2017-18 Auburn Engineering Dean's Report

SAMUEL GINN COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING 2 0 1 7 - 1 8

D E A N ’ S

R E P O R T

I N S P I R E INNOVATETRANSFORM

CONTENTS

DEAN Christopher B. Roberts

Annual Report Data

4

Record-Breaking Campaign

8

Fellows

9

Academic Departments and Degrees 12 Student Engagement

13

Student Support

14

Faculty Highlights

16

Student Highlights

18

Thinking 3-D Aerospace

20

Fueling an Alternative Future Biosystems

24

When Downsizing Is a Good Thing Chemical

28

Building a Better Future Facilities

32

Safer Streets Through Big Data Civil

36

Cultivating Computational Thinkers Computer Science and Software

40

Attack of the Clones Electrical and Computer

44

Redefining Online Education Graduate Online

48

Driving Innovation Industrial and Systems

52

Next-Generation Batteries Materials

56

Better Together Mechanical

60

Health Care at Your Finger Tips Wireless

64

Research Centers

70

DIRECTOR, COMMUNICATIONS AND MARKETING Jim Killian EDITOR Chris Anthony CONTRIBUTORS Megan Burmester Teri Greene Christine Hall Eduardo Medina Carol Nelson Austin Phillips Amy Weaver GRAPHIC DESIGN Al Eiland ILLUSTRATIONS Al Eiland Sarah McCollough Armin VahidMohammadi WEB MANAGER Tyler Patterson PHOTOGRAPHY Jim Killian Marcus Kluttz 2017-18 Dean’s Report The Dean’s Report is published

by Auburn University’s Office of Engineering Communications and Marketing.

Engineering Communications and Marketing c/o Editor 1320C Shelby Center Auburn, AL 36849 eng.editor@auburn.edu 334.844.3447 © 2018 Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, Auburn University Auburn University is an equal opportunity educational institution/employer.

DEAN’S MESSAGE It’s been an incredible year for the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, one in which we have made key advances as Auburn University’s largest academic unit.

Our enrollments continue to be strong, our research volume continues to place us among the top institutions in the nation, and we continue to move aggressively in modernizing and enlarging our facilities.

In fact, we are moving through a period where our facilities are building on the same kind of impetus that we experienced a decade ago with the construction of the $150 million Shelby Center for Engineering Technology. We are now in the final stages of the renovation of one of our landmark buildings into the Gavin Engineering Research Laboratory, and in the beginning stages of constructing a state-of-the-art structural dynamics laboratory.

At the same time, we are at the midpoint in the construction of the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center, which will serve the college as a recruiting center, a place where our corporate partners can meet, a central location where we can host our alumni and, most importantly, a place where we can engage our students in interactive teaching and cooperative learning experiences. Our unwavering goal is to provide the best student-centered engineering experience in the country.

We continue to build on a well-established research presence, and have just established a center that addresses additive manufacturing – the National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence, which has been developed in collaboration with NASA. We are also partnering with ASTM International, NASA, EWI and the Manufacturing Technology Centre to establish the ASTM International Center of Excellence for Additive Manufacturing. Our thrust in cybersecurity will take a new and exciting direction as the McCrary Institute for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Systems becomes operational this year.

As dean, I am excited about these facilities and programs, but even more excited about the tremendous surge we have experienced in bringing new faculty into our college. We could not have brought this new generation of teachers and researchers into the college without the solid foundation and world-class reputation of our veteran faculty members – and I find now that we have an exceptional faculty enlivened by a new generation of engineering talent that brings with them new ideas, new methods and new dreams.

Auburn President Steven Leath has challenged the university community to “inspire, innovate and transform.” The Samuel Ginn College of Engineering believes in these touchpoints, and in taking the action necessary to meet and exceed these expectations. As you read this report, we hope you will see how our faculty is moving toward and beyond these goals as we seek to reach new levels of engagement with our students, our alumni and our partners in industry and government.

Sincerely,

Christopher B. Roberts

NATIONAL RANKINGS

31 36th 15th 31st 20th 25th st

1

32 48th

nd Ranking in research expenditures among

Undergraduate program ranking among public universities1 Graduate program ranking among public universities1 Graduate online program ranking among all engineering colleges1

S I N C E 2010

33 5

Ranking in engineering degrees awarded to African-Americans2

1

Ranking in undergraduate enrollment among all engineering colleges2 2

Ranking in research expenditures among all engineering colleges2

National Prestigious Scholarships3

Graduate computer information technology program1 ranking

U.S. News & World Report |

public engineering colleges2

American Society for Engineering Education |

3

National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellows Goldwater Scholars Rhodes Scholar and many more recipients and finalists for other national prestigious scholarships

Auburn University National Prestigious Scholarship Program

Enrollment

Engineering

University

Undergraduate

5,282

23,964

Graduate

971

5,812

Total

6,253 29,776

20 percent female 15 percent underrepresented

UNDERGRADUATE ENROLLMENT

4

3,383

3,595

3,890

2008

2009

2010

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

4,018

4,157

4,294

2011

2012

2013

4,618

2014

4,968

4,963

2015

2016

5,282

2017

FRESHMAN CLASS SNAPSHOT

1,348

GRADUATE SNAPSHOT

29.4/1,252 AVERAGE ACT/SAT

FRESHMEN

3.97

37

AVERAGE HIGH SCHOOL GPA

MASTER’S

DOCTORAL

503

468

24

NATIONAL MERIT SCHOLARS

PERCENT FEMALE

Largest college at Auburn University with

25 PERCENT OF THE FRESHMAN ENROLLMENT

Undergraduate Students

by Department

Graduate Students

by Department

Aerospace: 478 Biosystems: 163 Chemical: 652 Civil: 546 Computer Science and Software: 892 Electrical and Computer: 550 Industrial and Systems: 437 Materials: 80 Mechanical: 1,310 Polymer and Fiber: 17 Wireless: 56 Pre-engineering: 101

Aerospace:

51 (27 master’s and 24 doctoral)

Biosystems:

31 (18 master’s and 13 doctoral)

Chemical:

98 (18 master’s and 80 doctoral)

Civil:

140 (83 master’s and 57 doctoral)

Computer Science and Software: 169 (107 master’s and 62 doctoral) Electrical and Computer:

118 (57 master’s and 61 doctoral)

Industrial and Systems:

141 (75 master’s and 66 doctoral)

Materials:

60 (31 master’s and 29 doctoral)

Mechanical:

155 (85 master’s and 70 doctoral)

Polymer and Fiber:

8 (2 master’s and 6 doctoral)

GRADUATE

ENROLLMENT

See page 51 for a list of online graduate programs

754

810

834

853

885

917

851

897

971

720

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

2017

2017-18 Dean’s Report

5

RESEARCH SNAPSHOT

48th in nation

in research expenditures, ranked in the top 50 for the past 10 years1 1

American Society for Engineering Education,

2017 (latest available data)

$62.6 million in research expenditures

Research Expenditures (in millions)

2008

47.1

2009

49.5

2010

55.5

2011

57.4

2012

60.1

2013

61.3

2014

60.0

2015

58.3

2016

61.7

2017

62.6

FACULTY SNAPSHOT

177

Tenured/tenure track faculty 6

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

58

Non-tenure track teaching/research faculty

25

Postdoctoral researchers/fellows

HIGH PROFILE

STRATEGIC

FUNDING AWARDED IN 2017

Advanced Manufacturing

Transportation Engineering:

Biomedical and Pharmaceutical Engineering

RESEARCH AREAS

RESEARCH AREAS

$5,363,898

Autonomy and Assured Positioning, Navigation and Timing: $2,481,212 Additive Manufacturing:

$2,009,211

Cybersecurity and Information Technology Energy and Environment Engineered Materials and Nanotechnology Infrastructure and Transportation

Largest Research Awards in 2017

$4,667,362 $1,500,000 $1,105,277

National Science Foundation “SFS Renewal: Using Auburn University’s Land Grant Mission to Prepare Cybersecurity Professionals” David Umphress, computer science and software engineering

National Institute of Standards and Technology “Layer-by-Layer X-ray Computed Tomography of Additive Manufacturing” Ruel (Tony) Overfelt and Bart Prorok, materials engineering

National Science Foundation “MRI: Development of an Intensified KHz Rate Plenoptic Camera System for 3D Flow Diagnostics” Brian Thurow, aerospace engineering 2017-18 Dean’s Report

7

RECORD-BREAKING CAMPAIGN Because This is Auburn — A Campaign for Auburn University has propelled the university forward through a renewed commitment to our students, a continued promise to our state and a shared responsibility to the world. In April 2018, the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering held an event to celebrate the generosity and commitment of our dedicated alumni, corporate partners and friends. As a college, we set an ambitious goal of $200 million — the largest of any academic unit — but our alumni and friends have given more than $247 million as part of the total $1.2 billion raised by the university.

Because This is Auburn Campaign By the Numbers

$47.4 million for student scholarships and fellowships

$126.1 million for programmatic support

$19.6 million for faculty support

$54.1 million for facilities

Largest gift:

$30 million

(part of a $57 million gift from John and Rosemary Brown — the largest in university history)

$3,785 12,966 donors 72,764 gifts Average gift:

Read more about our successful fundraising campaign at aub.ie/campaign 8

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

FELLOWS IN THE COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING Aerospace Engineering

John Cochran – Fellow, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)

Biosystems Engineering

Dan Wilamowski – Fellow, IEEE

Hulya Kirkici – Fellow, IEEE

Vishwani Agrawal – Fellow, IEEE

Prathima Agrawal – Fellow, IEEE

William Batchelor – Fellow, American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers (ASABE)

Charlie Gross – Fellow, IEEE

Dave Irwin – Fellow, IEEE

Oladiran Fasina – Fellow, ASABE

Dick Jaeger – Fellow, IEEE

Steven Taylor – Fellow, ASABE

John Wu – Fellow, IEEE

Chemical Engineering

Industrial and Systems Engineering

Thomas Hanley – Fellow, American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE)

Sean Gallagher – Fellow, American Industrial Hygiene Association (AIHA)

Harry Cullinan – Fellow, Technical Association of the Pulp and Paper Industry (TAPPI)

Rob Thomas – Fellow, AIHA

Bruce Tatarchuk – Fellow, National Academy of Inventors (NAI)

Alice Smith – Fellow, Institute of Industrial and Systems Engineers (IISE); Fellow, IEEE

Joseph Shaeiwitz – Fellow, AIChE; Fellow, American

Society of Engineering Education (ASEE)

Jeff Smith – Fellow, IISE

Prabhakar Clement – Fellow, American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)

John Evans – Luminary of Surface Mount Technology Association (SMTA)

Civil Engineering

J T. Black – Fellow, IISE

Xing Fang – Fellow, ASCE; Fellow, Environmental Mechanical Engineering and Water Resources Institute Bryan A. Chin – Fellow, ASM International; Fellow, American Nuclear Society; Fellow, American Welding Society; Andrzej Nowak – Fellow, ASCE; Fellow, American Concrete Institute (ACI), Fellow, International Fellow, Electrochemical Society Association for Bridge and Structural Engineering

Robert Barnes – Fellow, ACI

Anton Schindler – Fellow, ACI

Huaguo Zhou – Fellow, Institute of Transportation Engineers

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Chan Park – Fellow, IISE

Daniela Marghitu – Fellow, Society for Design and Process Science

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Foster Dai – Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)

Mark Halpin – Fellow, IEEE

John Hung – Fellow, IEEE

Mark Nelms – Fellow, IEEE

Adit Singh – Fellow, IEEE

Jitendra Tugnait – Fellow, IEEE

Malcolm Crocker – Fellow, Acoustical Society of India; Fellow, Acoustical Society of America Jeffrey Fergus – Fellow, Electrochemical Society George Flowers – Fellow, American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)

Jay Khodadadi – Associate Fellow, AIAA

Pradeep Lall – Fellow, Alabama Academy of Sciences; Fellow, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers; Fellow, ASME

P. K. Raju – Fellow, ASME; Fellow, American Society of Engineering Education; Fellow, Acoustical Society of India; Fellow, The Institution of Engineers, India

Subhash Sinha – Fellow, ASME; Associate Fellow, AIAA

Jeffrey Suhling – Fellow, ASME

Hareesh Tippur – Fellow, Society of Experimental Mechanics; Fellow, ASME

2017-18 Dean’s Report

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Auburn Engineering is focused on providing the best student-centered engineering experience in America. We pride ourselves on providing hands-on, experiential learning opportunities for students both inside and outside the classroom. By providing a student-centered learning experience and high levels of engagement with faculty, we graduate engineers capable of addressing some of the world’s most pressing challenges in the engineering field.

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

2017-18 Dean’s Report

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ACADEMIC DEPARTMENTS AND DEGREES Aerospace Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

 Bachelor of Aerospace Engineering

 Bachelor of Electrical Engineering

 Master of Science in Aerospace Engineering

 Bachelor of Computer Engineering

 Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering

 Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Biosystems Engineering

 Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering

Industrial and Systems Engineering

 Bachelor of Biosystems Engineering

 Bachelor of Biosystems Engineering Ecological Engineering Option

 Bachelor of Industrial and Systems Engineering

 Master of Science in Industrial and Systems Engineering

 Bachelor of Biosystems Engineering Forestry Engineering Option

 Master of Industrial and Systems Engineering

 Bachelor of Biosystems Engineering Bioprocess Option

 Master of Engineering Management

 Ph.D. in Industrial and Systems Engineering

 Master of Science in Biosystems Engineering

Materials Engineering

 Ph.D. in Biosystems Engineering

 Bachelor of Materials Engineering

Chemical Engineering

 Master of Science in Materials Engineering

 Bachelor of Chemical Engineering

 Ph.D. in Materials Engineering

 Master of Science in Chemical Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

 Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering

 Bachelor of Mechanical Engineering

Civil Engineering

 Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering

 Bachelor of Civil Engineering

 Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering

 Master of Science in Civil Engineering

Wireless Engineering

 Master of Civil Engineering

 Ph.D. in Civil Engineering

 Bachelor of Wireless Engineering Hardware Option

Computer Science and Software Engineering

 Bachelor of Computer Science

 Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

 Bachelor of Software Engineering

 Master of Science in Computer Science and Software Engineering

 Master of Science in Cybersecurity Engineering

 Ph.D. in Computer Science and Software Engineering

12

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

 Bachelor of Wireless Engineering Software Option

Interdepartmental Programs

 Master of Engineering

 Master of Science in Polymer and Fiber Engineering

 Ph.D. in Polymer and Fiber Engineering

STUDENT ENGAGEMENT

Formula SAE race team

Student learning goes far beyond the classroom.

Auburn Engineering offers a wide array of co-curricular programming that builds on academic instruction and allows students to unlock their full potential as engineers.

Engineering Global Programs Auburn Engineering offers more than a dozen global programs and study abroad scholarships for students to engage in experiential learning across the world. These include exchange programs with institutions in Australia, Germany, Italy and Taiwan; faculty-led programs in China, Germany, Italy and Spain; and service-learning programs through Engineers Without Borders in Rwanda and Bolivia. Students also have the opportunity to experience the world through Auburn’s newly developed global internship program.

Student Organizations With dozens of engineering student organizations, every student can find their niche at Auburn. From discipline-specific honor societies to the interdisciplinary Formula SAE race team and the Student Launch rocket-building team, Auburn Engineering students have ample opportunities to get involved outside the classroom, including leadership programs such as the Cupola Engineering Ambassadors and the Engineering Student Council.

Undergraduate Research As a nationally prominent research institution, Auburn provides undergraduates with hands-on opportunities to engage in fundamental and applied research projects with faculty members, postdoctoral researchers and graduate students.

Star researchers can even receive a stipend and funds for travel and research through the university’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship program.

By the Numbers

40+

engineering student organizations

14

engineering global programs

A more than 200 percent increase over five years

Engineers Without Borders in Rwanda

2018 Dean’s Report

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STUDENT SUPPORT At Auburn Engineering, we put students first. Our comprehensive academic support services demonstrate the college’s commitment to educating well-rounded engineers capable of addressing next-generation engineering challenges.

Advising and Mentoring From highly engaged academic advisors to attentive faculty members, Auburn engineers have an expansive network of professionals to support and assist them in their academic pursuits. Auburn also utilizes successful peer advising and peer mentoring programs to achieve an unparalleled student-centered experience in engineering education.

Engineering Tutoring Center Auburn Engineering has expanded its individual and group tutoring services significantly to cover more than 55 subjects in math, science and high-demand engineering courses. The innovative Coordinated Academic Support for Engineers program also provides supplemental classroom resources so students can master difficult engineering concepts.

Engineering Academic Excellence Program The Academic Excellence Program supports engineering students from pre-college through graduation by focusing on expanding academic preparation, professional readiness and exploration of career paths.

It achieves this through a wide range of programs, including learning communities, professional development workshops, peer learning sessions and similar programs.

100+ Women Strong The force to recruit, retain and reward Auburn women in engineering, 100+ Women Strong offers comprehensive programming to encourage young women to pursue engineering and support them along the way. Successful alumni and friends of the college devote their time to counseling young women in engineering through individual mentoring, professional development presentations, networking events and similar programs.

Engineering Career Services Our college provides students with the resources and support they need to stand out in their pursuit of internships, cooperative education opportunities and their long-term employment goals. The college’s efforts in career services are being bolstered with the addition of a new Office of Career Development and Corporate Relations.

100+ Women Strong speed mentoring

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

Engineering Tutoring Center

By the Numbers

2,368 Students supported by scholarships in 2017-18

Cooperative Education Program

$22.1 million Scholarship support awarded to engineering students in 2017-18

9

Consecutive Alabama Co-Op Student of the Year winners from Auburn Engineering

Engineering Academic Excellence Program

2018 Dean’s Report

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FACULTY HIGHLIGHTS W. Robert Ashurst, the Uthlaut Family Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Virginia Davis, the Alumni Professor of Chemical Engineering, were awarded a patent for their research on “Microdevices and methods of manufacture.” Their work focuses on making microelectromechanical systems from cellulose nanocrystals extracted from waste forest products and agricultural biomass.

Lorenzo Cremaschi, associate professor of mechanical engineering, was appointed associate editor of the Science and Technology for the Built Environment Journal by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers.

James Cross, professor of computer science and software engineering, was named a 2017 distinguished member by the Association for Computing Machinery for his educational contributions to computing, particularly his role in creating the jGRASP integrated development environment used in many computer science curricula.

OUT OF THIS WORLD Masatoshi Hirabayashi, assistant professor of aerospace engineering, joined an elite group of scientists and engineers whose contributions to planetary science have warranted an asteroid naming.

Hirabayashi was honored with the asteroid naming at the “Asteroids, Comets, Meteors 2017” conference in Montevideo, Uruguay. Hirabayashi’s asteroid, 11471 Toshihirabayashi, was discovered on March 6, 1981, at the Siding Spring observatory in Australia by astronomer Schelte Bus. Hirabayashi’s work focuses on astronautics and geophysical modeling for small planetary bodies and planetary surface processes, specifically the dynamics and structure of these small bodies. He believes his study on the comet 67P/ Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which was published in Nature, was a large factor in the selection of his asteroid name.

Hirabayashi’s Space Technology Application Research, or STAR, lab is collaborating with NASA and the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency on missions that involve asteroids and other small bodies, such as the DART mission and the Hayabusa 2 mission.

“In space missions, a better understanding of natural phenomena in space will help us develop innovative technologies and solve challenging problems,” Hirabayashi said. “I would like to conduct interdisciplinary research for critical space missions, such as asteroid mining and deflection.”

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

Greg Harris, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, is the principal investigator on a $1.04 million project from the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute for research on digital supply chain practices and technologies. The project will result in the development of guides and strategies to accelerate the adoption of digital supply chain practices and technologies for original equipment manufacturers and small/medium manufacturers.

Elizabeth Lipke, the Mary and John H. Sanders Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, and Selen Cremaschi, the B. Redd Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering, were awarded a $621,934 grant from the National Science Foundation for their research on cardiac tissue manufacturing.

Tony Overfelt, the William and Elizabeth Reed Professor of Materials Engineering, and Bart Prorok, professor of materials engineering, were awarded a $1.5 million grant from the National Institute of Standards and Technology for their research examining the use of X-ray

computed tomography as a means to inspect metal components created through additive manufacturing.

Rod Turochy, the James M. Hunnicutt Associate Professor of Traffic Engineering in the Department of Civil Engineering, received the 2017 James M. Robbins National Excellence in Teaching Award from Chi Epsilon, the civil engineering honor society.

Auburn University was awarded a $4.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation to help address a shortage of public sector cybersecurity professionals through the CyberCorps Scholarship for Service program. The program is overseen by David Umphress, the COLSA Corporation Cyber Security and Information Assurance Professor and director of the Auburn Cyber Research Center, and Dean Hendrix, associate professor of computer science and software engineering.

Bogdan Wilamowski, professor of electrical and computer engineering, was elected to the Polish Academy of Sciences. His research on intelligent nonlinear systems with shallow and deep architectures was listed among the top accomplishments in Polish science

by Minister of Science and Higher Education Jarosław Gowin.

SPREADING THE KNOWLEDGE Alice E. Smith, the Joe W. Forehand/Accenture Distinguished Professor with a joint appointment in industrial and systems engineering and computer science and software engineering, was chosen as an IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Distinguished Lecturer for a three-year term, which began in 2018.

Smith is one of only 15 current IEEE Distinguished Lecturers from around the world. She presented her first two lectures in May in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, speaking on “Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization” and “Decision Science Inspired by Nature.”

Smith’s primary research field is modeling and optimization of complex systems using computational intelligence.

The CIS Distinguished Lecturer Program aims at serving communities interested in computational intelligence and, specifically, supporting local CIS Chapters and CIS members who like to stay up-to-date on the latest research and practical applications by organizing lectures given by distinguished experts.

An Auburn faculty member since 1999, Smith was previously on the faculty at the University of Pittsburgh following a 10-year career in telecommunications engineering with Southwestern Bell Corp. She served as Auburn’s department chair of industrial and systems engineering from 1999-2011.

Smith was named an IEEE fellow in 2016.

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ENTREPRENEURIAL STUDENT HIGHLIGHTS ENGINEERS A team consisting of Auburn engineering students and alumni has hit the market with Tennibot, the world’s first autonomous tennis ball collector.

By using advanced algorithms and computer vision technology, Tennibot is able to freely roam hard and clay courts as it identifies any dispersed tennis ball and places it into an attached ball bucket.

Before players practice their slice serves and twisting backhands, they can access the Tennibot app on their phones to select the areas on the court that Tennibot will clear during their session.

Tennibot Founder and CEO Haitham Eletrabi, a 2014 doctoral graduate in civil engineering, remembers his eureka moment that resulted out of frustration.

“I was out hitting with a tennis ball machine when I realized I spend more time picking up balls than hitting them,” Eletrabi said.

The Tennibot’s creative concept has brought success in numerous competitions, such as winning the grand prize in the Tennis Industry Association’s inaugural Tennis Industry Innovation Challenge.

Tennibot was also awarded $40,000 from the Auburn Regional Alabama Launchpad competition for its ingenuity and marketability.

In addition to Eletrabi, the Tennibot team is comprised of mechanical engineering alumnus Lincoln Wang, public relations alumna Kelsey Bixler and current mechanical engineering student David Wahlig.

For more information, visit tennibot.com.

Aerospace engineering major Jill Joffe was awarded the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. She will use the $34,000 annual stipend and a $12,000 cost-of-education allowance to pursue her graduate studies in mechanical engineering at Purdue University.

James Smith, graduate student in electrical and computer engineering, was named co-winner of the 2017 Alton B. Zerby Outstanding Electrical Engineering Student Award from IEEE-Eta Kappa Nu, the national honor society of IEEE. The War Eagle Motorsports Formula SAE racing team won first place in half of the events at the 2018 FSAE Lincoln competition.

The team finished in first place in the following events: acceleration, autocross, engineering design and skidpad.

Paul Kovacic, doctoral candidate in aerospace engineering, was named the 2018 Graduate Student of the Year by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Greater Hunstville Section.

Rachelle Minor, doctoral student in computer science and software engineering, was named a fellow

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

of the Community for Advancing Discovery Research in Education program, which provides capacity-building experiences for early career researchers and developers who are members of the National Science Foundation’s Discovery Research K-12 projects.

Langston Williams, graduate student in aerospace engineering, was chosen as the 2017 recipient of the Abe M. Zarem Award for Distinguished Achievement from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation.

Mechanical engineering senior Collin Phillips was awarded the Legacy of Excellence Scholarship by the Society of Maintenance and Reliability Professionals for the 2017-2018 academic year.

Yalin Liu, doctoral student in civil engineering, received a Best Student Paper Award at the Transportation Research Board’s 2018 annual meeting for “Finiteelement modeling and analysis of early-age cracking risk of cast-inplace concrete culverts.”

Yellow Card Financial, a startup cryptocurrency business created by finance major Chris Maurice and computer science major Justin Poiroux, took second place at the 2018 Global Student Entrepreneurship Awards national pitch competition in Dallas. The duo won first place in the regional competition held in Atlanta.

Cassie Jones, doctoral student in aerospace engineering, received a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship.

The nationally competitive fellowship comes with a $38,400 annual stipend and is renewable for up to four years.

Xuyu Wang and Xiangyu Wang, graduate students in electrical and computer engineering, won a Best Student Paper Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Mobile Radio Communications for “ResLoc: Deep Residual Sharing Learning for Indoor Localization with CSI Tensors.”

Aravind Tankasala, doctoral student in civil engineering, earned a Best Paper Award at the 2018 Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting for “Risk of Thermal Cracking from use of Lightweight Aggregate in Mass Concrete.”

The student chapter of the American Concrete Institute was awarded an Excellent University Award in the 2017 ACI Awards for University Student Activities. Auburn was one of only 25 universities worldwide to receive the award.

CYBER WARRIOR AND RHODES SCHOLAR For Matthew Rogers, the road to success starts with the Rhodes Scholarship.

Rogers was one of only 32 students from across the United States selected for the prestigious scholarship, which funds graduate studies at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. He is the fifth Rhodes Scholar in Auburn’s history and second from the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering.

Rogers completed his bachelor’s degree in software engineering one year early and will pursue a doctorate in cybersecurity at Oxford beginning fall 2018.

As a student in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering and the Honors College, Rogers maintained a 4.0 grade point average and served as an undergraduate research fellow working with IBM on a Trusted Platform Module crypto-processor to create secure exchanges of information.

He worked three summers as an undergraduate research intern at the Huntsville-based Dynetics, where he helped develop malware analysis tools.

“One of the main things that interested me about the University of Oxford program is that it looks at cybersecurity from a multidisciplinary perspective,” Rogers said. “It’s not just about the technical aspect, but when you take a step back, you see the role it has in international relations and politics, and it’s kind of thrown a loop into how we consider our negotiations with other countries.”

Aerospace engineering major Nathaniel Reed won a $3,000 Vertical Flight Foundation scholarship from the American Helicopter Society.

2017-18 Dean’s Report

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

THINKING

3-D New imaging system to improve flow diagnostics B Y

C A R O L

N E L S O N

2017-18 Dean’s Report

21

the system to help us look at more practical problems.”

A research team led by Thurow has been awarded a $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation to develop a new, single-camera imaging system capable of capturing high-speed and 3-D measurements in practical flow fields.

A group of Auburn Engineering researchers is developing a new imaging system that could have wide-reaching impacts, ranging from health care to the aerospace industry.

In one click of the shutter, can you get all of the information about what’s happening in three dimensions?

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

“From blood flow through artificial heart valves to the mixing and combustion of fuel and air in a modern jet engine, many flows are both unsteady and three-dimensional,” said Brian Thurow, professor and chair of the Department of Aerospace Engineering. “Modern diagnostics used to study these flow fields are slow, two-dimensional, and in the case of multi-camera 3-D diagnostics, both expensive and complex. We are trying to simplify fundamental 3-D imaging technology into a more compact and economical hardware, while also increasing the speed of

In recent years, Thurow’s lab developed a prototype that has been demonstrated as a simple, robust and effective 3-D imaging system.

The grant is helping researchers to develop the hardware and software of the technology, which allows them to capture all the information they need in one snapshot, using just one piece of equipment.

“In one click of the shutter, can you get all of the information about what’s happening in three dimensions? The unique piece of what we’re developing is that we don’t have to have hundreds of cameras looking at an experiment at one time, and we don’t have to move the cameras around to a number of different positions,” Thurow said. “We can do it all in a simple, compact hardware, which will also allow the system to be optimized for various facilities and techniques.”

Aerospace Engineering, Stanley Reeves of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Pavlos Vlachos of the Purdue University School of Mechanical Engineering.

Thurow said the technology allows the team to expand their research beyond aerospace to other areas, including biomedical engineering and cardiovascular fluid mechanics.

“Dr. Thurow and I are looking at ways to apply his technology in biomedical engineering,” said Vrishank Raghav, assistant professor of aerospace engineering. “No one has done that before. It’s a newer technology, so we are trying to incorporate these ideas into understanding cardiovascular diseases.”

Raghav’s primary focus is prosthetic valve design, essentially prosthetic or artificial heart valves that are implanted into patients with a failing heart valve. Natural wear and tear on the heart leads to calcium deposits and damage to valves, which can begin to malfunction.

“Younger patients are usually able to undergo open heart surgery, but older patients usually cannot withstand it,” Raghav explained.

“There is a new technology that is not as invasive, called transcatheter valve replacement, where doctors make an incision in the thigh or groin area, and snake a catheter up to the heart and replace the valve.

While I was at Georgia Tech previously, I began collaborating with Dr. Thurow to apply his technology

to improve the valve design for this transcatheter approach.”

Raghav said that optical access is extremely limited when replicating the flow in the heart using a bench-top system, since they don’t have multiple points of entry like they do in the case of some aerodynamic experiments in aerospace engineering.

“This technique offers significant advantage because it’s also a single-camera technique, where other techniques use four. We can measure volumetric flows or 3-D flow fields and can take multiple snapshots of the velocity field around the heart valve within a single cardiac cycle, or one heartbeat,” he said.

Thurow said the system will have an immediate impact on the understanding and treatment of cardio/cerebrovascular diseases; the understanding and modeling of non-reacting compressible flow fields associated with high-speed vehicles; and the understanding and design of stable and efficient combustion processes. Long term, the technology will support collaborative research activities at both Auburn and Purdue University.

“At Auburn, biomedical fluid dynamics, unsteady 3-D rotating flows and combustion instability are emerging topics being led

by Vrishank Raghav and David Scarborough,” Thurow said. “Our counterparts at Purdue have a track record of applying advanced diagnostics to high-impact problems and are well established in their respective fields. There is this nice synergy between what they’re doing and what we’re doing. We are able to focus on the instrumentation and hardware development, and then the applications will push out through the work of our colleagues at Purdue. The collaboration is mutually beneficial.”

BRIAN THUROW W. Allen and Martha Reed Professor of Aerospace Engineering and Department Chair

334-844-6827 thurobs@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/BThurow

VRISHANK RAGHAV Assistant Professor of Aerospace Engineering

334-844-6811 vzs0037@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/VRaghav

Other researchers involved in the project include David Scarborough, also of the Department of 2017-18 Dean’s Report

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FUELING

AN ALTERNATIVE FUTURE Making bio-sourced fuels part of mainstream travel is an uphill road, but it’s one Auburn’s Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts is prepared to take B Y

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Sushil Adhikari was born and raised in Nepal, a landlocked country with no access to fossil fuel-sourced energy. Hydraulic power still provides much of the country’s energy needs, but large swaths of homes have no electricity.

from nature that are converted to fuel through pyrolysis and gasification. These fuels could supplement and — in the distant future — help to replace gasoline, diesel fuel and jet fuel that is currently derived from slowly declining fossil fuel supplies that have largely powered the U.S. for the past century.

Growing up in that environment shaped Adhikari’s future.

Accomplishing that goal requires collaboration with a group of specialists from across the Auburn campus, including researchers in engineering, agriculture and forestry and wildlife sciences.

“A lot of people are dependent on firewood stoves,” he said of his native country. “Not every place has electricity. So I was just fascinated about alternative energy.”

Adhikari, director of the Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts and Alumni Professor of Biosystems Engineering, aims to devise increasingly efficient methods of producing fuels from biomass — trees, grasses, algae and other resources

Biofuels and bioproducts are intertwined economically, Adhikari said.

Revenue from the sale of bioproducts, which now have a high profit margin, can be diverted to reduce the cost of biofuels.

And the bioproducts industry is booming, he said.

For instance, Coca-Cola has kicked off its plan to produce all its plastic bottles from bioresources, Lego is committed to construct its plastic bricks from bio-sourced materials and Ford is using soybean-based materials to make auto interior boards and car parts.

Alabama is home to a forest production and processing industry that contributes more than $2 billion to the state economy, making it a prime candidate to lead the growth of a bio-based economy.

“The forest industry in the South has a long history. It is sustainable,” Adhikari said. “People have been growing trees and selling to the pulp and timber industries for a long time. All we’re trying to do is create a different market.”

PRIORITIZING PROGRESS Adhikari said he cannot overstate the crucial role of biofuels in creating a cleaner, higher quality alternative to fossil fuels, but the topic seldom surfaces beyond the bioengineering field. There are major challenges.

While the Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the Electric Power Research Institute, Alabama Power and the university provide ongoing funding for research, Adhikari says any further biofuel advancement relies largely on the state of the economy and the political landscape.

During the 1970s, the urgent need for alternative energy sources was front and center as two devastating gas crises resulted in soaring prices.

As the U.S. government rationed gas, lines of cars wrapped around city blocks as drivers waited hours just to make it to the pump.

In that perilous time, the idea of biofuels was “tossed in,” Adhikari said. Government funding to science-centered institutions, including Auburn, was increased to support research and production, and researchers jumped at the chance to get their fuel out there.

But then, the crisis subsided, gas became affordable, and seemingly everyone forgot about the promise of biofuels. Funding dissipated.

It happened again in 2008, when gasoline prices rose to more than $4 per gallon. But that crisis ended, too, and since then, the average price per gallon has hovered around $2.50. In the summer of 2018, gas prices rose to a four-year seasonal high, with vacationers doling out $2.70 per gallon.

It’s an unpredictable scenario, Adhikari said. Garnering attention

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from organizations and institutions that could lend enough funding to create longstanding biofuel production would require nothing less than another national crisis.

Biofuels cost about double the price per gallon of gas. They’re unable to compete. Adhikari uses the word “cost” not in terms of dollars, but as a viable way of solving long-term problems and reversing a century’s worth of damage.

“Price is one thing, but what are the other benefits that biofuel in general brings to society?” Adhikari asked.

“What’s the benefit of getting fuels from this alternative energy source rather than digging out the coal and other fossil fuels? What is the price of introducing carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases? What are the benefits of having a local biorefinery in a rural area like Selma in west Alabama? What is that going to bring to the community over there?

Those are the impacts.”

He likens the difference between gasoline and biofuel to a familiar activity: shopping, comparing massive discount stores that deal in high volume, low-value products — like Walmart — to upscale stores that sell high-value, low-volume products, such as Publix. The products are similar. The shopping experience and the quality of the product are worlds apart. That model applies to the comparison of biofuels and fossil fuels. All that is needed is to focus on research and development. How does that model apply to biofuels?

“One would be the perception — people understanding the importance of biofuels and how they affect the environment by lowering CO2 emissions,” he said. “The other way is to keep focusing on research and development. There is a road to go down, but we are not there yet.”

A MULTIDISCIPLINARY QUEST Spreading awareness of biofuels to a large segment of the population necessitates an enormous amount of study from top experts in multiple fields. Fortunately, Auburn has them in abundance. The Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts research is based on an integrative approach that culls findings from multiple schools, colleges and departments across the Auburn campus.

Mario Eden, Department of Chemical Engineering chair and the Joe T. and Billie Carole McMillan Professor, is one of the center’s founding members. After securing the university’s first NSF-IGERT project, Eden worked with 30 doctoral students from engineering, sciences and mathematics, agriculture and forestry to study biomass-based fuels and products.

“This is a highly complex and multi-faceted problem that needs innovation and advances in myriad areas, and thus demands an interdisciplinary approach,” he said. “It is important for everyone in the supply chain to understand the capabilities of each step and how it impacts the overall result.” Maria Auad, professor of chemical engineering and director of the Center for Polymer and Advanced Composites, is part of the interdisciplinary team.

“It is a new approach,” she said of the integrated research. “Looking for ways to create sustainable materials offers an enormous opportunity to share a common interest but also pulls all the ideas from completely different points of view. The opportunity was to convert these biofuels into products.

My background is in plastics, and I am using these bio-oils to produce resin. There is such a great contribution from all these sectors.”

The most notable event to impact this effort is the recent launch of a new sustainable biomaterials and packaging degree at Auburn’s School of Forestry and Wildlife Sciences. Set to begin in the fall, it is a promising turn of events that may lead to more funding for and awareness of biofuels.

A NICHE MARKET Adhikari emphasizes that biofuels alone won’t conquer all the transportation challenges brought on by the decrease in fossil fuel sources.

He foresees an energy future that utilizes multiple technologies, with some drivers in electric cars, others still dependent on gasoline or hybrid energy, and a growing number of

vehicles and aircraft running solely on biofuels.

Getting planes off the ground is a prime example of biofuels’ possible niche market.

“It would be extremely hard for you to think about flying an airplane with just solar power or batteries instead of jet fuel, which biofuel can replace,” he said. That is just one scenario in which biofuel will be able to step in to fulfill a need that cannot be aided by other alternative energy source.

Biofuel is among myriad sources that have emerged as researchers look to supplement fossil fuels, Adhikari said, but “this will be an extremely significant one.”

SUSHIL ADHIKARI Alumni Professor of Biosystems Engineering Director, Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts

334-844-3543 sza0016@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/SAdhikari

MARIA AUAD Professor of Chemical Engineering Director, Center for Polymer and Advanced Composites

334-844-5459 auad@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/MAuad

MARIO EDEN Joe T. and Billie Carole McMillan Professor of Chemical Engineering Chair, Department of Chemical Engineering

334-844-2064 edenmar@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/MEden

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WHEN

DOWNSIZING IS A GOOD THING Auburn researchers aim to make scalable energy solutions a reality B Y

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“We need to break the traditional chemical process engineering paradigm,” Tatarchuk said. “The need is a 100 barrel per day plant — not a 100,000 barrel plant — but a 100 barrel a day plant at a significant lower capital expenditure.”

Hulking oil refineries dot the coastline of the Gulf of Mexico, stretching from Texas to Alabama, with many of these facilities churning out more than 100,000 barrels of product per day. Refining crude oil is a tried and true method of energy production, and it has helped put the U.S. on a path toward energy independence.

But it’s not without drawbacks.

Operating an oil refinery is tremendously capital intensive, requiring tens of billions of dollars, and the facility must be strategically located near the supply chain and distribution infrastructure.

“All of those factors don’t always align, and the answer is we waste a lot of energy,” said Bruce Tatarchuk, the Charles E. Gavin III Professor of Chemical Engineering.

By addressing fundamental science and technology barriers, Auburn researchers are identifying ways to economically produce and utilize small and otherwise underutilized energy sources in an environmentally beneficial manner.

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Because large-scale operations such as oil refineries dominate the energy industry, many smaller and more isolated energy sources are underutilized or, in many cases, essentially stranded. Tatarchuk and his team of researchers in Auburn’s Institute for Scalable Energy Conversion Science and Technology are aiming to take advantage of these energy resources by creating smaller scale solutions.

Realizing the importance of research in this area, Auburn University established a cluster hire area for scalable energy conversion science and technology and committed 12 new faculty hires across a wide range of disciplines, including agriculture, chemistry, engineering and forestry.

By addressing fundamental science and technology barriers, Auburn researchers are identifying ways to economically produce and utilize small and otherwise underutilized energy sources in an environmentally beneficial manner.

Some of these candidate energy sources include agricultural and forest biomass, land fill gas, anaerobic digester gas, food wastes, coal wastes and a large number of small oil and gas wells that populate Alabama and many other areas of the U.S. In talking about scalable energy solutions, Tatarchuk likes to show a satellite photo of the U.S. at night.

As one would expect, cities such as New York and Chicago light up the night sky. But so do sparsely

populated areas in North Dakota and Texas. The associated light comes from smaller oil and natural gas wells flaring gas in the Bakken and Eagle Ford shale formations.

Tatarchuk says that 20 to 30 percent of the gas brought to the surface at these wells is flared, or burned off and essentially wasted. It is far preferable to develop a system that can capture that wasted energy.

“For a number of years, we have been studying ways to make chemical conversion plants smaller and able to be mounted so they could go on individual wellheads,” Tatarchuk said.

“We have been very active in this area and pretty successful.”

Although flaring gas is the preferred method across the industry, many energy sources often vent the gas, or release it directly into Earth’s atmosphere.

“Much of the gas around the country — whether it’s landfill sites, emissions from oil and gas, wastewater treatment facilities or others — much of that is being vented, and that methane is a major greenhouse gas contributor,” Tatarchuk said.

A big culprit is landfills, of which there are 52 in Alabama. A few have started burning waste and selling the steam to other entities, but a large amount of methane is still vented into the atmosphere.

“Some landfills will clean this gas up and run it though an engine perhaps to make electricity. Most don’t,” Tatarchuk said.

That’s where Auburn’s work comes in. By developing scalable chemical operations, Auburn researchers are aiming to produce standardized modules that can tap into these underutilized resources and produce usable energy units in a cost-effective manner while also benefitting the environment.

Auburn’s expertise and track record in this area has not gone unnoticed. In 2016, the Department of Energy established the 10th Manufacturing USA Institute, the $70 million Rapid Advancement in Process Intensification Deployment, or RAPID, Institute.

productivity and energy efficiency through manufacturing processes in industries, such as oil and gas, pulp and paper and various domestic chemical manufacturing enterprises.

Auburn is a founding member of RAPID and one of only four universities on the executive governing board and the technical advisory board, according to Tatarchuk, who represents Auburn on both boards.

“Auburn University’s administration is putting unprecedented resources into research, so this is a very exciting time at Auburn,” Tatarchuk said. “Our Institute for Scalable Energy Conversion Science and Technology is primed for a big future in this area, and we believe our innovative research will address pressing societal needs in energy security, the environment and economic development.”

BRUCE TATARCHUK Charles E. Gavin III Professor of Chemical Engineering Director, Microfibrous Materials Manufacturing Center

334-844-2023 tatarbj@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/BTatarchuk

RAPID’s mission is to enable the development of groundbreaking technologies to boost energy

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BUILDING A BETTER FUTURE

Auburn investing more than $65 million toward the student experience B Y

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Rendering of the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center

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Auburn University is advancing the engineering campus and its learning environments through more than $65 million in new construction and renovations.

With a share of the largest gift in the university’s history, the college is constructing a state-of-the-art, comprehensive student support center thanks to the generosity of John and Rosemary Brown, both 1957 graduates. Construction

This renovation provides our students and future generations with the tools and environment to thrive, collaborate and innovate.

of the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center is made possible thanks to a $30 million gift from the Browns, part of an overall $57 million gift that was announced in April 2015 at the Because This is Auburn – A Campaign for Auburn University kickoff event.

The 142,000-square-foot BrownKopel Engineering Student Achievement Center will consolidate a multitude of student support services into one facility. This building will house resources for students from freshman year through graduation, including recruiting and scholarships; academic advising; tutoring and learning; professional development and corporate relations; a design and innovation center; and more than 40 collaborative study areas.

“This facility will allow us to be capable of significantly transforming the personal and professional successes of tomorrow’s Auburn

engineers by providing students with the highest level of hands-on experiences and academic support throughout their college experience,” said Christopher B. Roberts, dean of engineering. “Redefining engineering education in a changing world and training engineers inside and outside the classroom is a vital part of our vision. This facility will enable the college to build the infrastructure to make this a reality.”

Located in the heart of campus, this facility will specifically address students’ professional and academic needs, providing one of the most comprehensive, active-learning environments in the country. In cohesion with the college’s vision to provide the best student-centered engineering educational experience in America, the center will also create greater opportunities for collaboration among faculty members and students, creating a sense of home within the engineering campus.

Renovated interior of Broun Hall

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The first floor of the building will include a design and innovation center, which will consist of student-maker spaces, laboratories, shops, project incubators, study rooms, a flexible classroom, computer labs and more, while also serving as the home for engineering student organizations. The second floor will house a tutoring and learning center, academic advising center, student recruitment center, professional development and corporate relations center, the Engineering Academic Excellence Program for underrepresented students and offices for support staff. The third floor will incorporate ample, spacious student study areas with large-group and small-group study rooms, two large flexible classrooms,

boardrooms, conference rooms and a grand hall, all outfitted with the latest smart technologies.

In addition to the construction of the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center, the college has renovated the former Textile Building — now the Gavin Engineering Research Laboratory — thanks to a generous $10.5 million gift from Charles Gavin and his late wife, Carol Ann. The renovation of the Gavin Laboratory allowed the college to demolish the Engineering Shops and L Building, and create the Carol Ann Gavin Garden. The Textile Building was originally constructed in 1929 to prepare future engineers for the textile industry,

and it has served as a vital component to economic development in the region and state for more than eight decades.

An additive manufacturing facility will be incorporated into the building renovation to allow students to gain experience with emerging fabrication technology, as well as the new Center for Polymer and Advanced Composites to continue the college’s research in this area and to meet industry needs. The renovated structure will include traditional research laboratories, as well as a facility for the Nuclear Power Generations Systems Program, a new wind tunnel system, a pulp and paper pilot machine, a series of

hands-on student project areas and collaborative meeting spaces.

The south entrance of the Gavin Engineering Research Laboratory will also be renovated to allow students more convenient entry to the building when coming from the heart of campus, while also providing access to the Brown-Kopel Engineering Student Achievement Center.

“Charles and Carol Ann’s generous gift enabled us to retrofit the new laboratory with advanced technologies to serve students for the next 80 years,” Roberts said. “This is very important as we continue to provide meaningful, hands-on experiences to students.”

Broun Hall, the home of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been renovated to include the Davidson Pavilion, which has transformed the area most used by students and includes a new main entrance that allows natural light into the first two floors. The renovation was made possible thanks to a $5 million gift from Dorothy Davidson in honor of her late husband Julian, a 1950 electrical engineering graduate and defense industry pioneer.

“We will make the student experience the best it can be and increase the value of an Auburn degree, and this beautiful new addition to campus helps us achieve those goals,” said Auburn University President Steven Leath. “This renovation provides our students and future generations with the tools and environment to thrive, collaborate and innovate.”

These facilities upgrades come on the heels of more than $173 million in construction over the past 20 years.

Gavin Engineering Research Laboratory

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SAFER STREETS THROUGH BIG DATA Auburn Engineering is paving the way for new solutions to roadway safety through predictive algorithms and advanced technologies B Y

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Automobile collisions resulted in more than 37,000 fatalities in the United States in 2017, according to recent projections from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. Is it possible to predict when and where accidents will happen? Can the number of yearly traffic fatalities and injuries be reduced to zero?

Civil engineering faculty members at Auburn University are using big data and advanced technologies to answer these questions through their research in transportation engineering.

ANALYZING DRIVER BEHAVIOR Unprecedented amounts of data are being generated from sources such as ride-sharing services and smartphone applications. With information becoming more prevalent and available than ever before, the resultant mountains of data can be mined to better forecast travel behavior patterns.

Managing the transportation system involves long-range planning, and Associate Professor Jeffrey LaMondia is confident that these databases will revolutionize the

If each state can identify two locations per year to implement our suggested countermeasures, there will be a significant reduction of fatalities.

process. He’s working to help shape the Next Generation Travel Behavior Data Initiative for the Federal Highway Administration to better understand how, why, when and where people travel.

“It’s the first of its kind that we’re pushing forward,” LaMondia said.

“I’m working closely with a number of states and private industries to collect and fuse data from a variety of public and private sources together.”

The objectives of the initiative are to collect, process, estimate and report national state and local travel behavior on an annual basis.

With enough data, patterns begin to develop that can be applied to transportation modeling, planning and policy. It’s the ability to predict trouble before it happens, such as maintenance issues and traffic congestion, that can make our streets safer for all users.

“It’s extremely probability based,” LaMondia said. “We use non-deterministic methods to statistically identify whether you might have a high possibility of an incident happening, kind of like a red flag indicating that something may be wrong.”

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LaMondia is also teaching a data analytics course that blends the fields of mathematics, computer science, statistics and civil engineering. This newly offered class gives students the skills and tools necessary to understand patterns, discover relationships and develop predictions based on these data sets.

“I come at it from a transportation angle, but we use different engineering examples in the class,” LaMondia said. “It’s really focused on modeling and simulating using these giant data sets. From structural equation modeling to neural network analyses, there’s so much information yet to be discovered that’s relevant to all fields of engineering.”

This background in data science will help future transportation planners allocate the necessary resources to select safe and efficient infrastructure advancements to meet the changing needs of roadway users.

PRIORITIZING INTERVENTIONS Highway work zones present scenarios for traffic crashes that might not occur otherwise. Rod Turochy, the James M. Hunnicutt Professor of Traffic Engineering and director of the Alabama Technology Transfer Center, is investigating the severity of work zone-related crashes and the relationships between their severity and other variables.

“We encounter work zones on a regular basis, and I only see that increasing,” Turochy said. “Most of today’s system is due for major

replacements and managing these work zones in the future will be imperative.”

Turochy has developed a database of work zone related crashes in Alabama for the past 10 years that includes details from police reports, traffic control inspector reports, and supporting documentation from contractors.

“We’re currently in the process of mining that database to find information that we can use to better design work zones and traffic control,” Turochy said. “We anticipate that this information will enable us to make some decisions to better operate these areas and reduce the frequency and severity of crashes.”

PINPOINTING THE FOCUS Huaguo Zhou, professor of transportation engineering, is leveraging datasets to create mathematical models that can predict the risk of wrong-way drivers entering the freeway at exit ramps. He is working with students to identify and monitor individual high-risk locations in Alabama. New data analysis technology can enable us to reconsider the assumptions about wrong-way collisions, according to Zhou.

“There have been several research statements that wrong-way crashes are totally random, but we have found that high-risk locations exist.

Instead of putting a camera at each

possible location, we can develop a model to select sites and then verify the model using field data,” Zhou said. “We hope this model can be used nationwide. Although wrong-way driving crashes are rare, they are severe. If each state can identify two locations per year to implement our suggested countermeasures, there will be a significant reduction of fatalities.”

Over the past five years, Zhou has been working with the American Traffic Safety Services Association to develop advanced traffic control devices and intelligent transportation technologies to reduce severe and fatal crashes, including wrongway driving, roadway departure and work zone intrusion crashes.

Five case study booklets have been published as a result of this work, one of which addresses the impact of connected and automated vehicles on transportation infrastructures and traffic control devices — one of the earliest publications of its kind to help agencies prepare for accommodating future transportation technologies.

Zhou is also collaborating with Turochy on a project to improve geometric design practices for rural highway intersections using the Naturalistic Driving Study Database.

Acquiring data from the nationally funded project, the researchers have access to information from instrumented cars around the country to address the role of driver performance and behavior in traffic

safety. The Department of Civil Engineering recently purchased a mini-driving simulator to enhance classroom teaching and assess the risk of poor driver behaviors.

“We’re trying to improve the safety and efficiency of the system, mainly in areas of highway safety analyses and traffic operations,” Turochy said. “There’s all kinds of data being collected, from vehicle movement to looking at what the driver is doing and capturing potential distraction issues. Access to this data gives us the opportunity to really see what’s going on from a driver behavior perspective and determine what drivers are responding to.”

With this information, Turochy and Zhou can uncover and evaluate elements that may contribute to crashes at intersections and determine to what extent driver behavior, road conditions and street signs play a role. The information will support the development of alterations to roadway geometry, signs and pavement markings that can prevent traffic collisions and injuries.

“One of the reasons I was drawn to transportation engineering is because it impacts almost everyone every day,” Turochy said. “If you leave your house, you’re going to be affected by the things that we do at Auburn.”

JEFFREY LAMONDIA Associate Professor of Transportation Engineering

334-844-6284 jjl0006@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/JLaMondia

ROD TUROCHY James M. Hunnicutt Professor of Traffic Engineering Director, Alabama Technology Transfer Center

334-844-6271 rodturochy@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/RTurochy

HUAGUO ZHOU Professor of Transportation Engineering

334-844-1239 hhz0001@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/HZhou

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CULTIVATING

COMPUTATIONAL THINKERS Through NSF CAREER award, Jakita Thomas empowers the next generation of women in STEM B Y

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Auburn Engineering faculty member Jakita Thomas’ passion project has been years in the making. It began with 20 sixth-grade African-American girls who lived throughout metro Atlanta, some from inner-city sections, some from working-class families and others from affluent neighborhoods.

These girls on the verge of entering their teenage years had little knowledge of the field of computing and no knowledge of the workings of algorithms. Thomas’ mission: put them at the starting line with Scratch, the most basic of video game-creation platforms, and lead them through the process of algorithmic thinking via one of their favorite pastimes. Now, the girls would become more than avid consumers of video games. They would be creators, armed with enough knowledge to venture into the cutting-edge world of virtual reality with systems including Oculus.

It’s helping students to see that game design and gaming can be a tool to create social change and to create changes in the way people experience and understand the world.

From the outset, Thomas suspected the project would outgrow its initial aims. Three years later, all participants were still on board, ready for more immersion. She applied for a no-cost extension of her NSF CAREER Award to continue to track what would happen in the two years that followed.

The findings of this complex longitudinal study could become a working model to increase access to the STEM fields’ underserved populations, Thomas said. The results could shift paradigms.

In the past five years, Supporting Computational Algorithmic Thinking, or SCAT, has allowed Thomas, the Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Associate Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering, to collect data on how the girls perceive themselves as game designers and critical thinkers.

The project aims to shatter barriers and assumptions. As a black woman in engineering, Thomas is acutely aware that she is one of a handful in her field. The girls she has been tracking are oblivious to any such statistics.

“Most of my SCAT scholars may not even know that black women are heavily underrepresented in computer science,” Thomas said, citing the most recent Computer Research Association Taulbee Survey. It showed that black women received three percent of the bachelor’s degrees in computer science awarded in the United States in 2016 – and that was a drop from the previous year, in which that group received four percent of those degrees.

“The numbers have been single-digit for years and years. And if you look at Native American women and Latina women, it’s the same,” she said. “It’s abysmal.”

To recruit her first scholars for a yearlong pilot study, Thomas leveraged organizations including Boys and Girls Clubs, black churches and teachers. They found dozens of girls and their parents who were up to the challenge. That pilot study yielded such positive results

– though they knew they were in a limited program, some girls in the pilot program begged to be allowed to continue – that Thomas set out to begin her three-year study in earnest.

The 20 sixth-grade girls who entered the now five-year-old SCAT program will soon enter 11th grade. They remain devoted to their progress, continuing to meet with Thomas monthly.

Parents were enthusiastic to enroll their daughters.

Tarenia Carthan saw SCAT as an opportunity to open new doors in tech for her daughter, Asia, and expand her knowledge of the field.

“When she asks for rewards, she always wants video game cards. So I decided to find her a program that would put her on the other side of it, not just to play them but to actually create them,” Carthan said.

Asia was game for it.

“It’s a really exciting experience because you get to know about working with other people,” Asia said, adding that she became an expert in the Scratch video game creation platform and its algorithm, something one of her teachers at school refers to often. “What he talks about, I already know, so I have an advantage. It’s actually more fun than work.”

In one of their latest projects, the scholars created digital comic books in which a young, black woman is cast in the role of superhero.

Then, they put those superheroes in motion, making them the lead characters in their video games.

Thomas said it was notable that those superheroes were not all based on the characteristics of the girls creating them. Several scholars created a united front of sister superheroes.

That speaks to the scholars’ level of cooperation, a critical component in the study. Thomas allowed the girls to form groups, with one caveat: they could not team up with girls they already knew from school or their neighborhoods.

They were experiencing teamwork and cooperation, many of them for the first time.

“They formed a kind of sisterhood around creating video games,” Thomas said.

SCAFFOLDS OF LEARNING The scholars were immersed in a cognitive-apprenticeship environment, structured on the educational scaffolding technique. For the first two years, an African-American computer science professor facilitated the group and modeled the way the girls needed to approach the learning process. Then, a group of undergraduate students — also black women — joined in, providing “just-in-time” scaffolding, catching the girls whenever they got stuck in the process, providing subtle pushes to help them along.

In the final learning stage, novices who picked up the knowledge at an accelerated pace stepped in to help, or scaffold, their fellow scholars.

“We ended up designing this extremely intersectional learning environment that spoke strongly to the needs of these girls,” Thomas said. “As black girls and as black women, we experience the world through a different lens because we experience multiple ‘isms’ simultaneously. We might experience racism, sexism and classism. There are a lot of different ‘isms’ that can’t be broken apart because our experience is that they’re happening at the same time.”

Thomas is thrilled that the games the girls are designing address social issues. That’s echoed in a class she has taught for the last two fall semesters at Auburn: Game Design for Social Change.

“It’s helping students to see that game design and gaming can be a tool to create social change and to create changes in the way people experience and understand the world,” she said. “In video-game speak, that addictiveness or that playing as hours pass by is called flow. So if you can get somebody to enter a state of flow and at the same time help them to shift their perspective of how they see, respond to or understand the world, that’s amazing to me.”

At the end of each middle school year, the SCAT scholars completed a questionnaire about their learning experience.

“They were describing more and more these situations where they were using the things that they learned in SCAT in other contexts.

Things like, ‘I taught my Girl Scout troop how to design video games,’ or, ‘I put together a presentation at my school about how to use Scratch because I already knew how to do it.’ I thought, ‘Oh, wow, it would be cool to see if we could more formally develop that capability in them.’”

The girls led summer computer game sessions for younger kids, formulating their own lesson plans, then de-briefing with one another to analyze more effective approaches to teaching.

Auburn doctoral student Rachelle Minor left a long, boring summer internship as a software tester and joined Thomas. She wanted to learn about non-programming computing fields. She liked working with kids.

It became so much more than an internship.

Now, Minor is gauging how the subjects’ perceptions of themselves have shifted over time, using data from the study, but also drawing from the work of psychologist Albert Bandura’s work in social learning and self-efficacy.

“After initially joining, I had no idea how impactful this program would be, not only for Dr. Thomas but for the SCAT scholars, their parents, the community, student researchers and co-facilitators, and for the expansion of the knowledge base in general, especially in STEM education,” Minor said.

Once strictly consumers of video games, the girls are now designers and educators as well and continue to build on their knowledge and experience.

Thomas said parents consistently tell her, “I had no idea my child could do that.”

Yolanda Wright-Udoh enrolled her daughter, Nubia, in the program.

“Since technology and jobs are ever-changing, it was definitely to her benefit to have been exposed to writing programs,” Wright-Udoh said. “It seems that’s where our future is leading, so she would

definitely have an edge in just being exposed to it, even if she doesn’t go into creating video games.”

Nubia, at first reluctant, is now enthusiastic.

“It helped me have a different view on thinking,” Nubia said. “I’d never heard the word algorithm before this program, and all the processes involved with it. I feel pretty awesome about learning it.”

The ongoing goal is to encourage young African-American women to pursue computer science, software engineering and other STEM fields by shattering barriers and assumptions and sending a group of intensely trained and enthusiastic students into a realm where they have always been underrepresented. As they embark on their final years of high school, all the project’s scholars plan to attend college, and most of them intend to go into STEM fields, Thomas said.

“How generalizable will the findings end up being? I don’t know,” Thomas said. “But I will be able to say, very clearly, that this particular young woman was impacted in this way because of something that happened here. Dots will be able to be connected, and that’s something that has been missing in the field.”

JAKITA THOMAS Philpott-WestPoint Stevens Associate Professor of Computer Science and Software Engineering

334-844-6498 jnt0020@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/JThomas

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ATTACK OF THE CLONES

Electrical and computer engineering researcher seeks to combat cloning within global electronics supply chain B Y

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Electronic cloning — whether it’s duplicating a printed circuit board or copying the electronics in a network router — is a significant and complex problem that is plaguing the global electronics supply chain.

Cloned products with inferior quality parts or counterfeit components that make it through the supply chain and land in the hands of consumers may not be as reliable as the product with authentic parts.

Such products may not even work.

Or it may work just as well as the

As the number of IoT devices grows, everyone should become more aware of the dangers that cloned products pose. real thing, but provide hackers with remote control or access to personal information. For instance, a hacker who has control over a cloned router can intercept or redirect communications on the network. A car with cloned parts may not start. Or cloned devices that connect to an engine control unit may give a hijacker access to a car’s brakes and steering.

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“While there appear to be no published reports of injury or hacking related to this cloning, the risks are bigger today because more of the systems we interact with daily are connected to the internet,” said Ujjwal Guin, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “Cloned hardware may lack the security modules intended to protect such devices, and so it may open up the unsuspecting user to cyberattack.”

Predictions from Gartner, a research and advisory company, and Cisco’s Internet Business Solutions Group, claim there will be 20-50 billion devices connected to the internet by 2020, further complicating the “internet of things.” Without solutions such as those being developed by Guin and others at Auburn University, the global epidemic of cloned systems will only worsen.

“As the number of IoT devices grows, everyone should become more aware of the dangers that cloned products pose,” said Guin.

Even if just 1 percent of those 50 billion connected devices were clones, harboring malicious hardware or software, that’s 500 million susceptible devices.

Unfortunately, the battle against cloning and counterfeiting is much more complicated than it used to be. In earlier times, counterfeiters would simply repackage old or inferior components and sell them as if they were new, but these knockoffs had poor reliability. These days, cloned electronics are very sophisticated and potentially more nefarious.

Guin said the counterfeiters make their own components, boards and systems from scratch and then package them into superficially similar products. The clones may be less reliable than the genuine product, having never undergone rigorous testing. In addition, they may also host unwanted or even malicious software, firmware or hardware and the consumer may not know the difference.

The growing practice of counterfeiting and cloning of electronics is destructive to the global supply chain, companies and consumers.

The International Chamber of Commerce estimated that trade in counterfeit and cloned products — including non-electronic products such as designer handbags — amounted to $650 billion globally in 2011. A 2017 report commissioned by the ICC’s Business Action to Stop Counterfeiting and Piracy and the International Trademark Association estimated the wider social and economic impact on displaced economic activity, investment, public fiscal losses and criminal enforcement could reach an estimated $1.9 trillion by 2022.

The negative impacts of counterfeiting and piracy — the unauthorized use or reproduction of another’s work — are projected to drain $4.2 trillion from the global economy and risk 5.4 million legitimate jobs by 2022, according to the report.

“Cloned electronics are a great threat, even if the device is purchased in the United States,” said Jubayer Mahmod, a graduate

research assistant under Guin.

“The electronic supply chain is quite complicated nowadays. Therefore, it is difficult to ensure the integrity of the parts and the devices.

Internet-connected devices, like modems and phones, could lead to much more serious threats than just reliability problems. Cloning, along with hardware/software level malicious modifications, can make people vulnerable to hacking.”

Such a gloomy outlook is only darkened by the fact that nobody really knows the true scale of cloning in the electronics realm. Cloners themselves are a clandestine group.

Plus, adequate detection measures don’t really exist in the global supply chain.

Guin wants to change that. His research is focused on developing solutions to detect counterfeit integrated circuits and cloned systems.

By discovering these items in the supply chain, Guin seeks to prevent them from getting into electronic products before they are sold around the globe.

Whatever the true size of the cloned electronics market, Guin and

fellow researchers at the University of Florida firmly believe it is growing, simply based on their work with SMT Corp., a Connecticutbased electronic parts supplier whose labs specialize in identifying cloned and counterfeited components in global supply chains.

“Among the trends contributing to the growth of cloning are more-sophisticated imaging and analysis tools and the spread of contract manufacturing, a business model in which the companies that design chips and systems outsource their fabrication,” Guin said. “As design files are passed back and forth between the designer and the contractor, cloners will exploit any crack in security to get those files.

Once a cloner succeeds in fabricating credible copies, the ubiquity of online sales makes it easy for the sellers to hide their identities and attract bargain-minded customers.”

Guin’s research is part of the Charles D. McCrary Institute for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Cyber Systems at Auburn.

“The primary objective of the McCrary Institute is to ensure security

for our critical infrastructure,” said Guin. “Infiltration of compromised electronics in our critical infrastructure will be catastrophic. An adversary can disable an infrastructure when they want.”

Simply, Guin said his research is about trust. There is currently very limited trust in integrated systems manufactured outside the United States. However, establishing trust throughout the global supply chain should allow consumers to confidently purchase and use reliable electronic systems, no matter where production occurs.

“Trust is a big part of combating this intricate problem,” said Mahmod. “A well-planned supply chain should improve consumers’ freedom of buying an electronic device.”

With funding from the National Science Foundation, Guin’s latest project focuses on designing a

secure logic locking technique to enable protection against untrusted integrated circuits manufacturing.

“Due to the prohibitive costs of semiconductor manufacturing, most computer chip design companies outsource their production to offshore foundries.

As many of these chips may be manufactured in environments of limited trust, problems of the piracy of intellectual property and the overproduction of integrated circuits have emerged in recent years,” he wrote.

Guin said research like his in addressing clones in the critical infrastructures is in the nascent phase and would benefit from additional support from government and industry. Now is a crucial time for such work as advance reverse engineering techniques are making cloning easy and low-cost electronic products are in high demand.

UJJWAL GUIN Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering

334-844-1835 ujjwal.guin@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/UGuin

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REDEFINING

ONLINE EDUCATION

Three new online degrees elevate Auburn’s top-ranked online graduate programs

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Technology is rapidly evolving every day. In our fast-paced world, industry professionals are balancing work and life demands while also seeking additional training and education to be successful in their field. The Samuel Ginn College of Engineering is doing its part to match these demands through its online educational offerings.

Auburn Engineering Online and Continuing Education offers students the opportunity to continue their academic journey at their own convenience through flexible, online courses. The graduate online program is ranked 15th in the nation according to U.S. News & World Report, and combines traditional instruction with the latest delivery methods to offer educational opportunities beyond the campus.

Online students receive the same lectures, assignments and exams from engineering professors as their on-campus peers. The admissions process, performance expectations and degrees are identical to those on-campus graduate students.

Students have the opportunity to gain new knowledge, increase their professional opportunities and create a brighter future, all from the comfort of home, work or anywhere.

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The program offers affordable online degree offerings in eight engineering disciplines that will increase professional opportunities, and provide that stepping stone needed to move forward in one’s career. Online graduate degrees may be earned in the following disciplines: Aerospace Chemical Civil Computer Science and Software Electrical and Computer Industrial and Systems Materials Mechanical “Our graduate online program ranks among the top in the nation because of our quality of programs and dynamic faculty,” said Christopher B. Roberts, dean of engineering. “We are proud to offer an on-campus equivalent graduate engineering degree to those who want to further their professional goals, but want to do so at their convenience. With our list of degree options continuing to grow, we have the ability to attract more students from all across the country.”

To continue to meet the demand for relevant and in-demand academic offerings for students and industry, Auburn Engineering Online and Continuing Education offers three brand new degrees — the Master of Cybersecurity Engineering, Master of Engineering and Master of Engineering Management.

The Master of Cybersecurity Engineering, housed in the Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, equips students with the advanced education required to analyze, develop, investigate, protect and defend computer information systems. The degree also concentrates on engineering and the technical aspects of cybersecurity. With cybersecurity becoming one of the nation’s most discussed issues, this degree will prepare individuals to identify, assess and provide solutions to thwart cyber attacks.

The Master of Engineering degree allows students to design a specific degree tailored to fit their needs and is not limited to one engineering discipline.

“The Master of Engineering degree is unique in that it attracts students from all engineering disciplines,” said Roberts. “Our mission is to provide access to the highest quality engineering education, and that’s exactly what we’re accomplishing through this online degree. Students

will have the advantage of earning an Auburn Engineering graduate degree at their convenience and use the degree to fulfill their professional goals.”

The Master of Engineering Management, housed in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, is designated for students who are currently working in an engineering-related field and want to expand their career potential. Students who complete 30 hours will earn a Master of Engineering Management in one of four options — manufacturing, occupational safety and ergonomics, systems or product innovation (anticipated in 2020).

The degree is the only of its kind in Alabama and was ranked fifth in BestCollegeReviews.org 2018 Top 50 Online Master’s Degrees in Engineering Management.

For those students interested in continuing their education, but may not be ready to pursue a graduate degree, graduate certificates permit students to take individual courses in their chosen area of interest. This option allows individuals to continue building their knowledge in a specific area while also receiving academic credit. If an individual applies to Auburn Engineering’s online program, and is accepted, any earned certificates may be later applied toward that student’s degree. The GRE is not required to enroll and there is no limit to the number of certificates a student may earn.

future, all from the comfort of home, work or anywhere. And for students who are eager to expand their knowledge on topics related to their career, graduate certificates offer a perfect blend of becoming better educated in a specific area while banking those credit hours toward a degree.

Mirroring the upward trajectory of the graduate online degrees, several new graduate certificates have been added or will be offered soon.

“The graduate certificates offer an excellent opportunity for engineering professionals who want to take a few courses to further their knowledge in their area of expertise,” Roberts said. “Our graduate certificates allow students the flexibility to take courses, grow in their career and work toward a master’s degree in the future if they choose to do so.”

It may be a fast-paced world filled with work and family commitments, but that doesn’t stop individuals from continuing their education whether near or far. Auburn Engineering Online and Continuing Education will continue to change, adjust and grow to reflect the increased demand for online learning — and like its students, can’t wait to see what the future holds.

Auburn Engineering Online and Continuing Education offers a type of versatile program that appeals to potential students in any engineering-related discipline. Students have the opportunity to gain new knowledge, increase their professional opportunities and create a brighter

To learn more about the graduate online programs, visit aub.ie/eng-online.

Online Degree Programs Master of Science, Aerospace Engineering

New Online Programs

Master of Science, Chemical Engineering

Bachelor of Computer Science

Master of Civil Engineering

Master of Engineering

Master of Science, Computer Science and Software Engineering

Master of Engineering Management Master of Cybersecurity Engineering

Master of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering

Online Graduate Certificates

Master of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Automotive Manufacturing Systems

Dual Master of Industrial and Systems Engineering and Master of Business Administration

Occupational Safety and Ergonomics

Master of Science, Materials Engineering

Pulp and Paper (pending approval)

Master of Science, Mechanical Engineering

Tribology Engineering (pending approval)

Power Engineering (pending approval)

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DRIVING

INNOVATION Auburn researchers address challenges in advanced vehicle manufacturing B Y

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Photos courtesy of Honda Manufacturing of Alabama

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The state of Alabama and the Southeast have become a hub for vehicle manufacturing, and the Southern Alliance for Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing Center at Auburn University aims to provide a clear research contribution to a sector that is vital to the region and nation’s economy.

The center addresses the many challenges facing vehicle manufacturers by focusing on four major thrust areas: PRODUCT AND PROCESSES

 Equipment

 Processes

 Automation

 Materials

MATERIALS AND LOGISTICS

 Work in progress

 Final inventory

 Material handling

HUMANS

 Ergonomics

 Skills

 Training

 Human in the loop

INFORMATION AND DATA

 Digital manufacturing

 Model-based enterprise

 Internet of things

 Industrie 4.0

 Data analytics

SAAV is supported by numerous faculty members and graduate students. Greg Harris, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering, serves as the SAAV director. A 1981 graduate with a bachelor’s degree in industrial

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engineering, Harris returned to Auburn in 2016. Prior to returning to the Plains, Harris was the program manager for the Digital Manufacturing and Design Innovation Institute, a cornerstone of former President Barack Obama’s initiative to spur American competitiveness through next-generation manufacturing centers.

they have been taught in a real environment.”

Harris and his colleagues are building partnerships with industry collaborators that will lead to technological advancements all along the automotive supply chain.

“The alliance is working on real industry problems by using academic research to address those challenges while applying advanced manufacturing processes and technologies to solve manufacturing problems. An important goal of the center is to develop robust relationships between industry and academia,” Harris said.

Harris and SAAV are supported by faculty members Sa’d Hamasha, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering; Tom Devall, director of auto manufacturing initiatives; Daniel Silva, assistant professor of industrial and systems engineering; and Justin Patton, director of the Radio Frequency Identification Lab in the Harbert College of Business. A group of 11 graduate students representing a number of Alabama-based industries are also heavily involved with the center.

SAAV members have completed two projects and there are five active members with projects. Current active members include automotive original equipment manufacturer Honda Manufacturing of Alabama, automotive suppliers Brose Tuscaloosa Inc., Borbet Alabama Inc. and Arkal Automotive, and an electronics-manufacturing consortium that includes Universal Instruments.

“Our faculty bring a wide variety of expertise and experience in solving complex problems,” Harris said.

“We are able to implement problem-solving techniques appropriate for the complex problems under consideration. Our engaged and motivated students bring energy, excitement and intelligence, and they’re focused on implementing the problem-solving capabilities

Government participants in additive manufacturing include NASA and the Army Aviation and Missile Research Development and Engineering Center. The completed projects focused on continuous improvement and development of a quality system (a more than 25 percent reduction in first-pass defects) and the implementation of a continuous improvement strategy and

application resulting in the Brose Tuscaloosa plant being recognized as a Best Plant by the corporation.

The company is implementing the Auburn-proposed system worldwide at more than 60 plants.

Ongoing projects include supply chain simulations and production flow improvement at Honda, quality and productivity improvement at Arkal, Borbet and Brose, and reliability of various lead-free solder materials in mechanical life testing at Universal Instruments.

In addition to solving serious and complex problems for these organizations, Auburn Engineering students are gaining extremely valuable skills. At this time, 100 percent of the students placed in these projects have been offered positions with the companies they were engaged with. To expand on this success, SAAV members also met in 2018 for the first Industrial Advisory Board meeting, with future plans to expand and collaborate with peer institutions and other corporations.

GREG HARRIS Associate Professor of Industrial and Systems Engineering Director, Southern Alliance for Advanced Vehicle Manufacturing

334-844-1407 gah0015@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/GHarris

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NEXTGENERATION BATTERIES Auburn researchers look beyond lithium ion for the next great battery B Y

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Illustration by Armin VahidMohammadi

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Exploding batteries create chaos.

That’s the headline Auburn University Assistant Professor Majid Beidaghi read in 2016 when Samsung’s newest cellphone, the Galaxy Note 7, began combusting inside the pockets and purses of people worldwide.

Surveillance footage showed people in restaurants jolting away from their phones as they emitted thick puffs of toxic smoke. Images showed charred bronze cellphone frames next to a man whose leg had just been scorched by the Samsung device, leaving him with second-degree burns.

A year later, hoverboards joined the lineup of gadgets susceptible to engulfing in flames, but these hazards are no surprise to Beidaghi. All wireless products have a common

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denominator in terms of power source, thus all wireless products are capable of an explosion, he said. In every camera, computer, tablet and cellphone lies this power source, and so too lies the cause for the vast number of explosions reported.

The culprit is lithium ion batteries.

Beidaghi and his team of Auburn researchers are spearheading the development of a new type of battery that will revolutionize all wireless products, and more importantly, end the flurry of headlines following another lithium ion battery explosion.

“We’re working beyond the lithium ion battery. It’s the best battery right now, but we’re developing a safer, more sustainable, multivalent battery,” Beidaghi said.

The idea behind Beidaghi group’s multivalent battery is being driven

by earth’s most abundant metal — aluminum.

Armin VahidMohammadi, a graduate research assistant in Beidaghi’s lab, is among the researchers making aluminum batteries a reality.

The setbacks accompanying lithium ion batteries are juxtaposed by aluminum’s benefits, he said; reactivity being an example.

“You can handle aluminum in the air, but you can’t do that with lithium because then...,” VahidMohammadi said before motioning his hands outwards, signaling an explosion.

The way a lithium battery discharges is that lithium ions are removed from the anode, or negative electrode, and lose electrons into an external circuit, which is where the functional work is done. Ions then move through an ionically conductive material, the electrolyte, and

become embedded in the cathode or positive electrode. The failures of this system, which can result in explosions, come from charging too fast, physical damage or overheating.

Once a spark ignites, extinguishing the flames becomes difficult.

Oxygen infiltrating the lithium fuels the fire because the oxidant is self contained in the battery. This, VahidMohammadi said, is why it’s important to make a battery without lithium and with aluminum — the latter is impervious to the effects of air, thus eliminating any chance of combustion.

The positives of aluminum also extend beyond safety. Batteries with a metal in the negative electrode are ideal because they give the most capacity and highest energy density. Lithium’s dangerous sensitivity and its tendency to grow dendrites that can cause a short circuit in the battery means using it as an anode is impossible, but aluminum is safe to use as an anode in an aluminum battery.

“Aluminum has the highest volumetric capacity among all metals, and we can use this property to make batteries that store a high amount of charge in a limited volume,” Beidaghi said.

The rewards brought on by aluminum’s charge density also present a problem. Because of its high charge density from three positive charges, aluminum interacts strongly with other similarly charged ions, preventing the intercalation of aluminum ions into the structure of most cathode materials.

If an aluminum battery system can be developed, then theoretically for each ion there will be three electrons, said Beidaghi; meaning an aluminum battery will be much more efficient and powerful than

the lithium battery, which only gets one electron for each ion.

“If you increase the energy and power densities of batteries, you could be able to charge batteries quicker, and the charged battery could last much longer,” Beidaghi said.

The main obstacle in realizing an aluminum battery was finding a cathode material suitable for an aluminum battery — and the Auburn researchers found just that.

“We were working with a new family of materials called MXenes…

We took one of the members of this family, used it as the cathode, and made a fully working battery,” VahidMohammadi said.

The Auburn researchers are the first to publish research highlighting the potential of MXenes as a cathode material for aluminum batteries.

“We have demonstrated that this can work, so it feels good,” VahidMohammadi said. “But it doesn’t come without challenges.”

With pioneering research comes unknown problems, and Beidaghi sees a parallel between the initial stages of their aluminum battery research and the research of lithium ion batteries in the 1970s, which was met with skepticism.

The notion of lithium batteries was seen as farfetched and an unlikely development.

“Not many people believed lithium batteries would work, and it ended up changing the world,” Beidaghi said. “So there is no scientific reason to think aluminum batteries won’t work either.”

The surging electric vehicle market could be a prime platform for this research. Just like cellphones, these vehicles are powered by lithium ion batteries and are also prone to the same types of explosions; meaning

Illustration by Armin VahidMohammadi

people not only risk losing their phone in a pile of ash, but their $100,000 electric vehicle as well.

The exorbitant cost of these vehicles is largely because of lithium ion batteries, but having a cheaper battery could change that. Since aluminum is so abundant and easy to extract, aluminum batteries could potentially drive down the cost of luxurious Teslas.

“One important aspect of our work is the potential for making electric cars more affordable by making a safer and cheaper battery,” Beidaghi said.

Andrew Tormanen, an undergraduate researcher in Beidaghi’s lab, is responsible for changing the structures of materials on nano and micro scales in the research. He also regards developing next-generation batteries as a necessary progression needed in the electric vehicle market.

“In Europe, they’re phasing out gas

vehicles for electric, so in the next five years, there’s going to be a rise in the demand for electric vehicles,” Tormanen said.

Just as electric vehicles are being heralded for their potential for increased sustainability, aluminum batteries could also be an equally advantageous product for the environment.

Recycling lithium from batteries is expensive and difficult, said Beidaghi, but recycling aluminum is something we have done for many years, and can continue to do. The plentiful amounts of the metal and its easy recyclability could be a huge benefactor for sustainability.

“If we continue on our current track in our research, we won’t be talking about batteries catching fire in the future,” Beidaghi said while pointing at his phone. “Difficulty is what we want. We are scientists, and we want to solve problems because we’re not afraid of them.”

MAJID BEIDAGHI Assistant Professor of Materials Engineering

334-844-3118 mzb0088@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/MBeidaghi

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BETTER

TOGETHER Truck platooning research yields increased fuel efficiency, improved safety B Y

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Illustration by Sarah McCollough

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as well. Using vehicle-to-vehicle wireless communications technology and sensors, two or more trucks can link together and maintain a set, close distance between each other automatically. When the lead truck accelerates or decelerates, so do the following trucks.

As the Blue Water Bridge demonstration and subsequent testing on I-69 have shown, this technology offers the promise of increased fuel efficiencies, decreased traffic congestion and improved safety for truck fleets.

Rumbling down Interstate 69 on a crisp fall day in Michigan, a mixed convoy of military and commercial trucks using autonomous vehicle technology snaked its way through Port Huron across the picturesque Blue Water Bridge into Canada and back.

Truck platooning systems could have large benefits in the trucking industry for both commercial and military applications.

Led by a team of U.S. Army and Auburn University researchers, the convoy demonstrated the capabilities of truck platooning technology for a crowd of dignitaries and the automotive press corps gathered at the U.S.-Canada border. The history-making trek in October 2017 was the first international border crossing conducted by the U.S. Army Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, or TARDEC, using the rapidly advancing technology.

Truck platooning is increasingly seen as the future of freight transport with myriad other applications

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“Truck platooning systems could have large benefits in the trucking industry for both commercial and military applications,” said David Bevly, the Bill and Lana McNair Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of Auburn’s GPS and Vehicle Dynamics Laboratory.

Since joining the Auburn Engineering faculty in 2001, Bevly and his team of GAVLAB researchers have been at the forefront of research on vehicle dynamics, navigation and control. The lab’s expertise in this area has made it a natural partner for organizations engaged in autonomous vehicle research and development, such as TARDEC and the Federal Highway Administration.

Bevly and his GAVLAB team have been at the heart of a $1.42 million FHWA project to evaluate the commercial feasibility and benefits of driver assisted truck platooning, or DATP. It is a form of cooperative

adaptive cruise control for twotruck platoons. Other project partners include Peloton Technology, Peterbilt Trucks, Meritor WABCO and the American Transportation Research Institute.

The project has consisted of development and testing of DATP, as well as stakeholder engagement and business case analyses in the trucking industry. The team’s findings have supported their theory that truck platooning technology is near market ready and will provide significant value to the industry and fleet owners.

“Humans don’t have the reaction time to allow short distance platooning,” Bevly said. “When you can have sensors and computers controlling that to allow trucks to follow close and draft, you get fuel savings and those fuel savings are a benefit to the economy and to the environment.”

As part of the project, the GAVLAB team conducted initial fuel testing at the Transportation Research Institute’s test track in Ohio using Peloton’s prototype truck platooning systems. The GAVLAB team has gone on to develop its own algorithms used in recent testing at Auburn University’s National Center for Asphalt Technology test track, as well as the demonstrations on the Blue Water Bridge and I-69

in Michigan and I-85 in Alabama.

GAVLAB-developed algorithms and software operated all four trucks in the mixed military and commercial convoy on I-69.

Data from these tests showed that peak fuel savings for the platoon was 6.96 percent at a 30-foot distance, and peak fuel savings for the following truck was 10.24 percent at a 50-foot distance. Even at a 75-foot following distance, the tests showed that truck platoons can yield a 10.11 percent fuel savings for the following truck and a 5.59 percent average fuel savings for the platoon.

Considering that long-haul trucking accounts for more than 10 percent of U.S. oil, and fuel takes up 41 percent of operating expenses for truck fleets, the economic impact is substantial.

“The heavy truck industry is really a large consumer of fuel so I think there’s a huge potential benefit for fuel savings,” said Grant Apperson, a GAVLAB research and mechanical engineering graduate student. “It can have a huge impact on our economy because this industry uses so much fuel.”

The DATP system functions using a low level of autonomy, controlling only the truck’s brakes and throttle.

The driver is still in control of

steering and can override the system braking and throttling, if needed.

The system operates by pulling together radar for longitudinal sensing, vehicle-to-vehicle communications for exchanging information between vehicles, satellite positioning for verifying distance between trucks, actuation for longitudinal control of the vehicle and human-machine interfaces for controlling DATP settings.

Besides the economic upside, the DATP technology can also vastly improve safety by reducing the opportunity for human error.

Highlighting how truck platooning technology can improve safety is a key goal for industry and the military, which was one aspect of Auburn’s October 2017 demo with TARDEC in Michigan.

That day, the four-truck convoy consisted of two Peterbilt 579 commercial trucks, as well as the Army’s M915

“line haul” tractors carrying flatbed trailers loaded with cargo containers.

“It was really interesting to show interoperability between military trucks and commercial trucks using common communication platforms between the trucks,” Bevly said of the truck platooning demo.

For the Army, interest in truck platooning technology goes far beyond fuel economy. With military convoys a prime target for attack in conflict zones, the Army has a vested interest in using as few personnel as possible during transport.

“It’s about saving lives, first and foremost,” TARDEC Director Paul Rogers told Great Lakes Today, a regional journalism consortium.

“It’s about being more efficient and being able to do more with the number of soldiers and the number of trucks that we have. And it’s always about giving the soldier what they need to succeed and come home.”

DAVID BEVLY Bill and Lana McNair Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering

334-844-3446 bevlydm@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/DBevly

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HEALTH CARE AT YOUR FINGER TIPS Researchers develop smartphone app that monitors respiration rates B Y

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What if a simple smartphone app could alert you or your doctor to a health issue based upon the detection of a change in your respiration or heart rates?

Rather than using sensors that attach to the chest or clip to your fingertips, the technology is contact-free, low-cost, easy to deploy and suitable for long-term monitoring of a patient’s conditions.

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

Researchers in the Auburn University Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center are working to make this a reality.

The SonarBeat system is implemented in the form of an Android smartphone app to transmit signals into open space through the phone’s speaker.

Shiwen Mao and graduate students Xuyu Wang, Runze Huang and Chao Yang are developing two systems with applications in health care: SonarBeat, an ultrasound-based smartphone app that is used to monitor respiration rates; and PhaseBeat, a Wi-Fi-based technology that can monitor both respiration and heart rates.

“The signal hits on the chest of the patient — there is a chest movement induced by breathing — and the acoustic signal changes,” Mao said. “Those chest movements change the feature characteristics of the signal. The smartphone microphone picks up the reflected signal, and the signal processing software is executed to detect the small variations induced by the movements. We are then able to make accurate estimates of respiration rates, with a median error around 0.3 beats-per-minute.”

“We use an acoustic signal to detect respiration rates of a patient,” said Mao, Samuel Ginn Professor and director of the Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center.

“Rather than using sensors that attach to the chest or clip to your fingertips, the technology is contact-free, low-cost, easy to deploy and suitable for long-term monitoring of a patient’s conditions.”

The smartphone app-based system has been tested in a living room, an office and even a crowded movie theater.

“It has been found to be quite robust when it comes to interfering

noises and different environments, largely due to the short propagation range of acoustic signals,” Mao said.

The PhaseBeat system employs the ubiquitous Wi-Fi infrastructure for contact-free health sensing, transmitting Wi-Fi signals from devices such as wireless routers, smartphones or laptop computers.

“Again, the signal hits the patient’s chest, and the reflected signal, along with signals from the line-ofsight path and reflected from other obstacles, are received by another device equipped with an IEEE 802.11n card with three antennas,” Mao said. “The received signal is calibrated and analyzed, with the small vital sign signals detected.

It works the same way to detect heartbeat signals to measure heart rates, working over a longer distance and even through a wall.”

Mao said the technology will eventually be available for use in the home to assist those who are living alone, without the necessity of specialized or expensive equipment.

“We can use what is monitored to detect an issue or to compare with certain features that can indicate certain types of disease,” he said.

“By comparing the data, we can detect anomalies and send alarms to the doctor or directly to the patient.

“In addition, the wireless system’s signal is able to penetrate obstacles and could be used to locate survivors in the aftermath of a disaster or to detect breathing patterns and sound an alarm to wake a tired driver.”

Mao said the next step to making that a reality is to pursue collaborations for testing the technology with researchers in industry or medical schools.

“Both SonarBeat and PhaseBeat can capture vital sign signals over an extended period of time,” he said. “Once equipped with the medical knowledge through such collaborations, the team aims to develop algorithms to detect signature features or symptoms in captured vital sign signals for diseases, such as sudden infant death syndrome or apnea. The system also can be used for activity recognition, to detect various activities of a patient, such as a fall, and trigger a warning message to doctors or family members.”

to use the captured respiration signal to control the MRI scanner.

If successful, patients would not be required to hold their breath during an MRI scan, making the procedure more comfortable for the elderly and patients with certain diseases.

Mao and his team were honored last fall at an international conference for their work on the SonarBeat technology. Their presentation of “SonarBeat:

Sonar Phase for Breathing Beat Monitoring with Smartphones” earned the Best Demo Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Conference on Sensing, Communication and Networking. The conference focuses on novel communication technologies and emerging applications and services involving mobile sensing and communication, and ubiquitous and pervasive computing.

SHIWEN MAO Samuel Ginn Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering Director, Wireless Engineering Research and Education Center

334-844-1845 szm0001@auburn.edu Website: aub.ie/SMao

Additionally, the team is collaborating with researchers at the Auburn University MRI Research Center 2017-18 Dean’s Report

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Auburn University President Steven Leath is committing unprecedented levels of support for research across the Auburn campus, bolstering engineering research programs that have long been on the ascendancy. Our faculty and students are conducting novel research in many emerging and established research areas, including advanced manufacturing, infrastructure and transportation, cybersecurity and information technology, energy and environment, engineered materials and nanotechnology and biomedical and pharmaceutical.

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Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

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RESEARCH CENTERS Auburn Engineering is one of the nation’s top 50 institutions in research expenditures. Pioneering research is underway in our 19 research centers and dozens of labs across campus, focused on producing technology and innovation that will help drive economic growth while improving human life on a global scale. Read more about Auburn Engineering’s quality indicators in research on page six.

Alabama Center for Paper and Bioresource Engineering

Center for Bioenergy and Bioproducts

National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence

Advanced Manufacturing Research Center

Center for Microfibrous Materials

National Center for Asphalt Technology

Alabama Micro/Nano Science and Technology Center

Center for Polymer and Advanced Composites Cyber Research Center

NextFlex Alliance — Harsh Environment Node

Alabama Technology Transfer Center

Erosion and Sediment Control Testing Facility

Occupational Safety, Ergonomics and Injury Prevention Center

Auburn University Detection and Food Safety Center

Highway Research Center

Thomas Walter Center for Technology Management

Center for Advanced Vehicle and Extreme Environment Electronics

MRI Research Center

McCrary Institute

NCAT CELEBRATES 30 YEARS OF INNOVATION IN ASPHALT The National Center for Asphalt Technology at Auburn University recently celebrated its 30th anniversary.

NCAT was established to provide practical research and development to meet the demands of maintaining America’s highway infrastructure. Today, NCAT remains committed to its mission: to provide innovative, relevant and implementable research, technology development, and education that advances safe and economically sustainable asphalt pavements.

In its 30 years of existence, NCAT researchers have published more than 300 technical reports, refereed publications and National Cooperative Highway Research Program reports. In addition,

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NCAT’s “Hot Mix Asphalt Materials, Mixture Design and Construction” was the industry’s first comprehensive textbook on hot mix asphalt technology.

Beyond its significant research contributions, NCAT has an economic development impact of $125 million to the state of Alabama each year.

“NCAT is a shining example of how to take the fundamentals that we try to provide in the classrooms and laboratories and bring them into application,” said Christopher B. Roberts, dean of engineering. “This center epitomizes our philosophy to applied research, making our roadways safer and saving taxpayer dollars. NCAT is truly a national asset with national exposure.”

Samuel Ginn College of Engineering

AUBURN JOINS ADDITIVE MANUFACTURING CENTER OF EXCELLENCE

Nima Shamsaei, director of NCAME

ASTM International, a worldrenowned standards and related services organization, recently announced Auburn University as one of the winners of a global competition for its first-ever Center of Excellence, which will focus on additive manufacturing.

From a pool of dozens of proposals submitted, EWI and Auburn University-NASA were co-selected.

The organizations and their partners will work to create a global innovation hub that advances technical standards, related research and development, education and training and more. The UK-based Manufacturing Technology Centre recently joined the Center of Excellence.

“Our college has made major investments in faculty, laboratories

and equipment to achieve a leadership position in additive manufacturing,” said Christopher B. Roberts, dean of engineering. “The efforts by our faculty are resulting in significant dividends to our research program. To be recognized

by ASTM International is quite an honor and we look forward to a productive, collaborative relationship with ASTM and EWI.”

Auburn’s inclusion in the new Center of Excellence follows another agreement with the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center to establish a National Center for Additive Manufacturing Excellence at Auburn. Nima Shamsaei, associate professor of mechanical engineering, was named director of NCAME.

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Auburn University Samuel Ginn College of Engineering Office of the Dean 1301 Shelby Center Auburn, AL 36849

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