Tech.

Influential Climate Change Work

Brown joined the university in 2006 after 22 years at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she served as director of the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy Program and the Engineering Science and Technology Division.

From 2010 to 2017, Brown served as a regulator on the board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, the nation’s largest public power provider. Between 2014 and 2018, she led the Smart Grid subcommittee of the Electricity Advisory Committee at the U.S. Department of Energy.

In 2000, she led the Scenarios for a Clean Energy Future project, which at the time was the most detailed carbon-reduction analysis funded by the U.S. Department of Energy and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Brown’s deep expertise in climate and energy policy helped shape numerous reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including one that led to the organization receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

In addition to Brown, the NAE also elected to its 2020 class Georgia Tech professors Susan Margulies, chair of the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering, Alexander A. Shapiro of the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and Thomas Kurfess of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of Georgia Tech's Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

The 2020 cohort of Clark Scholars is made up of 10 first-year students majoring in various engineering disciplines. In 2018, the A. James & Alice B. Clark Foundation partnered with Georgia Tech to launch the A. James Clark Scholars Program at Georgia Tech. The Clark Scholars Program is the Foundation’s signature academic program, combining engineering, business, leadership, and community service. 

Duran is from Miami, Florida and attended Jose Marti MAST, where he served as both class and school president. Duran co-founded a marine science lab and served as president of the Marine Science Club and the Technological Student Association. Additionally, he conducted research focused on a different approach to lab instruction in a secondary setting. Duran was also captain for his judo tournament team from 2017-2020. In his free time, he enjoys woodworking, fishing, playing basketball, and spending time with his family. 

Duran is an electrical engineering major. He plans to focus on energy and the application of renewable energy sources, with a focus on efficient storage of said energy. Ultimately, Duran would like to start a renewable energy power company and more efficiently harvest the clean energy around us.

Duran is getting involved with the Energy Club at Georgia Tech, IEEE, and the Solar Racing Team. He would also like to join The Hive and become a peer instructor, and he said that he would like to be involved with energy-related research during his years at Georgia Tech.

“I come from a low-income family and this scholarship means everything to me; it gave me the chance to be here at Tech, and to receive a top tier education,” Duran said. “I will be eternally grateful to the foundation and to those that granted me this opportunity.”

The goals of this collaborative arrangement are to:

• Solve Big Problems by leveraging the significant infrastructure and intellectual capabilities of both parties in a multidisciplinary and multi-institutional manner.
• Sustain and Engage Human Capital by exposing a pipeline of talented future members of the workforce to problems of practical importance and complex nature early in their academic programs.
• Accelerate Technology Adoption by introducing new ideas, science, and technology into the industrial and federal marketplace for the public good.

This five-year agreement was acknowledged during a virtual memorandum of understanding (MOU) signing event on Oct. 23, organized by Georgia Tech’s Strategic Energy Institute (SEI). 

“This MOU provides a basis for both parties to engage in research collaborations, and the joint creation and administration of intellectual property,” said Tim Lieuwen, SEI’s executive director.

Leaders of both institutions emphasized that the MOU leverages existing relationships and takes advantage of synergies. PNNL and Georgia Tech already have a long history of collaboration, with more than 100 journal articles, conference papers, and the like coauthored by PNNL and Georgia Tech researchers over the past decade. PNNL also boasts 32 current staff members who earned a bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral degree from Georgia Tech.

The MOU lays out several potential topics of mutual interest to both institutions. 

“Georgia Tech and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory share interests in many areas of science and technology, including data science and visual analytics, electrical grid technologies, cybersecurity, and processing for fuels, chemicals, and materials,” said Chaouki T. Abdallah, Georgia Tech’s executive vice president for research. “Through this MOU, we look forward to expanding our collaborations in these important research areas.”

The MOU also calls for expanded intellectual engagement, with PNNL and Georgia Tech students and researchers having a substantive presence on each other’s campuses, often in the form of joint appointments and internships. Personnel exchanges of this nature typically accelerate research efforts by making available to both parties the unique capabilities, facilities, and research communities that both have to offer.

“The complexity of the research problems we are tackling today requires cooperation among institutions. No one institution can solve the big problems alone,” Tony Peurrung, PNNL’s deputy director for science and technology, said. “We are pleased to elevate our partnership with Georgia Tech because with our combined strengths, we will be better prepared to solve some of world’s most difficult science and technology challenges.”

Several online seminars are planned in the coming months to boost awareness of this agreement among the research communities of both institutions and to foster connections between researchers with similar interests.

Pacific Northwest National Laboratory draws on signature capabilities in chemistry, earth sciences, and data analytics to advance scientific discovery and create solutions to the nation's toughest challenges in energy resiliency and national security. Founded in 1965, PNNL is operated by Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Science — the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States — and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

The Georgia Institute of Technology, also known as Georgia Tech, is one of the nation’s leading research universities, providing a focused, technologically based education to more than 36,000 undergraduate and graduate students. The Institute has many nationally recognized programs, all top-ranked by peers and publications alike, and is ranked among the nation’s top public universities by U.S. News & World Report. It offers degrees through the Colleges of Computing, Design, Engineering, Sciences, the Scheller College of Business, and the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech has hundreds of centers focused on interdisciplinary research that consistently contribute vital research and innovation to American government, industry, and business.

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Media Relations Contacts: Georgia Tech - John Toon (jtoon@gatech.edu); PNNL - Greg Koller (greg.koller@pnnl.gov).

By turning the compromised equipment on or off to artificially increase or decrease power demand, botnets made up of these energy-consuming devices might help an unscrupulous energy supplier or retailer (electric utility) alter prices to create a business advantage, or give a nation-state a way to remotely harm the economy of another country by causing financial damage to its electricity market. If done within the bounds of normal power demand variation, such an attack would be difficult to detect, the researchers said.

“If an attacker can slightly affect electricity market prices in their favor, it would be like knowing today what’s going to happen in tomorrow’s stock market,” said Tohid Shekari, a graduate research assistant in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If the manipulation stays within a certain range, it would be stealthy and difficult to differentiate from a typical load forecasting error.”

Believed to be the first proposed energy market manipulation cyberattack, the operation would depend on botnets composed of thousands of appliances that could be controlled centrally by attackers who had taken over their Internet of Things (IoT) controllers. Malicious actors have already demonstrated IoT botnet attacks such as Mirai, which used a network of compromised internet-connected cameras and routers to launch attacks on key internet infrastructure.

The attack, dubbed “IoT Skimmer,” would be made possible by the deregulation of energy markets, which has created a system to efficiently supply electrical power. To meet the demand for electrical energy, utility companies must predict future demand and purchase power from the day-ahead wholesale energy market at competitive prices. If the predictions turn out to be wrong, the utilities may have to pay more or less for the energy they need to meet the demands of their customers by participating in the real-time market, which has more volatile prices in general. Creating erroneous demand data to manipulate forecasts could be profitable to the suppliers selling energy to meet the unexpected demand, or the retailers or utilities buying cheaper energy from the real-time market.

The researchers weren’t able to determine whether such an attack might have already taken place because IoT devices – beyond being insecure – also lack the kind of monitoring that would be necessary to detect such hijacking. But they used real data sets from two of the largest U.S. energy markets – New York and California – to evaluate the feasibility of their proposed attack.

“We did a lot of simulation and mathematical analysis to show that this kind of transfer could occur,” said Raheem Beyah, the Motorola Foundation Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering who is also Georgia Tech’s vice president for Interdisciplinary Research and co-founder of the company Fortiphyd Logic. “We also did a feasibility analysis of the supporting areas to show that this would be possible from various perspectives.”

The researchers assume that such botnets already exist, and that attackers could simply rent their use on the dark web. More than 20 million smart thermostats already exist in the North American market, and they are connected to at least one high-wattage device – a heating and air-conditioning system that could be controlled by attackers on an intermittent basis.

“If you consider all of the smart thermostats and internet-connected electric ovens, water heaters, and electric vehicle chargers that are already in use, there are plenty of devices to be compromised,” Shekari said. “Homeowners would likely never notice if the EV charger turns on when electricity demand is highest, or if the air conditioning cools a little more than they expected when they are not home.”

To counter the potential attack, researchers suggest both detection and prevention steps. Through integrated monitoring of the normal power use of high-wattage IoT-connected devices, unexpected peaks or valleys in power consumption triggered by an attacker could be detected. And access to data on expected energy demand – which is now made available publicly – could be restricted to those who actually need it.

The primary factor that makes this attack possible is the detailed online data sharing of electricity market information, which is usually updated every five minutes. 

“This energy demand information is really a data privacy issue, and we need to think long and hard about the balance between transparency and security,” Beyah said. “There’s always a tension there, but limiting the amount of detail could make it more difficult for attackers who want to hide their manipulations to know what the normal variations are.”

The potential attack highlights the need for considering cybersecurity threats in technology areas where they had perhaps never been possible before.  

“This is an interesting intersection between the IoT security world and energy markets,” said Beyah. “Right now, it seems that there is a large gap between the two worlds. Our point is that there are implications for combining IoT technology and high-wattage devices that can compromise markets in ways we would never have thought of before.”

The presentation, “IoT Skimmer: Energy Market Manipulation Through High-Wattage IoT Botnets,” will be presented on Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 2:30 p.m. as part of the Black Hat USA 2020 conference.

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Fractionation of crude oil mixtures using heat-based distillation is a large-scale, energy-intensive process that accounts for nearly 1% of the world’s energy use: 1,100 terawatt-hours per year (TWh/yr), which is equivalent to the total energy consumed by the state of New York in a year. By substituting the low-energy membranes for certain steps in the distillation process, the new technology might one day allow implementation of a hybrid refining system that could help reduce carbon emissions and energy consumption significantly compared to traditional refining processes.

“Much in our modern lives comes from oil, so the separation of these molecules makes our modern civilization possible,” said M.G. Finn, professor and chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. Finn also holds the James A. Carlos Family Chair for Pediatric Technology. “The scale of the separation required to provide the products we use is incredibly large. This membrane technology could make a significant impact on global energy consumption and the resulting emissions of petroleum processing.”

Reported in the July 17 issue of the journal Science, the paper is believed to be the first report of a synthetic membrane specifically designed for the separation of crude oil and crude-oil fractions. Additional research and development will be needed to advance this technology to industrial scale. 

Membrane technology is already widely used in such applications as seawater desalination, but the complexity of petroleum refining has until now limited the use of membranes. To overcome that challenge, the research team developed a novel spirocyclic polymer that was applied to a robust substrate to create membranes able to separate complex hydrocarbon mixtures through the application of pressure rather than heat.

Membranes separate molecules from mixtures according to differences such as size and shape. When molecules are very close in size, that separation becomes more challenging. Using a well-known process for making bonds between nitrogen and carbon atoms, the polymers were constructed by connecting building blocks having a kinked structure to create disordered materials with built-in void spaces. 

The team was able to balance a variety of factors to create the right combination of solubility – to enable membranes to be formed by simple and scalable processing – and structural rigidity – to allow some small molecules to pass through more easily than others. Unexpectedly, the researchers found that the materials needed a small amount of structural flexibility to improve size discrimination, as well as the ability to be slightly “sticky” toward certain types of molecules that are found abundantly in crude oil. 

After designing the novel polymers and achieving some success with a synthetic gasoline, jet fuel, and diesel fuel mixture, the team decided to try to separate a crude oil sample and discovered that the new membrane was quite effective at recovering gasoline and jet fuel from the complex mixture.

“We were initially trying to fractionate a mixture of molecules that were too similar,” said Ben McCool, a senior research associate at ExxonMobil and one of the paper’s coauthors. “When we took on a more complex feed, crude oil, we got fractionalization that looked like it could have come from a distillation column, indicating the concept’s great potential.”

The researchers worked collaboratively, with polymers designed and tested at Georgia Tech, then converted to 200-nanometer-thick films, and incorporated into membrane modules at Imperial using a roll-to-roll process. Samples were then tested at all three organizations, providing multi-lab confirmation of the membrane capabilities. 

“We have the foundational experience of bringing organic solvent nanofiltration, a membrane technology becoming widely used in pharmaceuticals and chemicals industries, to market,” said Andrew Livingston, professor of chemical engineering at Imperial. “We worked extensively with ExxonMobil and Georgia Tech to demonstrate the scalability potential of this technology to the levels required by the petroleum industry.”

The research team created an innovation pipeline that extends from basic research all the way to technology that can be tested in real-world conditions.

“We brought together basic science and chemistry, applied membrane fabrication fundamentals, and engineering analysis of how membranes work,” said Ryan Lively, associate professor and John H. Woody faculty fellow in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering. “We were able to go from milligram-scale powders all the way to prototype membrane modules in commercial form factors that were challenged with real crude oil – it was fantastic to see this innovation pipeline in action.”

ExxonMobil’s relationship with Georgia Tech goes back nearly 15 years and has produced innovations in other separation technologies, including a new carbon-based molecular sieve membrane that could dramatically reduce the energy required to separate a class of hydrocarbon molecules known as alkyl aromatics. 

“Through collaboration with strong academic institutions like Georgia Tech and Imperial, we are constantly working to develop the lower-emissions energy solutions of the future," said Vijay Swarup, vice president of research and development at ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company. 

In addition to Finn, Livingston, Lively, and McCool, the paper’s authors include Kirstie Thompson and Ronita Mathias, Georgia Tech graduate students who are co-first authors; Daeok Kim, Jihoon Kim, Irene Bechis, Andrew Tarzia, and Kim Jelfs of Imperial; and Neel Rangnekar, J.R. Johnson, and Scott Hoy of ExxonMobil.

CITATION: Kirstie Thompson, et al., “N-Aryl Linked Spirocyclic Polymers for Membrane Separations of Complex Hydrocarbon Mixtures” (Science 2020). https://science.sciencemag.org/content/369/6501/310

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The case competition focused on the expansion and construction of the Atlanta Beltline in Atlanta’s Westside neighborhoods. More specifically, participants had to develop a set of new policies that would help residents manage their transportation, energy and other utility costs while strengthening the electrical infrastructure. All participants were given one week to prepare a proposal assuming an estimated budget of $10 million from a federal grant.

The policy proposals were evaluated on four criteria: economic efficiency, sustainability, scalability, and proposal delivery. On all four criteria, Ghodeswar and Tsybina achieved top scores. The judges commented that the team did an excellent job identifying the current state of the energy grid infrastructure and coming up with a creative set of policy prescriptions. After visiting the neighborhood, meeting with Georgia Power employees, and conducting extensive research on successful policy architecture in other states, Ghodeswar and Tsybina developed an in-depth multi-pronged proposal. The policy recommendations included both tangible solutions such as providing rebates to residents for retrofitting their residential systems (attic insulation, thermostat replacement, water heater replacement, etc.) as well as plans to engage the community in behavioral change through K-12 voluntary at-home advocacy and leading by example, and other behavioral nudges encouraging habits that lead to energy savings.

“The case was a big success among the judges and the conference participants. The School of Economics could not be prouder of Eve and Archana for winning the CASE competition. This win raises the profile of the SOE around GT and will be a nice feather in each of their caps as they move toward completing their Ph.D.’s. I am personally thrilled by it because it is an indication that the field of energy economics is thriving in the SOE. Great job by two outstanding students!" said Associate Professor Matthew Oliver.

Dupuis was specifically recognized “for pioneering development of the metalorganic chemical vapor deposition (MOCVD) technology and seminal contributions to compound semiconductor materials and devices, including the first MOCVD III-V compound semiconductor solar cells, and advances in quantum-well semiconductor light emitters used in telecommunications and visible LEDs (light-emitting diodes).” 

Dupuis’ contributions to the development of MOCVD are among the most significant contributions made in the growth of semiconductor devices in the last 40 years. His work on the understanding and improvement of the MOCVD process was the key development that led to the demonstration of the first MOCVD-grown III-V compound semiconductor heterostructure solar cells, injection lasers, the first CW room-temperature quantum-well lasers grown by any materials technology, and the demonstration of high-reliability MOCVD lasers. These important achievements have had a great impact the efficient use of energy in the world.

Dupuis has been a member of the Georgia Tech ECE faculty since 2003. Prior to his arrival at Tech, he was a chaired professor at the University of Texas at Austin and worked at Texas Instruments, Rockwell International, and AT&T Bell Laboratories. 

In 2015, Dupuis was one of five pioneers to receive the Draper Prize for Engineering in recognition of the significant benefit to society created by the initial development and commercialization of LED technologies. He has also been recognized with the IEEE Edison Medal and as a Fellow of the IEEE, OSA, the American Physical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science for his achievements in this field.

AI enables computer systems to automatically learn from experience without being explicitly programmed. Such technology can perform tasks that formerly only a human could: see, identify patterns, make decisions, and act.

The new co-design center, known as the Center for ARtificial Intelligence-focused Architectures and Algorithms (ARIAA), funded by DoE’s Office of Science, will promote collaboration between scientists at the three organizations as they develop core technologies important for the application of AI to DoE mission priorities, such as cybersecurity, electric grid resilience, graph analytics, and scientific simulations.

PNNL Senior Research Scientist Roberto Gioiosa will be the center’s director and will lead the overall vision, strategy, and research direction. Tushar Krishna, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), and Siva Rajamanickam, a computer scientist at Sandia, will serve as deputy directors. 

Each institution brings to the collaboration a unique strength: PNNL has expertise in power grid simulation, chemistry, and cybersecurity and has research experience in computer architecture and programming models, as well as computing resources such as systems for testing emerging architectures. Sandia has expertise in software simulation of computer systems, machine learning algorithms, graph analytics, and sparse linear algebra, and will provide access to computer facilities and testbed systems to support early access to emerging computing architectures for code development and testing. Georgia Tech has expertise in modeling and developing custom accelerators for machine learning and sparse linear algebra and will develop and provide access to novel hardware prototypes. 

“New projects like the center were made possible by the strategic collaboration between Sandia and Georgia Tech for the past few years," said Sandia’s Rajamanickam.

Special-purpose hardware can enable AI tasks to run faster and use less energy than on conventional computing devices such as CPUs and GPUs. ARIAA is centered around a concept known as “co-design,” which refers to the need for researchers to weigh and balance the capabilities of hardware and software – and corral the vastly different types of architectures and algorithms possible to best solve the problems at hand. 

Krishna’s lab will lead the effort on architecting and evaluating reconfigurable hardware accelerators that can adapt to the rapidly evolving needs of AI applications. In particular, running sparse computations efficiently will be a key focus. Sparse computations are critical to several computational areas of interest to the DoE because they greatly reduce the number of computations on problems with large amounts of data. One way of thinking about sparsity is that there might be millions or even billions of users on a social media site, but a user cares about updates only from a few hundred friends.

Krishna, the ON Semiconductor Junior Professor in ECE, works on custom hardware accelerators for AI. In 2015, he co-developed the Eyeriss Deep Learning ASIC (in collaboration with MIT), which was one of the earliest prototypes demonstrating real-time inference on a state-of-the-art deep neural network then known as AlexNet. More recently his lab has been working on an analytical microarchitectural design-space exploration tool for AI accelerators known as MAESTRO (developed in collaboration with NVIDIA) and a reconfigurable AI accelerator platform known as MAERI. Both of these will be leveraged to perform co-design as part of the ARIAA center.

“Georgia Tech provides a great environment to carry out research in hardware-software co-design due to a rich collaborative environment across ECE and the College of Computing, and vibrant research centers such as Machine Learning at Georgia Tech (ML@GT) and the Center for Research into Novel Computing Hierarchies (CRNCH) that bring together researchers with experience in algorithms, compilers, architecture, circuits, and novel devices, fostering collaboration and innovation,” said Krishna.

- Adapted from an article by the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

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As the growth in connected devices outstrips that of conventional home appliances, consumers will find it increasingly more difficult to understand which electrical devices are consuming the most power in their homes, and what to do about it, according to Omar Isaac Asensio, an assistant professor in the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Public Policy.

U.S. consumers and businesses already have installed some 3.4 billion connected consumer devices, recent research shows, ranging from color-changing lightbulbs to constantly streaming security cameras. Despite their often diminutive physical footprint, such devices already exact an enormous draw on the energy supply—consuming about 15% of the global growth in electricity demand.

Writing in the September issue of Nature Energy, Asensio says that with forecasts calling for the installation of billions more of such devices in coming years, the need is ever more acute for ways to encourage energy conservation and address consumer misperceptions about power use.

“Given the growth of connected, smart devices in the home, which are easily expected to outpace traditional consumer electronics, it will increasingly be harder for households to understand the uses of electricity in the home, as these devices continuously draw power for two-way, on-call communications,” he said. “This is what economists refer to as a behavioral failure and it brings to center stage the need for behavioral interventions that can correct consumer misperceptions of household energy use.”

Asensio’s article is a companion to a paper in the same Nature Energy issue detailing research from scholars at Indiana University. That paper examines the effectiveness of two types of interventions meant to help correct consumer misperceptions about which appliances use the most energy. The randomized online experiment by the Indiana University researchers examined the effect of one intervention in which respondents were told about energy usage among devices that consumed power on the high and low ends of the scale, as well as another intervention that told study participants that large heating and cooling appliances use “more energy than people think.”

While the first scale-use intervention, called an anchoring intervention, had no impact on participants’ ability to identify effective behaviors, the second intervention — which simply gave participants an easy to understand rule of thumb to estimate energy use — did. The conclusion: simply offering a conservation message may not be as important as how the conservation message is framed to consumers.

Asensio also has studied such framing interventions as part of a growing body of work by behavioral researchers. In a paper published in 2015 in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences, Asensio reported on a study he conducted using high-frequency appliance monitoring data with environment and health-based information strategies highlighting the negative impacts of electricity production. Such individualized messages, which were delivered through a website and emails, resulted in an 8% reduction in power consumption versus a control group. But Asensio found that consumers took very different approaches to which appliances were targeted for conservation when the detailed breakdowns of energy use were disclosed using mobile apps at the point of use.

With connected devices poised to fundamentally shift patterns of electricity use, Asensio said targeted information about invisible power consumption is needed at the place where it will do the most good: built into such devices and the smartphone apps that drive them.

In other words, Asensio says, connected devices and apps should be designed to give consumers these science-based behavioral cues in ways that prompt them to make better decisions about the power consumption in their homes.

“What’s exciting about this research is that direct communication to consumers is potentially a very low-cost policy,” he said. “The idea that we could couple leading-edge smart devices with behavioral science-based interventions can be a powerful approach to achieving large-scale conservation goals.”

Asensio’s article for the October 2019 edition of Nature Energy, “Correcting Consumer Misperception,” is available online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41560-019-0472-5.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

The agreement, which was announced by NREL Director Martin Keller at a Georgia Tech Strategic Energy Institute event, establishes an official avenue for the exchange of Georgia Tech faculty and NREL employees across both institutions. Samuel Graham, the Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. school chair of the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in the College of Engineering, will be the first appointee under this new program. 

The purpose of the program is to attract rising stars in scientific and engineering fields and to enhance the quality of the science, technology, education, and industrial development in the regions surrounding Georgia Tech and NREL. This mutually beneficial relationship will combine the expertise and leadership of both the university and the lab in the pursuit of innovative research and help prepare the next generation of future scientists through scholarly excellence.

"Under this joint agreement, NREL and Georgia Tech open up an avenue for significant research collaboration to explore opportunities for advanced energy technologies in a wide range of energy efficiency and renewable energy applications," said Johney Green, associate lab director for Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences at NREL. "NREL researchers are excited to continue collaborating with Graham and his team and benefiting from the expertise of a prestigious educational institution like Georgia Tech."

The formal collaboration between Georgia Tech and NREL will initially focus on the fundamental research and development of advanced wide bandgap (WBG) technologies used in electrical power transfer applications—such as vehicle drive systems, building technologies, and solar inverters. This unique arrangement will allow NREL to leverage the extensive expertise that Georgia Tech has in thermal energy sciences. Working with Graham, NREL's vehicle electrification and advanced manufacturing research programs aim to advance WBG materials science and develop low-thermal-resistance power electronics packaging. The goal is to make devices and components smaller, more efficient, and higher-performing compared to present-day silicon-based component packaging.

"Given the breadth and depth of Georgia Tech and NREL's expertise in renewable energy, this partnership is very exciting," said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute at Georgia Tech. "This agreement will facilitate the continued growth of our relationship and existing partnerships."

The NREL Buildings Program will also benefit from this exchange as the lab works to strengthen its research capabilities with emphasis on optimized energy use, generation, and storage in the built environment at multiple scales. Georgia Tech's Heat Transfer, Combustion, and Energy Systems Research Group is one of the largest thermal and energy science groups in the country, with a focus on cutting-edge basic and applied research that ranges from nanoengineered materials to large thermal energy systems.

"We're excited for how this agreement significantly expands our research capabilities," said NREL Buildings Laboratory Program Manager Roderick Jackson. "Georgia Tech has a reputation for being leaders in this research space, which we can now leverage as we transform energy through building science."

Learn more about NREL's research organization partners and how to work with them.

McCarthy will be presenting: “U.S. Environmental Policy & the Assault on Science:  The role of sound science in protecting our health and natural resources" with an introduction by Dean Jacquelyn Royster, Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts. 

Gina McCarthy led the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from July 2013 to January 2017. Prior to her appointment as the EPA’ Administrator, she was appointed by President Obama in 2009 as Assistant Administrator for EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation, McCarthy has been a leading advocate for common-sense strategies to protect public health and the environment. Previously, McCarthy served as the Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. During her career, which spans over 30 years, she has worked at both the state and local levels on critical environmental issues and helped coordinate policies on economic growth, energy, transportation and the environment.

McCarthy received a Bachelor of Arts in Social Anthropology from the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a joint Master of Science in Environmental Health Engineering and Planning and Policy from Tufts University.

The highly technical, science-based, and interdisciplinary program — approved by the Board of Regents on Feb. 12, 2019 — will prepare students to deliver fact-based policy expertise through robust analytical techniques and a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues and sustainability practices.

“This professionally focused degree will allow Georgia Tech to educate the next generation of sustainability leaders in corporate, government, and non-governmental organizations,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “Georgia Tech is proud to deliver innovative, affordable, and top-quality education in high-demand areas such as sustainability to meet the needs of our evolving workforce."

When the program begins in the Georgia Tech School of Public Policy in August 2019, MSEEM students will study topics such as sustainable energy and voluntary environmental commitments, cost-benefit analysis, utility regulation and policy, Earth systems, economics of environmental policy, big data and policy analytics, climate policy, and environmental management.

They also will learn analytical techniques used to estimate and evaluate sustainability metrics, be able to expertly assess the context of energy and environmental problems, and understand environmental ethics and its implications for sustainability practice.

The program will combine professional instruction from the nationally-ranked School of Public Policy with Georgia Tech’s top-notch engineering, business, and planning faculties to educate professionals who can lead organizations toward policies consistent with a sustainable future.

“This unique interdisciplinary program takes an innovative and integrative approach to sustainability that epitomizes the commitment of the School of Public Policy to collaborate across disciplines to educate future policy analysts and leaders and turn ideas into solutions to public problems,” said Kaye Husbands Fealing, professor and chair of the school.

Faculty will be drawn from across the Georgia Tech campus, including from the School of Public Policy, the Scheller College of Business, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the School of City and Regional Planning.

Guest lecturers from Atlanta’s corporate community, government agencies, NGOs and research organizations also will participate — helping connect MSEEM students to the state of the practice and to job opportunities.

MSEEM students also will have access to Georgia Tech’s summer Program on Sustainable Development and Climate Change in Venice, Italy. The 5-week, 6-credit program features courses in climate policy and sustainable development and provides a multi-disciplinary learning experience that combines classroom lectures, guest speakers and instructional field trips.

 “The world’s energy economy is undergoing transformational change, and as the public and private sectors strengthen their commitment to green practices, the need will increase for well-trained policy experts able to design, implement, and manage responses to sustainability issues. This program will provide such leaders,” said Marilyn A. Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy.

The MSEEM program is designed to serve a broad range of students interested in sustainability issues. Students can complete the degree on campus or online as a full-time student. Students also have the option to enroll part-time and complete their degree online. The program is designed to serve working professionals and others who want to participate part-time and earn their degree over several years.

In addition to the master’s degree, Georgia Tech is also offering a Certificate in Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management. This 12-credit hour SEEM Certificate can be completed in one or two semesters and can be earned on its own or in combination with the master’s degree.

Applications are being accepted through June 15 for the inaugural class of MSEEM students, who will begin study in August 2019.

A generous philanthropic gift has enabled Georgia Tech to offer five fully funded MSEEM fellowships to the program each year for the first three years of the program.

For more information on these programs, visit https://spp.gatech.edu/masters/mseem.

Tinsley's team proposal would present the HES in an interpretable and interactive manner to homeowners through an online dashboard, which would not only aid the homeowner in understanding the HES but also help the DOE track this information and collect additional useful data. The long-run goal is to reduce the current information asymmetry in the real estate market by educating homeowners on their score, and consequently, on household energy efficiency, in general. Moreover, this will help formalize the HES as a variable that influences prices in the real estate market. 

Tinsley and her team were named winners of the first round of this challenge and have been invited to compete in the finalist competition weekend in Golden, Colorado, this April!

JUMP into STEM is an online crowdsourcing community, launched by ORNL in 2015. JUMP into STEM engages university and college professors to promote the challenges as either a modular component for course work or extracurricular development opportunities. ORNL is collaborating with NREL to offer challenges that will culminate in a Final Event competition to select and award up to six paid summer internships at ORNL or NREL.This initiative is being funded by the Department of Energy's Building Technologies Office.

 “It’s not good enough for us to reduce our own use if we’re continuing to send these fuels to Asia and other global markets,” said Brown, Regents’ Professor in the School of Public Policy and director of the Climate and Energy Policy Laboratory. Other countries also need to overhaul their energy systems and drastically curb their greenhouse gas emissions, as well, she said.

“This doesn’t mean we should wait to act, but we need to worry about our role as an enabler of pollution through our fossil fuel exports,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez unveiled her proposal for the Manhattan Project-style effort to thwart climate change on February 7, 2019. In it, she calls for a “national mobilization” to reshape the U.S. economy within a decade so that greenhouse gas emissions are largely eliminated.

Brown, the author of a forthcoming book on empowering the transition from fossil fuels to renewables, said it would be possible to move the economy away from fossil fuels that rapidly, but it would come at enormous cost to businesses and consumers, who would have to idle fossil-fuel based power plants, machinery, and even cars well before the end of their useful lifespans.

“We do need to move more rapidly in this direction, but such a precipitous shift would be more costly than a somewhat more gradual approach.”

Moreover, Brown said, such an enormous investment over such a short span of time could divert capital from other critical needs, such as healthcare, education, basic science, and national security.

It would be “politically infeasible” to prevent U.S. energy producers from tapping existing fossil fuel reserves and exporting those fuels to countries around the world. The result? Other countries would burn the fuel instead of the United States.

“We need to be sure that other countries have green alternatives that are equally appealing to them and policies that promote them,” she said.

A 12-month effort, the Southeast MEP Energy Management Program is being funded with a grant from the U.S. Department of Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP).

“The program aims to help companies in the Southeast accelerate their energy and cost savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by incorporating best practices as outlined by ISO 50001,” said Bill Meffert, the GaMEP’s group manager for energy and sustainability projects.

The ISO 50001 Energy Management System — an international standard in which the GaMEP had a role in developing when first drafted in 2011 and its 2018 revisions — provides business and industry with an energy performance improvement framework.

“That’s the focus of the ISO 50001 training and coaching. We’re assisting companies in their efforts to bring energy costs under control and make smart energy usage part of their daily processes,” Meffert said.

Participants in the Southeast MEP Energy Management Program will take a series of classes and webinar sessions, and receive on-site coaching over a 12-month period. Completing the program allows them to be certified by the U.S. Department of Energy as 50001 Ready by showing they’ve implemented the standard into their operations. They can also take an additional step to become certified, Meffert said.

The class for the first cohort launches in early 2019 and applications are being accepted at this link: https://gamep.org/southeast-energy-management-program/.

The federal grant covers most of the cost for the training, but participating companies will pay about 25 percent of that. As part of the grant, the GaMEP will partner with MEPs in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, and Texas. Those sister MEPs will find clients in those states to work with them to implement the ISO 50001 management system.

“For many companies, energy use is a critical component of their ability to maintain a competitive edge,” Meffert said.

A medium- to large-sized company with 250 employees or more could spend more than $1 million a year on energy, including electricity, natural gas, fuel, and water.

“What we see with the companies that we’ve worked with to adopt the ISO standard in the past is that they achieve energy performance improvements that go beyond the typical approaches,” he said. “Roughly 70 percent of the savings achieved are through operational controls and behavior change.”

Since the ISO standard’s adoption in 2011, the GaMEP has helped more than 70 facilities in North America to implement ISO 50001, with most becoming certified, including nine in the Southeast.

“This energy management system is applicable to a whole host of industries from textiles and floor coverings to food and beverage to automotive manufacturing,” Meffert said. “One of the reasons we sought to get more companies in the Southeast to adopt this energy standard is because we have such a strong manufacturing presence in all of these sectors.

“Incorporating these standards and changing processes for energy usage can really make a difference to the bottom line, while also helping companies meet their competitiveness and sustainability objectives,” Meffert said.

About the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP)

The Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP) is an economic development program of the Enterprise Innovation Institute at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The GaMEP is a member of the National MEP network supported by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. With offices in 10 regions across the state, the GaMEP has been serving Georgia manufacturers since 1960. It offers a solution-based approach to manufacturers through coaching and education designed to increase top-line growth and reduce bottom-line cost.

His current work focuses on artificial intelligence, data science, and operations research with the goal of developing methodologies, algorithms, and systems for addressing challenging problems in mobility, energy systems, resilience, and privacy.

In fact, Atlanta’s well-known traffic issues present a particularly intriguing puzzle for Van Hentenryck, who has a project with MARTA already in place. One aspect of the project involves working to determine how autonomous vehicles, such as rail line “pods,” can be used to more efficiently deliver people to where they’re trying to go. Such pods would be smaller than today’s current train cars, but they would depart and arrive on a more frequent schedule.

“Transportation will likely undergo substantial changes in the next decade,” said Van Hentenryck. “Finding how to design effective, equitable, and sustainable mobility systems is one of the fundamental challenges faced by society. The convergence of a number of technological enablers, including machine learning and optimization, provide truly exciting opportunities.”

Van Hentenryck’s research on energy systems and resilience involves looking at how renewable energies such as solar and wind impact the availability of electricity across large power grids. These energy sources are very unpredictable compared to traditional sources and lead to increased volatility in the system. He is working to solve this complex problem and shape the future grid.  

He is also working with the French transmission system, RTE France, on a project called Grid Research for Good. The goal is to generate test cases that capture the complexity of actual electrical networks. The test cases will be based on RTE’s transmission system, which spans over 100,000 km and operates at three different voltage levels.

“Energy research is another fundamental societal challenge where new advances in optimization and machine learning are strongly needed in order to deal with the additional stochasticity introduced by renewable energy, the scale of these systems, and the underlying physics,” he noted.

In addition, Van Hentenryck brings with him to Georgia Tech the Seth Bonder Summer Camp in Computational and Data Science, which is funded through a gift from the Seth Bonder Foundation and will be administered by CEISMC and overseen by Van Hentenryck and his students.

This camp aims to attract rural and lower-income high school students in Georgia who have had limited or no exposure to data science and computer programming. Throughout the course of the week, students will gain facility with computer programming, machine learning, optimization, computational social science, and genomics.

“I always believed – and we now have shown – that high school students can learn and be excited by computer science and engineering,” Van Hentenryck said. “Every year, I look forward to the Seth Bonder camp and to getting rejuvenated by teaching the next generation of students.”

Van Hentenryck is a Fellow of AAAI (the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence) and of INFORMS. He has been awarded honorary doctoral degrees from both the University of Louvain and the University of Nantes, the IFORS Distinguished Lecturer Award, the Philip J. Bray Award for teaching excellence in the physical sciences at Brown University, the ACP Award for Research Excellence in Constraint Programming, the ICS INFORMS Prize for Research Excellence at the Intersection of Computer Science and Operations Research, and an NSF National Young Investigator Award. He received a Test of Time Award from the Association of Logic Programming and numerous best paper awards, including at IJCAI and AAAI.

Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy Regents and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems Marilyn Brown was instrumental in efforts to win the Challenge for Atlanta.

“Atlanta's Better Building Challenge, Energy Benchmarking, and 100% Clean Energy goals were among the many initiatives hailed as evidence of the city's leadership in climate readiness and mitigation. With the new funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, Atlanta will continue to launch innovative pilot projects and policies, and I'm hopeful that some of these will engage Georgia Tech students and faculty,” she said.

Bloomberg praised the both cities for their commitment to reducing air pollution and city-wide emissions creating programs aimed at reforming their transit and building sectors. As a winner, Atlanta is accepted into a two-year acceleration program with access to new resources and cutting-edge support that will help the city meet or beat their near-term carbon reduction goals, technical assistance and a support package that is valued up to $2.5 million per city.

Bloomberg lauded Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms and Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkin for their commitment to ambitious climate action and securing a cleaner, safer, and healthier environment and economy for their citizens.

The School of Public Policy is a unit of the Georgia Tech Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

Click the link to read the article on the American Cities Challenge:  https://www.bloomberg.org/press/releases/seattle-and-atlanta-first-winners-american-cities-climate-challenge/

A Purdue University-led team that included researchers from Georgia Tech have developed a new material and manufacturing process that would make one way to use solar power – as heat energy – more efficient in generating electricity.

The innovation is an important step for putting solar heat-to-electricity generation in direct cost competition with fossil fuels, which generate more than 60 percent of electricity in the U.S.

“Storing solar energy as heat can already be cheaper than storing energy via batteries, so the next step is reducing the cost of generating electricity from the sun's heat with the added benefit of zero greenhouse gas emissions,” said Kenneth Sandhage, Purdue’s Reilly Professor of Materials Engineering.

The research, which was done at Purdue in collaboration with the Georgia Institute of Technology, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, published in the journal Nature on October 18. 

Solar power doesn't only generate electricity via panels in farms or on rooftops. Another option is concentrated power plants that run on heat energy. 

Concentrated solar power plants convert solar energy into electricity by using mirrors or lenses to concentrate a lot of light onto a small area, which generates heat that is transferred to a molten salt. Heat from the molten salt is then transferred to a "working" fluid, supercritical carbon dioxide, that expands and works to spin a turbine for generating electricity.

To make solar-powered electricity cheaper, the turbine engine would need to generate even more electricity for the same amount of heat, which means the engine needs to run hotter. 

The problem is that heat exchangers, which transfer heat from the hot molten salt to the working fluid, are currently made of stainless steel or nickel-based alloys that get too soft at the desired higher temperatures and at the elevated pressure of supercritical carbon dioxide.

Inspired by the materials his group had previously combined to make composite materials that can handle high heat and pressure for applications like solid-fuel rocket nozzles, Sandhage worked with Asegun Henry – formerly at Georgia Tech, but now at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – to conceive of a similar composite for more robust heat exchangers.

Two materials showed promise together as a composite: The ceramic zirconium carbide, and the metal tungsten.

Purdue researchers created plates of the ceramic-metal composite. The plates host customizable channels for tailoring the exchange of heat, based on simulations of the channels conducted at Georgia Tech by Devesh Ranjan's team.

“We simulated the printed circuit heat exchanger, which contains channels that are straight and parallel with semi-circular cross sections two millimeters in diameter,” said Ranjan, associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The thickness of each plate in the printed circuit heat exchanger stack and the spacing between the channels were then determined from the maximum allowed stresses for each type of material, with a factor of safety added.”

Mechanical tests by Edgar Lara-Curzio’s team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and corrosion tests by Mark Anderson’s team at Wisconsin-Madison helped show that this new composite material could be tailored to successfully withstand the higher temperature, high-pressure supercritical carbon dioxide needed for generating electricity more efficiently than today’s heat exchangers.

An economic analysis by Georgia Tech and Purdue researchers also showed that the scaled-up manufacturing of these heat exchangers could be conducted at comparable or lower cost than for stainless steel or nickel alloy-based ones.

“Ultimately, with continued development, this technology would allow for large-scale penetration of renewable solar energy into the electricity grid,” Sandhage said. “This would mean dramatic reductions in man-made carbon dioxide emissions from electricity production.”

A patent application has been filed for this advancement. The work is supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, which has also recently awarded additional funding for further development and scaling up the technology.

This story was provided by Purdue University.

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Media Relations Contacts: Purdue (Kayla Wiles, 765-494-2432, wiles5@purdue.edu); Georgia Tech (John Toon, 404-894-6986, (jtoon@gatech.edu)

Writer: Kayla Wiles, Purdue University

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Dr. Sherwood-Randall to our Georgia Tech family and faculty,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.  “Few can claim the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience about national security matters and energy and climate policies that Dr. Sherwood-Randall brings to Georgia Tech. Her presence will add to the growing expertise and reputation in the realm of policy at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and other schools around the campus.”

Sherwood-Randall’s exemplary career has been dedicated to public service. As the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy from 2014 - 2017, she provided strategic direction for the agency’s broad missions in national security, science and energy, environmental management, and emergency preparedness. This included advancing the development of a network of regional energy innovation partnerships. The Georgia Tech Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center has played a leading role in implementing this network of partnerships and was founded to conduct energy research and to design policy specific to the Southeast. Under her leadership, the Department of Energy implemented a new approach to increasing the nation’s readiness to prevent and respond to natural, physical, and cyber threats to the power grid.  In addition, she led bilateral energy, climate, and nuclear security cooperation with key international counterparts.

“Liz’s contribution to the energy community is invaluable,” said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute. “In addition to being an expert on domestic energy whose thought leadership and policy acumen has contributed significantly to securing the national grid, she is also extremely well-versed in global energy issues, having led energy dialogues with numerous allies and partners. We are very honored to have her on board as a senior fellow.”

Sherwood-Randall has also served in senior national security roles at the White House and the Department of Defense, including as the White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control from 2013 to 2014 and, in the Clinton administration, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 1994 to 1996.  At the Pentagon, she led the implementation of Senator Nunn’s landmark Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program which denuclearized three former Soviet states and substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian Cold War arsenals while maintaining strategic stability.

Former Senator Nunn has worked closely with Sherwood-Randall.  “We are delighted and honored to have Liz as part of the Nunn School team.  Liz is an outstanding leader who has had an impactful and effective career in government ... Her national security expertise will be a terrific asset to the Nunn School and to Georgia Tech.”   

In addition to her public leadership and management roles, Sherwood-Randall has taught, mentored students, and conducted research at Harvard University and Stanford University.  She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Prior to joining the Obama administration, she was a founding principal of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project and previously co-founded the Harvard Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project.  She received her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.  Immediately following receipt of her doctoral degree, she served as chief foreign affairs and defense policy advisor to Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. 

Sherwood-Randall looks forward to her involvement across the Institute:  “I have had several previous opportunities to interact with Georgia Tech leaders, faculty, and students, including during my tenure as Deputy Secretary of Energy and as a panelist at the SEI 2018 Intersect Conference. I have been consistently impressed by your boldly innovative spirit and determination to drive our competitive edge in science and technology, which is essential to our ability to tackle the toughest challenges we face, including climate change and nuclear proliferation. I am eager to work collaboratively with the dynamic Georgia Tech community at the nexus of energy, technology, and national security — and to inspire Georgia Tech’s graduate and undergraduate students to consider future opportunities in public service.”

“We are extremely pleased to welcome Dr. Sherwood-Randall to our Georgia Tech family and faculty,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for academic affairs.  “Few can claim the depth and breadth of knowledge and experience about national security matters and energy and climate policies that Dr. Sherwood-Randall brings to Georgia Tech. Her presence will add to the growing expertise and reputation in the realm of policy at the Sam Nunn School of International Affairs and other schools around the campus.”

Sherwood-Randall’s exemplary career has been dedicated to public service.  As the U.S. Deputy Secretary of Energy from 2014-2017, she provided strategic direction for the agency’s broad missions in national security, science and energy, environmental management, and emergency preparedness. This included advancing the development of a network of regional energy innovation partnerships. The Georgia Tech Energy, Policy, and Innovation Center has played a leading role in implementing this network of partnerships and was founded to conduct energy research and to design policy specific to the Southeast. Under her leadership, the Department of Energy implemented a new approach to increasing the nation’s readiness to prevent and respond to natural, physical, and cyber threats to the power grid.  In addition, she led bilateral energy, climate, and nuclear security cooperation with key international counterparts.

"Liz’s contribution to the energy community is invaluable," said Tim Lieuwen, executive director of the Strategic Energy Institute.  “In addition to being an expert on domestic energy whose thought leadership and policy acumen has contributed significantly to securing the national grid, she is also extremely well-versed in global energy issues, having led energy dialogues with numerous allies and partners. We are very honored to have her on board as a senior fellow.”

Sherwood-Randall has also served in senior national security roles at the White House and the Department of Defense, including as the White House Coordinator for Defense Policy, Countering Weapons of Mass Destruction, and Arms Control from 2013 to 2014 and, in the Clinton administration, as deputy assistant secretary of defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia from 1994 to 1996.  At the Pentagon, she led the implementation of Senator Nunn’s landmark Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction program which denuclearized three former Soviet states and substantially reduced the U.S. and Russian Cold War arsenals while maintaining strategic stability.

Former Senator Nunn has worked closely with Sherwood-Randall.  “We are delighted and honored to have Liz as part of the Nunn School team.  Liz is an outstanding leader who has had an impactful and effective career in government ... Her national security expertise will be a terrific asset to the Nunn School and to Georgia Tech.”   

In addition to her public leadership and management roles, Sherwood-Randall has taught, mentored students, and conducted research at Harvard University and Stanford University.  She is currently a Senior Fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. Prior to joining the Obama administration, she was a founding principal of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project and previously co-founded the Harvard Strengthening Democratic Institutions Project.  She received her B.A. magna cum laude from Harvard University and her D.Phil from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar.  Immediately following receipt of her doctoral degree, she served as chief foreign affairs and defense policy advisor to Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. 

Sherwood-Randall looks forward to her involvement across the Institute:  "I have had several previous opportunities to interact with Georgia Tech leaders, faculty, and students, including during my tenure as Deputy Secretary of Energy and as a panelist at the SEI 2018 Intersect Conference. I have been consistently impressed by your boldly innovative spirit and determination to drive our competitive edge in science and technology, which is essential to our ability to tackle the toughest challenges we face, including climate change and nuclear proliferation. I am eager to work collaboratively with the dynamic Georgia Tech community at the nexus of energy, technology, and national security -- and to inspire Georgia Tech’s graduate and undergraduate students to consider future opportunities in public service.”

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan on Tuesday, August 21, 2018. The Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE, rule would set state guidelines for plans addressing emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Proponents say it will ease regulatory burdens on power plant operators while reducing carbon dioxide emissions to levels similar to those projected by the Clean Power Plan, which was the first-ever federal plan aimed at reducing carbon pollution from existing power plants. It has never taken effect due to legal challenges.

Opponents say the proposal does too little to lower the output of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from the approximately 600 coal-fired electric generating units the EPA says would be covered by the rule.

We spoke to Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy  Regent’s Professor, and the head of the Climate and Energy Policy Lab, to get her take on the proposed new rule.

What is your analysis of the plan?

This is a timid plan. In terms of reductions, the Affordable Clean Energy proposal would have one-tenth the impact the Clean Power Plan would have had.

Based on EPA’s Fact Sheet, the Affordable Clean Energy proposal would reduce CO2 emissions in 2025 by only 0.2 to 0.5 percent. That’s about 0.7 to 1.6 percent of total emissions from the electricity sector. Compare that to the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut U.S. emissions by 3.8 percent in 2025. That amounts to 10.8% of overall electricity sector emissions.

One of the problems is that the proposal focuses on increasing the efficiency of coal plants as the primary means of reducing carbon emissions, but U.S. coal plants are already run very efficiently. The most inefficient plants already have been retired for economic reasons so there will not be a lot of efficiency gains left, and the overall impact is going to be de minimis.

This plan abandons the parts of the Clean Power Plan that would have most helped drive down carbon emissions, including, one, shifting energy production to natural gas, two, switching to zero-emission sources like renewables and nuclear, and three, working to decrease energy demand through efficiency improvements.

I’m also worried that this proposal is not going to prompt any action on the part of some states. It’s really just handing the ball to them, and they may not run with it.

The EPA says it’s plan will give power plant operators and state regulators more flexibility to upgrade plants without triggering the major “new source review” permitting process, which the industry argues inhibits investments in existing plants. What’s your view on this?

I like it from one perspective. This change will eliminate a barrier to plant modernization. The threat that a new source review would be triggered when a plant undergoes a significant renovation has prevented some upgrades from being made. Under the Affordable Clean Energy proposal, only projects that increase a plant’s hourly rate of CO2 emissions would need to undergo a full NSR analysis.

The problem is that a more efficient plant will likely be dispatched more. As a result, overall CO2 emissions could increase. This “rebound effect” is acknowledged in the proposal, but is not addressed.

Who wins and who loses under this proposal?

If you compare it to the Clean Power Plan, it’s a major loss for the renewables industry and energy efficiency, and a gain for the coal industry. But compared to the status quo, the future for natural gas, renewables, and efficiency will continue to be bright because they make economic sense. They just won’t get an extra boost, as they would have under the Clean Power Plan.

The two big missed opportunities here are, of course, the squandered health benefits and the mitigation of climate change. The Clean Power Plan passed a cost-benefit analysis solely on local and regional health benefits including reduced asthma, etc. It also would have provided a more effective approach to addressing global warming, raging wild fires, floods, and sea level rise that climate change is inducing.

What impact do you think this will have on the coal industry?

In the short term, we’re not going to see the massive retirement of coal plants that we would have seen under the Clean Power Plan. The Affordable Clean Energy proposal is going to keep coal burning and will prevent some power plants from closing.

Do you anticipate the kind of litigation that blocked the Clean Power Plan?

Yes, there will be a lot of litigation. It’s a jobs bill for environmental attorneys. The definition of “best system of emission reduction” will be challenged, since the Affordable Clean Energy proposal excludes the very approaches that stand to most reduce emissions. The Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency needs to address carbon emissions to protect human health and welfare, and the EPA will be challenged because it is not doing that.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced its replacement for the Obama-era Clean Power Plan on Tuesday, Aug. 21, 2018. The Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE, rule would set state guidelines for plans addressing emissions from coal-fired power plants.

Proponents say it will ease regulatory burdens on power plant operators while reducing carbon dioxide emissions to levels similar to those projected by the Clean Power Plan, which was the first-ever federal plan aimed at reducing carbon pollution from existing power plants. It has never taken effect due to legal challenges.

Opponents say the proposal does too little to lower the output of greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants from the approximately 600 coal-fired electric generating units the EPA says would be covered by the rule.

We spoke to Marilyn Brown, a Georgia Institute of Technology School of Public Policy  Regent’s Professor, and the head of the Climate and Energy Policy Lab, to get her take on the proposed new rule.

What is your analysis of the plan?

This is a timid plan. In terms of reductions, the Affordable Clean Energy proposal would have one-tenth the impact the Clean Power Plan would have had.

Based on EPA’s Fact Sheet, the Affordable Clean Energy proposal would reduce CO2 emissions in 2025 by only 0.2 to 0.5 percent. That’s about 0.7 to 1.6 percent of total emissions from the electricity sector. Compare that to the Clean Power Plan, which would have cut U.S. emissions by 3.8 percent in 2025. That amounts to 10.8% of overall electricity sector emissions.

One of the problems is that the proposal focuses on increasing the efficiency of coal plants as the primary means of reducing carbon emissions. But U.S. coal plants are already run very efficiently. The most inefficient plants already have been retired for economic reasons. So there’s just not going to be a lot of efficiency gains left, and the overall impact is going to be de minimis.

This plan abandons the parts of the Clean Power Plan that would have most helped drive down carbon emissions, including, one, shifting energy production to natural gas, two, switching to zero-emission sources like renewables and nuclear, and three, working to decrease energy demand through efficiency improvements.

I’m also worried that this proposal is not going to prompt any action on the part of some states. It’s really just handing the ball to them, and they may not run with it.

The EPA says it’s plan will give power plant operators and state regulators more flexibility to upgrade plants without triggering the major “new source review” permitting process, which the industry argues inhibits investments in existing plants. What’s your view on this?

I like it from one perspective. This change will eliminate a barrier to plant modernization. The threat that a new source review would be triggered when a plant undergoes a significant renovation has prevented some upgrades from being made. Under the Affordable Clean Energy proposal, only projects that increase a plant’s hourly rate of CO2 emissions would need to undergo a full NSR analysis.

The problem is that a more efficient plant will likely be dispatched more. As a result, overall CO2 emissions could increase. This “rebound effect” is acknowledged in the proposal, but is not addressed.

Who wins and who loses under this proposal?

If you compare it to the Clean Power Plan, it’s a major loss for the renewables industry and energy efficiency, and a gain for the coal industry. But compared to the status quo, the future for natural gas, renewables, and efficiency will continue to be bright because they make economic sense. They just won’t get an extra boost, as they would have under the Clean Power Plan.

The two big missed opportunities here are, of course, the squandered health benefits and the mitigation of climate change. The Clean Power Plan passed a cost-benefit analysis solely on local and regional health benefits including reduced asthma, etc. It also would have provided a more effective approach to addressing global warming, raging wild fires, floods, and sea level rise that climate change is inducing.

What impact do you think this will have on the coal industry?

In the short term, we’re not going to see the massive retirement of coal plants that we would have seen under the Clean Power Plan.  The Affordable Clean Energy proposal is going to keep coal burning and will prevent some power plants from closing.

Do you anticipate the kind of litigation that blocked the Clean Power Plan?

Yes, there will be a lot of litigation. It’s a jobs bill for environmental attorneys. The definition of “best system of emission reduction” will be challenged, since the Affordable Clean Energy proposal excludes the very approaches that stand to most reduce emissions. The Supreme Court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency needs to address carbon emissions to protect human health and welfare, and the EPA will be challenged because it is not doing that.

Georgia Tech ended its run by taking fifth place overall and third place in the technical categories, and earning eight more awards that totaled $12,750. The team won the Mechanical Systems Presentation Award and the Control Systems Modeling & Simulation Presentation Award, marking the second year in a row that Georgia Tech has earned these honors at EcoCAR 3. 

The Georgia Tech team won the Best Project Status Presentation Award and the Second Place Project Management Award. The team also received the First Place ETAS ECU Excellence Award and the Second Place dSPACE Embedded Success Award. Jessica Britt, a master’s student in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE), was presented with two honors–the Excellence in Leadership Award and the General Motors Women in Engineering Award.

The Georgia Tech team is part of the Vertically Integrated Projects Program and consists of about 50 undergraduate and graduate students from the Schools of ECE, Mechanical Engineering, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and Computer Science. Fifteen students attended the competition, including five from ECE–Sterling Smith, Andrew Fillingim, Jessica Britt, Sungwoo Han and Andres Strulovic. All are ECE graduate students, with the exception of Andres, who is an undergraduate majoring in electrical engineering. The team's faculty advisors are ECE Professor David Taylor, ChBE Professor Tom Fuller, and ME Professor Mike Leamy. 

EcoCAR 3 required the 16 participating teams to design, build, and integrate their hybrid-electric designs into a 2016 Chevrolet Camaro, with the end goal of making the vehicle more energy-efficient without losing high-performance and safety features that Camaro buyers expect. Events began at GM’s Desert Proving Grounds in Yuma, where the Camaros were put through rigorous safety inspections. Upon passing inspections and competing in dynamic events, the teams moved to southern California for the second leg of the competition, where teams further tested their Camaros at the Auto Club Speedway. 

After the racetrack activities, teams presented to industry and government judges in six categories and for several sponsored awards in Pomona. Teams then hit the open road with a 150-mile road rally through Los Angeles County public roads, where the Camaros were scored in everyday city and highway driving applications and in fuel consumption. The EcoCAR 3 finale was held in Hollywood with a Media Ride and Drive event.

To learn more about the national EcoCAR 3 event, visit http://ecocar3.org. To learn more about the Georgia Tech EcoCAR team, visit http://www.vip.gatech.edu/teams/ecocar-collegiate-competition-team.

Cutlines for photographs (top to bottom)

The Georgia Tech EcoCAR 3 team proudly show the awards that they were earned on May 22. Photo courtesy of EcoCAR.

Jessica Britt (right) was presented with the Excellence in Leadership Award and the General Motors Women in Engineering Award. She is pictured with Cindy Svestka, senior manager of  Control System Engineering Process at General Motors. Photo courtesy of EcoCAR.

EcoCAR 3 pictured at Tech Square against the Atlanta skyline. Photo courtesy of Georgia Tech EcoCAR 3 team.

Georgia Tech EcoCAR 3 cruises the roads of Los Angeles County, California. Photo courtesy of EcoCAR.

The Georgia Tech EcoCAR 3 takes on the race track at the Auto Club Speedway. Photo courtesy of EcoCAR.

Six Georgia Tech researchers will receive a portion of a $72 million DOE investment that will ultimately lead to construction and demonstration of an operating Generation 3 CSP facility. The Georgia Tech researchers will collect information on the thermophysical properties of molten salts used in concentrated solar facilities and study particle flows and heat transfer that may be part of thermal storage applications.

“Concentrated solar power is another option that allows us to generate electricity from sunlight,” said Shannon Yee, assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and one of the award recipients. “Concentrated solar allows storage of the sun’s heat, so we can generate electricity even when the sun isn’t shining – at night, for example.”

Concentrated solar facilities use mirrors to concentrate sunlight that is then captured by solar receivers installed at the top of towers. Some existing installations use the heat to generate steam, which then drives a turbine to produce electric power. Engineers want to operate the facilities at higher temperatures – 700 degrees Celsius or above – to more effectively use the concentrated sunlight from fields of mirrors (i.e., heliostat fields) that deliver more concentrated sunlight to solar receivers than the widely used parabolic troughs.

“We have to move to higher and higher temperatures, which means we have to use materials that are more and more exotic,” said Yee, whose research team will receive a total of about $2 million during the five-year program. “We really don’t have the information we need about the thermophysical properties of these materials. Our goal will be to learn more about these materials, and to disseminate that information to the organizations that will be designing the new facility.”

An alternative to using molten salts is to use solid particle flows as a thermal energy carrier and storage medium to transfer thermal energy from the receiver to a working fluid to produce electricity. Understanding these materials will be the work of Associate Professors Peter Loutzenhiser and Devesh Ranjan, and Professor Zhuomin Zhang, all faculty members in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. 

“We will be working together to characterize flow and model the heat transfer for different particles under different conditions as they are applied to CSP applications,” said Loutzenhiser, whose team will receive $1.4 million from the DOE over three years. “The end goal will be supporting the use of particles as solar energy storage and carrier media to provide on-demand electricity derived from supercritical CO₂ and/or Air Brayton cycles. Solid particles are advantageous because they have high energy densities and can operate to higher temperatures without much degradation compared to molten salts.”

Ranjan compared the particle flow to that of volcanic lava. “The particles can absorb a lot of heat and allow us to move the thermal energy,” he said. “We will be looking at these particle flows in detail.”

The work will include both theoretical and applied aspects, Loutzenhiser noted. “We will examine fundamental behavior of the particle flows and heat transfer for different solar particle heating receiver configurations. This work will then be used to support the design and development of real technologies at scale-up that are being pursued by other Generation 3 researchers within the scope of the program. The project will culminate in a suite of experiments that will use our high-flux solar simulator to closely mimic the conditions that the particle flows would experience under sunlight in an actual solar receiver.”

In addition to Yee, Loutzenhiser, Ranjan and Zhang, the overall DOE project will also include Said Abdel-Khalik and Sheldon Jeter, also mechanical engineering professors, who will support the development of the demonstration CSP facility proposed by Sandia National Laboratories. The proposed Sandia design will use particle heating technology. The team led by Abdel-Khalik and Jeter has been developing particle heating CSP technology in collaboration with Sandia and others for several years.  

Ultimately one test facility will be built by a team to be chosen from among Sandia or competitors Brayton Energy and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Those three organizations received preliminary awards from the DOE. 

The new DOE funding will extend previous research on high-temperature components, develop them into integrated assemblies, and test these components and systems through a wide range of operational conditions, the agency said. 

If successful, the DOE expects that this will result in reducing the cost of a CSP system by approximately $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, which is 40 percent of the way to the 2030 cost goals of $0.05 per kilowatt-hour (kWh) for baseload CSP plants.

“DOE has led the world in CSP research,” said Daniel Simmons, principal deputy assistant secretary for the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. “These projects will help facilitate the next wave of new technologies and continue the effort to maintain American leadership in this space.”

Through the Generation 3 CSP program, three teams will compete to build an integrated system that can efficiently receive solar heat and deliver it to a working fluid at a temperature greater than 700 degrees Celsius, while incorporating thermal energy storage, the agency said in its news release.

Over the first two-year period, those teams will work to de-risk various aspects of diversified CSP technology pathways, prepare a detailed design for a test facility, and be subjected to a rigorous review process to select a single awardee to construct their proposed facility. If selected, they will receive an additional $25 million over the subsequent three years to build a test facility that allows diverse teams of researchers, laboratories, developers and manufacturers to remove key technological risks for the next generation CSP technology, the DOE said.

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The title of Vejdan’s award-winning paper is “The Expected Revenue of Energy Storage from Energy Arbitrage Service Based on the Statistics of Realistic Market Data.” His coauthor on the paper is his Ph.D. advisor, Santiago Grijalva, who holds the Georgia Power Distinguished Professorship in ECE.

Vejdan is working on research to help electric utilities and energy providers assess the value of energy storage systems connected to electric power grids. Various energy storage technologies such as batteries are being integrated in the electricity grid for multiple applications ranging from absorbing changes in solar and wind production, to providing grid services such as frequency regulation and reserve. Sponsored by industry members at Georgia Tech’s NEETRAC, Vejdan's work is helping determine optimal strategies to operate energy storage to maximize its value.

“Andy is to be congratulated on this professional accomplishment,” said H. Milton and Carolyn J. Stewart School Chair and Professor Edwin Romeijn. “Andy’s promotion to associate professor acknowledges his many successes in the areas of optimization and stochastic modeling, including applications in electric energy systems and electricity markets.”

About Andy Sun

In addition to his research in optimization and stochastic modeling, Sun also works on theory and algorithms for robust and stochastic optimization, and large-scale nonconvex optimization. His work has broad applications in electric energy systems and electricity markets.

Sun's doctoral thesis won the second prize of the 2011 INFORMS George B. Dantzig Award, given for the best dissertation in any area of operations research and the management sciences that is innovative and relevant to practice. His paper, “Adaptive Robust Optimization for Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problem” has been highly cited and helped form a new area of research of optimization under uncertainty in electric power system. Sun’s research has also won several paper awards, among which, “Multistage Adaptive Robust Optimization for the Unit Commitment Problem” won the first prize of the 2017 INFORMS Energy, Natural Resources, and Environment Section Best Paper in Energy Award. “An Adaptive Optimization-based Load Shedding Scheme in Microgrids” received the Best Paper Award at the 51st Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences in 2018. He has had numerous papers published in flagship journals in both power systems and operations research, such as IEEE Transactions on Power Systems, Operations Research, and Mathematical Programming.

In 2011, he received a Ph.D. in operations research from the Operations Research Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a bachelor's degree in electronic engineering from Tsinghua University. Before joining ISyE, Sun spent a year as a postdoctoral researcher at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.

Sarvey will be recognized for the paper entitled "Monolithic Integration of a Micropin-Fin Heat Sink in a 28-nm FPGA” at the 2018 IEEE Electronic Components and Technology Conference. The conference will be held May 29-June 1 in San Diego, California.       

This marks the second time that a member of the I3DS Group has won this particular Best Paper Award. Sarvey’s coauthors on the paper are Yang Zhang, an alumnus of the group; ECE Professor Muhannad S. Bakir, who leads the I3DS Group; and Colman Cheung, Ravi Gutala, Arifur Rahman, and Aravind Dasu, all of Intel Corporation’s Programmable Solutions Group. 

For more than a decade, the challenge of removing the heat from high end computing platforms has been a primary limiter of processor power and computing performance. The use of micro-scale fluidic channels has previously been proposed as a method of extracting the large amounts of heat produced by modern processors. 

In this work, such a liquid-cooled heat sink was etched into the backside of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) die, approximately 500 μm from the heat generating circuitry. The heat sink, only 240 μm tall, provided a thermal resistance that is approximately one quarter of that of the best air-cooled heat sinks, in less than 1/1000^th of the volume. This type of cooling has the potential to unlock higher computing throughput, lower energy usage, and denser integration in datacenters and high performance computing applications.

Obikwelu is a new ECE Ph.D. student specializing in power engineering and is currently a GTA for ECE 3040A–Microelectronics/Solid State Devices. He is currently focusing his literature review efforts on the topic of wide area monitoring, control, and protection. Obikwelu is also interested in research aimed at the use of synchronized wide-area measurements to facilitate “smart” wide-area system control and system protection decision-making in response to, or as a means of expediently mitigating the scale of wide-area power system disturbances.

Prior to enrolling in the ECE doctoral program, Obikwelu held engineering positions at Xcel Energy, Pike Energy Solutions/UC Synergistic, Schweitzer Engineering Laboratory, and Consumers Energy. He is a 2005 B.S.E.E. graduate of Wayne State University and a 2008 M.S.E.E. graduate of Michigan Technological University.

By focusing on science, technology, engineering, and math in this fellowship program, 3M encourages student interest and awareness in STEM fields at the K-12 level and works to build high performing and diverse global talent at the college/university level.

In the policy memo, Stulberg explores the U.S. and E.U. sanctions on Russia. These sanctions are intended to punish the Kremlin for mobilizing in Crimea, not fully implementing the Minsk II accords and for its intrusion in foreign elections. Instead, oil prices are increasing, which shows that the Russian economy is stabilizing, and there is a widening internal division among American and European energy stakeholders in Russia.

To maintain relations with Russia, all parties must accept that sanctions will not be lifted and work together to de-escalate future tensions. They also need to realize that the regional gas landscaping is changing because of the interconnection of liquefied natural gas (LNG). When all parties recognize the importance of easing tensions, it will make it easier to commercially engage. 

Professor Stulberg is the Neal Family Chair Professor, associate chair for Research and co-director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP) in the Nunn School. He teaches courses on energy and international security; international security; Russia/Eurasian politics and security; and international security policy. His research interests include energy, weapons and security, emerging technology and security, and national security.

Ultimately, the researchers believe their device design – a combination of a carbon nanotube antenna and diode rectifier – could compete with conventional photovoltaic technologies for producing electricity from sunlight and other sources. The same technology used in the rectennas could also directly convert thermal energy to electricity.

“This work takes a significant leap forward in both fundamental understanding and practical efficiency for the optical rectenna device,” said Baratunde Cola, an associate professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “It opens up this technology to many more researchers who can join forces with us to advance the optical rectenna technology to help power a range of applications, including space flight.”

The research was reported January 26 in the journal Advanced Electronic Materials. The work has been supported by the U.S. Army Research Office under the Young Investigator Program, and by the National Science Foundation.

Optical rectennas operate by coupling the light’s electromagnetic field to an antenna, in this case an array of multiwall carbon nanotubes whose ends have been opened. The electromagnetic field creates an oscillation in the antenna, producing an alternating flow of electrons. When the electron flow reaches a peak at one end of the antenna, the diode closes, trapping the electrons, then re-opens to capture the next oscillation, creating a current flow.

The switching must occur at terahertz frequencies to match the light. The junction between the antenna and diode must provide minimal resistance to electrons flowing through it while open, yet prevent leakage while closed.

“The name of the game is maximizing the number of electrons that get excited in the carbon nanotube, and then having a switch that is fast enough to capture them at their peak,” Cola explained. “The faster you switch, the more electrons you can catch on one side of the oscillation.”

To provide a low work function – ease of electron flow – the researchers initially used calcium as the metal in their oxide insulator - metal diode junction. But calcium breaks down rapidly in air, meaning the device had to be encapsulated during operation – and fabricated in a glovebox. That made the optical rectenna both impractical for most applications and difficult to fabricate.

So Cola, NSF Graduate Research Fellow Erik Anderson and Research Engineer Thomas Bougher replaced the calcium with aluminum and tried a variety of oxide materials on the carbon nanotubes before settling on a bilayer material composed of alumina (Al2O3) and hafnium dioxide (HfO2). The combination coating for the carbon nanotube junction, created through an atomic deposition process, provides the quantum mechanical electron tunneling properties required by engineering the oxide electronic properties instead of the metals, which allows air stable metals with higher work functions than calcium to be used. 

Rectennas fabricated with the new combination have remained functional for as long as a year. Other metal oxides could also be used, Cola said.

The researchers also engineered the slope of the hill down which the electrons fall in the tunneling process. That also helped increase the efficiency, and allows the use of a variety of oxide materials. The new design also increased the asymmetry of the diodes, which boosted efficiency.

“By working with the oxide electron affinity, we were able to increase the asymmetry by more than ten-fold, making this diode design more attractive,” said Cola. “That’s really where we got the efficiency gain in this new version of the device.”

Optical rectennas could theoretically compete with photovoltaic materials for converting sunlight into electricity. PV materials operate using a different principle, in which photons knock electrons from the atoms of certain materials. The electrons are collected into electrical current.

In September 2015 in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, Cola and Bougher reported the first optical rectenna – a device that had been proposed theoretically for more than 40 years, but never demonstrated. 

The early version reported in the journal produced power at microvolt levels. The rectenna now produces power in the millivolt range and conversion efficiency has gone from 10^-5 to 10^-3 – still very low, but a significant gain. 

“Though there still is room for significant improvement, this puts the voltage in the range where you could see optical rectennas operating low-power sensors,” Cola said. “There are a lot of device geometry steps you could take to do something useful with the optical rectenna today in voltage-driven devices that don’t require significant current.”

Cola believes the rectennas could be useful for powering internet of things devices, especially if they can be used to produce electricity from scavenged thermal energy. For converting heat to electricity, the principle is the same as for light – capturing oscillations in a field with the broadband carbon nanotube antenna.

“People have been excited about thermoelectric generators, but there are many limitations on getting a system that works effectively,” he said. “We believe that the rectenna technology will be the best approach for harvesting heat economically.”

In future work, the research team hopes to optimize the antenna operation, and improve their theoretical understanding of how the rectenna works, allowing further optimization. One day, Cola hopes the devices will help accelerate space travel, producing power for electric thrusters that will boost spacecraft.

“Our end game is to see carbon nanotube optical rectennas working on Mars and in the spacecraft that takes us to Mars,” he said.

This work was supported by the Army Research Office under the Young Investigator Program agreement W911NF-13-1-0491 and the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship program under grant DGE-1650044. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations.

CITATION: Erik C. Anderson, Thomas L. Bougher and Bartatunde A. Cola, “High Performance Multiwall Carbon Nanotube–Insulator–Metal Tunnel Diode Arrays for Optical Rectification, (Advanced Electronic Materials, 2018). http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/aelm.201700446

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A member of the ECE faculty since 2001, Rincón-Mora is being recognized for his work in energy-harvesting and power-conditioning microchips. He was a design consultant at Texas Instruments from 2001-2003 and director of the Georgia Tech Analog Consortium from 2001-2004. Prior to his tenure on the ECE faculty, Rincón-Mora was adjunct professor at Georgia Tech from 1999-2001, senior design engineer and design team leader at Texas Instruments from 1997-2001, and circuit designer at the same company while he was a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech from 1994-1996. He earned his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical engineering at Georgia Tech in 1994 and 1996.

Rincón-Mora currently leads the Georgia Tech Analog, Power, and Energy ICs Lab. He holds 25 U.S. patents and 17 foreign patents – all assigned/licensed. They have been incorporated into portable consumer products like cellular phones, laptops, and tablets since 1994. He has published nine books, four book chapters, and over 170 articles; designed over 26 commercial chips; and delivered over 125 international talks.

Rincón-Mora is a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology. He was recently named Distinguished Lecturer for the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society (CASS) for 2018-19, the second time that he has received this honor. He will speak on the topics of energizing and powering microsystems and energy-harvesting power supplies. He also serves as technical program committee co-chair for the IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS), to be held May 26-29, 2019 in Sapporo, Japan.

Rincón-Mora is the recipient of the National Hispanic in Technology Award from the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Charles E. Perry Visionary Award from Florida International University, a Commendation Certificate from the Lieutenant Governor of California, the IEEE Service Award from IEEE CASS, the Orgullo Hispano and the Hispanic Heritage awards from Robins Air Force Base, a Certificate of Appreciation from IEEE CASS, and two Thank a Teacher Certificates from Georgia Tech. Georgia Tech has also inducted him into its Council of Outstanding Young Engineering Alumni and Hispanic Business magazine named him one of "The 100 Most Influential Hispanics."

Election to NAI Fellow status is the highest professional accolade bestowed to academic inventors who have demonstrated a prolific spirit of innovation in creating or facilitating outstanding inventions that have made a tangible impact on quality of life, economic development, and the welfare of society. To learn more about the 2017 class of NAI Fellows, visit the NAI website.

Professor Stulberg presented on “Extricating from the Energy Sanctions Tangle: Gas Networks & Off-Ramps to Escalation in U.S.-E.U.-Russia Relations.” In his presentation, he spoke on how the U.S. and E.U. double down on Russia and detailed how energy is featured prominently in their sanctions. 

Professor Stulberg is the Neal Family Chair Professor, associate chair for Research and co-director of the Center for International Strategy, Technology, and Policy (CISTP) in the Nunn School. He teaches courses on energy and international security; international security; Russia/Eurasian politics and security; and international security policy. His research interests include energy, weapons and security, emerging technology and security and national security.

His presentation was recorded by the NYU Jordan Center and begins at 1:38:48. Watch it here. 

His visit was filled with stakeholder meetings for those interested in engaging Indian states on energy. Singh also gave a talk on “Of Sun, Gods and Solar Energy.” 

SIngh's research focuses on climate change, energy policy, and geopolitics. He has traveled across the world exploring energy geopolitics in changing circumstances. He has worked for the Republica of Maldives, the US Department of Energy. He has a BS from Furman University a M.E.Sc from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a Ph.D. from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Learn more about the most recent US-India State and Urban Initiatives here.

A small electrical charge is generated when a piezoelectric material is compressed, flexed, or vibrated. Harnessing this technology at the visitor complex, the researchers are using a thin, ceramic disk of lead zirconate titanate, which has the strongest piezoelectric response of any known material. “Just as a sponge squeezes out water,” said Stern, “the piezo element under pressure squeezes out electricity that can be harvested and stored.” 

For this unique project, the researchers designed floor cavities of very thin, ultra-high- performance concrete. To fit into each cavity, the Georgia Tech engineers designed a novel system of custom electronics: circuit boards, six mini solar panels, a battery, LEDs, a Bluetooth transmitter, a Wi-Fi transmitter, micro controllers, and the piezoelectric element—all of which are covered by a loadbearing glass tile top. 

The tiles operate on three power sources: piezoelectricity, solar panels, and a small rechargeable lithium battery for energy storage and use at night. The self-powered system, when triggered by a human footstep, produces a wireless signal that informs visitors about NASA space missions, piezoelectric technology as well as the STEM cooperation between NASA and Georgia Tech. 

“No one has made anything like this—an outdoor tile system using a piezoelectric element to trigger customized and off-the-shelf electronics and coupling them for human interactions,” said Stern. “When you step on the load-bearing glass tile, it compresses the piezoelectric element, creating an electrical charge that lights up the cavity’s 125 LEDs.” In the entire footpath, about one thousand glass tiles light up in various colors. Each glass tile is a pixel in the pathway’s mosaic imagery of Earth, Mars, the moon, and the International Space Station.

“The piezoelectric element also powers a Wi-Fi or Bluetooth signal to visitors’ smartphones, which can play audio, providing information about their geolocation and for potential wayfinding,” said Stern. “The audio provides information such as how much energy is being generated throughout the park during the day.” 

Although a small amount of energy is produced per piezo element, per step, the aggregation of such systems in heavily trafficked areas can produce a significant amount of electricity to be stored for local onsite powering of street signs, lights, and other facilities. “The piezo element has a very long lifetime, but these are modular systems that could be easily updated over time,” he said. The glass lid can be removed so the piezo element and electronics system can be updated with newer technologies.” 

Many of the site’s engineering applications are based on fundamental research by the lab of Alper Erturk, an associate professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Erturk, Stern, and their graduate students, for instance, have utilized a method of vibrating a piezo element’s edge, called plucking, allowing for the coupling of the piezoelectric material’s inherently high resonant frequency, to the low frequency of human scale motion. This has various applications intended for biomechanical energy harvesting. 

In future smart cities applications, lattices of pressure-sensitive sensors underneath roadways could produce wireless, real-time signals distributing information about roadway conditions, temperature, or traffic. Roadway sensors and autonomous vehicles could share information, and vehicles could communicate with each other through the roadway’s wireless system. Indoor flooring systems powered by piezoelectricity could provide safety monitoring and sensing capabilities without being plugged into to the grid. 

“We need a more flexible use of the electric grid,” Stern said. “Our goal is to develop more self-powered, self-generating systems with added storage that will give us more choices in energy usage and minimize waste. As much as possible, we should convert wasted mechanical energy—human and vehicle movement—into usable energy generation and storage.”  

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Lambert will then serve as the IEEE PES president in 2020-2021 and as its past president in 2022-2023. The IEEE PES provides the world’s largest forum for sharing the latest in technological developments in the electric power industry, for developing standards that guide the development and construction of equipment and systems, and for educating members of the industry and the general public.   

Lambert is a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech National Electric Energy Testing, Research, and Applications Center (NEETRAC) and the Center for Distributed Energy. After spending the first 22 years of his career working at Georgia Power, Lambert came to Georgia Tech in 1996, where he helped to establish NEETRAC, an electric energy-focused research and testing consortium with over 40 electric utility and manufacturing members.

Lambert’s research interests are in power delivery systems, electric vehicles, sensors and communications systems for smart grid, power flow control, and integration of renewable energy into the grid. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering, both from Georgia Tech. 

This committee advises the director of NIST on roadmaps, frameworks, and standards for the implementation of the smart grid in the United States. They advise NIST on smart grid standards, priorities, and gaps, as well as provide input on the overall direction, status, and health of smart grid implementation by the smart grid industry. 

Grijalva is the Georgia Power Distinguished Professor in the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE). He has been a member of the ECE faculty since 2009 and is the director for the Advanced Computational Electricity Systems Lab, where he and his team conduct research on real-time power system control, informatics, economics, and renewable energy integration in power. 

The new pump could facilitate high efficiency, low-cost thermal storage, providing a new way to store renewable energy generated by wind and solar power, and facilitate an improved process for generating hydrogen directly from fuels such as methane – without producing carbon dioxide. Use of ceramic components, normally considered too brittle for mechanical systems, was made possible by precision machining – and seals made from another high-temperature material: graphite.

The research was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) and reported in the October 12 issue of the journal Nature. The pump was developed by researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology with collaborators from Purdue University and Stanford University.

“Until now, we’ve had a ceiling for the highest temperatures at which we could move heat and store it, so this demonstration really enables energy advances, especially in renewables,” said Asegun Henry, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The hotter we can operate, the more efficiently we can store and utilize thermal energy. This work will provide a step change in the infrastructure because now we can use some of the highest temperature materials to transfer heat. These materials are also the hardest materials on Earth.”

Thermal energy, fundamental to power generation and many industrial processes, is most valuable at high temperatures because entropy – which makes thermal energy unavailable for conversion – declines at higher temperatures. Liquid metals such as molten tin and molten silicon could be useful in thermal storage and transfer, but until now, engineers didn’t have pumps and pipes that could withstand such extreme temperatures.

“The hotter you can operate, the more you can convert thermal energy to mechanical energy or electrical energy,” Henry explained. “But when containment materials like metals get hot, they become soft and that limits the whole infrastructure.”

Ceramic materials can withstand the heat, but they are brittle – and many researchers felt they couldn’t be used in mechanical applications like pumps. But Henry and graduate student Caleb Amy – the paper’s first author – decided to challenge that assumption by trying to make a ceramic pump. “We weren’t certain that it wouldn’t work, and for the first four times, it didn’t,” Henry said.

The researchers used an external gear pump, which uses rotating gear teeth to suck in the liquid tin and push it out of an outlet. That technology differs from centrifugal and other pump technologies, but Henry chose it for its simplicity and ability to operate at relatively low speeds. The gears were custom-manufactured by a commercial supplier and modified in Henry’s lab in the Carbon Neutral Energy Solutions (CNES) Laboratory at Georgia Tech. 

“What is new in the past few decades is our ability to fabricate different ceramic materials into large chunks of material that can be machined,” Henry explained. “The material is still brittle and you have to be careful with the engineering, but we’ve now shown that it can work.”

Addressing another challenge, the researchers used another high-temperature material – graphite – to form the seals in the pump, piping and joints. Seals are normally made from flexible polymers, but they cannot withstand high temperatures. Henry and Amy used the special properties of graphite – flexibility and strength – to make the seals. The pump operates in a nitrogen environment to prevent oxidation at the extreme temperatures.

The pump operated for 72 hours continuously at a few hundred revolutions per minute at an average temperature of 1,473 Kelvin – with brief operation up to 1,773 Kelvin in other experimental runs. Because the researchers used a relatively soft ceramic known as Shapal for ease of machining, the pump sustained wear. But Henry says other ceramics with greater hardness will overcome that issue, and the team is already working on a new pump made with silicon carbide.

Among the most interesting applications for the high-temperature pump would be low-cost grid storage for surplus energy produced by renewables – one of the greatest challenges to the penetration of renewables on the grid. Electricity produced by solar or wind sources could be used to heat molten silicon, creating thermal storage that could be used when needed to produce electricity.

“It appears likely that storing energy in the form of heat could be cheaper than any other form of energy storage that exists,” Henry said. “This would allow us to create a new type of battery. You would put electricity in when you have an excess, and get electricity back out when you need it.”

The Georgia Tech researchers are also looking at their molten metal pump as part of a system to produce hydrogen from methane without generating carbon dioxide. Because liquid tin doesn’t react with hydrocarbons, bubbling methane into liquid tin would crack the molecule to produce hydrogen and solid carbon – without generating carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.

The pump could also be used to allow higher temperature operation in concentrated solar power applications, where molten salts are now used. The combination of liquid tin and ceramics would have an advantage in being able to operate at higher temperatures without corrosion, enabling higher efficiency and lower cost. 

The ceramic pump uses gears just 36 millimeters in diameter, but Henry says scaling it up for industrial processing wouldn’t require dramatically larger components. For example, by increasing the pump dimensions by only four or five times and operating the pump near its maximum rated speed, the total heat that could be transferred would increase by a factor of a thousand, from 10 kW to 100 MW, which would be consistent with utility-scale power plants. 

For storage, molten silicon – with still higher temperatures – may be more useful because of its lower cost. The pump could operate at much higher temperatures than those demonstrated so far, even past 2,000 degrees Celsius, Henry said.

This research was supported by the Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E) under award DE-AR0000339. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding agency.

CITATION: Caleb Amy, et al., “Pumping Liquid Metal at High Temperatures Up To 1,673 K,” Nature, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature24054.

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Because of their symmetrical fractal wiring patterns, the devices can be cut to the size needed to provide the voltage and power requirements for specific applications. The modular generators could be inkjet printed on flexible substrates, including fabric, and manufactured using inexpensive roll-to-roll techniques.

“The attraction of thermoelectric generators is that there is heat all around us,” said Akanksha Menon, a Ph.D. student in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “If we can harness a little bit of that heat and turn it into electricity inexpensively, there is great value. We are working on how to produce electricity with heat from the body.”

The research, supported by PepsiCo, Inc. and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, was reported online in the Journal of Applied Physics on September 28th. 

Thermoelectric generators, which convert thermal energy directly into electricity, have been available for decades, but standard designs use inflexible inorganic materials that are too toxic for use in wearable devices. Power output depends on the temperature differential that can be created between two sides of the generators, which makes depending on body heat challenging. Getting enough thermal energy from a small contact area on the skin increases the challenge, and internal resistance in the device ultimately limits the power output.

To overcome that, Menon and collaborators in the laboratory of Assistant Professor Shannon Yee designed a device with thousands of dots composed of alternating p-type and n-type polymers in a closely-packed layout. Their pattern converts more heat per unit area due to large packing densities enabled by inkjet printers. By placing the polymer dots closer together, the interconnect length decreases, which in turn lowers the total resistance and results in a higher power output from the device.

“Instead of connecting the polymer dots with a traditional serpentine wiring pattern, we are using wiring patterns based on space filling curves, such as the Hilbert pattern – a continuous space-filling curve,” said Kiarash Gordiz, a co-author who worked on the project while he was a Ph.D. student at Georgia Tech. “The advantage here is that Hilbert patterns allow for surface conformation and self-localization, which provides a more uniform temperature across the device.”

The new circuit design also has another benefit: its fractally symmetric design allows the modules to be cut along boundaries between symmetric areas to provide exactly the voltage and power needed for a specific application. That eliminates the need for power converters that add complexity and take power away from the system.

“This is valuable in the context of wearables, where you want as few components as possible,” said Menon. “We think this could be a really interesting way to expand the use of thermoelectrics for wearable devices.”

So far, the devices have been printed on ordinary paper, but the researchers have begun exploring the use of fabrics. Both paper and fabric are flexible, but the fabric could be easily integrated into clothing.

“We want to integrate our device into the commercial textiles that people wear every day,” said Menon. “People would feel comfortable wearing these fabrics, but they would be able to power something with just the heat from their bodies.”

With the novel design, the researchers expect to get enough electricity to power small sensors, in the range of microwatts to milliwatts. That would be enough for simple heart rate sensors, but not more complex devices like fitness trackers or smartphones. The generators might also be useful to supplement batteries, allowing devices to operate for longer periods of time.

Among the challenges ahead are protecting the generators from moisture and determining just how close they should be to the skin to transfer thermal energy – while remaining comfortable for wearers.

The researchers use commercially-available p-type materials, and are working with chemists at Georgia Tech to develop better n-type polymers for future generations of devices that can operate with small temperature differentials at room temperatures. Body heat produces differentials as small as five degrees, compared to a hundred degrees for generators used as part of piping and steam lines.

“One future benefit of this class of polymer material is the potential for a low-cost and abundant thermoelectric material that would have an inherently low thermal conductivity,” said Yee, who directs the lab as part of the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. “The organic electronics community has made tremendous advances in understanding electronic and optical properties of polymer-based materials. We are building upon that knowledge to understand thermal and thermoelectric transport in these polymers to enable new device functionality.”

Among the other prospects for the materials being developed are localized cooling devices that reverse the process, using electricity to move thermal energy from one side of a device to another. Cooling just parts of the body could provide the perception of comfort without the cost of large-space air conditioning, Yee said.

This research was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) under Award No. FA9550-15-1-0145 and by PepsiCo, Inc. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

CITATION: Kiarash Gordiz, Akanksha K. Menon, Shannon K. Yee, “Interconnect Patterns for Printed Organic Thermoelectric Devices with Large Fill Factors, (Journal of Applied Physics, 2017). http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.4989589

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By implanting conductive and charge storage materials in the paper, the technique creates large surface areas that function as current collectors and nanoparticle reservoirs for the electrodes. Testing shows that devices fabricated with the technique can be folded thousands of times without affecting conductivity.

“This type of flexible energy storage device could provide unique opportunities for connectivity among wearable and internet of things devices,” said Seung Woo Lee, an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “We could support an evolution of the most advanced portable electronics. We also have an opportunity to combine this supercapacitor with energy-harvesting devices that could power biomedical sensors, consumer and military electronics, and similar applications.”

The research, done with collaborators at Korea University, was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea and reported September 14 in the journal Nature Communications.

Energy storage devices are generally judged on three properties: their energy density, power density and cycling stability. Supercapacitors often have high power density, but low energy density – the amount of energy that can be stored – compared to batteries, which often have the opposite attributes. In developing their new technique, Lee and collaborator Jinhan Cho from the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at Korea University set out to boost energy density of the supercapacitors while maintaining their high power output.

They began by dipping paper samples into a beaker of solution containing an amine surfactant material designed to bind the gold nanoparticles to the paper. Next they dipped the paper into a solution containing gold nanoparticles. Because the fibers are porous, the surfactants and nanoparticles enter the fibers and become strongly attached, creating a conformal coating on each fiber. 

By repeating the dipping steps, the researchers created a conductive paper on which they added alternating layers of metal oxide energy storage materials such as manganese oxide. The ligand-mediated layer-by-layer approach helped minimize the contact resistance between neighboring metal and/or metal oxide nanoparticles. Using the simple process done at room temperatures, the layers can be built up to provide the desired electrical properties.

“It’s basically a very simple process,” Lee said. “The layer-by-layer process, which we did in alternating beakers, provides a good conformal coating on the cellulose fibers. We can fold the resulting metallized paper and otherwise flex it without damage to the conductivity.”

Though the research involved small samples of paper, the solution-based technique could likely be scaled up using larger tanks or even a spray-on technique. “There should be no limitation on the size of the samples that we could produce,” Lee said. “We just need to establish the optimal layer thickness that provides good conductivity while minimizing the use of the nanoparticles to optimize the tradeoff between cost and performance.”

The researchers demonstrated that their self-assembly technique improves several aspects of the paper supercapacitor, including its areal performance, an important factor for measuring flexible energy-storage electrodes. The maximum power and energy density of the metallic paper-based supercapacitors are estimated to be 15.1 mW/cm2 and 267.3 uW/cm2, respectively, substantially outperforming conventional paper or textile supercapacitors.

The next steps will include testing the technique on flexible fabrics, and developing flexible batteries that could work with the supercapacitors. The researchers used gold nanoparticles because they are easy to work with, but plan to test less expensive metals such as silver and copper to reduce the cost. 

During his Ph.D. work, Lee developed the layer-by-layer self-assembly process for energy storage using different materials. With his Korean collaborators, he saw a new opportunity to apply that to flexible and wearable devices with nanoparticles.

“We have nanoscale control over the coating applied to the paper,” he added. “If we increase the number of layers, the performance continues to increase. And it’s all based on ordinary paper.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the research team included Yongmin Ko and Minseong Kwon from Korea University, Wan Ki Bae from the Photoelectronic Hybrids Research Center at the Korea Institute of Science and Technology, and Byeongyong Lee from Georgia Tech.

This work was supported by National Research Foundation (NRF) grants funded by the Korean government (NRF-2015R1A2A1A01004354 and NRF-2016M3A7B4910619).

CITATION: Yongmin Ko, Minseong Kwon, Wan Ki Bae, Byeongyong Lee, Seung Woo Lee & Jinhan Cho, “Flexible supercapacitor electrodes based on real metal-like cellulose papers,” (Nature Communications, 2017) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00550-3

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According to the ACEEE, the awards “recognize leadership and accomplishment in the industrial energy efficiency field. Winners are selected based on demonstrated excellence in industrial leadership, lifetime achievement, research and development, implementation and deployment, or energy policy.”

Brown was recognized for “her decades of research and leadership in industrial energy efficiency. She conducted research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, wrote trend-setting publications, co-founded the Southeast Energy Efficiency Alliance, and created and led the Climate and Energy Policy Laboratory at Georgia Tech.”

For more information on Brown’s honor, click here. 

The paper, published in the IEEE Transactions on Smart Grid in 2014, was coauthored with Daniel E. Olivares, Claudio A. Cañizares, Mehrdad Kazerani, and Amir H. Hajimiragha (University of Waterloo); Ali Mehrizi-Sani (Washington State University); Amir H. Etemadi and Reza Iravani (University of Toronto); Oriol Gomis-Bellmunt, Rodrigo Palma-Behnke, and Guillermo A. Jiménez-Estévez  (University of Chile); and Nikos D. Hatziargyriou (National Technical University of Athens).

The microgrid concept is a quite appealing alternative for overcoming the challenges of integrating distributed energy resource (DER) units, including renewable energy sources, into power systems. However, in order to allow seamless deployment of microgrids, several issues still remain unsolved.

Currently, effort is being put into the design of special protection schemes and control systems that ensure reliable, secure, and economical operation of microgrids in either grid-connected or stand-alone mode. Saeedifard and her colleagues classify the micro grid control strategies into three levels: primary, secondary, and tertiary, where the primary and secondary levels are associated with the operation of the microgrid itself, and the tertiary level pertains to the coordinated operation of the microgrid and the host grid. The paper presents a comprehensive overview of the existing technologies and remaining challenges in microgrid control.

In fall 2016, the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) issued a Request for Proposals for cross-disciplinary energy projects focused on the intersection of the physical and digital worlds. The primary objective was to facilitate broader community at Georgia Tech linking the computing, visualization, and data sciences with science, engineering, business, policy, and economics relevant to energy infrastructure.

Moreno-Cruz's proposal with Professor Santiago Carlos Grijalva in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering was among three projects selected to receive funding:

Proposal Title: Economics for the Internet of Energy: A Techno-Economic Framework for Transactive Energy Prosumers. 

Proposal Team:  Santiago Carlos Grijalva, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Juan Moreno-Cruz, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

Proposal "Snapshot": With the deployment of distributed energy resources in many regions, the traditional passive customers are now able to produce and, often store, energy. They become prosumers. Equipped with sensors and communications, these prosumers can interact through a cyber-physical platform to maximize their shared value in an emerging Internet of Energy. This project will explore new techno-economic models of interacting energy prosumers and the information requirements associated with exchange in the cyber-physical platform. 

Proposal Title: Risk of Combined Physical Cyber Attacks Against Electricity Infrastructure                                                                                    
Proposal Team: Valerie Thomas, Professor, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Margaret Kosal, Associate Professor, School of Internal Affairs  
                                                                                   
Proposal "Snapshot": Potential attacks on energy infrastructure are issues that span social science, information science, and energy engineering. This project will support collaborative research on energy infrastructure resilience between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Georgia Tech. The project determines and assesses the risk of physical and cyber attacks on electricity infrastructure to develop strong policy analysis of risks of attacks on U.S. electricity systems. 

Proposal Title: Economics for the Internet of Energy: A Techno-Economic Framework for Transactive Energy Prosumers. 

Proposal Team:  Santiago Carlos Grijalva, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Juan Moreno-Cruz, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

Proposal "Snapshot": With the deployment of distributed energy resources in many regions, the traditional passive customers are now able to produce and, often store, energy. They become prosumers. Equipped with sensors and communications, these prosumers can interact through a cyber-physical platform to maximize their shared value in an emerging Internet of Energy. This project will explore new techno-economic models of interacting energy prosumers and the information requirements associated with exchange in the cyber-physical platform. 

Proposal Title: Building Energy Data Platform Development

Proposal Team:  Dennis Shelden, Associate Professor, School of Architecture;           Godfried Augenbroe, Professor, School of Architecture; D. Scott Jones, Director, Design & Construction, Facilities Management 

Proposal "Snapshot": The proposed initiative will develop a data visualization and analytics platform for use by Georgia Tech research, asset management, and facilities operations communities. The effort will develop a web services platform integrating campus building control systems data with spatial data from Building Information Models, allowing multiple building energy data streams to be aggregated, queried, and visualized. Further development will expand platform access and capabilities: integrating performance simulation and prediction, supporting other Smart Energy Campus, Building Control, and Smart City Initiatives. 

Proposal Title: Risk of Combined Physical Cyber Attacks Against Electricity Infrastructure                                                                                    
Proposal Team: Valerie Thomas, Professor, School of Industrial and Systems Engineering; Margaret Kosal, Associate Professor, School of Internal Affairs  
                                                                                   
Proposal "Snapshot": Potential attacks on energy infrastructure are issues that span social science, information science, and energy engineering. This project will support collaborative research on energy infrastructure resilience between Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Georgia Tech. The project determines and assesses the risk of physical and cyber attacks on electricity infrastructure to develop strong policy analysis of risks of attacks on U.S. electricity systems. 

Proposal Title: Economics for the Internet of Energy: A Techno-Economic Framework for Transactive Energy Prosumers. 

Proposal Team:  Santiago Carlos Grijalva, Professor, School of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Juan Moreno-Cruz, Assistant Professor, School of Economics

Proposal "Snapshot": With the deployment of distributed energy resources in many regions, the traditional passive customers are now able to produce and, often store, energy. They become prosumers. Equipped with sensors and communications, these prosumers can interact through a cyber-physical platform to maximize their shared value in an emerging Internet of Energy. This project will explore new techno-economic models of interacting energy prosumers and the information requirements associated with exchange in the cyber-physical platform. 

Proposal Title: Building Energy Data Platform Development

Proposal Team:  Dennis Shelden, Associate Professor, School of Architecture;           Godfried Augenbroe, Professor, School of Architecture; D. Scott Jones, Director, Design & Construction, Facilities Management 

Proposal "Snapshot": The proposed initiative will develop a data visualization and analytics platform for use by Georgia Tech research, asset management, and facilities operations communities. The effort will develop a web services platform integrating campus building control systems data with spatial data from Building Information Models, allowing multiple building energy data streams to be aggregated, queried, and visualized. Further development will expand platform access and capabilities: integrating performance simulation and prediction, supporting other Smart Energy Campus, Building Control, and Smart City Initiatives. 

Abstract

This article explicates the puzzle of strategic restraint in contemporary European-Russian gas relations. The first and second sections compare and contrast successive gas wars since 2006, detailing respective dimensions to restraint and costly paralysis experienced by upstream, downstream, and transit states alike. The third part presents an alternative understanding of energy power politics rooted in social network analysis. It probes the validity of new forms of power, influence, and vulnerability in Russia's evolving gas relations with Europe, as derived from "betweenness centrality" among emerging infrastructure hubs and the quality of corporate alliances across subregions of Central Europe. This includes cursory examination of the credibility and costliness of disruption related to the flexibility and diffusion of gas relationships into/across the northern and southern parts of Central Europe, as well as the social capital within Gazprom's corporate eco-system that bound Russia's lasting prominence as a supplier in these sub-regions. The final section identifies practical guidelines for transcending the current knotty predicament to stabilize commercial trading and peaceful U.S./Euro-Russian energy governance.

For access to the article and more information, please visit: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2214629616303206 

The study, which required more than three years, examined power failures that affected more than 600,000 customers from four major service regions. The study showed that failures affecting small numbers of customers accounted for more than half the outage impact, defeating efforts to restore service by prioritizing repairs to substations and other major facilities – a traditional recovery strategy. The research, reported April 29 in the journal Nature Energy, is believed to be the largest detailed study of failure reports for distribution grids using real data.

“System failures can affect large numbers of customers even if they occur at the distribution level of the grid and do not cascade,” said Chuanyi Ji, an associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Together, these local failures can have a big non-local impact on customers. The grid simply cannot respond well to large numbers of failures.”

The top 20 percent of distribution grid failures accounted for more than 80 percent of the customers affected. But even failures that each affected relatively small numbers of customers added up. A large number – 89 percent – of small failures, represented by the bottom 34 percent of customers and commonplace devices, resulted in 56 percent of the total cost of 28 million customer interruption hours.

“If you are just going after the big failures, the effect will be limited because there are just too many small ones that cannot be restored quickly,” Ji noted. “Together, small failures were significant in the total down time of customers.”

The large-scale study used granular data provided by the Central Hudson Gas & Electric Corporation in Poughkeepsie; National Grid in Waltham, Massachusetts; the New York State Electric and Gas Corporation in Binghamton; Orange and Rockland Utilities, Inc., in Pearl River – and the New York State Public Service Commission in Albany. Overall, the study examined the utility infrastructure serving nearly 51,000 square miles in the entirety of upstate New York.

Beyond the storm damage information, the researchers also examined data from day-to-day operations and studied how routine issues were handled. Those resilience issues included customer service and restoration, in addition to sporadic infrastructure failures. Two Ph.D. students from the Georgia Tech School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Yun Wei and Henry Mei, were instrumental in the data study as part of the research team. The research was supported by the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.

“Our analysis shows that extreme weather does not cause, but rather exacerbates, existing vulnerabilities in the infrastructure and service, which are obscured in daily operations,” Ji said. “We also saw the issues in daily operations.”

The researchers began the work with development of a non-stationary spatiotemporal random process model that linked a large number of infrastructure failures to recoveries and customer impact. The model was chosen because failure and recovery were subject to uncertainty and occurred over widely varying times and locations. The researchers believe their model could be useful to other service regions.

“Super Storm Sandy was an unusual event, but we discovered that our findings about the response is broadly applicable to other states and other DSOs when we compared data from daily operations to emergency conditions,” Ji said. “The infrastructure problem is generic due to the design, and the recovery problem is also somewhat generic because the response follows a similar strategy. This highlights a larger issue of how to make the nation’s energy infrastructure and service more resilient to outside disruptions.”

Because the emphasis was on restoring service, not all the records that were obtained from the storm contained information useful to the model. Still, the study is believed to be the largest ever done based on granular failure reports across multiple service regions, and could provide a foundation for future analyses of utility data, Ji noted.

“Data analysis can help utilities turn what they collect into knowledge for improving services,” she added. “The grid can be made more inherently resilient, like communication networks, so a failure in one place doesn’t cut off services for many people in the network.”

CITATION: Chuanyi Ji, et al., “Large-scale data analysis of power grid resilience across multiple US service regions,” (Nature Energy, 2016). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nenergy.2016.52

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The article can be located here: http://www.naturalgasworld.com/geopolitics-of-gas-lines-34475

The first, funded by General Electric (GE), looks at sensor data from gas turbines that power electricity generators. The turbines are large and quite expensive to both manufacture and maintain, so they are equipped with thousands of sensors constantly measuring whether the turbines are functioning within normal operation parameters by monitoring temperatures, pressures, and vibrations from different sections of the turbines in a process known as condition monitoring. Immense amounts of data are sent to Atlanta, Georgia, where GE’s monitoring and diagnostic center is located.

Gebraeel’s research team and collaborators include Shabbir Ahmed, ISyE Dean’s Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow; Kamran Paynabar, ISyE Assistant Professor; Andy Sun, ISyE Assistant Professor; Edmond Chow, CSE Associate Professor and Director of the Intel Parallel Computing Center in the College of Computing; and Polo Chou, CSE Assistant Professor and Associate Director of the M.S. in Analytics program. In response to the Big Data problem, they are developing a new computational platform to provide detection and predictive analytics for the energy industry. This platform assesses the health and performance of equipment in real-time and monitors trends to determine such things as:

• When to order new spare parts so they don’t linger in inventory, costing money and possibly becoming obsolete.
• Prescribing operational profiles that extend an asset’s life without increasing risk of failure.

By integrating detection, prediction, and optimization capabilities, the new prototype platform could help power companies achieve significant savings. Indeed, a preliminary study shows a 40 to 45 percent reduction in maintenance costs alone.

In contrast to the Big Data problem of gas turbines with thousands of sensors is Gebraeel’s project analyzing Big Data from wind farms. A wind farm may have hundreds of turbines, which in turn are equipped with relatively few sensors. Thus — unlike the gas turbines — if one or even several wind turbines stop working, it has relatively little impact on the wind farm’s power production. Furthermore, maintaining wind turbines often requires sending out cranes, or ships in the case of off-shore wind farms, which can be very expensive. So, in contrast to the gas or steam turbines which need to be repaired as soon as one goes down, it’s more cost-efficient to repair several wind turbines at one time. Thus, the optimization model for wind farm maintenance focuses more on opportunistic maintenance.

“They are similar in that the objective is the same, and the constraints are the same, but the dynamics of solving and optimizing them are distinctly different. The perspective on the tradeoffs between the cost of maintenance and operation are almost the reverse,” said Gebraeel. “These two settings represent the wide spectrum of configurations within the energy network.”

Although the gas turbines present a setting with a high number of sensors on a smaller number of units, while the wind turbines represent a large number of units with relatively few sensors, either way, you end up with a Big Data problem.

“ISyE is one of the few engineering disciplines at the intersection of engineering, statistical sciences, and operations research. For example, the analytic algorithms that we develop are all based on statistical methodologies; the optimization models are all based on operations research,” explained Gebraeel. “We are lucky to have some of the best statistics and operations research faculty here in ISyE.”

An important aspect of algorithms designed to deal with Big Data in the energy sector is making sure that they are scalable.

Having a scalable computing architecture means the algorithms can be scaled as well. “Sometimes we test the limits of the algorithms in the research that we do,” said Gebraeel. His research team uses both actual data from GE as well as simulated data. “Then we go to the hypothetical cases: Let’s blow the number of units and the number of sensors beyond what’s available in today’s industry to study the limits of the algorithms we have re-engineered. It helps us understand the scope of their application.”

A child born today will probably ride to middle school in a driverless car or bus, guided safely along its route by machine-learning algorithms.

Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence in which computers are trained to learn from data so as to perform tasks on their own, whether detecting anomalies in a secure computer network, accurately predicting customer demand, or navigating an autonomous vehicle through traffic.

For Georgia Tech engineers, machine learning presents both opportunities and challenges — and the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering (ISyE) is well positioned to take a leading role.

“The ISyE School at Georgia Tech has worked very hard over many years to establish an outstanding reputation for combining innovation with applications in engineering,” said Sebastian Pokutta, David M. McKenney Family Associate Professor and Associate Director of Research for the Center for Machine Learning @ Georgia Tech (ML@GT). “This makes us a logical place for the development and deployment of machine learning — perhaps the hottest area of engineering today. We have the benefits of an established research infrastructure with a tradition of close collaboration among all Tech colleges and schools. This tradition extends to our numerous industry partnerships as well. Also, we have terrific, capable people. Our faculty, students, and staff enjoy solving complicated problems — and they’re very good at it.”

All analytical tools share a common purpose in that they extract meaningful information from large sets of data to inform decision making. What sets machine learning apart is its predictive accuracy. Unlike standard computation, where a computer follows explicit instructions from a human programmer to perform a defined task, machine-learning algorithms are trained to look for and remember certain patterns in data that are relevant to the performance of a specified task, which is expressed as a mathematical model. When provided new data — algorithms provide insights, outcomes, and “what-if” scenarios but they cannot create new data — the algorithms then act on their previously gained knowledge, their experience, to solve other   problems or perform tasks by adjusting the model outcomes accordingly. For example: Show a thousand pictures of a dog to a machine-learning algorithm, and it will learn the characteristics of dogs and then be able to pick them out from a gallery of animal photos.

Machine learning is not new. It’s the technology that powers search engines as well as recommendation systems used by Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, eHarmony, and thousands of other sites.

What’s new is the rapidly increasing number and scope of applications for machine learning, boosted by the availability of tremendous amounts of data, cheap data storage, advances in high-performance computing, and the development of increasingly sophisticated machine-learning algorithms.

Applications run a diverse gamut from supply chains and logistics to computer vision and object recognition; from autonomous vehicles and natural language processing to health data analysis and manufacturing.

From an industrial engineer’s perspective, machine learning is a powerful way to automate the optimization process in large, complex systems involving petabytes of data — a scale too large to be handled by traditional computation.

At ISyE, machine-learning techniques go hand-in-hand with the school’s traditional research and education mission that emphasizes the development of methodologies to solve real- world problems.

“We’re interested in developing and devising machine- learning and optimization methodologies to see how they interact with each other and whether they can be made to interact in a very integrated way,” said Pokutta. “Then deploy these technologies or methods in real-world applications in a variety of different domains.”

While machine learning is concerned with studying data to obtain new insights, “you still have to do something with those insights,” he continued, “and that’s where the optimization part comes into play because you have to make those insights actionable by turning them into decisions — that’s whenthe connection between machine learning and optimization becomes apparent.”

ISyE faculty are involved with machine learning in a number of key areas including:

Supply Chains and Logistics

When it comes to optimizing supply chains regarding production, supply, product deployment, distribution, and delivery, machine-learning research and development at ISyE are having a profound impact in two ways. One, they automate routine supply chain decisions, enhancing speed and efficiency. And two, machine-learning algorithms provide human decision makers with predictive analysis and guidance for the choices they make in response to changing circumstances. In effect, machine learning is making supply chains smarter, which dovetails with the emerging concept of the physical internet.

The physical internet takes some of the basic characteristics of the information internet — open access, standardization, interconnectedness, digitization, speed — and applies them to the operation of supply chains and logistics, said Benoit Montreuil, Coca-Cola Material Handling and Distribution Chair, Professor, and Director and founder of the Physical Internet Center.

 “In this context,” he continued, “we’re taking advantage of the physical internet’s digital aspect to hyperconnect all facets of a given business, and then using machine learning to understand the business more deeply. We have a project right now with an industry partner where we’re using machine- learning techniques to model product availability through their autonomous dealer networks, their factory, and warehouses in order to help them make better decisions.”

Montreuil anticipates that machine-learning algorithms will eventually automate a significant portion of product movement through the adoption of smart, standardized modular cargo containers — a key component of the physical internet. Fitted with sensors and two-way communication with the shipper through a wireless computer network, containers will learn how to operate in a dynamic environment and be largely self-directing, he said.

“You will communicate to the container that it has to be in Chicago in 18 hours, let’s say, and it will work as autonomously as possible to get there, interacting with humans or more sophisticated logistics agents only as necessary, using machine learning as one of the reasoning mechanisms to make sure the modular container goes where it is supposed to go.”

Machine-learning algorithms and techniques being developed by ISyE researchers Schneider National Chair in Transportation and Logistics Chelsea White, Coca-Cola Professor Alan Erera, H. Milton Stewart Associate Professor Mohit Singh, and Assistant Professor He Wang, also support supply chain forecasting models that more accurately predict the impact of demand variables, and thereby help decision makers optimize their supply chain operations. Common influences on demand include new product introductions, seasons and holidays, consumer preferences and trends, product promotions, weather, and material shortages.

The work will enable companies to better manage inventory levels, improve delivery times, enhance customer satisfaction, and ultimately save money. Machine-learning analysis also provides management with a dynamic view and a high level of visibility of the core processes and elements of their supply chain.

Algorithms work with historical data as well as data drawn from contemporary sources such as social media, where the first inkling of important consumer trends often appear. In a method called online learning, data becomes available in a sequential order, and decisions are made in real time. For example, when a company launches a new product, it can use online learning to track the sales data and adjust its pricing and inventory strategies for this product.

Machine learning also facilitates a rapid response   to unexpected disruptions to the supply chain, such as a natural disaster in an area that’s the source of a particular raw material, thereby enabling companies to seek alternatives.

“There’s a lot of ground work still to be done in machine learning as it relates to supply chains and logistics,” said Montreuil. “It’s a very pioneering domain and a fantastic time for researchers.”

Health Care

The U.S. health care system is awash in data: electronic health records; claims data; medical procedure results such as EKG readings, lab test findings, and genetic analysis; and health- monitoring information from wearable devices.

This wealth of data is fueling innovative analytics- based research for improving health care in three main areas: efficiency (cost), effectiveness (outcomes), and public health, particularly in terms of equity in the system and ensuring that the needs of vulnerable populations are addressed. In addition, data analytics can make it possible to tailor medical treatment to the needs and characteristics of individual patients, said Julie Swann, Harold R. and Mary Anne Nash Professor and Co-director of the Interdisciplinary Research Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems, adding that “we’re still in the early stages of what is being called individualist or precision medicine.

“You have to have a large enough set of data so that you can start to draw conclusions from it,” she continued. “These datasets may be deep, very detailed, and could also be wide in the sense that you’re bringing together heterogeneous data types.”

While data is becoming increasingly available, it takes a lot of resources and advanced methodologies to fully harness its power, according to Swann.

Machine learning is one set of analytic techniques that’s being used to turn data into information and knowledge for application at either the policy level or patient population level.

Algorithms create a mathematical model specific to a particular area of inquiry, such as patient care at a particular hospital, that imparts a big picture understanding of the system and how certain decisions or actions affect the system as a whole. More important, the algorithms can predict the consequences of one decision versus another regarding whatever metric is being studied.

“Data can drive decision making,” she said. “For example, you can use data to inform what kinds of things insurance should be required to pay for or what interventions associated with a specific disease or illness are most effective at reducing the burden on the entire system.”

Machine learning and analytics can reach down to the clinician level in exceptional detail to look at, say, continuous patient monitoring in an intensive care unit. Researchers can learn what kinds of medical situations qualify for monitoring and for how long, what medical actions were taken related to the monitoring, and if a personalized treatment approach would be possible, based on certain patient characteristics.

“The modeling of systems that have tens of thousands of constraints or variables can be used to evaluate access to health care too,” said Nicoleta Serban, Coca-Cola Associate Professor with the ISyE Health Analytics research group. “For example, collecting health care utilization data involving millions of individuals for events such as hospitalizations can be used in estimating the cost savings of preventive care. Modeling to assess for the occurrence of severe health outcomes, applied to data for millions of individuals, can be used to characterize what impacts health care utilization behaviors. Distributed computing is used to improve the computational effort of such methods.”

In one problem solving application of machine learning to health care, ISyE faculty are analyzing data from Geisinger, a hospital network in Pennsylvania, to help predict the risk for sepsis and septic shock in patients before they are admitted   to the hospital. Sepsis and septic shock are the dominant causes of death in intensive care units in the U.S., accounting for up to three million cases yearly. The next step is to facilitate prevention measures by applying the analytical techniques developed by ISyE to real-time patient data at each of Geisinger’s various locations.

A machine-learning framework called DAMIP discovers gene signatures that can predict vaccine immunity and efficacy on an individual basis.

Developed by Professor Eva Lee and her colleagues from Emory and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the work marks an important advance in both developing new vaccines and better vaccines to fight emerging infections and improve monitoring for poor responses in people with weak immune systems.

DAMIP-implemented results for yellow fever demonstrated that a vaccine’s ability to immunize a patient could be successfully predicted with   greater than 90 percent accuracy within a week after vaccination. Results for flu vaccine demonstrated DAMIP’s applicability to both live-attenuated and inactivated vaccines. Similar results in a malaria study enabled targeted delivery to individual patients.

Additional health care applications of machine learning by ISyE faculty include quantifying disparities in access to pediatric primary care, evaluating the impact of access to pediatric asthma care on severe health outcomes, projecting the impact of Medicaid expansion in Georgia on access to adult primary care, and estimating the cost savings on preventive dental care for young children.

Swann emphasized that health care research at ISyE is collaborative. “Many of us are affiliated with other entities on campus such as the Center for Health & Humanitarian Systems and the Health Analytics group. We also draw upon the expertise of statisticians, computer scientists, optimization experts, systems engineering experts, and others in the area of advanced analytics, and machine learning is one part of that work toward improved health care decision making.”

Energy

ISyE researchers at the Strategic Energy Institute (SEI) are helping the companies that produce and distribute electricity maintain their capital assets and provide uninterrupted service to their customers. These assets — transformers, turbines, generators — have been fitted with thousands of sensors that continuously stream performance data in real time to central monitoring centers scattered around the country. At the centers, data is analyzed for anomalies or abnormal behavior, which would trigger repair or maintenance actions to avoid a catastrophic system failure.

“You need really efficient analytical tools to analyze this data,” said Nagi Gebraeel, Georgia Power Associate Professor and Associate Director of SEI, “and the underlying basis of these tools is machine learning.”

Going a step further, machine-learning algorithms can predict the risk of asset failure over time. This knowledge allows utilities to optimize operations in terms of pricing, customer demand, and energy production, while maximizing their investment in multi-million-dollar assets, many of which are operating well beyond their design lifetime. For instance, data may show that derating the load on a particular generator by a specific amount would extend its life by a certain percentage.

The machine-learning algorithms developed for optimizing the power grid are applicable to  any situation where abundant sensor data could accommodate trend analysis, such as for monitoring the performance of jet engines, locomotives, diesel generators on ships, or the engines of a truck fleet.

Interactive Optimization and Learning

At ISyE’s Laboratory for Interactive Optimization and Learning (IOL), research takes place at the “intersection of optimization and machine learning,” according to Pokutta.

Working across academic boundaries, IOL researchers have completed more than 20 projects so far in areas including logistics and supply chain management, manufacturing, predictive analytics, big data, digital services, energy, transportation, and medical and health care systems.

In addition, IOL is involved in a number of significant activities designed to advance basic science and drive innovation.

One project on the medical diagnosis side involves digital scanning technology that uses 3-D cameras and Kinect sensors to produce 3-D models of individuals for medical diagnoses. Machine-learning and optimization techniques look for certain anomalies in the model scan data, and a report is generated.

At present, the technology could serve two potential applications. One is to screen pregnant women for cephalopelvic disproportion (CPD), a condition where the baby’s head or body is too large to pass through the mother’s pelvis. It is a preventable contributor to infant and maternal mortality in developing countries where neither ultrasound testing nor Cesarean delivery are available in rural areas. Women who are determined to be at high risk for CPD could then be referred to urban clinics for medically supervised labor or a Cesarean procedure.

Another potential diagnostic application of the ISyE invention is for the early detection of lymphedema, a severe, permanent swelling of an arm or leg that often follows surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation for breast cancer. Lymphedema is caused by a fluid buildup in lymph nodes damaged by the cancer treatment and afflicts an estimated four million people in the U.S.

The scanning technology could support a low-cost diagnostic device at home to detect the first signs of lymphedema by tracking patients’ limb-fluid volumes over time. This early warning would give patients enough time to begin taking preventive measures that could thwart the onset of disease.

Manufacturing/Engineering Statistics

ISyE’s System Informatics and Control (SIAC) group contributes to machine-learning capabilities by providing a new scientific base for the design, analysis, and control of complex manufacturing and service systems, anchored to the effective and seamless integration of physical and analytical models with empirical data-driven methodologies, according to Jianjun Shi, Carolyn J. Stewart Chair and Professor.

In practical terms, SIAC faculty develops quantitative models unified with data extraction and engineering knowledge integration capabilities, and then deploys these models in the analysis and control of complex manufacturing and service systems.

SIAC’s research involves faculty with complementary backgrounds in manufacturing and service systems, quality and reliability engineering, diagnostics and prognostics, industrial statistics and data mining, and automation and control.

Shi’s research centers on monitoring, diagnosis, and control of manufacturing systems. “I am working on multiple data fusion for abnormality detection in the semiconductor manufacturing process,” said Shi, who studies the massive amounts of data continuously streamed from hundreds of sensors embedded into the manufacturing equipment. “The challenges are how to extract useful information from the data, learn the system’s behavior, and improve its performance.”

The analytical issues are complicated by sensing data’s high dimensionality, variety, and velocity; and intricate spatial and temporal structures.

ISyE faculty solve these challenges by developing scaleable and agile machine-learning techniques that provide effective modeling and analysis of multi-sensor data streams, allowing researchers  to extract essential information for manufacturing improvement.

In addition to real-time monitoring and fault diagnosis and control, machine learning facilitates online product inspection and can predict potential failures in the manufacturing process, thereby allowing time for planning corrective and preventive actions.

In related research, Assistant Professor Yao Xie focuses on detecting changes in massive data streams, which usually signal anomaly and novelty, as quickly as possible, and then analyzes them in real time.

She develops real-time change-point detection algorithms based on statistical and optimization theory for high-dimensional streaming data, which are usually dynamic in nature, corrupted, and carry incomplete data.

Xie has solved problems including seismic network data processing, social network event detection, environmental monitoring, and power network monitoring. She is currently working on accelerating the processing of the massive amount of sequential data generated from material science for the Materials Genome Initiative.

Professor Xiaoming Huo is developing fast algorithms to build predictive models from distributed inference, meaning the information is scattered among various locations and cannot be transported to a centralized database. The algorithms must be communication efficient, requiring only a minimal amount of communication between data locations.

A practical example is a company such as Walmart, which houses transactional data at its thousands of stores. Huo’s algorithms would allow the retailer to utilize this distributed data to create predictive models for logistics purposes.

Another approach to utilizing distributed data may be termed “physics based and data-driven analytics,” said Jeff Wu, Coca-Cola Chair in Engineering Statistics and Professor, and is a useful computational technique for some engineering and sciences applications. Here, data is derived from physics and then subjected to statistical data analysis.

Wu cited the example of designing the next generation of rockets for the U.S. Air Force. The physics, typically described or modeled by partial differential equations, must be understood first before a physical model can be built. The model is then refined by using a statistical analytic approach on large or small data.

Theory of Machine Learning and Optimization

Over the past decade or so, machine learning has become perhaps the most “intelligent customer” of convex optimization, and the major outer driving force influencing the development of convex optimization, according to Arkadi Nemirovski, John Hunter Chair and Professor.

Numerous mathematical models arising in machine learning are of an optimization nature, which is why optimization algorithms form a significant part of the machine-learning toolbox, he pointed out. Typically, optimization problems of machine- learning origin are extremely large-scale. Their numerical processing requires the most advanced optimization techniques and is possible primarily when the problems are convex and well-structured.

Convexity as it pertains to mathematical optimization is a term denoting problems in which local information can be used to determine key global characteristics of a problem. This “local implying global” feature is also true of linear programming, the older, traditional programming technique that allows the computation of optimal decisions efficiently, assuming that the world is linear. Linear problems are also convex problems, with applications that include how to allocate time on a communications satellite among competing users, or for studying the relationship between traffic delay times and the number of cars on the road.

But not every problem is linear. Supply chain efficiency, for instance, is not a linear function of resources available. Convex optimization models provide a way of more accurately representing problems that account for real-world uncertainty.

Associate Professor Santanu Dey offered an example of the use of convex optimization in design of electrical power systems dispatch algorithms, a joint project with faculty colleague Assistant Professor Andy Sun and graduate student Burak Kocuk.

“Among other things, our results indicate that older generation algorithms that use a linear approximation of physical laws such as Ohm’s law and Kirchhoff’s current law produce inferior performance in comparison to our new methods using the more powerful general convex optimization methods.”

Convex problems form a “solvable case” in optimization, Nemirovski continued. “These are the problems for which high-accuracy approximations to optimal solutions can be found in an efficient fashion.”

The close connection between optimization and machine learning goes beyond the fact that optimization forms the computational building blocks for the majority of machine-learning methods. Results from the optimization field have also been used to analyze data efficiency in machine learning. As an example, Assistant Professor Huan Xu works in the intersection between robust optimization (an optimization paradigm to address uncertainty) and machine learning. He has shown that some popular machine-learning algorithms are implicitly solving robust optimization formulations, and this robustness provides a unified tool that establishes favorable statistical properties of these algorithms. In effect, learning happens because uncertainty is carefully addressed.

Nemirovski, along with Professor Alexander Shapiro, Associate Professor George Lan, and Professor Anatoli Juditsky from Université Joseph Fourier, play a leading role in the design of efficient stochastic optimization methods, which are at the core of modern machine-learning approaches.

These methods can make progress by only using limited information. In fact, they can often find solutions of acceptable quality without the need to observe the entire dataset. Consequently, they are the focus of much interest and research in computer science, industrial engineering, and other research communities interested in big data.

Many distributed, large-scale optimization problems involve translating large data sets into effective actions, which is a research interest of George Nemhauser, A. Russell Chandler III Chair and Institute Professor, and Shabbir Ahmed, Dean’s Professor and Stewart Faculty Fellow. Ahmed illustrated with the example of coordinating the movement of autonomous vehicles in a network. The vehicles could be school buses or a fleet of delivery trucks that deliver loads from many sources to several destinations.

If each vehicle makes an independent decision as to which route it follows moving from A to B, some links within the network may become overly congested. Thus for smooth operation, the vehicles need to collect and learn from the traffic information in the network and adapt accordingly.

The information includes historical traffic data and real-time data from auxiliary sources such as road sensors and other autonomous vehicles on the road. This collective learning enables each vehicle to access a more accurate representation of the surrounding world.

“This logistics problem can be set up as a decentralized stochastic routing problem for which some of the approaches that ISyE faculty are working on can be adapted,” Ahmed noted.

Another example where machine learning would make decisions in an uncertain environment may be found in health care. Consider a cancer patient who receives a certain cancer-fighting drug every day. The problem is that doctors cannot know in advance the impact of any given drug on any given patient. If one is applying drug A, and the tumor is not growing but not shrinking either, should one switch to a different drug, with the hope that it might shrink the tumor? What is the optimal way to administer different drugs over time?

This particular optimization problem is known as the “multi-armed bandit” problem, referring to the choices facing someone playing several slot machines but who does not know the payoff of each arm in advance, and thus must decide which arms to play and when.

Similar trade-offs arise in many industries ranging from online advertising to logistics, in which one must decide how to allocate resources over time between different alternatives whose benefits and costs are uncertain.

“Fundamental to such problems is the question of how to combine ideas from probability — due to the inherent uncertainty in the problem — with ideas from optimization since one wants to select between alternatives as intelligently as possible,” said David Goldberg, A. Russell Chandler III Assistant Professor, whose study of probability and optimization are core to his expertise as well as to the entire field of operations research.

“One particular question I am studying is how to use ideas from probability theory to understand what an ‘optimal’ machine-learning algorithm will do when presented with trade-offs, how simpler heuristics compare to this optimal algorithm, and how to use these insights to design new algorithms and insights for machine learning.”

Analytics

As the extraction of useful, actionable information from data, analytics undergirds everything at the ISyE school, which specializes in the development and application of cutting-edge analytics tools based on statistics, operations research, and optimization.

“We have a long history of being a world leader, way before ‘analytics’ became a buzzword,” said Joel Sokol, Associate Professor and Director of the Master of Science in Analytics degree. “Machine learning is currently one of the hottest analytics tools being applied to analyze large and complex data sets, and ISyE has several specialists in both machine-learning theory and its application in a variety of industries.”

One of Sokol’s research interests is sports analytics, which uses machine learning and other computational techniques for predictive and optimization tasks.

While sports teams — particularly baseball — have long sought guidance from statistics, the availability of massive datasets covering virtually every conceivable metric offer a far better basis for optimal decision making.

Analytics techniques may be applied to sports management operations, game strategy, player performance and draft choice evaluation, and can even help a coach determine the optimal lineup for any given opponent.

Sokol devised a mathematical model for predicting the outcome of NCAA Division I basketball tournament games. With data input consisting only of which two teams played, who held home-court advantage, and the margin of victory, the model has consistently outperformed standard ranking systems.

Machine Learning @ Georgia Tech

Underscoring the growing importance of machine- learning research across campus, ML@GT was launched this past summer and named one of Georgia Tech’s Interdisciplinary Research Centers. One of the focus areas of the center is to develop and study machine-learning processes and applications within or with close ties to the engineering disciplines. Pokutta, one of the Associate Directors of the Center, emphasizes that this is what makes the Tech center unique.

“While there are other machine-learning centers in the U.S., they are focused mainly on the interactions between statistics and computing,” he noted. “The distinguishing feature of our Center is its incorporation of the engineering component.”

In fact, the Center is an interdisciplinary effort involving all colleges and schools across campus. It is expected to serve as a nexus for collaborative machine-learning research as well as a one-stop resource for partnerships between Tech and industry.

“Machine learning will significantly impact the way we solve problems by making the process more dynamic and realistic,” Pokutta says. “ISyE definitely has a strong stake in the machine-learning center and also has high interest in interacting with it and making it work.”

Deng’s research interests include renewable energy; nanomaterial synthesis and self-assembling; biofuel and biomass materials; colloid and interface science and engineering; polymer synthesis; and papermaking.

His research group has reported a novel fuel cell that directly consumes natural polymeric biomasses, such as starch, cellulose, lignin, and even switchgrass and wood powders.  This fuel cell combines some features of solar cells, fuel cells, and redox flow batteries. Specifically, the polyoxomatelate forms a charge transfer complex with the biomass by either absorbing solar light or heat energy. The complex releases their electrons to anode. These electrons pass through anode to cathode where oxygen captures the electrons.  Unlike most cell technologies that are sensitive to impurities, the cell reported in this study is inert to most organic and inorganic contaminants present in the fuels.  The fuel cell is completely noble metal free. The similar system was investigated for low temperature hydrogen production using native biomass directly.

In the area of biofuel, his group has focused on novel pretreatment of lignocellulose for biofuel production and low temperature catalytic depolymerization of lignin for fuel applications.

Dr. Deng, an RBI-affiliated faculty member, is an elected Fellow of the International Academy of Wood Science, a member of AIChE and TAPPI.  He received several awards, including AIChE Forest Bioproducts Division Chase Award, IPST President Research Award.  He serves editorial board member for five journals, and associate editor for two journals.

Green Energy- 2016 provides a platform for researchers/scientists to share and globalize their research work while the participants from industry can promote their products thus felicitating dissemination of knowledge. We anticipate more than 300 participants around the globe with thought provoking keynote lectures, oral and poster presentations. The attending delegates include Editorial Board Members of related journals. The scope of Green Energy -2016 is to bring the advancements in the field of renewable energy and environmental sciences.

Tracks include renewable energy, biofuels, bioenergy, green technology, energy conservation, sustainable energy policies, green economy, energy and environment, nano environmental technologies and bioremediation.

The new material is based on polymer hollow fibers treated to retain their structure – and pore sizes – as they are converted to carbon through pyrolysis. The carbon membranes are then used in a new “organic solvent reverse osmosis” (OSRO) process in which pressure is applied to effect the separation without requiring a phase change in the chemical mixture.

The hollow carbon fibers, bundled together into modules, can separate molecules whose sizes differ by a fraction of a nanometer while providing processing rates superior to those of existing molecular sieve zeolites. Because it uses a commercial polymer precursor, the researchers believe the new membrane has potential for commercialization and integration into industrial chemical separation processes. The research was reported in the August 19 issue of the journal Science.

Separation is currently achieved through refining processes such as crystallization and adsorption with distillation, which are energy-intensive. Globally, the amount of energy used in conventional separation processes for alkyl aromatics is equal to that produced by about 20 average-sized power plants.

“We see this as a potentially disruptive technology in the way we separate xylenes and similar organic compounds,” said Benjamin McCool, one of the paper’s co-authors and an advanced research associate at ExxonMobil Corporate Strategic Research in Annandale, N.J. “If we can make this work on an industrial scale, it could dramatically reduce the energy required by these separation processes.”

Fabrication of the new membrane material begins with hollow polymer fibers approximately 200 microns in diameter, slightly thicker than the average human hair. The fibers have pore sizes of less than one nanometer, and are treated via cross-linking before they are converted to carbon through a pyrolysis process. The pore sizes of the fibers can be adjusted during the fabrication process.

“We take a scalable platform based on polymeric membranes and then turn those materials into inorganic molecular sieves,” explained Ryan Lively, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and the paper’s corresponding author. “Our membranes are mechanically robust and they can withstand the process conditions required by OSRO. They maintain advantageous mechanical properties and membrane performance as they are converted to carbon fiber.”

Lively and postdoctoral fellow Dong-Yeun Koh used the OSRO process in the laboratory to separate mixtures of para-xylene and ortho-xylene, molecules whose sizes differ by one-tenth of a nanometer. By applying pressure at room temperature, the membrane can convert the 50-50 mixture to an 85-15 mixture at a high flux relative to zeolite membranes.

“These molecules have incredibly similar sizes and properties, but the membranes can tell them apart,” said Lively. “This bulk cut of the mixture greatly enhances the concentration with a very low energy input. This mixture could then be fed into a conventional thermal process for finishing, which would reduce the total energy input dramatically.”

In industrial use, the membranes would be bundled together in modules that would be used in chemical facilities. “In practice, you would get as many modules as you needed for a particular application, and if the need increased, you could simply add more modules,” Lively said. “It would be totally scalable.”

Reverse osmosis membranes are already widely used in desalination to produce drinking water from saltwater, consuming a fraction of the energy required by thermally-driven process. Carbon fiber membranes are being used for gas separations, but the new OSRO process is believed to be the first use of reverse osmosis with carbon membranes to separate liquid hydrocarbons.

Though the membrane has demonstrated promising results, it still faces a number of challenges. The membranes will have to be tested with more difficult separations before they can be considered for commercialization and scale-up. Industrial mixtures normally contain multiple different organic compounds, and they may include materials that can foul membrane systems. The researchers will also have to learn to make the material consistently and demonstrate that it can withstand long-term industrial use.

“Because we are starting with commercially-available polymers and we are using commercial-type equipment, we can see a clear line-of-sight to commercialization with this technology,” McCool said. “It’s a big advantage that the membranes are being spun on a hollow-fiber line similar to that currently used in the industry. The time horizon to make this happen and the cost of production could be highly advantaged over other inorganic systems or more exotic materials like graphene.”

Development of the OSRO process resulted from a collaborative process in which Georgia Tech researchers worked closely with ExxonMobil scientists – including McCool and scientist Harry Deckman – to identify and overcome the challenges of industrial processing.

“ExxonMobil is a leader in its commitment to fundamental science," said Mike Kerby, ExxonMobil Corporate Strategic Research manager. “As part of our commitment, we continue to widen our research aperture through collaborations with academic research institutions to better enable us to identify potential breakthrough technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy supplies and realize other environmental benefits.”

CITATION: Dong-Yeun Koh, et al., "Reverse Osmosis Molecular Differentiation of Organic Liquids using Carbon Molecular Sieve Membranes," (Science, 2016).

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In May 2016, Frank Lambert, principal research engineer in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) at Georgia Tech, led a group of students from the Student Chapter of the IEEE Power & Energy Society (PES) on a trip to Thoman to provide one of the many resources the village desperately needed—an inexpensive, reliable source of power. The team installed a solar-powered micro grid system in the health center, which now provides 24/7 power and replaces a costly diesel generator.

Lambert, who has been going on mission trips to Haiti since 2013, also extended an opportunity to another student group from ECE’s Opportunity Research Scholars (ORS) Program, which matches undergraduate students with a Ph.D. mentor and a research project. The “Thing in a Hut” team, as they are fondly called by faculty advisor Ron Harley, was working on a prototype for a smaller solar-powered system that would provide LED light and phone charging for single family houses. These solutions, though small, can make a big impact on a community that typically has only kerosene lamps for light and often have to travel several miles to charge cell phones—their only connection to the larger world.

When the ORS team, which was made up of undergraduate students Edlawit “Julie” Bezabih, Elizabeth Robelo, Kyron Longwood, Tshim Tshimanga, Wondewosen Kihinet, and Ph.D mentor Liyao Wu, embarked on this project, they had no idea they would have the chance to actually install their system and see it work. For some, it was the first time they had traveled outside the United States and the experience broadened their world view significantly.

“The trip was something that has left an imprint on me that will last for the rest of my life. Not only was it the first time that I was given an opportunity to travel outside of the United States and grab a taste of the world, but I was also fortunate enough to participate in social and humanitarian efforts that improved the livelihood of the Haitian people. The trip also made me realize how much first world countries take things for granted,” said Longwood.

After lengthy testing in Atlanta, the team’s focus shifted to the installation of two identical prototypes. The first system was installed in the local pastor’s house. Unsure of what type of houses they would be working on, they faced some unexpected challenges. They found that the installation kit they brought wasn’t useful. The roof tops were weak, which meant only Bezabih and Robelo were light enough to perform the installation of the solar panels. In the case of the second house, which belonged to a woman and her children, the team had to create a new mount for the solar panels in order for them to be correctly positioned for maximum sun exposure. Luckily, the larger IEEE PES group was on hand to provide guidance and troubleshooting. While the first installation took three days, the second installation went more smoothly and took only one.

Ph.D. mentor Wu explained that the end result consisted of a controller board that interfaced with the roof panels to charge LED lights and phones via USB ports. After each installation, the team showed the family how the system worked and how to use it.

“Living in the US, we take electricity for granted; you do not think about whether a building will have it or not. It’s incredible that our system can change a life so drastically. Now they will not have the inconvenience of traveling several miles just to charge their cell phones. They will no longer have to use kerosene lamps at night. It's a great feeling knowing that you've given these people who have nothing one less thing to worry about it. The best part is knowing that as long as the sun is shining they will have electricity readily available,” said Robelo.

Two houses are now outfitted with the system, but there are millions more that could benefit from the work that future ORS teams hope to do. Now the task at hand will involve improving the prototype to make it lighter, smaller, and more efficient. And the possibility that Georgia Tech teams could teach the Haitians how to build and install the systems themselves would mean a scalable solution that provides employment.

To learn more about Opportunity Research Scholars and to get involved, please visit the website.

Images: 1) Julie Bezabih 2) ORS Team in Atlanta (from left): Elizabeth Robelo, Julie Bezabih, Wondewosen Kihinet, Liyao Wu, Kyron Longwood. 3) ORS Team inside the 2nd house with the owner and her daughter. 4) Liyao Wu, Kyron Longwood, Elizabeth Robelo, and Julie Bezabih. 5) Liyao Wu and Patrick Pierre. 6) Elizabeth Robelo and Julie Bezabih.

In a comment article published April 26 in the journal Nature, two researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology suggest seven energy-intensive separation processes they believe should be the top targets for research into low-energy purification technologies. Beyond cutting energy use, improved techniques for separating chemicals from mixtures would also reduce pollution, cut carbon dioxide emissions – and open up new ways to obtain critical resources the world needs.

Technologies applicable to those separation processes are at varying stages of development, the authors note. These alternative processes are now under-developed or expensive to scale up, and making them feasible for large-scale use could require a significant investment in research and development.

“We wanted to highlight how much of the world’s energy is used for chemical separations and point to some areas where large advances could potentially be made by expanding research in these areas,” said David Sholl, one of the article’s authors, chair of Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. “These processes are largely invisible to most people, but there are large potential rewards – to both energy and the environment – for developing improved separation processes in these areas.”

In the United States, substituting non-thermal approaches for purifying chemicals could reduce energy costs by $4 billion per year in the petroleum, chemical and paper manufacturing sectors alone. There’s also a potential for reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 100 million tons per year.

“Chemical separations account for about half of all U.S. industrial energy use,” noted Ryan Lively, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering and the article’s second author. “Developing alternatives that don’t use heat could dramatically improve the efficiency of 80 percent of the separation processes that we now use.”

Dubbed the “seven chemical separations to change the world,” the list is not intended to be exhaustive, but includes:

• Hydrocarbons from crude oil. Hydrocarbons from crude oil are the main ingredients for making fuels, plastics and polymers – keys to the world’s consumer economy. Each day, the article notes, refineries around the world process around 90 million barrels of crude oil, mostly using atmospheric distillation processes that consume about 230 gigawatts of energy per year, the equivalent of the total 2014 energy consumption of the United Kingdom. Distillation involves heating the oil and then capturing different compounds as they evaporate at different boiling points. Finding alternatives is difficult because oil is complex chemically and must be maintained at high temperatures to keep the thick crude flowing.
• Uranium from sea water. Nuclear power could provide additional electricity without boosting carbon emissions, but the world’s uranium fuel reserves are limited. However, more than four billion tons of the element exist in ocean water. Separating uranium from ocean water is complicated by the presence of metals such as vanadium and cobalt that are captured along with uranium in existing technologies. Processes to obtain uranium from sea water have been demonstrated on small scales, but those would have to be scaled up before they can make a substantial contribution to the expansion of nuclear power.
• Alkenes from alkanes. Production of certain plastics requires alkenes – hydrocarbons such as ethane and propene, whose total annual production exceeds 200 million tons. The separation of ethene from ethane, for instance, typically requires high-pressure cryogenic distillation at low temperatures. Hybrid separation techniques that use a combination of membranes and distillation could reduce energy use by a factor of two or three, but large volumes of membrane materials – up to one million square meters at a single chemical plant – could be required for scale-up.
• Greenhouse gases from dilute emissions. Emission of carbon dioxide and hydrocarbons such as methane contribute to global climate change. Removing these compounds from dilute sources such as power plant emissions can be done using liquid amine materials, but removing the carbon dioxide from that material requires heat. Less costly methods for removing carbon dioxide are needed.
• Rare earth metals from ores. Rare earth elements are used in magnets, catalysts and high-efficiency lighting. Though these materials are not really rare, obtaining them is difficult because they exist in trace quantities that must be separated from ores using complex mechanical and chemical processes.
• Benzene derivatives from each other. Benzene and its derivatives are essential to production of many polymers, plastics, fibers, solvents and fuel additives. These molecules are now separated using distillation columns with combined annual energy usage of about 50 gigawatts. Advances in membranes or sorbents could significantly reduce this energy investment.
• Trace contaminants from water. Desalination is already critical to meeting the need for fresh water in some parts of the world, but the process is both energy and capital intensive, regardless of whether membrane or distillation processes are used. Development of membranes that are both more productive and resistant to fouling could drive down the costs.

Sholl and Lively conclude the paper by suggesting four steps that could be taken by academic researchers and policymakers to help expand the use of non-thermal separation techniques:

1. In research, consider realistic chemical mixtures and reflect real-world conditions, 
2. Evaluate the economics and sustainability of any separation technique, 
3. Consider the scale at which technology would have to be deployed for industry, and 
4. Further expose chemical engineers and chemists in training to separation techniques that do not require distillation.

CITATION: David S. Sholl and Ryan P. Lively, “Seven chemical separations to change the world,” (Nature, Vol. 532, 2016). http://www.nature.com/news/seven-chemical-separations-to-change-the-world-1.19799

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The event began with Suleymanov outlining the current state of Azerbaijan’s relations with the U.S., as well as the state of its oil and energy independence. Since 1991, Azerbaijan has sustained a tradition of oil and energy independence, which is no small feat in a region of post-totalitarian countries. In 1994, the U.S. invested roughly $8 billion in Azerbaijan in an unprecedented 30-year energy contract. Suleymanov stated that the government realized the importance of being a long-term partner as opposed to receiving short-term financial gain from a business deal. Azerbaijan drove a hard line on this contract but once agreed upon has maintained all conditions and is one of the strongest strategic partners with the European Union (E.U.). With the help of continued American investment, Azerbaijan began a pipeline in 1996 which was completed in 2006 and connected their oil and gas infrastructure with that of Turkey and Georgia. As a result, the geography of the Adriatic and Aegean regions has been changed — creating a new geo-political reality in Eastern and Southern Europe.

Thompson discussed the industry perspective of the region’s changing landscape. At the onset of the shale revolution in 2006, there was a projected need for reliance on natural gas in North America. In the early stages the industry grew and jobs increased. There were prospects for a “European energy renaissance” because of a geopolitical entrance in the region. However, there was a demonstrated shortage of necessary shale national gas reserves that resulted in regulatory uncertainty for the potential of natural gas collection and production. Consequently, Chevron retreated from the region, but the opportunity still remains for more production in the future.

Young explained the difficulties the European Union faces with policy cooperation and integration regarding energy policy. This is an enduring problem for the E.U. and it continues to affect their goal of maintaining competition, sustainability, and security within a single unified energy market.

Coote described the implications of U.S. investment in natural gas due to its costly infrastructure regarding collection and distribution. He stated that the growth in liquefied natural gas (LNG) has helped integrate the markets, but major price differentials in gas markets remain. Russia has proven to be an unpredictable supplier in terms of pricing and has consistently engaged in monopolistic trade rather than competitive trade. Coote posited that the U.S. appears to be in a position to be a reliable supplier of natural gas to Europe.

Stulberg spoke at length about Russia’s use of energy as an instrument of coercion. Despite Russia’s lack of reliability of supply and the costs it suffered due to international sanctions, it retains regional advantages and remains a competitor with cost advantages and strong corporate ties.

According to each of the panelists, the future of energy security is uncertain but the U.S. is likely to emerge as a supplier in this market, but Russia will maintain its status as a potential escalator of conflict. 

Granted, there’s no silver bullet, but Georgia Tech researchers are developing a broad range of technologies to make power more abundant, efficient, and eco-friendly.

This feature provides a quick look at a dozen unusual projects that could go beyond traditional energy technologies to help power everything from tiny sensors to homes and businesses.

Read the complete feature on the Research Horizons website