Texas A&M Engineer 2006 by Texas A&M Engineering

research at the Dwight Look College of Engineering Tex as A&M University

[the energy issue]

Your trash, Your gas

Oil and after Biomass and clean air Keeping the lights on

2006

Skyrocketing prices at the pump are making us more interested than ever in new fuels and vehicles that get good gas mileage. How about an engine that gets 90 miles a gallon and runs on garbage? Texas A&M Engineeringâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Mark Holtzapple will make this happen.

See story on p. 22.

r esearch at the Dwight Look College of Engineering Tex as A&M University

pr emier e issue â&#x20AC;˘ 2006

Vice Chancellor and Dean of Engineering

G. Kemble Bennett, Ph.D., P.E. Assistant Vice Chancellor for Public Affairs

Marilyn M. Martell director of communications

Pamela S. Green design director

Stanton Ware

editor

Gene Charleton

On the cover Professor Mark Holtzapple, pictured in this photo illustration filling a vehicle with fuel from biomass, says that biofuels combined with high-efficiency vehicles could be the answer to skyrocketing prices at the gas pumps. Read more on p. 22.

Writers

Lesley V. Kriewald Susan E. Cotton Adam Dziedzic

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Communications in the Dwight Look College of Engineering at Texas A&M University to inform readers about faculty

ILLUSTRATION AND Design

Roby Fitzhenry

research activities. Opinions expressed in Texas A&M Engineer are those of the author or editor and do not necessarily represent the

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Matt Zeringue

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opinions of the Texas A&M University administration or The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. Media representatives: Permission is granted to use all or part of any article published in this magazine. Appropriate credit and a tearsheet are requested.

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Let us know what you think about what you read in Texas A&M Engineer. Editor, Texas A&M Engineer Texas A&M Engineering Communications 3134 TAMU College Station, TX 77843-3134 http://engineermag.tamu.edu engineermag@tamu.edu

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Photo • Matt Zeringue

2006

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

There is nothing more relevant to the future prosperity of this nation and the world than the production, distribution and use of clean, economical and sustainable energy. Texas is known as the â&#x20AC;&#x153;energy state,â&#x20AC;? and within the extensive research program of Texas A&M Engineering, no area involves more faculty than the broad spectrum of energy. Across our 12 academic departments, research programs cover the energy enterprise: production, conversion, distribution and end-use technologies. This inaugural issue of Texas A&M Engineer features just a small sampling of the many significant projects currently taking place in this area. But energy is not all we are working on. Engineers in all our disciplines are conducting extraordinary, cutting-edge research. Our long-standing commitment to research has never been more important. We are in a period of enormous growth and opportunity. Texas A&M Universityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s aggressive faculty reinvestment is adding more than 400 new faculty by 2008, with more than 100 new faculty members joining Texas A&M Engineering. In the very near future, construction will begin on the $100 million Emerging Technology and Economic Development Buildings, which will be devoted to engineering research and will complement the $100 million Life Sciences complex currently under construction. These additions, coupled with newly assigned campus facilities, almost double the amount of space devoted to engineering research. This infusion of new faculty, new buildings and new laboratories is invigorating our entire research program and fueling our passion for providing practical solutions to relevant problems. Energy is just one of them. Through leadership and discovery, we are making significant contributions to engineering research, education and practice. I invite you to enjoy the small sampling of our current work that is featured in this magazine. O

G. Kemble Bennett, Ph.D., P.E. Vice Chancellor and Dean of Engineering

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

contents 8 13 16 18 20 21 22 29 32 34 36 38 40 41 38 Policy +

16 Keeping the 22 COVER STORY lights on 8 To drill or not to drill

Petroleum engineers like information  — the more, the better, usually. It helps them decide where to drill for oil. But sometimes having the right information is more valuable than having a lot of it.

Nonstop coast to coast

A package of new technologies will allow the electric distribution system to monitor itself and warn operators when equipment is about to fail.

Skyrocketing prices at the pump are making us more interested than ever in vehicles that get good gas mileage. How about one that gets 90 miles a gallon and runs on garbage?

technology = security

clean air

Cattle manure may be the key ingredient in a newly patented process that takes almost all of an important pollutant out of power plant smokestack emissions.

16 8

32 20

Growing worldwide demand for oil is pushing gas prices at the pump higher and higher. Technology developed by Texas A&M petroleum engineers may help us reach new reservoirs.

2006

38 29

29 Tapping

13 Petroleum under pressure

Nuclear energy brings with it a risk that nuclear fuel and nuclear capabilities could be used to produce nuclear or radiological weapons. Ensuring that nuclear energy is used peacefully is the task of the nonproliferation expert. Diplomats get the spotlight in nonproliferation. But engineers and scientists can play an important role, too.

32 Biomass and

20 Energy 101:

Certified energyconscious A new course and certificate program introduces undergrads to all kinds of energy and new ways of thinking about them.

the trash alternative They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Sergio Capareda says it’s true.

36 Nuclear by the numbers

Computational science  — like the calculations and simulations Marvin Adams performs — will be the key to designing the next generation of electric power-generating nuclear reactors.

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

44 48 50 54 56 58 62 64 66 68 70 50 Physical

Departments question & answer

therapy for failing hearts A new heart assist device developed by a Texas A&M biomedical engineer and physician could offer new hope of recovery to people with congestive heart failure.

64 56 The science of scent

Can sensors and a computer replace a finely honed sense of smell? Maybe. Researchers are working on it.

70 Protein

Making robots smarter

origami

Engineers say barcode’s big brother, RFIDs, may help humans put robots to work on Mars.

Proteins are some of the most complicated and important molecules in the human body. Computer scientists are adding to our understanding of how proteins do what they do.

Oil and after: Q&A with Stephen Holditch

perspective

Nuclear power now and in the future

personality

Bjarne Stroustrup

students

76 58

54 It is easy 44 Why the

levees broke Understanding why levees and flood walls failed instead of protecting New Orleans from Katrina’s surging waters is the job of three Texas A&M civil engineers.

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

68 68 Batteries

being green There’s more to recycling a cell phone than putting it out by the curb on collection day. Texas A&M engineers are working to make product recycling and remanufacturing more efficient.

Neat stuff our students do

leadership

56 54 44

58 Bright ideas

A lot of bright ideas just stay ideas. Our engineering technology students learn how to turn their bright ideas into marketable products.

not required Magnetic shape memory alloys that change shape to produce power could change our lives, from powering your iPod as you run to refrigerating your food. Oh, and protecting borders, too.

Who’s who in Texas A&M Engineering

honors & awards

Making us proud

chairs & professorships

Our top faculty

grants & contracts

Top research

Oil and After

Q&A with Stephen Holditch Stephen Holditch is department head and Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Endowed Chair in Petroleum Engineering at Texas A&M University and faculty member since 1976. A member of the National Academy of Engineering since 1995, Dr. Holditch is a world leader in petroleum engineering and served as president of the Society of Petroleum Engineers International from 2001 to 2003.

Consumers are buckling under rising prices at the gas station. Whatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s the real demand, worldwide, for fossil fuels and what can we expect in the future?

The demand for energy worldwide will continue to increase, and hydrocarbons (coal, oil and natural gas) will be the primary source of energy. The energy industry understands that in addition to increasing production to meet world energy demand, they must become better stewards of the environment and lead the way in developing sustainable energy systems. The challenge for universities will be to help develop the technology and train the next generation of professionals to increase the supply of energy, develop extraction methods that are environmentally acceptable, and develop the technologies that will lead to new energy systems to eventually replace fossil fuels.

What about the economics of finding these fuels?

Just like all natural resources, oil and natural gas deposits are distributed log-normally in nature. At the top of the resource triangle for oil and gas resources are the medium- to high-quality reservoirs. These conventional reservoirs are small and easy to develop. The most difficult part is finding these highpermeability reservoirs.

Stephen Holditch, head of the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering and Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Endowed Chair in Petroleum Engineering, says that over time petroleum engineering will transform itself into a broader-based discipline, energy engineering.

However, as one goes deeper into the resource triangle, one encounters unconventional reservoirs that have extremely large volumes of oil or gas in place but are more difficult to develop. To produce these unconventional reservoirs, a combination of increased oil and gas prices and/or improved technology are required. In the last 30 years, substantial improvements in technology and increases in oil and gas prices have allowed many operators to produce low-permeability oil and gas fields, gas from coalbed and shales, and heavy oil deposits.

Q A

What about the available gas reserves worldwide? The world gas reserves at the end of 2003 were 6,200 trillion cubic feet (Tcf ). Currently, the world uses about 80 Tcf of gas per year, mostly in North America and in Europe. Approximately 75 percent of those reserves are located in Europe, Eurasia and the Middle East, primarily in Russia, Iran and Qatar. Gas-toliquids technology is developing rapidly. Natural gas can be converted to syngas and then into methanol, ammonia, or using the Fisher Tropsch process, diesel or other fuels. Liquid fuels from natural gas can be used in fuel cells, gasoline engines and diesel engines whenever the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s conventional oil fields begin to decline. And liquid fuels from natural gas are clean-burning fuels when compared with conventional gasoline or diesel made from crude oil.

2006

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G â&#x20AC;˘ T H E ene r g y i s s u e

Energy Consumption, Quadrillion BTU

question & answer World demand for fossil fuels will continue to grow.

1970 1973 1976 1979 1982 1985 1988 1991 1994 1997 2000 2010 2025

Oil

Natural Gas

Coal

Nuclear

Renewables

Source: EIA, International Energy Outlook 2004

Heavy oil resources?

Heavy oil is also an unconventional fuel that will provide significant volumes of energy over the next 10 to 20 years. Heavy oil production is currently very important in the United States, Canada, Indonesia and Venezuela. In Canada, there are 1.7 trillion stock tank barrels (STB) of oil in place, of which 300 billion STB is classified as technical reserves. In Venezuela, the number is 1.2 trillion STB of oil in place, of which 272 billion is classified as technical reserves. The term “technical reserves” means that we know where a lot of that oil is and we have technology to develop those reserves.

Any other energy sources?

Alternative energy sources, such as biofuels, wind, solar, nuclear and hydroelectric energy, will become more important as the century progresses. However, hydrocarbon fuels will be the dominant fuel during the first half of the 21st century. There will eventually be a transition to other forms of energy sometime during the 21st century, although no one is sure when that will occur or what energy source will become the most prevalent. It could be a combination of nuclear fuel for electricity generation and biofuels for transportation. Regardless of the exact path of the future, it will be important for universities to take a leading role in both technology development and educating the next generation of leaders on energy issues and choices.

How is Texas A&M Engineering preparing its students to face the energy transition?

We will eventually have a degree for Energy Engineering at Texas A&M (see related story on p. 20). To prepare, we need to begin teaching “integrated energy” courses where all the elements of the energy industry are tied together, explained and analyzed. We also need to unite the faculty to look at integrated energy research opportunities. Texas A&M should lead the way during the 21st Table 1. Heavy oil resources and reserves century transition from CANADA hydrocarbon fuels to Oil in place 1.7 trillion STB the energy source of the Technical reserves 300 billion STB future. The path is not VENEZUELA clear, but the challenge is Oil in place 1.2 trillion STB clearly understood. Technical reserves

So in the meantime?

We will not run out of oil or natural gas anytime soon. We have enormous volumes of oil, natural gas and coal to supply world energy needs for many decades to come. However, better technology will be required to bring much of those hydrocarbon resources to market in an environmentally acceptable way. Sometime during the 21st century, the world will inevitably lessen its dependence on fossil fuels and move to other sources of energy for electricity and transportation. Research universities such as Texas A&M must lead the way in developing the needed technologies and training the engineers and scientists who will be the leaders in the energy industry. Stephen Holditch

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Holditch says the world will not run out of oil or natural gas anytime soon, but remaining reserves will be hard to get to.

272 billion STB

979.845.2255 steve.holditch@pe.tamu.edu

By Gene Charleton and Lesley V. Kriewald Illustration, Roby Fitzhenry

energy

Petroleum engineers like information â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the more, the better, usually. It helps them decide where to drill for oil. But sometimes having the right information is more valuable than having a lot of it.

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

decisions, decisions Information is one of the most valuable tools you have when you’re drilling for oil. Decision science can help you understand how much that information is worth.

All information is not created equal.That’s a fact of Eric Bickel’s professional life. Bickel is an engineer in Texas A&M’s Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, and he’s an expert in decision science — using mathematics to help make complex decisions. Decision science uses the odds that something will happen, its probability, to help decide what to do in complicated situations. Few situations are more complicated than when oil producers decide where to drill new wells. Drilling for oil is a high-risk, high-payoff proposition. Your chances of finding oil in any particular place may be low, but if you do, the payoff is high. If you’ve seen the classic movie Giant you understand how this works. One way to improve your odds of finding oil is to use seismic imaging to get a “picture” of what the underground geography looks like. You get seismic images by setting off small explosive charges and mapping how the vibrations from the explosions move through the rock formations, or strata, under the ground. Certain strata are associated with the presence of oil.

By applying the mathematics of decision science to the situations oil producers who use seismic services face, Bickel, Gibson and McVay are determining how much value Eric Bickel Eric Bickel is an assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering. He says that knowing the value of information can help oil producers make better use of new, expensive technologies.

2006

the additional detail adds.

“Geophysicists will often explore technical aspects of seismic imaging of reservoirs, attempting to predict whether or not it will be possible to detect the presence of oil,” says Richard Gibson, a specialist in seismology and associate professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics. Or, if they’re dealing with a known oil reservoir, provide some estimates of the amount of gas or oil in the reservoir. Bickel, Gibson and Duane McVay, an expert in reservoir management and professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, are evaluating the effectiveness of new technology developed by WesternGeco, a subsidiary of the international energy company Schlumberger that provides seismic services to oil producers. The new technology produces seismic images of the underground landscape that are more detailed and complete than those from conventional seismic technologies, says Stephen Pickering, marketing manager for WesternGeco’s reservoir seismic services. “The question is, ‘How much value does this additional detail add to the information we can give the producers?’” Pickering says. “We think it adds quite a bit, but we’d like to be able to quantify it.”

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

energy Enter decision science New information — such as the added detail in WesternGeco’s seismic technology — is valuable to oil producers’ decisions if it is relevant, material and economic, Bickel says. For information to be relevant, you must be uncertain about something that’s important to your decision, and the new information must have the possibility of telling you something useful about the uncertainty. For instance, you may be uncertain about whether it’s a good idea to drill a well in a particular location. For information to be material, it has to have the potential to affect your decision.

Drilling for oil is a high-risk, high-payoff proposition. The right information can help reduce the risk.

“If you’re going to take some particular action no matter what, new information is worthless,” Bickel says. On the other hand, if you’re considering drilling in a particular place and whether you drill or not depends on information you can get about the site, that information is material.

Finally, for information to be economic, it must be a good investment. Even if new information tells you exactly what you need to know, if you can’t afford to pay for it, it’s not economic. By applying the mathematics of decision science to the situations oil producers who use seismic services face, Bickel, Gibson and McVay are determining how much value the additional detail adds. “We were able to leverage Texas A&M’s energy expertise to help WesternGeco better communicate the value of its product to potential customers. In addition,” Bickel says, “the methodologies we have developed will help exploration and production companies make better use of their capital and hopefully discover more reserves.” O Eric Bickel

http:/ en g i nee / enrg.tam i neeur.emag. du tamu. edu

979.845.4347 ebickel@tamu.edu

Improving the odds Drilling for oil is one of the biggest gambles there is. New high-resolution computer models may help oil producers reap big-time payoffs. Drilling for oil can be a multimillion-dollar gamble at long odds, but Akhil Datta-Gupta is betting he can make those long odds more favorable. Highly detailed modeling of existing and future oil reservoirs could pay off by helping make “substantially” more oil available to U.S. producers and reducing our dependence on foreign oil. Datta-Gupta, the LeSeur Chair in Reservoir Management in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, says that much of the current domestic oil and gas production comes from three sources  — “mature” or partially depleted known reservoirs, geologically complex formations and ultra-deepwater reservoirs in the Gulf of Mexico. The challenge for petroleum engineers is to identify the location and distribution of the “unswept” or bypassed oil and untapped compartments in these reservoirs. To do this, Datta-Gupta uses highresolution fluid-flow modeling and seismic imaging techniques in combination with data assimilation methods to determine where best to drill to recover this unswept oil.

Drilling by the numbers Petroleum engineers routinely use numerical models to understand and visualize fluid flow in the reservoir and for future performance predictions. Recent advances in seismic imaging meant that today’s geologic models consist of tens of millions of grid cells, or computational elements — so many elements, in fact, that scientists and engineers using conventional flow modeling techniques usually resort to “upscaling” or averaging schemes to reduce the number of computational elements. (continued)

Akhil Datta-Gupta Akhil Datta-Gupta, professor and holder of the LeSeur Chair in Reservoir Management in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, is combining geologic information and flow-simulation techniques with advanced computing to increase oil recovery in mature oil fields.

Upscaling schemes, however, run the risk of losing significant geologic features of the reservoir, which can have a major impact on oil recovery. To avoid losing those features, Datta-Gupta’s team is developing “streamline-based” flow simulation techniques that model fluid flow directly at the scale of geologic models with multimillion computational elements.

Datta-Gupta says,

The basic idea, Datta-Gupta says, is to decouple, or split, the 3-D problem into individual 1-D problems that can be solved relatively quickly, resulting in orders of magnitude savings in computational time compared to conventional flow simulation techniques. Such decoupling also makes the tech“If we can nique well suited for parallel computation.

improve domestic recovery in existing oil fields by 5

percent, it will mean an extra billion barrels of oil for the United States.”

And this streamline-based flow simulation technique allows Datta-Gupta to look at the interaction of fluid flow and subsurface characteristics at a highly detailed level to identify unswept or bypassed oil for targeted recovery.

“We can quickly look at multiple models and make multiple predictions to quantify uncertainty in our subsurface models and future predictions — to identify and optimize drilling locations,” Datta-Gupta says.

High-stakes game And optimizing drilling locations is important: Drilling a single well in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico can cost more than $30 million, and completing the well for production can cost another $30 million. “We cannot afford to drill too many dry holes, so before we spend that money, we need to know how much oil is down there, where it is located and how to get it out efficiently.” With these highly detailed geologic and simulation models in hand, Datta-Gupta’s team then uses a variety of “dynamic” fluid flow data (such as oil, gas or water production; pressure; and time-lapse seismic images) from the reservoir to calibrate these models. Integrating the information into the geologic models allows Datta-Gupta to identify flow channels and barriers as well as any compartmentalization in the reservoir.

2006

And with advancement in well construction and down-hole sensor technology, Datta-Gupta says the dynamic data can be available every minute. The amount of data can be simply overwhelming, he says, and the challenge is to assimilate the data in real time for on-the-spot decision making.

In this figure, the yellow lines display streamlines indicating dominant flow patterns below the surface. The vertical lines (magenta) show the locations of wells in the field. The green background shows the conductivity patterns below the surface.

“We need to update the geologic model in real time to facilitate geosteering — that is, to guide the well trajectories during drilling,” Datta-Gupta says. Datta-Gupta says that knowing the properties of the subsurface reservoir in detail is critical for designing any targeted and environmentally sensitive drilling scheme that leaves minimum “footprints” and for improved oil recovery programs. And to put it all in perspective, Datta-Gupta says, “If we can improve domestic recovery in existing oil fields by, say, 5 percent, it will mean an extra billion barrels of oil for the United States over the economic life of the existing fields.” O Akhil Datta-Gupta

979.847.9030 datta-gupta@pe.tamu.edu

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

energy

Petroleum under pressure Growing worldwide demand for oil is pushing gas prices at the pump higher and higher. Technology developed by Texas A&M petroleum engineers may help us reach new reservoirs. By Susan E. Cotton

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Drilling in deep waters Drilling in water deeper than 5,000 feet seems costly and risky — why spend the money and take the chance? “There’s oil there,” says Hans Juvkam-Wold, professor in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering and holder of the John Edgar Holt Endowed Chair in Petroleum Engineering. “And gas. You have to go where the hydrocarbons are. The main disadvantage is cost.” A floater, an offshore platform or ship that supports the drilling, is the better part of about $500,000 a day; a whole well, about $50 million. (So the price of gasoline shouldn’t take you by surprise, he says.) “The United States has produced maybe 80 percent of the easy oil already — that’s just my number,” Juvkam-Wold says. “To keep producing, we have to go into the deep water.” It’s true, the Arctic has oil pools, too. But drilling in ultradeep water pays off more than drilling in the North Pole, he says. “I’ve been in the oil business all my life — since I got out of high school and went to South America,” Juvkam-Wold says. “You go to where the drilling is.”

When you pull up to the pump at a gas station, it’s easy to forget how that gas got there. Drilling for the oil that ends up as gasoline in your fuel tank is complicated, expensive and sometimes dangerous. We’ve used up most of the easy-to-get-to oil. The oil that’s left — and the experts agree, there’s still a lot there — is hard to get to, a lot of it under thousands of feet of water in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic and North Pacific oceans. Dual-gradient drilling may help. Petroleum engineering researchers say dual-gradient technology should enable drillers to get to reservoirs unreachable with current technology and make the process safer at the same time. This is where petroleum engineers Hans JuvkamWold and Jerome Schubert come in. Their work on dual-gradient drilling is moving the technology from laboratory simulations closer to the deep blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico or the North Atlantic and the oil beneath.

Jerome Schubert Assistant professor Jerome Schubert began studying dual-gradient drilling as a graduate student under Juvkam-Wold. Now the two are collaborating to advance the technology.

Juvkam-Wold, professor and Holt Chair in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, has been working on dual-gradient drilling technology since the mid-1990s. Assistant professor Jerome Schubert began working on the technology as one of Juvkam-Wold’s graduate students.

Back to (deepwater) basics To understand dual-gradient drilling, you need to start with conventional (single-gradient) drilling.

2006

Drilling for oil underwater has been going on a long time and it’s pretty routine. When you drill an oil well underwater, the hole in the seafloor is connected to the platform or drill ship on the surface by lengths of drill pipe. The drill pipe carries the bit that actually drills the hole. Drillers pump thick goo called drilling mud down the pipe to cool the bit and carry away debris the bit chews out of the rock. In the shallow part of the well (the first 3,000 to 4,000 feet below the seafloor), the mud simply flows back up the space between the pipe and the walls of the hole and out onto the seafloor, where it stays. (This is known in industry jargon as “pump and dump drilling,” Juvkam-Wold says.) This region can be the trickiest part of drilling the well. It’s where so-called shallow hazards — rock formations that often contain water, natural gas or pockets of frozen methane gas — may occur. When this water  — usually under abnormally high pressure — and the methane get into the bore hole as the bit drills through, they can burp back up toward the surface (a kick), with potentially disastrous consequences. Uncontrolled kicks can turn into blowouts that can damage the well, drilling equipment, and the people operating the well.

Blocking the kick After this shallow section is drilled, drillers place segments of larger-diameter pipe, called surface casing, around the drill pipe and cement it into place. Once this foundation-like assembly is in place, a large valve known as a blowout preventer is installed, followed

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

Drilling deep The usual approach to drilling in deep water begins much like what happens in shallow water, except that the drill pipe is enclosed in a larger pipe, the riser. Instead of pumping and dumping, the mud is pumped down the drill pipe to the bit and then recycled back up through the riser to the surface, where it is recycled.

PLATFORM

energy

10,000’

If the drillers can “close in” the well at the seafloor they have more ability to control these burps, or kicks, with the blowout protector. The whole assembly is similar to the foundation of a building in reverse, Schubert says. The cement and surface casing anchor and stabilize the well below them. But the mud still poses a problem. If the mud is flowing uncontrolled back to the seafloor with no means of shutting in the well, it’s very hard to control the kick and regain control of the well.

Enter the dual gradient MIDLIFT

30,000’

BOP

Dual-gradient technology offers a way to deal with this puzzle. With dual-gradient drilling, the mud doesn’t flow back up through the riser to the surface. Instead of the riser, a separate seafloor pump and line carry the mud to the surface for cleaning and reuse. Valves in this pump system allow drillers to circulate out a kick before it escalates into a blowout, which could damage drilling equipment and platform, as well as endanger the crew. Using dual-gradient technology requires drilling companies to look at drilling technology that’s different from what they’re used to using, Schubert says.

With dual-gradient drilling, the drilling mud is pumped back to the surface through a separate line. This pumping lets drillers control “kicks” before they become blowouts.

by another pipe called the marine riser that encloses the drill pipe all the way to the surface. The blowout preventer allows drillers to control pressure in the drill hole, important if the bit grinds into that natural gas or fresh water. The riser allows drilling mud to be pumped all the way to the surface for recycling instead of dumping it on the seafloor. This is the conventional approach, known as singlegradient drilling, and it works fine in relatively shallow water. The problem is that most of the oil beneath shallow water is gone. The oil that remains is in deep water: Much of the remaining reserves lie beneath water at least 10,000 or 12,000 feet deep.

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

“In their minds, this is untried, expensive technology and nobody wants to be first,” he says. This mindset may be changing. A test well using dual-gradient technology has been drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in 1,000 feet of water, and the technology worked as Juvkam-Wold and Schubert’s simulations had predicted. And two major energy companies are considering using dual-gradient technology to drill new wells soon. “We know it works,” Schubert says. “We just have to convince the industry that it’s a worthwhile investment.” O Jerome Schubert Hans Juvkam-Wold

979.862.1195 jerome.schubert@pe.tamu.edu

Hans Juvkam-Wold Hans Juvkam-Wold, holder of the John Edgar Holt Endowed Chair in Petroleum Engineering, has been developing dualgradient drilling technology for more than two decades.

979.845.4093 hans.juvkam-wold@pe.tamu.edu

By Gene Charleton

2006

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G â&#x20AC;˘ T H E ene r g y i s s u e

A package of new technologies will allow the electric distribution system to monitor itself and warn operators when equipment is about to fail.

energy

â&#x20AC;&#x153;The first job of electric power engineers is to keep the lights on,â&#x20AC;? says electrical engineer B. Don Russell, Regents Professor and J.W. Runyon Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and director of the Power System Automation Laboratory. Since pioneering electrical researchers and entrepreneurs Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse started stringing wire to distribute electricity in the last quarter of the 19th century, our society and the world have become totally dependent on electrical energy. We take for granted computers, microwave ovens and air conditioning. Electricity powers our lives. But when the power goes off, everything stops and our lives are disrupted. Today, the electric power system is complex. Large generators and long-distance high-voltage transmission lines must be monitored and controlled continuously to ensure proper operation. Despite the tremendous growth in the electric power system and our total dependence on electricity, the fundamental way we monitor and control power systems has not changed since the middle of the 20th century, Russell says. The development of inexpensive microcomputers has provided a new tool for power engineers to gather and analyze data from the power system to improve performance and reliability. In the 1980s, Russellâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s research group tackled one (continued) http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Catastrophic failures of the power system are relatively uncommon, but they are spectacular when they happen. Twenty-five million people in the northeastern United States lost electric power for 12 Aug. 15, 2003 — Satellite image shows the northeastern United States just before the 2003 blackout left 40 million people without electric power. NOAA/Defense Meteorological Satellite Program

hours in 1965. Another blackout shut down New York City for several days in 1977. And in 2003, the largest power failure in North American history left 40 million people in an area in the United States stretching from Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York and New Jersey west to Ohio and Michigan, and 10 million people in eastern Canada, without power.

What it looked like after the power went out. But more people are affected by shorter outages. NOAA/Defense Meteorological Satellite Program

of the most vexing problems of the electric power distribution system, detecting what are known technically as ground faults. Frequently, when an electric distribution line breaks and falls to the ground, it cannot be detected and remains energized, creating a dangerous condition for the public and interrupting electric power service. “Our research discovered unique electric signals associated with high-resistance ground faults that could be detected,” Russell says. “Many of the faults on electric power systems draw very little current, and from a system perspective, look just like an electric load in your house.” These faults cannot be detected by conventional equipment used by most utilities. When a line breaks and electric power is disrupted, the primary means for the electric utility to know something is wrong is a telephone call from the customer. “That is not exactly the best of modern technology.” Large power system blackouts get much publicity, but most often when the lights go out for several hours, it is the result of a small localized problem in the electric distribution system that affects a few square blocks or a few square miles. 18

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“In fact,” Russell says, “more people are affected annually by numerous small outages than by the catastrophic failures that make the newspaper headlines.”

Watch closely now By the late 1980s, Russell’s research group had developed a microcomputer-based system that could monitor electric distribution systems in real time and would allow the system to automatically isolate a fault and de-energize a line, eliminating a public safety hazard. Russell and laboratory manager and research colleague Carl Benner won an R&D 100 Award, dubbed the “Oscars of Invention,” in 1996 from R&D Magazine for developing this system. Ten U.S. patents were granted to them. These patents were immediately licensed, and equipment using this patented technology is currently sold by General Electric. Russell, Benner and their research team were known for several “firsts” — the first microcomputer arcing-fault detector, the first application of fiber optic communications in an electric-distribution substation and the invention of analysis techniques that allow very low-level electrical signals on the distriT E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

bution system to be analyzed and interpreted. For this work and its commercial implementation, they received the Outstanding Engineering Achievement Award from the National Society of Professional Engineers.

tant information from the normal operation of the electric system was most difficult.”

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Russell and EPRI solicited assistance from 11 utilities across North America — from south Texas and Alabama to Quebec and British Columbia — which

More people are affected annually by numerous small outages than by the catastrophic failures that make the newspaper headlines.

Photo • Courtesy of B. Don Russell

“The key to reliable electric service is repairing and maintaining the power system so that catastrophic equipment failures do not result in long outages,” Russell says. “Our research led us to believe that precursor electrical signals would precede the failure of a piece of equipment before it blew up and caused a large scale outage.”

Ground faults — what happens when electric power lines touch the ground — are the major cause of power outages that affect more people each year than the catastrophic 2003 outage.

Russell proposed a research investigation to the Electric Power Research Institute, or EPRI, of Palo Alto, Calif., which resulted in a 10-year funded study. The value of early detection of failing equipment before catastrophic failure clearly was recognized by the electric utility industry. Over the course of 10 years, $2 million in research funds was dedicated to developing new techniques in condition-based maintenance and incipient failure detection.

Hard problems, new solutions “Our first job was fundamental research,” Russell says. “The signals generated by degrading equipment are extremely small and difficult to detect. Furthermore, many loads on the electric utility system generate harmonics and load profiles that are very similar to failing equipment. Separating the imporhttp:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

allowed researchers to place monitoring instruments on 66 utility distribution grids. Over several years, data was gathered that allowed Texas A&M researchers to study the electric signals generated as equipment failed. This was new territory; until this project, no researcher had collected and analyzed naturally occurring equipment-failure data in a longterm field evaluation. The researchers characterized failures of electric cables, capacitor banks, switches and other equipment. Russell’s co-researcher, Benner, became the world’s expert on interpreting the electrical signals generated by failing electric distribution equipment. However, the sheer mass of information generated by sensors in Russell’s monitoring project would quickly overwhelm human operators in an electric utility. So the research team developed autonomous and intelligent real-time algorithms that could separate normal system activity from failing equipment signals. These algorithms became the “expert” that continually looks at the electric system and identifies a failure before an outage occurs. In 2005 Russell and Benner filed 10 patent disclosures on this package of technologies, and Texas A&M and EPRI are negotiating with companies for licenses to use this technology. These systems for prediction of catastrophic failures represent a generational leap forward in how electric distribution systems are monitored and controlled. “For the first time, failing equipment can be repaired and outages can be avoided by the quick response of electric utility engineers who have a new tool to improve the reliability of electric power systems,” Russell says. “It was never enough for me to just understand a problem. I always wanted to solve it. I am an engineer, not a scientist. Solving difficult problems is what engineers do.” O B. Don Russell

B. Don Russell B. Don Russell, Regents Professor and J.W. Runyon Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and his research group have developed a package of technologies to monitor the power grid automatically.

979.845.7912 bdrussell@tamu.edu

ENERGY 101 Certified energy-conscious

A new course and certificate program introduces undergrads to all kinds of energy and new ways of thinking about them. By Susan E. Cotton Illustration, Roby Fitzhenry

Engineering 101 isn’t only for engineering students; it’s for everyone else, too. And everyone else ought to learn about its subject: energy. “The general public actually knows very little about energy — where it comes from, how it’s transmitted or how it’s used,” says Stephen Holditch, head of the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering and holder of the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Chair in Petroleum Engineering. So to increase students’ knowledge and understanding of energy, one of Holditch’s faculty members, professor and Albert B. Stevens Chair Christine Ehlig-Economides, has developed and now coordinates the four-credit-hour course, Energy: Resources, Utilization and Importance to Society. Engineering 101 — or Energy 101, if you will — is a core-curriculum natural science elective for undergrads in all disciplines, from accounting to zoology. Ehlig-Economides and Holditch say they estimate

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energy Education

more than 1,000 students a year, most of them freshmen, will take the course. “That’s the vision: a great many students learning about energy and how it affects their lives,” EhligEconomides says. Ehlig-Economides and her co-instructor, professor Thomas Blasingame, invite faculty members from other departments to teach students about different kinds of energy sources and how each affects society. These energy sources include coal, natural gas, nuclear fission and fusion, oil, and renewables like sunlight, water and wind. Then the students consider what they learned in the context of sustainable development — the development of energy sources so coming generations can easily develop their energy sources. “The recitation is focused entirely on sustainable development,” she says. “As such, 25 percent of the course is focused on sustainable development aspects. It’s a very strong component of the Engineering 101 course.” Engineering 101 is the first of four courses any undergrad who has passed the prerequisites can take to earn the Energy Engineering Certificate. Students pick the other three courses from a list of 10 whose subjects include energy conservation; electric power systems; heating, ventilation, and air conditioning; internal combustion engines; and safety. “Only one or two of the courses currently listed have much emphasis on sustainable development,” EhligEconomides says. And this emphasis on sustainable development is what sets Engineering 101 apart from the rest. EhligEconomides has even asked the National Science Foundation to fund the development of materials to integrate sustainable development into the honors sections of the energy engineering certificate courses. She says she hopes the materials will find their way into the general sections of the courses.

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“That’s the vision: a great many students learning about energy and how it affects their lives,” Ehlig-Economides says. Ehlig-Economides has also teamed with Ramesh Talreja, Tenneco Professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, and Sam Mannan, holder of the Mike O’Connor Chair in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, to design sustainable development education and research programs. Talreja says that sustainable development should be more than a “perfunctory elective”  — it should become a keystone for all engineering students. Department head Holditch says the new courses and eventual energy engineering degree program are in line with the future of energy and especially petroleum engineering. “I see that this department will slowly transform itself from petroleum engineering to energy engineering,” Holditch says. “The transformation will take several decades, but we want to help set the agenda and lead the way.” O Christine Ehlig-Economides

979.458.0797 c.economides@pe.tamu.edu

Christine Ehlig-Economides Christine Ehlig-Economides has developed and coordinates Engineering 101, Energy: Resources, Utilization and Importance to Society, and the Energy Engineering Certificate.

By Lesley V. Kriewald

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Imagine climbing into your car in California and driving to New York — without stopping once to fill the fuel tank. For engineers Mark Holtzapple and Mark Ehsani, it’s more than a fantasy trip. For them, that 90-miles-per-gallon car is the future, and they’re already partway down the highway. Their crop-to-wheel concept should provide both a remarkably efficient engine and a sustainable source of fuel, one that doesn’t depend on foreign oil producers. (continued)

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The Crop-to-Wheel Initiative focuses both on new fuels and vehicle power train technologies. Holtzapple, a professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, and electrical engineering professor Ehsani are developing technologies to transform crops into liquid fuels that can be burned in high-efficiency cars.

Garbage to gas Fuels first. Holtzapple has developed the MixAlco process, so named because of the mixed alcohols that result. It converts biomass — trees, grass, manure, sewage sludge, garbage — into mixed alcohols for use as fuel. His research group operates a pilot plant on campus. “We can use anything biodegradable,” Holtzapple says. “If you put it outside and it rots, we can use it.” The process also can use high-productivity feedstocks, such as sweet sorghum and “energy” cane. Alcohol fuels produced from these crops are more productive in terms of net energy per acre than ethanol produced from corn. And water hyacinth, a weed that chokes waterways if left to grow uncontrolled, is even more productive, Holtzapple says. “You’ve heard of alchemists trying to turn lead into gold,” Holtzapple says. “We turn manure into rubbing alcohol. We’re turning something useless into something useful.”

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In the MixAlco process, the biomass feedstock is treated with lime and then fermented to form organic salts. Water is removed and then the mixture is heated to become ketones, such as acetone, a common ingredient in nail polish remover. Adding hydrogen Holtzapple has developed the to the ketones forms mixed alcohols, which can be used MixAlco process, so named as biofuels. “MixAlco is a robust process that uses naturally occurring organisms derived from soil,” Holtzapple says, “so no sterility is required in the process. In contrast, other researchers use genetically engineered organisms that require sterile — and expensive — equipment.”

because of the mixed alcohols that result. It converts biomass — trees, grass, manure, sewage sludge, garbage — into mixed

In addition, biofuels are alcohols for use kind to the environment: Combustion of biofuels doesn’t contribute to global warming because no net carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide released from the combustion of biofuels is recycled through photosynthesis, unlike carbon dioxide released from the combustion of fossil fuels, which accumulates in the atmosphere. (continued)

as fuel.

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Biomass feedstock — high-yield energy crops such as energy cane or sweet sorghum; agricultural residues such as corn stalks and wheat straw; manure and even municipal wastes such as refuse and sewage sludge — is processed in a biorefinery, which uses microorganisms derived from soil to convert the feedstock to organic acids. The acids are converted to ketones such as acetone and then transported to an oil refinery where they are hydrogenated to alcohols. Carbon dioxide can be injected into oil wells to enhance oil recovery. The mixed alcohols are combined with conventional gasoline at an oil refinery and then transported through existing pipelines and petroleum infrastructure to your local gas station. Finally the mixed alcohol–gasoline fuel is pumped into your high-efficiency or hybrid vehicles, while any carbon dioxide emitted from your tailpipe is consumed by the growing biomass, releasing no net carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and starting the whole cycle again.

Mark Holtzapple Mark Holtzapple, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, has invented the MixAlco process, which can turn any biodegradable material into mixed alcohols for fuel. He has also invented the StarRotor engine, which is three times more efficient than today’s engines.

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Octane. Mixed alcohols and ethanol have a high octane rating, which is required to prevent internal combustion gasoline engines from knocking, which can cause damage. Low volatility.

Volatile emissions from the fuel tank cause air pollution. Ethanol is very polar, which raises the fuel volatility. Mixed alcohols have a low volatility.

Pipeline shipping. Fuel components should be shipped through pipelines to lower costs, but ethanol is so polar that it absorbs water in the pipelines, which causes fuel problems. To prevent this, ethanol is shipped by train or truck to the terminal, where it is “splash” blended — an expensive proposition. Mixed alcohols can be shipped through the pipelines.

High energy content. The purpose of fuel is to store energy. Fuels with a high oxygen content, such as ethanol, have a low energy content, whereas fuels with a lower oxygen content, such as mixed alcohols, have a high energy content. Heat of vaporization.

Ethanol requires a lot of energy to vaporize, which can cause engine-starting problems. Mixed alcohols have a lower heat of vaporization.

Groundwater damage.

Fuel is stored in underground tanks, which tend to leak. Mixed alcohols and ethanol do not damage

groundwater.

Goodbye, V-8? New fuels deserve a new engine, and Holtzapple has one: the StarRotor engine. It uses the Brayton cycle, the same thermodynamic cycle used in jet engines. Air is compressed, fuel is combusted and the hot high-pressure gas expands, thus doing work. Conventional jet engines use high-speed spinning fan blades to accomplish the compression and expansion, but the StarRotor engine uses lower-speed positivedisplacement rotors, which are much more suitable for automotive applications, Holtzapple says. So far, they’ve built the compressor half of the StarRotor engine. Recent measurements indicate that a complete StarRotor engine would be about 55 percent to 65 percent efficient, which is about three times more efficient than today’s reciprocating engines. Holtzapple says that building a complete engine will take about one year once the funding is raised. The more fuel-efficient an engine is, the less fuel it needs, and the less energy cane or sweet sorghum must be grown to fuel the vehicle. “The combination of high-efficiency engines and high-productivity crops greatly reduces the required land area to supply the nation’s motor fuels,” Holtzapple says. “This overcomes the most common objection to corn-derived ethanol: that there simply is not enough land to make a big impact on the nation’s fuel needs.” 26

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The StarRotor engine uses the Brayton thermodynamic cycle used in jet engines. But unlike jet engines, which use spinning fan blades, the StarRotor engine uses gerorotors for the compressor and expander. The compressor raises the air pressure to about 6 atmospheres. This high-pressure air is preheated in a heat exchanger, while in the combustor, fuel is added to raise the air to the final temperature. Then, this hot, highpressure air is sent to the expander where work is produced. Finally, the air is released at 1 atmosphere. The air is still hot, so it is sent to a heat exchanger where most of the remaining heat is captured and recycled within the engine.

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Ethanol produced from corn grain may be the most talkedabout biofuel, but Holtzapple says it isn’t the only option, or the best. Alcohol fuels from high-productivity crops such as energy cane or sweet sorghum are far more productive than corn ethanol, so scientists can minimize land area required for growing feedstock by using these higher-productivity crops. Second, farmers can gross two to three times more per acre by growing these high-productivity energy crops instead of corn. Third, there is less environmental impact — water, fertilizer, pesticides, soil erosion and herbicides — when growing energy cane or sweet sorghum than when growing corn grain.

Enter the hybrid Conventional vehicles throw away energy every time they brake. Ehsani explains that capturing this energy can make vehicles more fuel efficient, hence, the hybrid. Hybrid cars have a fuel-powered engine plus an electric machine that can function as either a motor or a generator. In generator mode, a battery charges and slows the vehicle. In motor mode, the battery drains and speeds the vehicle. Ehsani says that this hybrid system captures energy normally lost in braking into the battery, which in turn increases fuel mileage, particularly in stop-and-go city driving. Hybrid cars have another advantage: They can baby the engine. Any engine, including the StarRotor engine, operates most efficiently when run at a constant speed, but driving in traffic means the engine must speed up as you accelerate and slow down when you idle at a stoplight. Incorporating the StarRotor engine into Ehsani’s Electrically Peaking Hybrid (ELPH) Vehicle will produce the best efficiency, emissions, performance and cost. “The StarRotor engine delivers average power,” Ehsani says, “but a battery provides peaking power that allows the vehicle to accelerate quickly. This compact and efficient traction system has a battery that never needs charging and minimizes fuel consumption.” (continued)

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Mark Ehsani Mark Ehsani, professor and holder of the Robert M. Kennedy ’26 Professorship in Electrical Engineering, has spent 15 years working on hybrid vehicles. Ehsani is now working to hybridize the superefficient StarRotor engine.

Holtzapple says, “We plan to get 90 miles per gallon in a conventional car equipped with a hybridized StarRotor engine. That means we can drive from Los Angeles to New York City on 31 gallons.”

“We’ve dedicated our careers to a crisis that hasn’t happened yet,” Ehsani says. “Dr. Holtzapple

Someday, there will be an economic end to the petroleum age, the researchers say, and our economy will suffer if we don’t prepare for it. “The previous energy crisis in the 1970s was just practice. This is the real one,” Holtzapple says.

Beyond all or none

But biofuels won’t replace fossil fuels entirely — at least not soon. We have invested trilwasn’t cool, and I was lions of dollars in the fossil fuel infrastructure — drilling rigs, pipelines, trucks and doing hybrids when hybrids refineries, the like  — and it will take a long time to replace it. Instead, weren’t cool.” as biofuels become available, they can be mixed with gasoline, transported in existing pipelines and finally pumped into cars at gas stations. And as gas gets more expensive, the percentage of biofuels in the mix can be increased.

was doing bio when bio

Mark Holtzapple and Mark Ehsani have spent their careers preparing for an energy crisis that hasn’t yet happened. But they say it will happen, and their integrative, multidisciplinary Crop-to-Wheel Initiative may be the answer.

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Ehsani and Holtzapple call this an enabling technology. “Put the whole picture together,” Holtzapple says. “We can convert fossil fuels such as coal or natural gas to hydrogen and carbon dioxide, which can be stored underground to address global warming.

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“The hydrogen is chemically bound to a biomolecule, which can be safely burned without adding net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This approach allows us to embrace both fossil fuels and the socalled hydrogen economy, while still building sustainable energy systems.” “There’s a path from where we are to where we’re going,” says Ehsani, who holds the Kennedy Professorship in Electrical Engineering. And, Holtzapple adds, “It’s not ‘all or none.’ We can use individual pieces of the technology.”

“This is truly multidisciplinary,

“We’ve dedicated our careers to a crisis that hasn’t happened yet,” Ehsani says. “Dr. Holtzapple was doing bio when bio wasn’t cool, and I was doing hybrids when hybrids weren’t cool.”

energy

The crop-to-wheel idea is unique, Holtzapple says, because it’s integrative: It makes sense from beginning to end. “We are the only group that we know of that is solving the problem in an integrated way, from the crop to the wheel.” O Mark Holtzapple Mehrdad “Mark” Ehsani

and Texas A&M is uniquely

979.845.9708 m-holtzapple@tamu.edu 979.845.7582 ehsani@ece.tamu.edu

positioned to achieve this vision,” Ehsani says. “It’s no accident that this integrated idea happened here. Where else do you have a world-class agricultural school side by side with a world-class engineering school?” Holtzapple and Ehsani say the whole crop-to-wheel concept can be refined and perfected by Texas A&M researchers. For instance, associate professor Othon Rediniotis in the Department of Aerospace Engineering is working to reduce aerodynamic drag on the car, while plant scientist Erik Mirkov at the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Weslaco is working to make energy cane more cold tolerant so it can grow more widely. “Our vision is to pull in as many faculty members as possible,” Ehsani says. “This is truly multidisciplinary, and Texas A&M is uniquely positioned to achieve this vision. It’s no accident that this integrated idea happened here. Where else do you have a world-class agricultural school side by side with a world-class engineering school?” Energy and gas mileage may be the latest new things, but Holtzapple and Ehsani have been working on the problem for decades.

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They say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Sergio Capareda says it’s true. Capareda has spent a good part of his life teaching villagers how to turn sap from coconut palms into ethanol that could be used in a generator to produce electricity in rural areas of the Philippines. That’s why now, as a professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, Capareda says he sees a solution to the world’s energy needs in biomass and biofuels — and almost everything out there is biomass. Capareda’s interests are diverse, but he says we will need diverse resource materials to realize the federal government’s “25 by ’25” plan to reduce this country’s dependence on foreign oil by 25 percent by 2025. “The only way to realize that with a single crop, such as corn, is for most of our land to be used as feedstock areas,” he says. “We need diverse resource materials.” And fuel from these diverse resources is what Capareda is after. Read on for some examples.

Sergio Capareda Sergio Capareda, an assistant professor in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, can turn trash into energy treasure.

(continued) Sergio Capareda

979.458.3028 scapareda@tamu.edu

Capareda’s interests are diverse, but he says we will need diverse resource materials to realize the federal government’s “25 by ’25” plan to reduce this country’s dependence on foreign oil by 25 percent by 2025.

Cotton is king In a project funded by the Cotton Foundation, Capareda is working to convert cottonginning waste into heat and electricity. The last few years have been banner years for cotton in Texas, producing more than 7.5 million bales annually. With that, though, comes more than two million tons of cotton-gin trash produced by the 270 cotton gins in Texas. Capareda says some of the gin trash can be used as a feed supplement, but there’s no widespread use for it, leaving “piles, heaps, mountains” of trash at the gins. Initial analysis of the energy content of the trash produced by each gin, regardless of the size of the gin, is more than enough to satisfy the gin’s energy requirements, even at only 20 percent efficiency, Capareda says. “The gins could be self-sufficient, if they had the ability to convert the trash,” he says. Now he’s helping cotton gins figure out how economically beneficial it would be to use technology to convert gin trash. Texas A&M’s state-of-the-art fluid bed gasifier is ideal for many gins, but the capital cost is so high that many gins would rather pay for fuel than for building the facility necessary to convert the trash. Instead, Capareda is working on a small, modular unit that would satisfy part of the gins’ needs. Tests at a gin in Golden, Texas, were successful, with the gin converting pellets of gin trash into heat.

More than a walk in the woods Capareda also is working with Temple Inland, a pulp and paper company, to convert wood sugar into ethanol for fuel. The company produces about 70 tons of wood sugar each day, which is usually released into the waste stream. Capareda is using what he learned in a “fermentation engineering” course taught by Texas A&M’s Mark Holtzapple to develop a process combining fermentation technology and the right combination of microbes to convert the waste to fuel. “We need to find the correct mix of microbes to do the job for us,” he says. That’s been difficult, he says, because microbes are very sensitive to compounds in wood sugar. But he has recently been successful in producing ethanol.

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Cattle and clean air In a Department of Energy-funded project, Texas A&M researchers are finding ways to convert manure in Central Texas and the Panhandle into useful energy. Burning the manure in coal-fired plants substantially reduces the percentage of manure being disposed of in water streams, he says. It could also reduce toxic emissions from coalfired plants and improve air quality in Texas. (See story on p. 32.)

Fill ’er up — with cotton

Moving appeal

In another project, Capareda is working with researchers at the Texas Engineering Experiment Station’s Food Protein Research and Development Center on biodiesel fuel from cottonseed oil.

Moving manure from where the cows leave it to biorefineries and storage facilities in East Texas is another biofuel issue Capareda is studying.

“It’s very easy to produce biodiesel,” Capareda says. “You mix vegetable oil and ethanol and you get biodiesel and glycerin, which can be used in cosmetics and pharmaceuticals.”

“We have enough manure for coal-firing fuel,” Capareda says, “but the big question is, Can we transport the manure efficiently? We don’t have systems for this, which is what we’re currently evaluating.”

Biodiesels are compatible with diesel engines, so the engines don’t have to be modified to use the fuel. Now, Capareda is testing the fuel’s performance in engines and in exhaust emissions.

Capareda says it may be possible to transport only the manure that is produced near the coal-firing plants and then convert the rest by using anaerobic digestion for methane production or thermodynamic conversion.

Combining methanol with various oils yields biodiesel fuel, which can be used in today’s diesel engines. A bonus? Glycerin, a by-product, can be purified and used in pharmaceuticals and cosmetics.

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BIOMASS and Cattle manure may be the key ingredient in a newly patented process that takes almost all of an important pollutant out of power plant smokestack emissions. By Gene Charleton

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If you’ve ever passed within sniffing distance of Amarillo, Texas, you already know something about the raw material Kalyan Annamalai uses in his air pollution research. It stinks.

Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh reached the same conclusion. If experiments later this year at a large utility-type facility in California work out the way the laboratory work predicts they will, this process could be for real. Using this process could allow generating-plant operators to replace expensive natural gas with cheaper coal and still get lower NOx emissions. DOE and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, or TCEQ, think so. They’ve funded the research for a total of more than $2.5 million so far. An advisory committee that includes utilities, feedlot and dairy operators is advising Annamalai and his colleagues on how the research can best address agriculture and power generation.

Photo • Courtesy of Kevin Heflin

“Once it works at the plant in California, I will be excited,” Annamalai says.

Researchers at a feedlot owned and operated by the Agricultural Experiment Station and USDA Agricultural Research Service in Amarillo/Bushland, Texas, prepare manure for composting.

“We’ve been as much as

Amarillo may be the feedlot capital of the world. More than 7 million cattle pass through feedlots within a 200-mile radius of the Texas Panhandle city every year. That means lots of manure. Millions of tons of it. And Annamalai, Paul Pepper Professor in the able to remove Department of Mechanical Engineering, thinks all that manure is wonderful. 90 percent of the

For most people, cattle manure is just something that smells bad on a hot day. For Annamalai, an expert in comAnnamalai says. bustion processes — how fuel burns — the stuff cattle leave behind on their way to becoming brisket and steaks is a key ingredient in a new way to reduce polluting nitric oxide, or NOx, from coal-fired power plants.

nitric oxide from the stack gases,”

“In experiments in our Coal-Fired Boiler Burner Laboratory, we’ve been able to remove as much as 90 percent of the nitric oxide from the stack gases,” Annamalai says. Similar experiments conducted with bigger pilotscale coal burners at the U.S. Department of 34

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Just because the process works in the laboratory and in pilot-plant studies doesn’t mean it will be practical for electric utilities to use it at their generating plants.

Coal, nitrogen and heat Power-plant air pollution starts with coal. Or more accurately, the nitrogen that coal contains. (We’ll call it coal nitrogen so you don’t confuse it with nitrogen in the air.) Electric utility companies burn more than a billion tons of coal every year to power steam-generating plants. We use 20 percent more electricity now than we did 10 years ago, and there’s no sign that growth is going to stop. Coal-fired power plants produce more than half of that pollution. That coal nitrogen is released when the coal burns in utility-plant boiler fireboxes, and the coal nitrogen combines with oxygen to form NOx. NOx has been on the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s air-quality hit list for decades. It’s the villain behind a lot of pollution that worries air-quality experts. NOx combines with oxygen in the air to become nitric acid and nitrogen dioxide. Nitric acid is an important ingredient in acid rain; nitrogen dioxide attacks the protective high-altitude ozone layer. At lower altitudes, nitrogen dioxide contributes to smog and haze.

Enter manure You wouldn’t expect manure to have much to do with getting rid of polluting nitric oxide. But it can. It’s chemistry in action. Manure contains a lot of ammonia; it’s one of the substances that make manure smell bad. As manure burns, it releases the ammonia, which latches onto nitric oxide released by the burning coal. The result? Harmless nitrogen and water — no NOx. T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

In Annamalai’s process, finely pulverized dried manure is injected into the gases produced in combustion chambers and fired with the pulverized coal that’s the power plant’s primary fuel. So far, the most efficient mix of coal and manure seems to be about nine to one, coal to manure. If you inject nine pounds of coal, you’d inject one pound of manure. It’s more complicated than it sounds, of course. One of the basic truths of engineering is that processes that work well in bench- and pilot-scale experiments don’t always work as well when you scale them up to a full-sized industrial operation. Even success in larger pilot-plant experiments doesn’t guarantee it.

to produce energy. Annamalai thought the idea was worth looking into.

energy

“We made a bit of a team,” Sweeten says. “I’m the manure guy; Kalyan is the combustion expert.” The two have worked together on manure-based energy projects for almost 24 years since, ranging from manure-fired fluidized bed combustors and development of manure-based air pollution reduction technology to using manure to supplement coal for power generation or to heat planned Panhandleregion ethanol plants.

TCEQ recently funded Annamalai and Sweeten to With manure, the biggest potential problem in scal- investigate whether trace amounts of manure could ing up the process is ash — what’s left behind after reduce the amount of mercury produced in coal combustion systems. The the manure is burned. idea is that small amounts of Burning manure with “It gets them to look at chlorine in manure would coal leaves behind more react with mercury, and the ash than coal by itself. At resulting compounds could manure as a valuable bench- and pilot-plant be washed away with water. scale, the additional ash Experiments on this use of hasn’t been a problem, resource instead of manure are under way at but full-sized boilers are the mechanical engineering more complicated, and the department’s Renewable something that they need to additional ash could clog Energy Laboratory. the tubes that carry heat through the water in the boiler, Annamalai says.

get rid of,” Sweeten says.

“The source of the high ash turned out to be soil collected with the manure,” he says. “So John Sweeten [an expert in livestock waste management and resident director of the Texas A&M Agricultural Research and Extension Center in Amarillo] and I came up with a scheme to pave the feedlots with ash from the power plants and then collect the manure. “We cut down the ash by half, a percentage almost the same as what Texas lignite coal produces. The only way we can find out how well this works is to try the low-ash manure in a real boiler.” In larger boilers, the combustion gases also take longer to get from the combustion chamber to the smokestack. How this additional time will affect the efficiency of the ammonia–nitrogen reaction remains to be tested. Annamalai is confident it will work, but again, there’s no way to find out except to try it.

Manure power Annamalai has been fascinated with manure and energy production for almost 25 years. It began in 1982, when he got an odd telephone call. Sweeten wanted to know if Annamalai could help him figure out how to use the millions of tons of manure left behind by cattle passing through Amarillo feedlots

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Altogether, these research programs involve about eight faculty members and nine graduate students in Texas A&M’s engineering and agriculture programs. Finding ways to use feedlot manure is getting urgent, Sweeten says. For the last 30 years, fertilizer-needy Panhandle farmers growing corn and other grain crops were a steady market for almost all the 7.2 million tons of manure left each year in Amarillo-area feedlots. Dwindling water supplies and the resulting changes in farmers’ crop planting mean they use much less manure than they used to, and it keeps piling up. “We should be able to make recommendations to the cattle feedlot managers on how they can improve the fuel characteristics of their manure,” Sweeten says. “It gets them to look at manure as a valuable resource instead of something that they need to get rid of.” O Kalyan Annamalai

979.845.2562 kannamalai@tamu.edu

Kalyan Annamalai Kalyan Annamalai, Paul Pepper Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, says adding manure to coal can eliminate almost all nitric oxide pollution from power plants.

NUCLEAR BY THE NUMBERS Computational science — like the calculations and simulations Marvin Adams performs — will be the key to designing the next generation of electric power-generating nuclear reactors. By Gene Charleton That’s the cue for nuclear engineer Marvin Adams and his colleagues. Adams is an expert in the numbers of nuclear engineering, especially the numbers that engineers and physicists use to understand in detail the processes happening in a nuclear reactor. Fission — the splitting of atomic nuclei — is the process that releases energy inside nuclear reactors, ultimately heating the steam that spins the turbines that turn the generators that give us the electricity that flashes along the wires to our homes. He knows more than most people about crunching the numbers that describe these processes, and he sees a lot of room for improvement over today’s computational approaches. “Today, when we do reactor analysis, most of the time we calculate separately the different things that are going on simultaneously,” Adams says. “We do our calculations of neutron behavior with very limited knowledge of the heat transfer and fluid flow

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that’s going on — and with no knowledge of what’s going on in the materials. Are they changing under irradiation? Do they vibrate because of fluid flow?”

More than algebra Solving the equations that describe each of these processes is difficult. Combining these already complex equations and solving them together has been impossible until recently. “Right now, we use PCs to solve these problems,” says Adams, a professor in the nuclear engineering department and director of the Center for LargeScale Scientific Simulation. “That’s all right, as far as it goes, but we can’t get the sort of resolution — detail  — we need to understand what’s going on to the level needed to gain confidence in new designs.” Development of what computer experts call massively parallel computers, machines with 10,000 or more processors running at the same time, is bringing solutions to these problems within reach. But we have to work out the most efficient ways to use them, Adams says. T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

This is where Adams and his colleagues in Texas A&M’s departments of nuclear engineering, computer science and mathematics come in. They’re working out the most efficient ways to use the socalled ASC Purple computer at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and other ultra-high-speed computers to solve neutron transport and other problems. “Our vision for the future is to have a really highfidelity simulation,” Adams says, “one where we’re explicitly taking into account the fact that the neutrons are causing heat generation and altering materials, heat is being transferred by various processes, fluids are flowing, and all of these processes affect each other and in particular affect how the neutrons behave. “It’s all a really big coupled system.”

Adams is most interested in

energy

The next generation of power reactors will be more efficient and safer than current reactors, thanks to computations like Adams’.

“If we operate them for another 60 years, we’ll need the equivalent of five Yucca Mountain storage sites to deal with the waste they’ll understanding how produce.

to solve neutron transport problems, but the same equations can be used to describe other complex situations — the behavior of radiation used to treat cancer tumors or of electrons as they cross a computer chip. A virtual reactor If nuclear scientists can solve neutron transport equations accurately, they can tell nuclear engineers the locations of all the neutrons in an operating nuclear reactor and what they are doing at any given moment. Having this kind of information is crucial for nuclear engineers to design the next generation of nuclear reactors, Generation IV reactors. Adams says the new class of reactors will be both safer and more efficient than the current generation of reactors — Generation III and III+ — which have been producing electricity since the 1960s. Generation IV reactors and advanced fuel cycles also will allow recycling of spent fuel for further use instead of sending it off to controversial waste storage sites like the one at Yucca Mountain, Nev. This process will drastically reduce the amount of storage needed for spent fuel. “Right now, there are 104 power generation reactors operating in the United States,” Adams says. http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

“With Generation IV reactors and advanced fuel recycling, on the other hand, we should be able to operate 1,000 reactors for hundreds of years, and one Yucca Mountain — three square miles — would hold all the waste they produce. Importantly, this reduced waste decays away in hundreds of years, not tens of thousands.”

Adams is most interested in understanding how to solve neutron transport problems, but the same equations can be used to describe other complex situations — the behavior of radiation used to treat cancer tumors or of electrons as they cross a computer chip, for example. Yet others describe the behavior of light particles, or photons, in the atmosphere, or how thermal energy is transferred during a nuclear explosion or in the heart of a star. Another Texas A&M engineering researcher, mechanical engineer Kalyan Annamalai, is considering using the center’s computational resources to model the behavior of gases inside steam-generating boilers. (See story on page 32.) “These problems involve some sort of transport — particle transport or radiation transport — coupled with fluid flow,” Adams says. “Once you know how to do that, you can apply it to a lot of different kinds of problems.” O Marvin Adams

Marvin Adams Marvin Adams, a professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering and director of the Center for Large Scale Scientific Simulation, says understanding more about what happens inside nuclear reactors will lead to better reactors in the future.

979.845.4198 mladams@tamu.edu

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energy

N u cl e a r energ y brings with it a risk that nuclear fuel and nuclear capabilities could be used to produce nuclear or radiological weapons. Ensuring that nuclear energy is used peacefully is the task of the nonproliferation expert. Diplomats get the spotlight in nonproliferation. But engineers and scientists can play an important role, too.

Bill Charlton is a nuclear engineer, not a diplomat.

By Gene Charleton

A diplomat would never talk so straightforwardly about a treaty the United States didn’t sign. But Charlton is as committed as any diplomat to solving an international issue that has vexed world powers for more than a half-century — proliferation of nuclear and radiological weapons. “The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty was a flawed treaty,” he says. “The U.S. works within the Comprehensive Test Ban framework, but we are not signatories to the treaty. (continued)

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William S. Charlton William S. Charlton, associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Engineering, says combining technology and policy development can lead to better defenses against nuclear proliferation.

“On the political side, it made sense and we agreed with it. But at the time the treaty was signed, there was no way to verify compliance with it. Thus, there was no way for us to say that no one was cheating on it.”

“One of our goals in this institute is to work with our partners (such as the Bush School) to try to help fix those sorts of problems so that for any treaty that gets signed, there is a technological basis for how we can verify that treaty and maintain it,” Charlton says.

Changing that is one of the goals of a new Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute (NSSPI) that Charlton helped found and heads. In the past, most efforts aimed at preventing the proliferation of nuclear and radiological weapons moved along separate paths, one policy oriented; one technology oriented. This practice led to situations like the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty — a good idea without the tools to make it work reliably. “One of our goals in this institute is to work with our partners (such as the Bush School) to try to help fix those sorts of problems so that for any treaty that gets signed, there is a technological basis for how we can verify that treaty and maintain it,” Charlton says. Major funding for NSSPI’s activities so far has come from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, the unit that oversees DOE’s nonproliferation programs.

Nuclear lie detectors? If verifying that nobody is cheating on treaties is the big issue in nuclear and radiological nonproliferation, figuring out how to make that work is a big part of what NSSPI was intended to do. Charlton says he considers the institute’s biggest strength the ability to bring together the policy development part of nonproliferation with the ability to develop the technology needed to make verification reliable. Nonproliferation technologies that NSSPI researchers are working on include • procedures and detection capabilities to safeguard nuclear reactor fuel; • methods and technology to determine the source of nuclear or radiological material used in a terrorist attack (such as the reactor that produced the spent fuel used in a dirty bomb); and • more sensitive and accurate interrogation devices to detect radioactive materials at ports of entry. The institute’s partners — the University of California, Berkeley; the University of New Mexico; and the Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, and Sandia National Laboratories — bring a variety of research and policy-development strengths. “They’ve all been extremely excited about the prospect of this institute and working with us,” Charlton says. “We have identified various research areas that

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energy

One of the most widely discussed issues in nonproliferation is keeping terrorists from getting their hands on nuclear or radiological weapons. There’s a big difference between them, and it’s important, Charlton says. Nuclear weapons use nuclear fission — the splitting of atomic nuclei — to produce huge amounts of energy. Their destructiveness ranges from the equivalent of several thousand tons of TNT to several million. Radiological weapons — “dirty bombs” — use conventional explosives to scatter powdered radioactive material over the area around the bomb’s explosion. Dirty bombs’ actual destructive power is minuscule, and unless you’re very near one when it goes off, they pose little real threat. Their real impact is fear and confusion. “They’re weapons of mass disruption, not mass destruction,” Charlton says.

we can work in with those different entities to help forward the state of knowledge in this arena.”

scientists also are working with DOE to develop research programs analyzing India and China.

The nuclear schoolhouse

Another ambitious educational undertaking is the joint development of master’s-level degree programs in nonproliferation at the Moscow Engineering Physics Institute (MEPHI) and the Obninsk Institute of Nuclear Power Engineering in Russia (Russian Academic Program in Nuclear Nonproliferation and International Security) and in Texas A&M’s nuclear engineering department. The new programs will hold their first classes in Fall 2006.

But nonproliferation research isn’t all the institute’s faculty is interested in. Education — both technical education for researchers at the national laboratories and more general education in nonproliferation issues for university students — is a big part of the institute’s mission. “We plan to get out into high schools, to go to other areas of Texas and small group settings, professors in front of a class, to be able to explain to them what is nuclear science, what is nuclear nonproliferation, what are the issues we have to deal with in the way of radiological weapons,” he says. Charlton has conducted nonproliferation-related short courses for researchers at national laboratories and has participated in DOE-sponsored activities aimed at helping nuclear weapons scientists in other countries convert weapons programs to peaceful uses, such as medical isotope production. Last year, he visited Libya as a member of a joint DOE team that consulted with Libyan nuclear scientists after the Libyan government formally renounced weapons of mass destruction.

“Finding ways that work to block the proliferation of nuclear and radiological weapons will only become more important as nuclear power becomes more important to worldwide energy production.” O William S. Charlton

979.845.7092 wcharlton@tamu.edu

NSSPI also is working with nuclear scientists in Egypt, Mexico and Morocco on nonproliferation issues. Algeria is expected to sign on soon. Institute

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Nuclear power

now and in the future By William Burchill William Burchill, the Heat Transfer Research Inc. Professor, is a renowned nuclear safety expert and frequent invited lecturer on nuclear power and safety. He has headed Texas A&M’s Department of Nuclear Engineering since 2003. This is an exciting time to be a nuclear engineering educator or a nuclear engineering student.

reactors, about 2.5 times the number for which applications have been announced.

Why? Because since the beginning of 2006, 10 utilities have announced plans to file applications during the next two years with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build as many as 21 new nuclear power plants. NRG Energy, owner of the South Texas Project, a two-reactor nuclear power plant 60 miles west of Houston, is one of those utilities. TXU Electric, owner of the other nuclear power plant in Texas — the Comanche Peak Plant 40 miles west of Fort Worth — announced June 8, “TXU will continue to investigate this [nuclear] option by exploring expansion of its Comanche Peak nuclear power facility.” These will be the first new nuclear power plant orders in this country since 1978.

Seventeen percent of the world’s electricity is generated by about 440 reactors. But the demand for electricity around the world is growing even faster than it is in the United States. This increase is due to three factors: world population growth rate is about three times the growth rate in this country; third-world countries are industrializing and improving their standard of living; and there is an ever-increasing availability of new technology powered by electricity.

Nuclear power from 104 reactors currently provides 20 percent of the United States’ electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) forecasts that by 2025 the country’s demand for electricity will increase by 50 percent. Just to maintain this fraction of electricity from nuclear power would require about 50 new

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Projections by the United Nations indicate that the world’s demand for electricity will increase by a factor of 2.5 by 2050. Thus, just to maintain the same worldwide fraction of electricity from nuclear power would require about 1,000 reactors. The International Atomic Energy Agency reported in January that 24 nuclear power plants are under construction outside the United States. However, many countries have aggressive plans to increase this number; the countries with the most ambitious construction plans are South Korea, Japan, China, India, France and Russia. Besides the projections of increased demand for electricity, concern with global warming has produced the current heightened

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p ersp e ctive

interest in nuclear power. During the past three years, the scientific community has collectively and definitively concluded that man-made emissions of carbon dioxide are causing the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere to increase. Nearly all those emissions are produced by burning coal for electricity production and burning petroleum products for transportation. Half of the United States’ electricity is produced by burning coal. Worldwide, the percentage is higher. Many environmentalists — for example, Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace, and James Lovelock, author of the Gaia Theory — have concluded that we must increase use of nuclear power and reduce our dependence on coal. In fact, Moore and former New Jersey governor and Environmental Protection Agency administrator Christine Todd Whitman announced in Spring 2006 the formation of the Clean and Safe Energy (CASEnergy) Coalition and are its co-chairs. The coalition “supports nuclear energy’s ability to enhance America’s energy security, attain cleaner air and improve the quality of life, health and economic well-being for all Americans.” The major factors that will determine the degree to which nuclear power is used in the future are (1) the operating record of current plants, (2) solution of the specific issues of radioactive waste disposal and security/nonproliferation of potential nuclear weapons materials, and (3) public understanding of the relative risk presented by nuclear power versus that from other forms of electricity production and other industrial and human activities. The operating record of current nuclear power plants is excellent. The average capacity factor (ratio of power produced to power that theoretically could be produced) of all U.S. plants was more than 90 percent in both of the last two years. No member of the U.S. public has ever been killed in an accident caused by a nuclear power reactor. The unit production cost of nuclear power is competitive with that of coal and significantly better than that of other fuels. The Department of Nuclear Engineering welcomes the current renewed interest in nuclear power. It is well positioned to take an active role in providing graduates to serve this interest and to address the factors that will determine nuclear power’s future. Each of the new nuclear power reactors announced by utilities this year are advanced designs with safety and economic improvements over the current fleet of operating nuclear power plants. DOE is, however, leading an international program involving 10 countries to design the next generation of nuclear power reactors — Generation IV. These new reactor designs include improved economics, safety, proliferation resistance and security. The nuclear engineering department is participating actively in this program through several DOE research contracts.

Quick facts about Texas A&M nuclear engineering • U.S. News & World Report currently ranks Texas A&M’s Department of Nuclear Engineering 3rd among undergraduate programs and 4th among graduate programs (2nd and 3rd respectively among public institutions). • The department has the largest student enrollment of any nuclear engineering program in the United States — about 200 undergraduates and 100 graduate students in Fall 2006. • New faculty added during the university-wide Faculty Reinvestment Program will bring the number of tenured and tenure-track faculty to 18. • Department research expenditures in both of the last two years was $4.6 million. Research awards this year total more than $7 million so far. • The department is the only one in the country with two nuclear reactors — a 1-megawatt TRIGA research reactor and a 5-watt AGN teaching reactor. • In collaboration with the George Bush School of Government and Public Service and the DOE Office of Defense Nuclear Nonproliferation, the department has established the Nuclear Security Science and Policy Institute. (See related story on p. 38) The Institute focuses on graduate education and research on topics related to safeguarding nuclear materials and enhancing national security against nuclear threats.

Nuclear power is expected to play a major role in responding to the increased demand for electricity both in this country and worldwide, providing a concentrated, economic and safe energy source while reducing the rate of greenhouse emissions into the atmosphere. William Burchill

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

979.845.1670 burchill@tamu.edu

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Environment

Understanding why levees and flood walls failed instead of protecting New Orleans from Katrinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s surging waters is the job of three Texas A&M civil engineers. By Lesley V. Kriewald

New Orleans, La., Aug. 30, 2005 â&#x20AC;&#x201D; Aerial photograph of the break in the levee in the 9th Ward. Neighborhoods throughout the area remain flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

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Erosion of levees caused by Katrina’s storm surge led to massive flooding that devastated the Big Easy. A Texas A&M expert in bridge scour applied his expertise to studying the quality of soil in New Orleans’ earthen levees. Laissez les bons temps rouler (“Let the good times roll”) may be New Orleans’ unofficial motto, but good times in the city have been hard to come by since floodwaters brought by Hurricane Katrina poured through broken levees and devastated the Big Easy in 2005. As much as eight feet below sea level, New Orleans straddles the Mississippi River and lies south of Lake Pontchartrain. More than 350 miles of levees — earthen embankments or concrete floodwalls that run alongshore The levees that failed to restrain water — protect New Orleans on both sides of the Mississippi River. did so because of what

engineers call sliding failures due to the force of the water or by overtopping of the levees during the

Those levees failed catastrophically, and Katrina’s storm surge inundated most of the city. Eventually, more than 450,000 people left New Orleans or were evacuated. Floodwaters damaged or destroyed more than 150,000 buildings in the city, and authorities estimate hurricane-related property damage at almost $23 billion.

storm surge, leading to

Understanding why the levees failed is the goal of the Independent Levee Investigation Team, a National Scierosion of the materials the ence Foundation-funded group led by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, that includes levees were made of. Texas A&M’s Jean-Louis Briaud, holder of the Spencer J. Buchanan Chair in Civil Engineering and a member of the Board of Governors of the American Society of Civil Engineers’ Geotechnical Institute. New Orleans, La., Sept. 9, 2005 — A blackhawk helicopter loads sandbags into areas where the levee has broken, which allowed neighborhoods throughout the area to be flooded as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

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Looking for answers Briaud is an expert in bridge scour, the erosion of soil around bridge supports due to water flow. He is applying this expertise to study the erosion of the levee materials during the hurricane. The storm surge, not the wind, is the most destructive part of a hurricane, and flooding caused by Katrina’s storm surge and accompanying rain flooded parts of the city to depths of 20 feet.

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Environment

New Orleans, La., Sept. 9, 2005 — FEMA Urban Search and Rescue teams continue search operations into areas affected by Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

The levees that failed did so because of what engineers call sliding failures due to the force of the water or the water overtopping the levees during the storm surge, leading to erosion of the materials the levees were made of. In the case of the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet and Industrial Canal levees, the height of the storm surge caused the water to rise and eventually overtop the levees. Some levees had been extended vertically with floodwalls, and the water cascaded over the tops of the floodwalls. When the water hit the earth on the back side of the levee, the overtopping water eroded the foundation of the levee, weakening its support and leading to breaches and flooding.

The power of water Water applies a force on each soil particle, Briaud says. The faster the water flows, the stronger that force is, and if the force is strong enough, the soil particle dislodges and erosion begins. Briaud says that force can be as weak as the pressure you feel when you blow gently on your hand — or powerful enough to breach levees. Soil resistance to erosion, however, can vary, depending on the degree of compaction, or cementation, of the particles. To test the soils used to construct the levees, Briaud analyzed samples from several sites — from levees

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that failed and from those that held. The samples were collected by shoving a hollow metal tube into the soil and then were brought back to Texas A&M, where Briaud and his students tested them using his Erosion Function Apparatus, a patented and licensed device that he invented. The apparatus tells how fast the surface erodes as a function of water velocity. If the flow rate is slow enough, no erosion occurs. But even though a superslow erosion rate may seem like nothing, to ignore it would be to ignore the Grand Canyon: The Colorado River may have taken 10 million years to erode the canyon, but it’s a mile deep. Briaud also performed a second, site-specific soil test by dropping a flow of water from a set height — say, two feet, for starters — and measuring the depth of the hole in the soil cut by the water flow. Then move the height up a set distance and repeat the test. “We’re trying to quantify how erodible a material is,” Briaud says. “We need a rating system, like the hurricane rating system.” Briaud says the test results can go a long way to predict erosion. An erodibility score of 1 or 2 means the soil erodes easily, whereas a score of 4 or 5 indicates resistance to erosion. (continued)

Jean-Louis Briaud Jean-Louis Briaud, professor and holder of the Spencer J. Buchanan Chair in Civil Engineering, tested soil samples from levees all around New Orleans. He says that some levees were made of much more erodible soil than others, leading to disastrous breaches, and that any levees left behind or being rebuilt should be evaluated for erodibility.

“It’s mind-boggling to see that

“The rate of erosion is critical,” Briaud says. “If the levees are overtopped but hold, it’s not really a problem. The overtop water is manageable.”

water — which if you think about

It’s the subsequent erosion of the back side of the levee by cascading overtop water that causes breaches.

it is such a ‘soft’ material — is able to destroy levees and bridges and lives but also create the Grand Canyon,” Briaud says.

All soils are not equal Briaud says that some of the New Orleans levees were made of very erodible material and some of erosion-resistant material. The good news, if any can be found in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, is that most of the erodible material in the levees has washed away. Briaud says the levees left behind or being rebuilt need to be evaluated for erodibility. Briaud says the fight between water and soil can be fierce. Often, the water wins, and people die. That’s what happened in New Orleans when the levees around the city failed, causing catastrophic flooding and devastation in the city of more than 1 million people.

Failure and flood

Numerical simulations and mathematical models are helping engineers paint the big picture of what went wrong in the Big Easy. For four months, one topic of conversation was offlimits to colleagues Billy Edge and Patrick Lynett: the performance of New Orleans’ hurricane protection system during Hurricane Katrina. Edge, head of the Coastal and Ocean Engineering Program and Bauer Professor, is serving on a committee of the American Society of Civil Engineers tasked with studying the performance of New Orleans’ hurricane protection system during Hurricane Katrina. As part of the committee, he is charged with reviewing the findings of others. Including assistant professor Lynett’s findings: Lynett did the numerical simulations necessary for making detailed predictions of forces on levees and during overtopping of the levees. “We don’t have a lot of observation,” Lynett says. “We don’t know what happened other than the devastation. So we have to rely on numerical simulations to tell us what happened.” For the numerical simulations, Edge says that Lynett performed about three years of calculations in about three weeks using Texas A&M’s Tensor Cluster, 256 computers purchased with a large National Science Foundation instrumentation grant. Using

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New Orleans, La., Sept. 7, 2005 — Neighborhoods on one side of the levee are flooded as one side remains dry as a result of Hurricane Katrina. Photo by Jocelyn Augustino/FEMA

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“The problem with levees is that if one component of the levee fails, the whole system fails,” Briaud says. “There’s no backup in case the levees fail. If any 100 feet of a levee fails, there’s no redundancy. To me, that has to change. You have to build some redundancy in those systems because the levees protect more than just people. It’s houses, factories, harbor facilities, warehouses — it’s not just lives.

Environment

“It’s mind-boggling to see that water — which if you think about it is such a ‘soft’ material — is able to destroy levees and bridges and lives but also create the Grand Canyon.” O Jean-Louis Briaud

Briaud’s Erosion Function Apparatus, a patented and licensed device that he invented, helps determine erodibility of soil by telling how fast surface material erodes as a function of water velocity.

979.845.3795 jbriaud@civil.tamu.edu

the computers, Lynett recreated conditions at given times. For instance, in the case of the 17th Street drainage canal, which failed near its entrance, Lynett took predicted water levels and the wave height in the canal to figure out what the water level and the wave height were near the failure, and the forces acting on the structure at various points in time. “We’re looking at forces at certain points in time,” Lynett says. “Then we give that information to structural and geotechnical engineers and say, ‘If these are the forces and the wave heights, etc., tell us what failed and how.’” Lynett also looked at the Mississippi River Gulf Outlet levee system. As water overtops a levee, it goes down the backslope of the levee and causes erosion. Using the velocity of the water and the overtopping of the levees at a given number of feet per second, Lynett estimated the erosion rate and compared that with the actual erosion of the levees. “I’m confident that the simulations recreated the conditions of Hurricane Katrina to a reasonable degree,” he says. Lynett says there were failures nearly everywhere in New Orleans’ hurricane protection system. The investigators have focused on the failures while also giving thought as to why some parts didn’t fail — for instance, the Orleans Canal, which flooded only at a pump station because of low wall height. “The Orleans Canal had the largest wave energy but no failure,” Lynett says. “The design worked, nothing failed, so the design elsewhere should work.”

“Modeling is extremely important to determine what happened because most of the wind-, waveand water-level measurement devices failed to capture the event,” Edge says. “The models are being compared with many eyewitness accounts where they were available.” Edge says that the city’s geography gives a big part of the picture. “New Orleans continues to sink,” Edge says, “but determining how much the city is sinking is almost impossible because the survey monuments are sinking as well. New Orleans is going down so fast, surveyors can’t keep up with it. To accommodate the rate of relative sea-level rise, reference points have to be continually adjusted and protection measures designed accordingly. “‘Category 1 through 5’ tells how fast the wind was blowing, but it doesn’t tell what happened, and that’s not fair. It’s all about location, location, location  — that’s what makes the difference.” O Billy Edge Patrick Lynett

979.847.8712 b-edge@tamu.edu 979.862.3627 plynett@civil.tamu.edu

Billy Edge and Patrick Lynett Billy Edge, holder of the W.H. Bauer Professorship in Dredging Engineering and head of the Coastal and Ocean Engineering Program, and assistant professor Patrick Lynett are helping to piece together exactly what failed and why during Hurricane Katrina.

And now it’s Edge’s turn to review the work of Lynett and others investigating the failures. http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Photo â&#x20AC;˘ Matt Zeringue

Veterinary surgeon Dave Nelson helps implant a direct cardiac compression device designed by Texas A&M biomedical engineer John Criscione. The patient? A sheep, as the device is now in animal trials.

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health and medicine

PHYSICAL THERAPY FOR FAILING hearts A new heart assist device developed by a Texas A&M biomedical engineer and physician could offer new hope of recovery to people with congestive heart failure. By Lesley V. Kriewald

By Lesley Kriewald

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Almost 5 million people in the United States suffer from congestive heart failure, and 400,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, most in people 60 and older. John Criscione hates problems he can’t solve, like the puzzle of congestive heart failure. As a young doctor, he found seeing patients suffering from congestive heart failure, but not being able to do anything about it, frustrating. Congestive heart failure is what happens when the muscles of the heart deteriorate over time. They get flabby and pump less efficiently than those of a healthy heart. It’s middle-age spread inside your chest. Almost 5 million people in the United States suffer from congestive heart failure, and 400,000 new cases are diagnosed each year, most in people 60 and older. A healthy heart must work to circulate blood through the body. But with congestive heart failure, a heart can’t pump efficiently, leading to fatigue and winding and eventually death. Illustration courtesy of the American Heart Association

What causes congestive heart failure is unknown, except that it can show up in the aftermath of a heart attack. The only sure cure is a heart transplant. So Criscione, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering who has an M.D. and a Ph.D., decided to do something about it, combining his engineering and medical skills to come up with a new approach. He began by focusing his attention on how mechanics — the study of force and motion in matter — applies to the physiology of the heart.

“The heart does a different kind of work from that of other muscles — not locomotion, but pumping. You have to do work in the heart to get blood from arteries to veins, and

Criscione says he believes the heart can be rehabilitated after a heart attack to ward off congestive heart failure. And with one of the first grants from the new Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Criscione and his company CorInnova are testing a device he designed that aims to get the unhealthy heart back into shape. In the absence of disease, bones and muscles grow to meet the demands placed on them. The same is true of the heart, Criscione says.

that’s mechanics,” Criscione says.

“Bones, tendons and muscles clearly respond to mechanical loads,” Criscione says. “If you start an exercise program, you’ll get bigger muscles. If you run, your leg bones get bigger to handle that load. “The heart does a different kind of work from that of other muscles — not locomotion, but pumping. You have to do work in the heart to get blood from arteries to veins, and that’s mechanics.”

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With congestive heart failure, Criscione says, the heart grows and changes shape in a way that makes the heart pump less efficiently. Patients with advanced congestive heart failure can’t climb stairs without feeling winded or tired and may have trouble walking or even getting out of bed.

CorInnova’s device, called a direct cardiac compression device, fits around the heart like a flexible cup with hollow walls. Pumping air into the walls of the cup squeezes the heart and pushes blood out. Letting the air out allows the heart to expand and fill with blood.

These failing hearts, Criscione says, show strain patterns drastically different from healthy hearts.

Implanted just after a heart attack, the device could restore proper motion to the heart when motion becomes abnormal. Criscione’s invention modulates the growth of the heart but doesn’t replace the heart or its action.

“After a heart attack, the heart’s mechanics are changed, so the ideal treatment for heart failure is to restore the heart’s regular strain pattern.”

“After a car accident or surgery, physical therapy can help repair the joint to become more functional. I think we can do the same for the heart,” Criscione says. Currently, the only real cure for congestive heart failure is a heart transplant, but most people with congestive heart failure aren’t eligible. Mechanical assist devices called left ventricular assist devices, invented by heart pioneer Michael DeBakey, may help to change the mechanical load on the heart. Many of those hearts even manage to repair themselves, a process known as ventricular recovery. But it doesn’t work for every patient, and current assist devices only help the heart pump blood. But Criscione says he thinks it may be possible to rehabilitate the heart after a heart attack — a kind of cardiac physical therapy. “When something goes wrong with joints and muscles, we need mechanics to get back into shape,” Criscione says. “After a car accident or surgery, physical therapy can help repair the joint to become more functional. I think we can do the same for the heart.” Criscione says such cardiac physical therapy would change the load on the heart, thereby changing the heart’s abnormal mechanics to guide good heart growth and operation.

health and medicine

Criscione and CorInnova co-founder Dennis Robbins (who manages the business side of the partnership) are currently conducting one-day animal trials on sheep with help from veterinary surgeons Teresa Fossum and Dave Nelson in the College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences’ Michael DeBakey Institute of Biomedical Devices. Results from these trials so far show that the device does restore motion to the heart. “Now the question is,” Criscione says, “if we do this for four weeks, do we reduce tissue death?” To test this, Criscione began 18 months of longterm efficacy trials in sheep this summer, studying the heart’s performance during the time the device is implanted. He says the efficacy trials will tell if the device can operate for several weeks without being rejected and if the longer implantation time reduces tissue death in the heart. “The ETF grant will allow for much longer trials, doubling our time from two to four weeks for implantation,” he says. “We’ll be able to do much more powerful studies in animals to further assess efficacy of the device.” From the results of the efficacy trials, Criscione says he and Robbins will either head back to the drawing board or proceed to safety studies before clinical trials. If all goes well, he says, they could begin clinical human trials in 2008. “Everyone has their own heart,” Criscione says. “We want to get it to work right.” O John Criscione

979.845.5428 jccriscione@tamu.edu

John Criscione Assistant professor John Criscione studies the mechanics of the heart, how the organ does what it does that allows us to live. He says a device he’s invented could help ward off congestive heart failure by restoring proper motion to a heart damaged by a heart attack.

And that’s where his invention comes in.

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It Is easy being green

You may be the eighth customer to use that particular camera, but to you, it’s new.

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There’s more to recycling a cell phone than putting it out by the curb on collection day. Texas A&M engineers are working to make product recycling and remanufacturing more efficient. By Adam Dziedzic and Lesley V. Kriewald

Last year’s cell phone. A disposable camera. Used auto parts. These things, among others, share a common fate, and it’s not shared space in your local landfill. They’re all things that can be reused, recycled or remanufactured, but getting the stuff from the consumer who no longer wants or needs it to the next consumer who does is tricky business. That’s where Sila Çetinkaya and Halit Üster in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering come in. The two specialize in supply chain management, controlling inventory from the manufacturing stage through distribution and into retail stores or dealerships. “The textbook definition of supply chain management is delivering the right product to the right customer at the right time and the right price,” Çetinkaya says. “But it’s also managing the financial flows throughout the process, not just the flow of physical goods.”

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BUSINESS

Supply chain management is a forward network, Üster says. The reverse — getting goods from the customers back to manufacturers — is called closedloop supply chain management. It’s a relatively new trend in supply chain management that focuses on “green manufacturing” to target recycling, recovery and remanufacturing systems to reuse many products that consumers no longer want.

So what happens to last year’s cell phone when you upgrade to this year’s model? Cell phones can be returned to the store where the new one is purchased. From there, the phones are resold and reused in other countries where the technology that is being phased out in the United States is just being introduced.

In these reverse networks consumers bring products to a retailer or a collection center. Depending on the particular product, it can be refurbished, remanufactured or recycled. Making sure the physical flow is efficient, Üster says, involves designing the network as well as production planning and inventory control. Mathematical models help to decide which retailer sends what product to which collection center and where the facilities need to be located for optimum efficiency.

What about that used-up printer cartridge? Users typically ship those directly to a collection center where they’re sent on to be refilled and resold. And those disposable cameras you turn in to be developed are similarly reusable; those are designed to be used seven or eight times, Çetinkaya says.

And that faulty transmission that’s still under warranty?

Closed-loop supply chain management is driven by changing customers, says Elif Akçali, an assistant professor at the University of Florida who is collaborating with Üster and Çetinkaya on their National Science Foundation-funded closed-loop supply chain management work. In the past, consumers bought a product and used it until it stopped working. Now, new models of many products are available every year and consumers want the latest model. These changing consumer behaviors also increase the life span of tech products, currently very short, comparatively. Take cell phones, for instance. Consumers often exchange their cell phones annually to upgrade to the newest models, but last year’s model may find a new life overseas in developing countries where it can be resold at lower costs to second consumers. Many other products have the potential for second use, including computers, auto parts, printer cartridges, refillable containers and a host of other possibilities. And increasing the life span of tech products means less solid waste in landfills and fewer pollutants emitted from first-time manufacturing systems, Akçali says. Making use of refillable containers such as glass bottles and print cartridges, and reusable materials such as tires and paper, is a viable alternative to landfill dumping.

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When you take it in for repair, chances are it’s being replaced with a refurbished transmission from another facility. Then your faulty transmission is itself collected, repaired and redistributed to eventually replace someone else’s buggy transmission.

Product reuse can also mean saving money. Çetinkaya says consumers notice 30 percent to 40 percent decreases in the final price of the reconditioned products. But these lower prices on remanufactured or refurbished products don’t mean lower product standards. Quality control is a crucial component in the process, Üster says. “You have to do 100 percent inspection on remanufactured parts,” he says, unlike new products that are only randomly sampled for quality control. Lower prices. Higher quality. Enhanced customer satisfaction. Sounds like a closed deal. O Sila Çetinkaya Halit Üster

979.845.5597 sila@tamu.edu 979.845.9573 uster@tamu.edu

Sila Çetinkaya and Halit Üster Graduate student Gopalakrishnan Easwaran (left) joins associate professor Sila Çetinkaya and assistant professor Halit Üster. Çetinkaya and Üster design networks that gets products from one group of consumers who no longer need or want them to another group of consumers who do.

the science of scent Can sensors and a computer replace a finely honed sense of smell? Maybe. Researchers are working on it. By Susan E. Cotton Your nose is a wonderfully sensitive thing. A trained nose, like one belonging to a perfumer, can detect as many as 10,000 odors, even in minute concentrations. Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna, an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, likes the aroma of perfume as much as anyone does. But he thinks about noses differently from most people. Instead of just sniffing with it, he’d like to design one. He doesn’t know if computer-powered “noses” will ever be able to distinguish between odors as subtly as a trained perfumer’s can, but he is convinced that noselike chemical–electronic sensors can extend our sense of smell in useful ways, like detecting spoiled food. Gutierrez-Osuna has studied computer models that may enable chemical–electronic instruments to imitate your sense of smell — olfaction  — for more than a decade. One of his graduate students, Baranidharan Raman, described one of these models in a recent Ph.D. dissertation. “To my knowledge, Raman’s work is the first that proposes a systemwide model of the olfactory system specifically for chemical sensors,” Gutierrez-Osuna says. To understand how the sort of chemical–electronic “nose” GutierrezOsuna envisions might work, let’s take a quick look at how your nose lets you know that that odor belongs to blue cheese and not blue fish. First, tiny molecules of the substances that make up blue cheese float into your nose with the air you breathe. Those molecules attach themselves to proteins in specialized cells called receptors on the surface of the inside of your nasal cavity deep inside your nose. Chemical reactions there cause a signal to go to specialized bundles of nerve fibers called glomeruli in your olfactory bulbs, which are at the end of the olfactory nerve deep inside your brain. The pattern these signals make on the glomeruli is similar to a fingerprint. The “shape” of this fingerprint is relayed to another collection of specialized cells, the olfactory cortex, in the cerebral cortex of your brain and you recognize the odor as blue cheese. All in a split second. The chemical–electronic sensors that someday may sniff out blue cheese  — or smuggled contraband — probably will work much the same way.

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Back to the blue cheese In the model proposed by Raman and GutierrezOsuna, molecules given off by the pungent cheese create a pattern of signals on chemical sensors that have the same function as the receptor cells in your nasal cavities. “It’s like a fingerprint, a digital fingerprint,” says Gutierrez-Osuna. Algorithms — step-by-step procedures that govern how computers carry out tasks — modeled after the way your nose works analyze the complex pattern. “Which are the key signal processing functions in the olfactory system that can be used to process data from chemical sensor arrays?” Gutierrez-Osuna says. “That was the question we posed.” Raman proposed a model with six functions: • Population coding — the blue cheese odor stimulates particular sensors. • Chemotopic convergence — simplifies the pattern produced by the sensors. • Volume control — diminishes the intensity of the odor so it can be recognized regardless of its concentration. • Contrast enhancement — makes the pattern more distinct to facilitate recognition upstream. • Holistic perception — compares odor patterns in the olfactory bulb to other patterns and completes them if necessary.

• Cortical feedback — modulates the olfactory bulb circuits to help identify individual components of the odor and eliminate background odors. You smell blue cheese. Or something else.

Technology

“Not unless you’ve shown it how blue cheese smells, though,” Gutierrez-Osuna says. The electronic nose, like yours, must learn and remember that blue cheese smells like, well, blue cheese. “Our expectation is that by modeling other computational functions performed by the olfactory system  — other than telling odor A from odor B or determining the concentration of odor A — we may be able to find new applications for the technology,” Gutierrez-Osuna says. His former graduate student, Raman, continues to work with electronic noses, studying chemical sensors at the National Institute of Standards and Technology and locusts’ sense of smell at the National Institutes of Health. “He’s trying to bridge these two fields,” GutierrezOsuna says, quoting Carver Mead of Cal Tech, founder of the neuromorphic systems approach: “‘As engineers, we would be foolish to ignore the lessons of billions of years of evolution.’” O Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna

979.845.2942 rgutier@cs.tamu.edu

Simplifying odors Before your nose — or a computer — can figure out that the odor it senses comes from a bottle of Chanel or a block of blue cheese, it has to “simplify” the odor. How does that work, anyway? Everything begins when volatiles — complex chemical molecules — from the wedge of blue cheese stimulate an array of chemical sensors. The pattern that response makes across the chemical sensors is an analog of the “population coding” that occurs inside your nose. Second, self-organization of sorts reduces the complexity of this pattern — through a process known as chemotopic convergence — like the glomeruli in your olfactory bulb represent an odor. Third, a circuit processes this pattern to dial down the intensity of the response, so the odor can be recognized over a range of concentrations — volume control.

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Fourth, another circuit enhances the pattern — makes it more distinct. Fifth, the signal is stored in a circuit that can fill in holes in a partial pattern — holistic perception — much like the olfactory cortex in your brain stores odor memories. Finally, the cortical circuit returns feedback to the bulb, to help identify components of the odor and eliminate background odors from the signal.

Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna studies computer models that may one day enable electronic noses to more closely imitate your sense of smell.

BRIGHT IDEAS A lot of bright ideas just stay ideas. Our engineering technology students learn how to turn their bright ideas into marketable products. By Lesley V. Kriewald

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Senior design courses never looked so good. Every engineering student looks forward to the senior design course. It’s where you get a chance to put what you’ve learned into practice. Hold onto your iPod — this one is something special. Senior electronics and telecommunications engineering technology majors in the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution’s two-semester “Capstone Experience” combine entrepreneurship, ethics, leadership and project management training with traditional and not-so-traditional senior design projects in an exciting experience. Assistant professor and program coordinator Jay Porter, the Victor H. Thompson Professor Joseph Morgan and senior lecturer George Wright designed (excuse the pun) the Capstone Experience to boost students’ project management skills, one area companies that hire engineering technology graduates said the graduates could improve upon. So they linked the project management skills development course with the final semester’s design course.

The experience In the first half of the sequence, called the project management course, students plan their design projects, from forming teams to identifying their design projects and securing an industry sponsor for the project. “Each team must operate as if it’s a startup company,” Morgan says. “They create their own names, logos, Web presence, shirts — the works.” In fact, the student teams were so good and convincing that at least one company didn’t want to work with a group because, on the basis of the team’s Web site, the company felt they were competing with the students’ company. The students also participate in a weekly entrepreneurship, leadership and ethics seminar series in which 10 executive-level individuals, such as Texas A&M President Robert M. Gates, serve as roundtable discussion leaders. Each team is responsible for identifying a topic and a speaker and then inviting the speakers to class. Discussions during the Spring 2006 course included “Legal, Ethical and Right,” “Facing Moral and Ethical Dilemmas,” “Invention and Commercialization: Where to Begin” and “Leading vs. Managing.”

able to pick their brains on ethical issues, starting a company from scratch, working on projects in teams, leading project teams, unique problems that they have dealt with during their careers and just about anything else you could think of,” Allison says. “I believe that all of the members of my class have benefited from the wealth of knowledge these guests were able to share with us.”

Technology Education

In the second semester, the senior design course, the students must deliver on their project plan with, as Morgan says, “a fully functional unit capable of being evaluated for commercialization.”

The student teams were so good and convincing that at least one company didn’t want to work with a group because the company felt they were competing with the students’ company. It might be something simple you can buy at Radio Shack or a system that the whole state of Texas will use. Or an automatic guitar tuner. One team designed a device that will automatically tune a guitar with one strum. You can pay $3,500 for a company to modify your guitar for self-tuning, but the Aggies’ invention will cost you only about $200. Morgan says that three engineers from the private sector who reviewed the project say that the algorithm the students used is unique and better than anything the engineers could have come up with. Porter says, “Five years ago, the students produced very little — a paper and a crude, simple prototype. Today, they’re producing commercially viable things — hardware and software that’s packaged and complete. “These projects far surpass everything I’ve seen come out of a senior design course.”

The incubator concept At the start of the design course, teams can agree to let the university help sell the prototypes. The upshot? Getting students to try to start businesses around their prototypes.

Senior Anthony Allison says he thinks the seminar series was the most exciting part of the course.

Morgan says this incubator concept enhances the undergraduate experience by motivating the students to learn.

“I cannot begin to describe the experience of meeting with such senior industry members and being

And it’s working. In the fourth annual Ideas Challenge hosted by Texas A&M’s Center for New

Joseph Morgan And Jay Porter Victor H. Thompson Professor Joseph Morgan and assistant professor Jay Porter have designed the Capstone Experience, a two-semester senior design course emphasizing project management and entrepreneurship that is, well, quite an experience.

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“If we have 100

Ventures and Entrepreneurship, a team from Morgan and Porter’s sequence — seniors Matthew Johnston, Kurt Richardson, Jud Chilton and Cody Thurston — won first place and $3,000 in startup cash with their project, the Expandable Vehicle Information System, a Bluetooth-enabled dashboard console that can interpret everything from a car’s malfunctions and steps to correct them to alerts from projects and rear bumper sensors.

only one starts a business,” Morgan says, “that will be a complete success and will do more to stimulate further

The National Science Foundation, or NSF, likes the incubator concept, too. In a preproposal evaluation, Texas A&M recently selected Morgan and Porter’s concept to go forward as the university’s response to the NSF Partners For Innovation call for proposals.

students than anything we can do In addition to the university’s help in selling the prototypes, a separate private company as faculty and as a university.” has opened offices in the Bryan–College Station area to partner with Morgan and Porter through their students to help take the projects from prototypes to products. The company will evaluate prototypes for commercial viability and then take the projects forward.

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“The key is that partnership,” Morgan says. “That’s why NSF is so enamored with our concept: We’ve formed this partnership that will repeat.”

Making it work Porter and Morgan say that they’re looking at viable products instead of technological developments, at intellectual property “know-how” instead of patents. Their aim is the know-how to produce a product and to make it work — and how to make it quickly, how to market it and how to make it profitable. “If we have 100 projects and only one starts a business,” Morgan says, “that will be a complete success and will do more to stimulate further students than anything we can do as faculty and as a university. “‘It can’t be done’ has been removed because we’ve shown it can be done.” O Joseph Morgan Jay Porter

979.845.4958 morganj@entc.tamu.edu 979.845.1459 porter@entc.tamu.edu

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Technology

Here’s a sample of products developed by Capstone Experience students.

Education

SureSense™ wireless sensor system Medical equipment can be cumbersome, difficult to wear and embarrassing at times. Fusion Networks seeks to remedy this trend with the SureSense™ wireless sensor system. Removing the wires that connect electrodes and medical electronics will free patients from the inconvenience of being tethered to equipment and greatly increase their comfort levels. (Lucas Folegatti, Sloan Williams, D. Gray Eby, Justin Vierra)

Project EVIS Project EVIS aims to provide greater driver awareness. By using a console unit located on the dash of a vehicle, drivers will be able to obtain crucial information about their cars. This unit will provide explanations for check-engine lights and notify the driver if they are about to bump into an object while parking. This system will provide cost-effective highend features for consumers to install in their cars. (Matthew Johnston, Jud Chilton, Kurt Richardson and Cody Thurston)

Auto-Tune

Game Guardian

Auto-Tune is a self-tuning electric guitar. The guitar will have a user-friendly interface that will allow the operator to choose among several different tuning styles. The Auto-Tune system will not affect the performance or the appearance of the guitar and will be powered by a stereo cable that is connected to a stomp-box-sized power supply. (Chad Stone, Evan Gooch, Eric Pesek, Matthew Tilleman)

The Game Guardian is targeted to parents and guardians who need some help in structuring game usage of the kids they supervise. With the Game Guardian, parents will not have to worry about monitoring the amount of time kids spend playing video games, eliminating one more thing busy parents worry about. (Kyle Royder, Don Hatchett)

Sensor Apparatus for Valued Energy Time-of-day billing will allow power companies to determine the amount of power used by customers on an hour-tohour basis instead of a month-to-month basis. With this information, customers can be charged for their power usage based on what time of day they are consuming it. The Sensor Apparatus for Valued Energy (SAVE) will use a Broadband over Power Line communications interface to automatically retrieve the power reading from a kilowatt-hour meter at regular intervals. This method of meter reading will provide power companies with an effective and economical way of implementing time-of-day billing. (Anthony Allison, Todd Celinski, Robert Feldman, Clayton Fischer)

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If you’re a serious computer programmer, you recognize Bjarne Stroustrup’s name. Now he’s sharing his passion for computer programming with freshman computer science students. By Susan E. Cotton Bjarne Stroustrup invented the programming language C++.

ject interesting and finally, to becoming an author yourself.”

He’s a member of the National Academy of Engineering, winner of the Sigma Xi William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, a tenured professor in the Department of Computer Science and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science.

He earned a Cand. Scient. (a degree like a master’s) in mathematics and computer science from the University of Aarhus (Denmark) in 1975 and a doctorate in computer science from England’s Cambridge University in 1979. Then he left Cambridge for the Bell Telephone Laboratories Computer Science Research Center in New Jersey. Then he invented C++.

He’s written three definitive books (The C++ Programming Language is in its fourth edition in at least 19 languages.). And now he is teaching freshman engineering students in a course he developed just for them. (He helped write the textbook, too.) “I decided to design a first programming course after seeing how many computer science students  — including students from top schools — lacked fundamental skills needed to design and implement quality software,” Stroustrup says. “Many simply had a completely warped view of what software development was about. They saw software development as ‘just programming,’ and programming as an obsessed individual working in isolation, slaving away night after night on obscure details of incomprehensible code. Some like that picture, but most don’t find it attractive. I don’t find it attractive. “This warped view causes some people to avoid computer science completely,” he says. “It makes some avoid software development and concentrate on specialties that don’t involve serious code and worst of all, leads people who do want to develop software to go about it in an inefficient and self-destructive way.” When Stroustrup was a beginner himself, he was “an impatient novice who just wanted to get his job done.” Programming was what he did to get the job done — until he became fascinated by it. “That’s a significant shift in emphasis,” he says. “I suppose it’s similar to the transition from enjoying reading a novel, to wondering about why the novel is enjoyable, to studying how the author made the sub-

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C++ is a programming language that supports techniques like object-oriented programming: Its commands initiate operations in discrete modules, or objects, in a program. Software like the Apple iPod user interface, Adobe Photoshop, the Mars Exploration Rovers’ visual systems and Microsoft Internet Explorer are programmed in C++. “We, that is, the ISO C++ Standards Committee, started work on a revised standard in 2003,” Stroustrup says. “Before that, we basically left the C++ standard alone to give implementers and users a chance to catch up with the 1998 standard. We hope that C++0X will become C++09. For that to happen, we need to fix the set of features by the end of next year.” Some of this set will simplify the programming language — and programming overall — for beginners. For example, the committee intends to reduce the operation that extracts a number from a character string from four lines of expert coding to one line of simple coding. And they’ll generalize rules like “You can add two integers, you can add two unsigned integers, you can add an integer and an unsigned integer, …” to “You can add two numbers.” “You have to consider how easy an individual feature is to use, how it will be used in the context of a real program, how easy it is to learn and how well it supports programming techniques,” Stroustrup says. “In addition, you have to consider how those techniques, as initially learned by novices, scale to realworld problems and how learning the feature and its related techniques lead to further effective learning. I really don’t want a ghetto of simple features and T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

p ersona l it y

techniques that must be unlearned before a student can progress from student exercises to real-world systems.” Some experienced programmers disagree with simplifying C++ for beginners. They worry it will become too simplistic for the experienced programmers and their applications.

“I want to help the hundreds of thousands of C++ programmers who are just starting out or just want to use a bit of C++ to get their work done. And C++0X will also provide plenty of new features for the experts.” O Bjarne Stroustrup

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

979.845.4094 bs@cs.tamu.edu

Photo • ©Scott Goldsmith

“Often, experts have a hard time putting themselves in the shoes of novices,” Stroustrup says. “Sometimes, their attitude is ‘Why don’t they just become experts?’ My answer to that question is ‘It takes a long time to become an expert, and you don’t need to know all of C++ to write good and useful programs.’

MAKING ROBOTS SMARTER

Engineers say barcode’s big brother, RFIDs, may help humans put robots to work on Mars.

Scene: We open on a close-up of a robot busily picking up parts and connecting them. Pull back to a wide shot of more robots assembling a base station on Mars.

Today, RFID technology is used in everything from inventory control to product authentication; toll tags to speed passes at the gas pumps; runners in marathons to assets in the supply chain.

Robotic construction crews may sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but Texas A&M engineers are working to make them a reality.

And, someday soon, automated robotic construction.

Aerospace engineering assistant professors John Hurtado and Tamás Kalmár-Nagy and Distinguished Professor and Eppright Chair John Junkins are collaborating with engineering technology professor Ben Zoghi to combine radio frequency identification (RFID) technology with robotics for automated construction and repair. RFID is a generic term for technologies that use radio waves to automatically identify items. There are many different methods of product identification using RFID, but the most commonly used is one in which a unique serial number identifying the product is stored on a microchip that is attached to an antenna. Together, the chip and the antenna are called an RFID transponder or RFID tag. The antenna enables the chip to transmit this unique identification number to a reader, which converts the radio waves returned from the RFID tag into a format that can be passed on to computers. RFID itself isn’t new, but the technology is currently experiencing a revival because of Wal-Mart’s announcement in June 2003 that it was requiring its top 100 vendors to be RFID compliant. In World War II, for example, rudimentary RFID was used to distinguish between friendly and enemy aircraft.

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Robots are inherently dumb without the right software, the engineers say. Robots don’t perceive as humans do, so humans have to give the robots ways to recognize things — using vision and global positioning system (GPS) technologies, for example. “RFID technologies will be fused together with other sensors and used by a new generation of robot control software to achieve a revolutionary degree of ‘situational awareness’ required for robotic systems to become more adaptive to unstructured and offnominal conditions,” Junkins says. RFID tags on each piece of the structure will tell robots exactly what goes where and how to connect the pieces. The robots will read the information stored in the tags as a computerized instruction manual to assemble whatever it is they are supposed to assemble. “Robots are really good at picking stuff up and moving it around,” Zoghi says. “They’re not so good at putting things together. But with RFID tags, the robot can say, ‘I know this, this goes with that piece over here,’ and start building something.” The tags can store all kinds of information, including compatibility with various joints and parts, and material properties, such as when to replace a part because of wear or aging. (continued) T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

Technology By Lesley V. Kriewald and

ROBOTICS

Adam Dziedzic

RFID tags — or “barcodes on steroids,” according to aerospace engineer John Junkins — can store incredible amounts of data. Texas A&M engineers want to use the tags in robotics for autonomous assembly and construction.

“Laser technology was driven by the barcode,” Junkins says. “It’s amazing that RFID — the same technology that is making for automated inventory control and will make for the automated store of the future — can be used for robotics. We just have to let our imaginations flow.”

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John Junkins

John Hurtado

Tamás Kalmár-Nagy

Distinguished Professor and holder of the George J. Eppright Chair in Engineering John Junkins and assistant professors John Hurtado and Tamás Kalmár-Nagy have teamed up with engineering technology professor Ben Zoghi to combine RFID and robotics for a new generation of autonomy for the future.

“The amount of information we can store on the tags is mind-numbingly incredible,” Junkins says. “There are good, bad and ugly uses for all that information, but the impact on automation is unambiguously good.” Hurtado says one challenge with RFID technology is pushing it beyond its current capabilities to aid in construction — for precise positioning, for instance. Presently, RFID has to be coupled with This simple robotic arm is building a tower from RFIDother sensing technologies labeled blocks. Junkins says this first experiment is such as vision. But a concept almost a toy experiment, and though it didn’t cost a lot of money, there is a lot of interest in the idea. “It just Junkins calls “RFID radar” requires imagination,” he says. could give positioning information relative to other objects, not just data. The researchers say one goal is repairable spacecraft. The recent missions to repair the Hubble Space

the power of the internet Junkins says a simple search for “RFID” in a popular search engine brought up Zoghi’s RFID and Sensor Convergence Laboratory. “It’s funny how things come together,” Junkins says. “I’ve known Ben Zoghi for years, but I didn’t know he was working in RFID.” In fact, Zoghi’s been working in the area of RFID since 2003, first using the technology for supplychain management when he headed the Industrial Distribution Program. Now he is pursuing using RFID sensors, combining them with GPS and Wi-Fi technologies for applications outside the supply chain. His extensive work, conducted through his RFID and Sensor Convergence Laboratory, focuses on designing systems and sensor networks for security, tracking, location and automation. Behbood “Ben” Zoghi

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979.845.4074 zoghi@tamu.edu

Telescope and the space shuttle Discovery required humans to make the expensive and risky repairs. “We hope to make a large fraction of assembly and repair amenable to robots,” Junkins says. And this technology could really affect the next generation of spacecraft. If humans ever colonize the moon or Mars, human-supervised or autonomous robots will have a big role in assembling and repairing structures. In that case, everything must be simple enough to assemble and repair robotically. Including the robots themselves, amusingly enough. “Robots could replace their own parts,” Kalmár-Nagy says. “If the left leg is malfunctioning, the robot can find a replacement leg in inventory and fix it.” “Self-repairing robots will happen, and RFID tags will be there,” Hurtado predicts. It may be sooner than you think. Texas A&M is leading a new 40-member consortium, the Consortium for Autonomous Space Systems (CASS), for a

Don’t be late! Students thinking about skipping that 8 a.m. intro to engineering class should probably think twice. Zoghi and students designed the Automatic Attendance System, a practical way to monitor class attendance. An RFID system picks up the transponders in the students’ possession when they walk into the classroom — say, ID badges clipped to their backpacks or pinned to their shirts. The information in the RFID tags is transmitted to the professor’s database, recording the students’ attendance.

Protecting the Hartford Library one book at a time Zoghi says RFID sensors can be used to tag just about anything for tracking purposes. The Hartford Public Library in Connecticut approached Zoghi to develop a system to eliminate theft of CDs, DVDs and books. As books are moved around, they are easily found with the tracking sensors, and decreasing theft means more funds are available to increase library inventory.

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new generation of autonomy. Junkins and Hurtado visited Sandia National Laboratory in June to gauge interest in partnering with Texas A&M on RFID and robotics for space construction. “If we could bring the RFID technology and they could help bring robots up to speed, we could really kick-start this thing,” Hurtado says.

and swipe your credit or debit card on your way out. The RFID reader at the door charges everything in your basket to your card on your way out.”

Technology

And takes the items you’ve just bought out of the store’s inventory automatically, Kalmár-Nagy adds.

ROBOTICS

Look to the past to see the future

The researchers say this technology is feeding back into engineering and robotics research in a revolutionary way.

In 1973, a grocery store in Ohio sold the first-ever item with a barcode, a pack of chewing gum. More than 30 years later, almost everything sold has a barcode, and the laser technology that was developed to read the barcode now reads our CDs, DVDs and our computer disk drives. In fact, the laser led to an incredible acceleration of the computer industry.

The Texas A&M engineers say RFID technology is at that point to have a tremendous impact. “RFID is a barcode on steroids,” Junkins says. “Eventually, when you do your grocery shopping, you’ll steer your cart full of stuff through the door

The real deal Nobody likes a fake, especially when it comes to prescription drugs. Zoghi says RFID can now monitor counterfeit drugs through an RFID-based drug pedigree information system. The pharmacy Life Station is an innovative self-starting device with an RFID reader that is deployed at each stage of the supply chain, from inception to your local pharmacy. At each shipment point, information is sent to a central subscription agency that maintains all records about a particular box of drugs.

John Junkins

979.845.3912 junkins@tamu.edu

John Hurtado

979.845.1659 jehurtado@tamu.edu

Tamás Kalmár-Nagy

979.862.3323 kalmarnagy@aero.tamu.edu

Warehousing for the chemical industry In a project for a Dallas company that supplies chemicals for the semiconductor and photo industries, Zoghi designed a zoning system in the company’s warehouse so management could better track where their chemicals are going for insurance purposes. The system also monitors temperature in real time in the barrels used to store the chemicals, alerting management when the temperature changes.

Smart superstore: Or, who moved my cheese? RFID tags are used in a grocery store to monitor products’ location and temperature as soon as they come off the trucks. Shelves are also fitted with RFID readers so that as soon as an item runs out, an alert is sent to a central computer. In stores, RFID tags can also be used for theft detection and to ease congestion in the checkout lane. The tags on all items automatically transmit information to the checker, thus removing the need for tedious item-by-item scanning. Also, if someone doesn’t pay for an item, readers at the store’s entrance will sound, alerting security personnel.

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Ben Zoghi Electronics engineering technology professor Ben Zoghi says RFID can be used in everything from tracking inventory in a library, warehouse or grocery store to taking class attendance and making sure prescription drugs aren’t fakes.

Batteries + – not required

Instead of a battery-powered iPod, imagine an iPod powered by, well, you. That’s one application Ibrahim Karaman in the Department of Mechanical Engineering says could be a reality with the use of smart materials called ferromagnetic shape memory alloys, or FSMAs for short. Alloys are materials made up of a combination of metallic elements. And alloys have more desirable properties than any of their individual components  — steel, for instance, which is stronger than the iron present in the alloy.

to wait for a slow temperature change, the materials change shape more quickly than traditional shape memory alloys. “The magnetic field can cause deformation like external stress,” Karaman says, “but upon the removal of the magnetic field, the FSMAs can go back to their original shapes. “Alternatively, the change in temperature of FSMAs or externally applied stress can change the magnetization of the FSMAs. In other words, you can make these materials magnetic by small change in temperature or by applying load on them.”

“Magnetic shape memory alloys can be used to harvest power from movement,” Karaman says. “A special FSMA module in the heel of your shoe would harvest the power generated when you walk, so

And switching repeatedly between nonmagnetic and magnetic behavior in the alloys causes power generation, which Karaman says can be exploited to generate power to make those tunes play on your iPod.

“Magnetic shape memory alloys can be used to harvest power from movement,” Karaman says. “A special FSMA module in the heel of your shoe would harvest the power generated when you walk, so you could use that power to charge your cell phone or MP3 player.”

you could use that power to charge your cell phone or MP3 player.” Shape memory alloys are metals that “remember” their shapes or configurations. You can deform shape memory alloys, which can go back to their original shapes when heat is applied. Similarly, Karaman says, shape memory alloys can be deformed when an external load or stress is applied. After the removal of the load, they can again go back to their original shapes, like rubber. But FSMAs go back to their original configurations when a magnetic field (as well as temperature change) is applied. The magnetic field induces shape change because of a reorientation of the material’s crystallographic structure. And because FSMAs don’t have 68

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Or for military and defense applications, to power communications and equipment in the field. It’s not a new idea, Karaman says. Earlier research used piezoelectric materials such as ceramics for power harvesting, but those materials have such a high resistance that it’s difficult to use them to store energy. Plus, piezoelectric materials are inflexible, rendering them impractical for use in the sole of a shoe.

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Magnetic shape memory alloys that change shape to produce power could change our lives, from powering your iPod as you run to refrigerating your food. Oh, and protecting borders, too. By Lesley V. Kriewald

“FSMAs are advantageous for power generation because they don’t require any moving parts as electric motors (or magnetic flashlights that you need to shake to recharge) do,” Karaman says.

operate. The significantly different operating mechanism in FSMAs may allow magnetic refrigeration at considerably lower fields as compared to rare-earth magnets.”

Another use for magnetic shape memory alloys? A wireless sensor network for border security. Karaman says a small FSMA unit buried underground (or on the ground disguised as a small stone) could detect pressure, force and heat. Stepping on the unit will generate power to give a signal. And the force of a footstep is enough to generate enough power for the unit to give the alarm, so there’s no worry about keeping batteries fresh.

“Shape memory alloys are truly multifunctional, multipurpose materials,” he says.

Similarly, an FSMA unit that combines a wireless network and power harvester could be used to detect cracks in ships and airplanes. “You have sensors on the hull of an airplane or a ship to sense cracks,” Karaman says, “but you always have to check the battery. But if you can harvest energy from ambient wind or vibration, then you can use that energy to power the sensors.” And an even cooler idea? Magnetic refrigeration. Karaman says that it’s possible to use magnetic fields to cool a refrigerator, which means no more environmentally unfriendly refrigerant gases. No one’s investigated this possibility of using FSMAs for magnetic refrigeration in the United States, but he thinks it can work because of the large entropy changes that occur upon the application of magnetic field.

Karaman is currently working to find new materials for FSMA and to understand their behavior. He collaborates with several other faculty in the Dwight Look College of Engineering: Slattery Chair Dimitris C. Lagoudas of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, who develops models for real FSMA applications; associate professor Aydin I. Karsilayan of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, who looks into designing effective power conversion and storage circuitry for FSMAs; and professor Tahir Cagin of the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, who tries to understand the effect of different atomic couplings in the atomistic scale in FSMAs that makes them work as power generators and refrigerators. Karaman says the researchers hope to computationally design new FSMAs using atomistic calculations in the not-too-distant future instead of using ad hoc approaches to alloy design. O Ibrahim Karaman

979.862.3923 karaman@tamu.edu

Ibrahim Karaman Assistant professor Ibrahim Karaman works with magnetic shape memory alloys, which he says could be used to protect borders, power your iPod or even refrigerate food.

“The idea of using alloys for magnetic refrigeration is not new, but people have investigated using only magnets made out of expensive rare-earth metals for this purpose, which require large magnetic fields to

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

harleton B y G en e C

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Computer programming techniques that enable robots to find their way around obstacles are helping researchers understand one of the most complex and important problems in biomedical science — how protein molecules fold. Proteins are crucial to human health. They do most of the important things that allow us — and other living things — to stay alive. The hemoglobin that carries oxygen in our blood is a protein. So are hormones like insulin, estrogen and testosterone. The antibodies that fight infection are proteins. Tendons and ligaments and bones are mostly protein.

Even simple proteins often are made up of more than 100 smaller molecules called amino acids strung together like beads. Big proteins have thousands of amino acids. In your body, this string of molecules is folded into complex subshapes known as alpha helices and beta strands, hairpins and sheets, that are connected by loops. All of these pieces have to fit together perfectly for the protein to have the right overall shape and stability for it to do what it’s supposed to do in our bodies.

Technology health and medicine

When this intricate folding goes awry, bad things happen. A hemoglobin protein that’s folded wrong results in the fatal disease sickle cell anemia. A misfolded bone protein gives us how proteins brittle bone disease. Misfolded proteins in the brain can mean Alzheimer’s or mad cow disease.

A team of researchers led by professor Nancy Understanding Amato, co-director of the Department of Computer Science’s Parasol Labora- fold will help medical tory, is applying these The protein solution programming techniques, scientists develop treatments Understanding how proteins fold known as motion plancan help researchers understand ning, to protein folding. why the proteins sometimes fold Motion planning means for diseases caused by incorrectly. This understandcomputing a feasible, or ing will help medical scientists possibly most efficient, misfolded proteins and work develop treatments for diseases way for something to caused by misfolded proteins and happen. It could be work out ways to prevent them. figuring a safe way out ways to prevent them. So far, the researchers have for a robot to move through a roomful of obstacles, the most effi- applied their technique to moderate-sized protein cient way to fold cardboard into a box or activi- molecules  — consisting of between 50 and 200 ties even more complex — like understanding smaller molecules. how stringlike protein molecules fold into the They use desktop PCs to compute mathematical complex shapes they take to do their jobs. descriptions of the “folding landscape” that deter“Our motion-planning technique for simulat- mines the process that protein molecules go through ing protein folding is orders of magnitude faster as they fold. Intuitively, the landscape encodes paths than existing methods — we solve problems in that protein molecule “robots” might follow to find hours on a desktop PC that take traditional their way around high-energy obstacles to “comfortmethods months of supercomputer time. Essen- able” positions. tially, we save time by computing approximate solutions that capture the important features of To study more and larger proteins, they are using the STAPL parallel C++ library, also developed in the the precise solution,” says Amato. Parasol laboratory, and the world’s fastest supercomputer, IBM’s Blue Gene. Putting proteins into motion When motion planning is applied to protein “So far we have shown that our simulations agree folding, it means working out how individual with known experimental results,” Amato says. The parts of the complex protein molecule move real significance of our method, though, lies in its into what biologists call the molecule’s native potential to discover facts that have not yet been state, the shape in which the parts of the established experimentally and to test proposed molecule nest together most “comfortably” therapies to alter undesirable folding behaviors.’’ O in terms of the energy in the molecule. The protein’s ability to function properly Nancy Amato 979.862.2275 depends on this shape being right. amato@cs.tamu.edu Figuring out how this works is a knotty problem. Proteins are some of the largest and most complicated molecules there are. http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

Nancy Amato Nancy Amato is co-director of the Parasol Laboratory. Researchers in the Parasol Lab are using programming techniques originally developed for robots to analyze the best way for the parts of complex protein molecules to fold together and function properly.

Engineering students ready microsatellite for competition Eighty undergraduates built a satellite experiment, SHOT II, that was launched from the University of Colorado (Boulder) to the edge of space on a weather balloon in June.

Earthward at initial velocities of up to 5,000 mph. Once the satellites fall far enough, a parachute inflates to slow their descent and they hit the ground at speeds of about 10 mph.”

The launch of SHOT II, part of the U.S. Air Force’s Students Hands-On Training (SHOT), is a prelude to an Air Force Research Lab competition in August.

This exercise will provide valuable information for the Aggie team as they complete AggieSat-l.

Helen Reed, head of the Department of Aerospace Engineering, brought the student satellite lab with her in 2005 from Arizona State University, where her students launched two nanosatellites. Her AggieSat Lab is a multidisciplinary hands-on program where students from 18 majors collaborate in designing and building nanosatellites for space exploration. One of the satellites built by her students at Arizona State University, the University of Colorado and New Mexico State University, nicknamed Petey, has guided Aggie aerospace engineering students in their quest to build their own satellite, AggieSat-1. (Petey is living from now on in the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.) AggieSat-1 will be featured in the August competition with 10 other universities. Its mission will be to operationally test a responsive space platform featuring three technology experiments: a simple microsatellite propulsion system using water as the propellant, a versatile miniature positioning mechanism using a reusable shape memory alloy as the actuator and an enzymatic energy source using glucose as the fuel. If AggieSat1 wins the competition, it will get the chance to be launched into space as part of a real rocket payload.

“The microcontroller on our SHOT II payload mimics the generic control board design for AggieSat-l,” Goodnight says. “SHOT II provided us with valuable experience building, programming, and testing this type of electronics and RSM device driver-dependent functions. It also helped determine the cooling times of an SMA spring (the main component of the SMA payload on AggieSat-l) to allow for more efficient operations on orbit.” Goodnight says that the Aggie SHOT II made it safely to the ground after reaching an altitude of 61,000 feet and that it was the only satellite to return with pictures of the mission. Competitors tracked the weather balloon and satellites using GPS, although Goodnight says at its highest altitude, the balloon is big enough to be seen from the earth with binoculars. “My team and I equipped a camera with a microcontroller that let us obtain video images and sound from the edge of space,” he says. “We got some great shots of the troposphere boundary — and found out that it’s really quiet up there!”

They’re the intangible qualities that Texas A&M students are known for: a can-do spirit, a sense of belonging and a work ethic that can’t be beat.

Aerospace engineering majors Amanda Collins, Ryan David Goodnight and Libby Osgood journeyed to Boulder to test the SHOT II’s responsiveness and its resilience temperatures as low as –40˚ F and G-forces of up to 15. “We padded our satellite with Texas A&M koozies,” Goodnight says. “Then it was attached, along with satellites from nine other universities, to a weather balloon. At ground level, these balloons, filled with helium, are no bigger than an average-sized room, but by the time they reach an altitude of 100,000 feet, they expand to fill an area comparable to Kyle Field. “The weather balloons are made of latex and finally burst, sending the attached satellites plummeting

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Members of the AggieSat-1 team show off Smithsonian-bound satellite Petey. Built by students at Arizona State University, the University of Colorado and New Mexico State University, Petey has guided Aggie aerospace engineering students in their quest to build their own satellite.

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students Aggies form first-ever INMM student chapter The first student chapter in the history of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management (INMM) has been formed at Texas A&M University. This is not the first time Aggie nuclear engineering students have formed the “first-ever” student chapter of a professional society. Students in the department organized the first-ever chapter of Women in Nuclear at Texas A&M in 2004. INMM aims to promote education and research in nuclear materials management, with an emphasis on nuclear nonproliferation, accountability, and international safeguards and materials control. “I not only want to help this chapter grow, but I want to teach students about the importance of nuclear materials management,” says chapter president Karen Miller, graduate student in the Department of Nuclear Engineering. The chapter’s activities will consist of a biweekly student forum, alternating with outside speakers. Hosted speakers will include representatives from the

National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the Oak Ridge and Los Alamos National Laboratories, and the Nuclear Threat Initiative. Other activities will include social events and a research paper contest at the national INMM meeting. Chapter adviser and associate professor William Charlton says this organization is extremely important for the students and the future. “In today’s world, the threat of terrorists using a nuclear or radiological weapon is greater than ever, and it is crucial that we have young minds with both a technical and political mindset thinking creatively about how to prevent the spread of nuclear and radiological weapons,” Charlton says.

Members of the first chapter of the Institute of Nuclear Materials Management gather to celebrate the organization’s founding.

Students win California Formula SAE competition Undergrads won 2006 Formula SAE West competition June 14–17 at the California Speedway in Fontana, Calif., with the formula race car they designed, built and drove. In addition to their overall win, the students finished first in the competition’s endurance/economy and skid pad events and won the Honda Dynamic Events Award for amassing the top score in combined dynamic events and the Road & Track magazine award for acceleration and agility. Their race car featured a new design and a new supercharged Yamaha engine. Mechanical problems held the team to a 44th-place finish in the May Formula SAE competition at the Ford Proving Grounds in Romeo, Mich. Formula SAE is an annual competition organized by SAE International (formerly the Society of Automotive Engineers). Student teams design, build and compete with small formula-style race cars in the competition. Texas A&M first competed in Formula SAE in 1999, when it finished 14th and brought home the national competition’s “Rookie of The Year” award. The team won the national competition in 2000 and finished second in 2004. The 2006 Formula SAE Team designed, built and drove this racecar all the way to No. 1 at the Formula SAE West competition.

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

More than half of the National Merit Scholars enrolled at Texas A&M University major in engineering  — more than 30 of them in a single department in one recent year.

Student civil engineer helps corral launch pad debris Justin Rutkowski, a senior in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, spent last summer at Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., where he helped associate professor David Trejo study ways to reduce the amount of launch pad debris that can collide with space shuttles. When a space shuttle lifts off, its engine exhausts hammer the launch pad with heat and pressure. The flames are directed into flame deflectors, metal channels coated in a refractory material — calcium aluminate cement concrete. The refractory coating is supposed to protect steel from the heat, but the heat, more than 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit, can cause the refractory material to fail and fragment. The fragments can slam into launch pad structures and space shuttles. Rutkowski and Trejo wanted to answer how and when to repair the refractory material and what to replace it with.

Undergraduate Justin Rutkowski and associate professor David Trejo stand in front of the launch pad that would return the space shuttle Discovery to outer space.

“The research will answer the question, ‘Is there a better refractory material that can be used at the launch pads?’” Rutkowski says. “This is important to the safety of the launch of the shuttle and over time should also decrease the amount of money spent on repairing the launch pads after every launch.” Rutkowski and Trejo had received fellowships from NASA.

Student petroleum engineers win SPE grad, undergrad competitions Eduardo Jimenez, a Ph.D. student in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, and senior Jessica Prowse (class of 2005) won the doctoral and bachelor’s degree divisions of the Society of Petroleum Engineers International Student Paper Competition in October 2005. Jimenez developed a model that resolves errors associated with using incorrect spacing or numbers of streamlines, which leads to inaccurate calculation of time of flight across cells in faulted grids, where lack of flux continuity at cell faces can lead to incorrect trajectories. The model corrects the underlying numerical spatial and temporal discretization errors in streamline simulations that lead to inaccurate time-of-flight calculations for stratigraphic grids. Prowse demonstrated how drilling two injection wells and working over two injectors in one block of the Wilmington field can increase production in the block over the life of the field by about 100 percent, increasing the expected life recovery of the block from 22 percent to 25 percent.

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Student engineers take part in NSF research experiences Undergraduate students from Texas A&M and other universities have participated in the six National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) sites Texas A&M Engineering hosted this summer. “The program allows for participation from diverse groups of students,” says Valerie Taylor, head of the Department of Computer Science and holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship I in Engineering. “It’s great to have students from many different universities exposed to the excellent research activities in the department.”

“The program allows for participation from diverse groups of students,” said

The students worked in teams with faculty members and graduate students on research projects in aerospace, chemical, civil, electrical and computer engineering, as well as computer science.

“We want to challenge the students,” said Sharath Girimaji, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, about one of his department’s two REU sites. “It has to be personalized or customized for the students in mind. They’ll be part of a team, but they’ll have a bite-sized piece cut out for them that they’ll be 100 percent responsible for.”

Valerie Taylor.

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students Engineering students celebrate 20 years of helping small business maximize energy efficiency Aggie engineering students are known for their energy, and they’ve been helping small businesses in the Brazos Valley save energy for 20 years. The Industrial Assessment Center (IAC), housed in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, provides no-cost studies of small- and medium-sized manufacturers within about 150 miles of College Station to analyze opportunities to improve energy efficiency, minimize waste and improve productivity. Engineering students under the direction of mechanical engineering faculty and researchers in the Texas Engineering Experiment Station’s (TEES) Energy Systems Laboratory analyze a plant’s energy waste and productivity issues and help make manufacturers aware of services available to them, such as bestpractices training, assessments, new and emerging technology, software tools, databases, publications and other information. The center celebrates its 20th anniversary in October, but 2006 is already a big year for the program. Last fall, Secretary of Energy Samuel W. Bodman — in the wake of energy supply disruptions after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and recent hikes in energy prices — launched a national campaign to highlight ways for Americans to save energy immediately. As part of this, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Industrial Technologies Program (of which the Texas A&M IAC is part) began the “Save Energy Now” program aimed at larger manufacturing plants. “The IAC usually goes to small plants who wouldn’t or couldn’t pay for our services otherwise,” says Warren Heffington, center director and associate professor of mechanical engineering. “But the Save Energy Now program invited larger manufacturers to apply for DOE services and we are able to work with some of those plants. If the big plants can save energy, that cuts down on energy costs for Texans.” In March, the IAC visited Texas Instruments in Stafford and Freescale Semiconductor in Austin. The group visited a slaughterhouse in San Antonio in January and then an electronics plant in Houston. The IAC has visited Granite Mountain at Marble Falls and a salt mine in Hockley, where the team worked 1,500 feet below the surface. “It’s a great program for Texas manufacturers,” Heffington says. “We always survey the manufachttp:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

turers a few months after our visit, and they claim to implement 60 percent of our recommendations at $23 million a year in total savings over the years. Our goal is to have more than $60,000 for implemented savings for each plant.” And it’s not just the manufacturers who benefit from the IAC’s work.

IAC student workers like this one analyze a plant’s energy waste and productivity issues and help make manufacturers aware of services available to them, such as best-practices training, assessments, new and emerging technology, software tools, databases, publications and other information.

The center typically employs about a dozen undergraduate and graduate students each semester. For clients, the students identify energy conservation projects; gather data in plants, including interviewing management and staff; calculate savings in terms of both energy and cost; provide conceptual designs and management techniques to capture the savings; analyze utility data; and write reports. The students work in teams of five or six, rotating leadership positions each time. Safety is always an important issue and each time one student is safety officer for the team as it works in a manufacturing plant. “The IAC is an excellent program for students because it’s one of the more real-world experiences a student can have while at Texas A&M,” Heffington says. “They work for pay, not a grade, and we’re not tied to a semester schedule. The great thing about the program is the leadership and teamwork training.” Andy Hanegan, an IAC employee and a senior mechanical engineering major, says, “We get a realworld perspective of a variety of industries. We learn about conservation, things companies need to do to save energy and money.” In its 20 years, the IAC has done more than 515 visits to plants around Texas, and more than 200 students have gone on multiple assessments during that time. Each student goes on an average of 10 visits. “The true strength of the IAC is its student engineering employees,” Heffington says. “Aggies do a really good job.” 75

Dwight Look College of Engineering Administration G. Kemble Bennett vice chancellor and dean of engineering

John Niedzwecki associate vice chancellor and executive associate dean, academics

Theresa Maldonado associate vice chancellor and associate dean, research

Department Heads Helen Reed

Department of Aerospace Engineering

Gerald Riskowski Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering

Lisa McNair assistant vice chancellor and assistant dean, finance

Gerard Coté Department of Biomedical Engineering

Kenneth Hall Cathy Reiley assistant vice chancellor, external affairs

Marilyn Martell assistant vice chancellor, public affairs

Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering

David Rosowsky Zachry Department of Civil Engineering

Valerie Taylor Department of Computer Science

Deena Wallace chief of staff

Katherine Rojo del Busto assistant director, research administration, Texas Engineering Experiment Station

Jo Howze associate dean, academic programs

Costas Georghiades Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Walter Buchanan Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

Brett Peters Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

Dennis O’Neal César Malavé assistant dean, recruitment and international programs

Department of Mechanical Engineering

William Burchill Department of Nuclear Engineering

N.K. Anand

Stephen Holditch

assistant dean, graduate programs

Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering

Ray James director, student advising and development

Diane Hurtado research initiatives officer

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leadership

Advisory Council Mark Albers ’79 President ExxonMobil Development Co.

Joe R. Fowler ’68, Chair President Stress Engineering Services

Joseph P. (Joe) Mueller ’48 President Mueller Energetics Corp.

C. Skip Alvarado ’68 Vice President Fluor Corp.

J.L. (Corky) Frank ’58 Marathon Oil, Retired

Patty P. Mueller Vice President/Finance Mueller Energetics Corp.

Brad Anderson ’82 Sr. Vice President & GM, Dell Product Group Dell Inc. Debra L. Anglin ’77 President Pate Engineers Inc. Dionel E. Avilés ’53 President Aviles Engineering Corp. W.M. (Mike) Barnes ’64 Rockwell International, Retired Craig C. Brown ’75 President, Owner Bray International Inc. Jerry M. Brown ’59 Amoco USA, Retired James R. (Bob) Collins ’63 Managing Director, Collins and Collins LLC Distinguished Lecturer, Texas A&M–Commerce William E. (Bill) Corbett Vice President URS Ralph F. Cox ’53 President RABAR Enterprises

R.E. (Ray) Galvin ’53 Chevron USA Production, Retired Walter (Walt) Gillette Boeing Co., Retired Mike Greene Chairman and CEO TXU Power William W. (Bill) Hanna ’58 Koch Industries, Retired Kenneth F. Hasenbeck ’70 Vice President Manufacturing and Engineering Dow Chemical Co. H. Darryl Heath ’84 Partner Accenture J.R. (Bob) Jones ’69 President Jones and Carter Inc. Tommy E. Knight ’61 Brown & Root International, Retired Tim Leach ’82 Chairman and CEO Concho Resources Inc. Ken R. LeSuer ’57 Halliburton, Retired

Tim Dehne Senior Vice President of R&D National Instruments

Raymond L. Leubner ’73 Corporate Vice President Applied Materials

Susan Dio Commercial Manager BP

Marcus J. (Marc) Lockard ’72 Chief Executive Officer Lockard & White Inc.

R.D. (Rod) Erskine ’66 Chairman and CEO Erskine Energy Thomas E. (Tom) Fisher ’66 President M2P Financing

Tommie E. Lohman ’59 Chairman Telco Investment Corp. Joe B. Mattei ’53 President EEM Enterprises Inc.

Peter C. (Pete) Forster ’63 Chairman and CEO Clark Construction Group LLC

A. Dwain Mayfield ’59 President ADM Global Resources

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William J. Neely ’52 Dow Chemical Co., Retired Joseph H. (Joe) Netherland Jr. Chairman, President and CEO FMC Technologies Inc.

T.A. Smith ’66 Voridian, Retired Lisa A. Stewart President El Paso Corp. William D. (Bill) Sullivan ’78 Consultant Van H. Taylor ’71 SBC Communications, Retired David G. Tees ’66 Texas Genco, Retired

Sharon L. Nunes Vice President Business, Development, Strategic Growth Initiative IBM Corp.

Ronnie Ward ’73 Consultant

Erle A. Nye ’59 Chairman Emeritus TXU Corp.

James E. Wiley Sr. ’46 Partner Wiley Brothers Investment Builders

T. Michael (Mike) O’Connor O’Connor Ventures Inc.

Delbert A. Whitaker ’65 Texas Instruments, Retired

Thomas C. (Tom) Paul ’62 General Electric, Retired Mark B. Puckett ’73 President Chevron Energy Technology David W. Reed ’83 Vice President, Logic Fab Operation Texas Instruments Inc. Joe C. Richardson ’49 JCR, Jr. Operating J. Stephen Rottler ’80 Vice President Weapons Engineering and Product Realization Sandia National Laboratories Christopher (Chris) Seams ’84 Executive Vice President Sales, Marketing and Operations Cypress Dennis L. Segers ’75 President and CEO Tabula Inc. Charles W. (Charlie) Shaver ’80 President and CEO Texas Petrochemicals LP

Our faculty are vital to our success. Whether a junior faculty member beginning a bright career or a seasoned shining star, faculty of all ranks find opportunities and support at Texas A&M.

Faculty facts 444 faculty 12 departments John M. Niedzwecki Associate Vice Chancellor and Executive Associate Dean, Academics

2006

32 endowed chairs 50 professorships

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honors & awards William Saric, professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering. The Academy honors those who have made important and significant contributions to engineering theory and practice as well as unusual accomplishment in the pioneering of new fields of technology. Saric was elected for his “contributions to the fundamental understanding and control of shear flow and boundary-layer transition.” Saric joined Texas A&M in January 2005 and has recently conducted theoretical, computational, experimental and flight research on stability, transition and control of two-dimensional and three-dimensional boundary layers for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), subsonic aircraft, supersonic aircraft and reentry vehicle applications. He has established the Flight Research Laboratory at Texas A&M with three piloted aircraft and is in the process of reestablishing several major, world-class wind-tunnel facilities on campus.

Anastasia Muliana, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has received a 2006 National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award for her research into new methods of analyzing the structure of advanced composite materials used in high-performance aircraft, marine construction, and in bridges, tunnels and pipelines. The prestigious NSF CAREER awards are made to outstanding junior faculty members to help them advance their research and teaching activities. Muliana’s research deals with building numerical models of the behavior of composite materials built up from individual layers of different materials. These built-up composites — usually consisting of layers of fibers and polymers — can be tailored precisely to fit individual applications because each layer has different characteristics. The models Muliana is investigating will help engineers predict how these composites will behave over time in different conditions of heat, moisture, stress and damage. Industries using the composites will be able to use the models to understand how to use the materials more effectively.

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Terry Alfriend, a professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, received the 2005 International Scientific Cooperation Award from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Alfriend is a member of a team of seven Russian and American scientists honored with the award at the AAAS 2006 Annual Meeting in St. Louis. Thomas A. Blasingame, holder of the Robert L. Whiting Professorship in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering, received the Society of Petroleum Engineers International Distinguished Service Award. The award recognizes contributions to the society that exhibit such exceptional devotion of time, effort, thought and action as to set them apart from other contributions. Joseph M. Bracci, professor and head of the Construction, Geotechnical and Structural Engineering Division in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Concrete Institute. A Fellow is someone who has made “outstanding contributions to production or use of concrete materials, products and structures in the areas of education, research, development, design, construction or management.” G. Kemble Bennett, vice chancellor and dean of engineering, was appointed by Texas Gov. Rick Perry to the Texas Board of Professional Engineers. The board licenses engineers, enforces the Texas Engineering Practice Act and regulates the practice of professional engineering in Texas. Bennett’s term on the Texas Board of Professional Engineers will expire Sept. 26, 2011, and is subject to Senate confirmation during the 2007 Regular Session. Jean-Louis Briaud, holder of the Spencer J. Buchanan ’26 Chair in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, has been named recipient of the 2006 Martin S. Kapp Foundation Engineering Award by the American Society of Civil Engineers. ASCE awards the Kapp Award to recognize innovative or outstanding design or construction of foundations, earthworks, retaining structures or underground construction. Briaud also is the 2006 winner of the Canadian Geotechnical Society’s G. Geoffrey Meyerhof Award for significant contributions to geotechnics research and education. Walter W. Buchanan, head of the Department of Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution, has been elected a Fellow of the National Society of Professional Engineers. The NSPE Board of Directors established the Fellow recognition program to honor those licensed members who have demonstrated exemplary service to the profession, the society and the community. Karen Butler-Purry, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been named recipient of the 2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Mentor Award. The award recognizes Butler-Purry for her “efforts for increasing the number of African Americans, Hispanic Americans and women with Ph.D.s in electrical engineering and computer sciences.”

Paul Cizmas, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been appointed to an aerospace propulsion committee of the National Research Council of the National Academies. The committee is jointly sponsored by the Office of the Air Force for Science, Technology and Engineering and the U.S. Department of Defense Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Committee members are conducting an 18-month study examining the Department of Defense’s future propulsion needs and the current commercial propulsion technical base.

Illya Hicks, assistant professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been awarded the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science 2005 Optimization Prize for Young Researchers. Hicks received the award in November 2005 during the INFORMS annual meeting in San Francisco, where he presented his winning paper, “Graphs, Branchwidth, and Tangles! Oh My!” The prize — a plaque and cash award — is presented each year for the most outstanding paper in optimization by a young researcher submitted to or published in a refereed professional journal.

Guy Curry, professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has won the Albert G. Holzman Distinguished Educator Award from the Institute of Industrial Engineers. This award recognizes outstanding educators who have contributed significantly to the industrial engineering profession through teaching, research, and publication; extension, teaching, and learning innovation; and administration in an academic environment.

Stephen A. Holditch, head of the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering and holder of the Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Chair in Petroleum Engineering, received the 2005 Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal from the Society of Petroleum Engineers International. The Lucas Medal is the society’s highest award for technical contributions and recognizes distinguished achievement in improving the technique and practice of finding and producing petroleum. Holditch was recognized for his contributions to the application of hydraulic fracturing in production of tight gas reservoirs.

Conrad Dudek, professor of civil engineering, received the first-ever Innovation in Education Award from the International Institute of Transportation Engineers. Dudek’s expertise is in the areas of urban traffic management; highway construction and maintenance work zone traffic control; management and safety; real-time motorist information systems; motorist information and signing; intelligent transportation systems; and traffic flow theory. Dudek is associate director of the Texas Transportation Institute’s Southwest Region University and director of the Advanced Institute in Transportation Systems Operations and Management. W.H. Bauer Professor and Coastal and Ocean Engineering Program Head Billy L. Edge was appointed to an American Society of Civil Engineers committee to study the performance of New Orleans’ hurricane protection system during Hurricane Katrina. A renowned expert in coastal engineering, Edge also recently began his term as president of the Board of Governors of ASCE’s Coasts, Oceans, Ports and Rivers Institute. L.S. “Skip” Fletcher, Regents Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2006 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foundation Award for Excellence. Fletcher was recognized for “four decades of dedicated service to the aerospace community as an educator, mentor and leader, and for exemplary efforts to further international collaboration in science and engineering.” He also was named presidentelect of the Accreditation Board for Engineering Technology Inc., the accreditation body dedicated to ensuring quality in applied science, computing, engineering and technology education. Natarajan Gautam, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, has been named an Outstanding Young Industrial Engineer by the Institute of Industrial Engineers. The award recognizes engineering contribution in application, design, research or development of industrial engineering methodologies.

2006

Mark Holtzapple, professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, has been chosen to receive the 2006 Walston Chubb Award for Innovation from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. Holtzapple is the first-ever recipient of the Chubb Award. He will be honored and will present the 2006 Walston Chubb Lecture on Innovation at the society’s Annual Meeting and Student Research Conference Nov. 2–5 in Detroit. Daniel F. Jennings, the I. Andrew Rader Professor in the Industrial Distribution Program, joined an elite group when he was inducted into the National Academy of Arbitrators. While approximately 5,500 individuals have been certified by either the American Arbitration Association or the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service to practice labor contract dispute arbitration in the United States, membership in the National Academy is now 540 members. Thus, less than 10 percent of the certified labor contract dispute arbitrators are members of the National Academy of Arbitrators. John Junkins, Distinguished Professor and holder of the George J. Eppright Chair in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been selected to receive the 2006 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control Award. The Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control Award recognizes important contributions in the field of guidance, navigation and control. Junkins’ award citation reads, “For significant and lasting contributions to aerospace guidance, navigation and control, and for leadership in the aerospace community.” Daejong Kim, assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, has won the American Society of Mechanical Engineers Tribology Division’s Innovative Research Award for his research on micro gas bearings. The award is given to mechanical engineers whose research has resulted in noteworthy or novel technologies that have furthered tribology, the science of friction and lubrication between mechanisms that are in relative motion: for example, bearings and gears.

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honors & awards John Lee, the L.F. Peterson Chair in Petroleum Engineering, has been elected to membership in the Russian National Academy of Science. A member of the U.S. National Academy of Engineering since 1993, Lee was nominated to the Russian National Academy of Science by fellow academy member and colleague Yuri Makogon, research engineer in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. A 1969 paper written by Lee Lowery, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, was one of nine chosen for the first-ever American Society of Civil Engineers Offshore Technology Conference Hall of Fame Award. The paper was the first to propose the use of computers and one-dimensional wave theory in a practical way to analyze the driving of large offshore piles, Lowery said. Those piles formed the foundations for large offshore oil platforms and were magnitudes of sizes larger than those for which simple pile-driving equations had been used for years, some reaching a thousand feet long. ASCE established the Hall of Fame in 2005 to recognize those technical papers that provided the industry with innovation, vision, direction and lasting impact on the design, construction or installation of the offshore infrastructure. Sam Mannan, holder of the Mike O’Connor Chair I in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering, was named to an independent advisory panel established by the Dow Chemical Co. to help understand the roles of industry, government and the public in a challenging security environment. The Independent Advisory Panel on Chemical Security is chaired by former Congressman and 9/11 Commission Vice-Chairman Lee Hamilton and includes distinguished experts around the world in physical security, manufacturing process safety, transportation and supply chain security, crisis management, and emergency response. Mannan is the leading expert in safe chemical manufacturing, process safety and risk management. James E. Moore Jr., professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. He was nominated and elected by The College of Fellows for outstanding achievements in medical and biological engineering. Daniele Mortari, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been named recipient of the 2007 Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Judith A. Resnik Award. The IEEE Judith A. Resnik Award recognizes outstanding contributions to space engineering. Mortari was selected “for innovative designs of orbiting spacecraft constellations, and efficient algorithms for star identification and spacecraft attitude estimation.” Ozden Ochoa, professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and associate dean of graduate studies at Texas A&M University, has received the Award in Composites from the American Society for Composites. Ochoa, who started her two-year term as president of the society in January, is the 10th recipient of the award, which recognizes a “distinguished member of the composites community who has made a significant impact on the development of composite materials through applied research, practice, education, service, advocacy or leader-

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ship.” Ochoa is currently serving as the director of Aerospace Sciences and Materials Directorate at the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research in Arlington, Va. President George W. Bush has appointed Professor John W. Poston Sr. to the Advisory Board on Radiation and Worker Health. The board advises the president on policy and technical functions required to implement and manage a new compensation program for workers who contract certain diseases as a result of exposure to beryllium, silica or radiation while working for the U.S. Department of Energy, its contractors or subcontractors in the nuclear weapons industry. B. Don Russell, Regents Professor and holder of the J.W. Runyon Jr. Professorship in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, has been elected a Fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers of the United Kingdom. A world-renowned expert in electric power systems, Russell was recognized for his professional and technical contributions to the engineering profession. Marlan O. Scully, Distinguished Professor of Physics and the TEES Distinguished Research Chair, has been honored by the American Physical Society with the 2005 Arthur L. Schawlow Prize in Laser Science. Scully, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, was cited “for his many farreaching contributions to quantum optics and quantum electronics and, in particular, for the quantum theory of lasers, for the theory of free-electron lasers and laser gyros, and for theoretical and experimental contributions to optical coherence effects.” Bjarne Stroustrup, professor and holder of the College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science, has received the 2005 William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement from Sigma Xi, the scientific research society. The Procter Prize is Sigma Xi’s top honor and since 1950 has been awarded annually to a scientist who has “made an outstanding contribution to scientific research and has demonstrated an ability to communicate the significance of this research to scientists in other disciplines.” Among the prominent scientists who have received the honor are Murray Gell-Mann, Benoit Mandelbrot, Jane Goodall and Stephen Jay Gould. Valerie E. Taylor, head of the Department of Computer Science and holder of the Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship I in Engineering, received the Richard A. Tapia Achievement Award for Scientific Scholarship, Civic Science and Diversifying Computing at the 2005 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference. The Tapia award recognizes Taylor’s excellence in scientific scholarship, her achievements within the scientific community and her dedication to ethnic diversity in computing. Taylor chairs the Coalition to Diversify Computing; served as the general co-chair of the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in 2001; and was the general chair of the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing Conference in 2002. This list represents faculty members’ national and international awards, appointments and honors from Sept. 1, 2005, through July 2006.

Chairs A.P. and Florence Wiley Chair in Civil Engineering David V. Rosowsky

Leland T. Jordan Chair in Mechanical Engineering Dara Childs

Professorships

Mechanical Engineering

LeSuer Chair in Reservoir Management Akhil Datta-Gupta

A.P. and Florence Wiley Professorship I in Civil Engineering Paul N. Roschke

Civil Engineering

Petroleum Engineering

Civil Engineering

Albert B. Stevens Chair in Petroleum Engineering Christine Ehlig-Economides

Marcus C. Easterling Chair in Mechanical Engineering Je-Chin Han

A.P. and Florence Wiley Professorship II in Civil Engineering Norris Stubbs

Petroleum Engineering

Mechanical Engineering

Civil Engineering

College of Engineering Chair in Computer Science Bjarne Stroustrup

Mike O’Connor Chair I in Chemical Engineering Sam Mannan

A.P. and Florence Wiley Professorship III in Civil Engineering Robin Autenrieth

Computer Science

Delbert A. Whitaker Chair in Electrical Engineering Costas Georghiades Electrical and Computer Engineering

E.B. Snead Chair in Transportation Engineering Dallas N. Little Civil Engineering

Forsyth Chair in Mechanical Engineering K.R. Rajagopal Mechanical Engineering (Civil Engineering)

Fred J. Benson Chair in Civil Engineering Robert L. Lytton Civil Engineering

George J. Eppright Chair in Engineering John L. Junkins Aerospace Engineering

J.L. “Corky” Frank/Marathon Ashland Petroleum LLC Chair in Engineering Project Management Kenneth Reinschmidt Petroleum Engineering

J.R. Thompson Department Head Chair in Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution Walter W. Buchanan Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

Jack E. and Frances Brown Chair in Engineering Kenneth R. Hall Chemical Engineering

John and Bea Slattery Chair in Aerospace Engineering Dimitris Lagoudas Aerospace Engineering

John Edgar Holt Chair in Petroleum Engineering Hans C. Juvkam-Wold

Chemical Engineering

Mike O’Connor Chair II in Chemical Engineering Thomas K. Wood Chemical Engineering

Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. Chair in Mechanical Engineering J.N. Reddy

Allen-Bradley Professorship in Factory Automation Jorge Leon Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

Carolyn S. and Tommie E. Lohman Professorship in Engineering Education Jay D. Humphrey

Civil Engineering

R.P. Gregory Chair in Civil Engineering John M. Niedzwecki

Biomedical Engineering

Civil Engineering

Robert Whiting Chair in Petroleum Engineering Dan Hill

Charles D. Holland Professorship in Chemical Engineering Rayford G. Anthony

Petroleum Engineering

Chemical Engineering

Royce E. Wisenbaker ’39 Chair II in Engineering David C. Hyland

Charles H. and Bettye Barclay Professorship in Engineering Gerard L. Coté

Aerospace Engineering

Samuel Roberts Noble Foundation Chair in Petroleum Engineering Stephen Holditch

Biomedical Engineering

Chevron Corp. Professorship I in Engineering Don Phillips

Petroleum Engineering

Industrial Engineering

Spencer J. Buchanan Chair in Civil Engineering Jean-Louis Briaud

Chevron Corp. Professorship II in Engineering Jennifer L. Welch

Civil Engineering

Computer Science

TEES Distinguished Research Chair Marlan O. Scully

Dow Professorship in Chemical Engineering Yue Kuo

Physics

Chemical Engineering and Electrical and Computer Engineering

TEES Distinguished Research Chair Richard Ewing VPR/College of Science

TEES Distinguished Research Chair Terry K. Alfriend Aerospace Engineering

TEES Distinguished Research Chair John C. Slattery Aerospace Engineering

TI/Jack Kilby Chair in Analog Engineering Edgar Sánchez-Sinencio

Petroleum Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

L.F. Peterson Chair in Petroleum Engineering W. John Lee

Wofford Cain ’13 Senior Chair of Engineering in Offshore Technology Jose M. Roesset

Petroleum Engineering

Civil Engineering

E.B. Snead Professorship I in Civil Engineering Eyad Masad Civil Engineering

E.B. Snead Professorship II in Civil Engineering Amy Epps-Martin Civil Engineering

Eugene E. Webb Professorship in Electrical Engineering Mladen Kezunovic Electrical and Computer Engineering

Ford Motor Company Design Professorship I in Engineering Jo W. Howze Electrical and Computer Engineering

Civil Engineering

2006

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chairs & professorships Ford Motor Company Design Professorship II in Engineering Richard M. Alexander

Leland Jordan Career Development Professorship Hong “Helen” Liang

Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship II in Engineering Steven M. Wright

Mechanical Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

G. Paul Pepper Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Kalyan Annamalai

Leland T. Jordan Professorship in Mechanical Engineering David Claridge

Stewart & Stevenson Services Inc. Professorship I in Engineering S. Rao Vadali

Mechanical Engineering

Aerospace Engineering

PSA Professorship in Chemical Engineering Perla Balbuena

Mast-Childs Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Luis San Andrés

Stewart & Stevenson Services Inc. Professorship II in Engineering William Saric

Mechanical Engineering

Aerospace Engineering

McFerrin Professorship in Chemical Engineering Mahmoud M. El-Halwagi

Tenneco Professorship Ramesh R. Talreja

Chemical Engineering

General Dynamics Professorship in Aerospace Engineering Vikram Kinra Aerospace Engineering

Harvey Hubbell, Incorporated Professorship in Industrial Distribution F. Barry Lawrence Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

Heat Transfer Research Inc. Professorship William Burchill Nuclear Engineering

Herbert D. Kelleher Professorship in Transportation Roger E. Smith Civil Engineering

Holdredge/Paul Professorship in Engineering Education Dennis O’Neal Mechanical Engineering

I. Andrew Rader Professorship in Industrial Distribution Daniel F. Jennings Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

Chemical Engineering

Meinhard H. Kotzebue Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Suhada Jayasuriya Mechanical Engineering

Mike and Sugar Barnes Professorship in Industrial Engineering Wilbert Wilhelm Industrial and Systems Engineering

Nelson-Jackson Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Gerald Morrison Mechanical Engineering

Oscar S. Wyatt Jr. Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Andrew McFarland Mechanical Engineering

Raytheon Co. Professorship in Electrical Engineering Kai Chang

TI Professorship I in Analog Engineering Jose Silva-Martinez Electrical and Computer Engineering

TI Professorship II in Analog Engineering Cam Nguyen Electrical and Computer Engineering

TI Professorship in Engineering Prasad Enjeti Electrical and Computer Engineering

Victor H. Thompson III Professorship in Electronics Engineering Technology Joseph A. Morgan Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution

W.H. Bauer Professorship in Dredging Engineering Billy Edge Civil Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

J.W. Runyon Jr. Professorship I in Electrical Engineering B. Don Russell

Raytheon Co. Professorship in Computer Science Udo Pooch

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Computer Science

J.W. Runyon Jr. Professorship II in Electrical Engineering Chanan Singh

Rob L. Adams Professorship in Petroleum Engineering Maria A. Barrufet

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Petroleum Engineering

Kenneth R. Hall Professorship in Chemical Engineering David M. Ford

Robert M. Kennedy Professorship I in Electrical Engineering Mehrdad “Mark” Ehsani

Chemical Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Lanatter and Herbert Fox Professorship in Chemical Engineering Jorge Seminario

Robert M. Kennedy Professorship II in Electrical Engineering Shankar P. Bhattacharyya

Chemical Engineering

Electrical and Computer Engineering

L.F. “Pete” Peterson ’36 Professorship in Petroleum Engineering Richard Startzman

Royce E. Wisenbaker Professorship I in Engineering Valerie E. Taylor

Petroleum Engineering

Computer Science

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Aerospace Engineering

Photo â&#x20AC;˘ Matt Zeringue

Theresa A. Maldonado Associate Vice Chancellor and Associate Dean, Research

Research is one of the most important things we do. The size of our program allows for a rich mix of study areas and a diversity of strengths.

Research facts $179 million in research expenditures (2005) 289,000 square feet of laboratory space 35 multidisciplinary research centers

2006

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grants & contracts

John Ayala, Texas Center for Applied Technology Restricted project Restricted sponsor $2,309,760 John Ayala, Texas Center for Applied Technology; David Lund, Aerospace Vehicle Systems Institute; Vikram Kinra, Ramesh Talreja, John Whitcomb, Department of Aerospace Engineering Restricted project Restricted sponsor $2,063,327 Daniel Davis and Dimitris Lagoudas, Department of Aerospace Engineering; Malcolm Andrews, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Richard Crooks, Department of Chemistry; Allison Ficht, Department of Medical Biochemistry and Genetics Institute for Intelligent Bio-nano Materials and Structures for Aerospace Vehicles NASA Langley Research Center $2,000,000 Kalyan Annamalai, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Brent Auvermann, Cady Engler and Saqib Muktar, Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering; John Sweeten, Texas Agricultural Extension Renewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability Using Biomass from Dairy and Beef Animal Production Facilities U.S. Department of Energy Golden Field Office $1,982,000 W. Dan Turner, Guanghua Wei, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Continuous Commissioning ® of Schools in the Austin Independent School District Austin Independent School District $1,524,160 Andrew McFarland, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Carlos Ortiz and Ben Thien, Energy Systems Laboratory Bioaerosol Sampling and Detection U.S. Army Edgewood Research, Development and Engineering $1,335,000

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John Junkins, James Turner, Helen Reed, Srinivas Vidali, David Hyland, Daniele Mortari, John Hurtado, Ergun Akleman, Tama’S Kalm’R-Nagy, Department of Aerospace Engineering Consortium for Autonomous Satellite Systems U.S. Air Force Laboratory $1,312,740 J.H. Hinojosa, Texas A&M International University; Judy Kelley, West Texas A&M University; Diana I. Martinez, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi; Lee W. Sloan, Del Mar College South Texas Rural Systemic Initiative National Science Foundation $1,200,000 Joe Gonzalez and James Wall, Texas Center for Applied Technology; Amarnath Banerjee, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering Continuation Of Research in Support of Army Digitization and Transformation (Force XXI) NAVAIR – Orlando TSD $1,051,890 Marvin L. Adams, W. Dan Reece, Department of Nuclear Engineering Innovation in Nuclear Infrastructure and Education U.S. Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office $1,040,000

David E. Claridge, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Song Deng, Energy Systems Laboratory; Jeff Haberl, College of Architecture; W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical Engineering Texas A&M University Physical Plant FY 2006 TAMU Building Energy Management, Plant Performance, Savings Analysis and Field Study Texas A&M University Physical Plant $999,500 Dara W. Childs, Luis San Andres, Hong Liang, Department of Mechanical Engineering Restricted Project Restricted Sponsor $992,176 Rodney Bowersox and Sharath Girimaji, Department of Aerospace Engineering; Simon North, Department of Chemistry Hypersonic Transition and Turbulence with Non-Equibrilium Thermo-Chemistry U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research $873,171 Michael Daniel, Texas A&M University– Kingsville; Lee W. Sloan, Del Mar College Alliance for Improvement of Mathematics Skills Pre-K – 16 National Science Foundation $814, 234

Frederick Best, Department of Nuclear Engineering; Frank Little and Michael Schuller, Center for Space Power Center for Space Power NASA Marshall Space Flight Center $1,024,000

M.-S. Alouini and Costas Georghiades, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Collaborative Work Between Texas A&M University at Qatar and Qatar Telecommunications Qatar Telecom $645,815

David Ford and Charles Glover, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering; Irvin Osborne-Lee, Prairie View A&M University; Lale Yurttas, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Chemical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum Reform National Science Foundation $1,002,391

Yoonsuck Choe, John Keyser, Bruce McCormick, Department of Computer Science; Louise Abbott, College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences MSM: Multiscale Imaging/Analysis/ Integration/Brain Networks National Institutes of Health $644,767

Nancy Amato, Lawrence Rauschwerger, Bjarne Stroustrup, Department of Computer Science; Marvin L. Adams, Department of Nuclear Engineering SmartApps: Middle-Ware for Adaptive Applications on Reconfigurable Platforms U.S. Department of Energy Chicago Operations Office $1,000,000

David R. Boyle, Nicholas Combs and L. Diane Hurtado, Spacecraft Technology Center; Mark Lemmon, Department of Meteorology Commercial Space Center for Engineering (Year 4) NASA Marshall Space Flight Center $608,109

Thomas Wood, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Plant Biofilms Inhibitors to Discover Biofilms Genes National Institutes of Health $593,181 Song Deng, Guanghua Wei, Energy Systems Laboratory; W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical Engineering Continuous Commissioning ® Assessments/ Operations and Maintenance of North Atlantic Region Medical Facilities Wingler & Sharp, Architects & Planners Inc. $558,182 Carol Stuessy, Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture; Timothy Scott, College of Science; James McNamara, Department of Educational Psychology Policy Research Initiatives in Science Education (PRISE) to Improve Teaching and Learning in High School Science National Science Foundation $556,849 Jean-Louis Briaud, Department of Civil Engineering; David Burnett, Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering; Gene L. Theodori, Texas Agricultural Experiment Station Field Testing of Environmentally Friendly Drilling Systems U.S. Department of Energy National Energy Technology Laboratory $547,342 Raymond Askew, Frank Little, Center for Space Power; Frederick Best, Department of Nuclear Engineering; Ali Beskok, Egidio Marotta, Michael Schuller, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Jean-François Chamberland-Tremblay, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Kambiz Farahmand, Texas A&M University– Kingsville; William Hyman, Department of Biomedical Engineering B-Crew, Robotics and Vehicle Equipment (CRAVE) $526,334 Milton Bryant, Prairie View A&M University; John Giardino, Department of Geology; Diana I. Marinez, Texas A&M University– Corpus Christi; Leo Sayavedra, Texas A&M University System; Karan L. Watson, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Texas A&M Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Phase III program: Cultivating the Future $500,000

2006

Jorge Seminario and Perla Balbuena, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering A Theory-Guided Approach to Design of Molecular Sensing Devices and Systems U.S. Army Research Office $500,000 W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Song Deng, Guanghua Wei, Joseph Martinez, Energy Systems Laboratory Continuous Commissoning ® Assessments/ Operations and Maintenance of Great Plains Medical Facilities Wingler & Sharp, Architects & Planners Inc. $479,464 Nancy M. Amato, Lawrence Rauschwerger, Valerie Taylor, Department of Computer Science CRI Infrastructure Acquisition: A Cluster Testbed for Experimental Research in HighPerformance Computing, National Science Foundation $433,000 Jo Howze, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Timothy Scott, College of Science; Janice Rinehart, SS; Mark Holtzapple, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering; Terry Kohutek, Zachry Department of Civil Engineering; William Bassichis, Department of Physics; Michael Pilant, Department of Mathematics; Donald Smith, IE Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering; JyhCham Liu, Department of Computer Science Retention Through an Applied Physics, Engineering and Mathematics (PEM) Model  – STEPS National Science Foundation $402,328 Anastasia Muliana, Department of Mechanical Engineering CAREER: Time-Dependent Multi-Scale Frameworks For Mechano-Thermo-HygroVisco and Damage Behaviors of Composite Materials and Structures National Science Foundation $400,000 Bruce Herbert, Department of Geology; Cathleen Loving, Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture Professional Learning Community Model for Alternative Pathways in Teaching Science and Mathematics National Science Foundation $389,072

Hong Liang, Department of Mechanical Engineering CAREER: Integrated Research and Education in Multi-Scale ChemicalMechanical Manipulation and Nanofabrication National Science Foundation $388,988 Emmett Ward, Richard Mercier, Jun Zhang, Charles Aubeny, Moo-Hyun Kim, KuangAn Chang, Hamn-Ching Chen, Offshore Technology Research Center Cooperative Agreement Between OTRC and DOI-MMS U.S. Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service $386,013 Stephen Holditch, Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering Restricted project Restricted sponsor $382,500 Richard Mercier, Offshore Technology Research Center Offshore Technology Consortium Various sponsors $380,000 James Wall, Texas Center for Applied Technology IPA assignment for Andrew Mark U.S. Army Corps of Engineers $380,287 Othon Rediniotis, John Junkins, John Valasek, Department of Aerospace Engineering UAV Hingeless Flight Controls via Active Flow Control Aeroprobe Corp. $375,000 Sila Çetinkaya, Halit Üster, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering An Integrated Outbound Logistics Model for Frito-Lay: Coordinating Production Output and Distribution Decisions Frito-Lay Inc. $370,000 Lihong Wang, Department of Biomedical Engineering Melanoma Detection by Optical Spectroscopy National Institutes of Health $353,951

T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E ene r g y i s s u e

grants & contracts

Thomas Wood, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Directed Evolution of a Cyanobacterium Hydrogenase to Produce Hydrogen University of Connecticut $350,537 James Wall, Texas Center for Applied Technology IPA for Jeff Wilkinson U.S. Army $339,978 Sam Mannan, Yanjun Wang, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Marcus Oil and Chemical Safety Program Marcus Oil & Chemical $331,000 Rayford Anthony, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Methane Conversion Catalyst (Marcus Oil) HRD Corp. $322,191 John Attia, Cajetan Akujuobi, Matthew Sadiku, Lijun Qian, Prairie View A&M University Modeling and Testing of Advanced MixedSignal Systems National Science Foundation $318,008 Lihong Wang, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Gheroghe Stoica, Department of Veterinary Pathobiology Full Polizaration by OCT National Institutes of Health $316,129 Carl Benner and B. Don Russell, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Restricted Project Restricted Sponsor $300,000 Jay Humphrey, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Emily Wilson, Department of Medical Physiology Ex Vivo Delineation of Mechanisms of Cerebral Vasospasm National Institutes of Health $295,000 Daniel Davis, Dimitris Lagoudas, Department of Aerospace Engineering Restricted project Restricted sponsor $279,000

http:/ / en g i nee r mag. tamu. edu

James Moore Jr., Department of Biomedical Engineering Stented Artery Wall Stresses National Institutes of Health $276,526 Jaakko Jarvi, Department of Computer Science Collaborative Research: Lifting Complier Optimizations via Generic Programming National Science Foundation $274,709 Dara W. Childs, Turbomachinery Laboratory Restricted project Restricted sponsor $262,500 Richard Mercier, Offshore Technology Research Center MODEC/Sea Telemark TLP Model Tests $259,112 Ben Thien and Carlos Ortiz, Energy Systems Laboratory Subcontract with University of Texas–Austin University of Texas–Austin $254,658 Tahir Cagin, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering IRTR-ASE-SIM: Collaborative Research: De Novo Hierarchical Simulations of Stress Corrosion Cracking in Materials California Institute of Technology $253,870 Victor Ugaz, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering Collection, Focusing and Metering of Biomolecules Using Addressable Microelectrode Arrays for Portable LowPower Bioanalysis National Science Foundation $250,000

These grants and contracts include funding for research conducted directly by Dwight Look College of Engineering faculty and their collaborators and for research conducted through centers in the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES). TEES, the State of Texas’ engineering research agency, is staffed largely by Texas A&M engineering faculty.

Dwight Look College of Engineering U.S. News & World Report Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Best Colleges 2006

Ranked 8th among public institutions in both Undergraduate and Graduate Programs

U.S. News & World Report Americaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Best Graduate Schools 2007

Top 10 Public Undergraduate Programs

Top 10 Public Programs

1st Agricultural Engineering

1st Petroleum Engineering

2nd Petroleum Engineering

2nd Nuclear Engineering

3rd Nuclear Engineering

7th Aerospace Engineering

6th Aerospace Engineering

7th Civil Engineering

6th Industrial and Systems Engineering

7th Industrial and Systems Engineering

8th Civil Engineering

9th Electrical and Computer Engineering 10th Mechanical Engineering