These hands-on learning experiences take students out of the classroom and place them in villages or communities in need of engineering solutions to help populations get out of poverty or simply improve their standard of living. They teach students about appropriate technology and engineering solutions that fit within the cultural, social, and economic context of the area. And they demonstrate a form of cross-cultural engineering whose final outcomes can change the lives of many—even the students themselves.

Beyond advancing a set of professional skills for their future careers, students gain a broader sense of their world, understanding that people aren’t that different from one another and that they all have the same basic desires for themselves and their families. Whether participating in service learning through an organization or class, students discover the rewards and challenges of engineering appropriate technologies in a global context—an important lesson that can be difficult to learn from a textbook.

A grassroots effort

Engineering students and faculty in service-learning projects share a passion to help others gain access to appropriate and sustainable goods and services. It’s this shared vision that makes the projects so successful at Iowa State, according to Julia Apple-Smith, director of Engineering International Programs and Services (EIPS).

Apple-Smith and others in the EIPS office help get projects up and running for organizations such as Engineers for a Sustainable World and Engineers Without Borders, as well as assisting faculty members with classes dedicated to engineering appropriate technologies for developing nations.

Laying the groundwork for a new project requires passing several checkpoints within the college and the university, as well as fund-raising and soliciting help to champion the programs.

Student and faculty safety is a top priority. Before students can travel to work on projects, a faculty member must visit the site at least once, often with EIPS support, depending upon the availability of funds. Also, students are provided with an orientation on the culture of the area they are visiting.

“A tremendous amount of organization goes into making these projects successful,” Apple-Smith says. “But the return on investment—building relationships across the globe and addressing important needs of people around the world—is well worth the effort.”

Help for the poorest nations

Mark Bryden, associate professor of mechanical engineering, has been engaged with the developing world since 1999, addressing engineering issues in places such as Vietnam, India, and Mexico with graduate students who share his interest in appropriate technology. Recently, however, he has shifted his focus to nations that have little or no access to services, areas where citizens make less than $1 per day—and he’s taking undergraduates along for the journey.

Bryden offers a series of three unique mechanical engineering (ME) courses in appropriate technology that present students with the challenge of engineering in developing countries with limited resources. Sustainable Engineering and International Development (ME 388) provides students with an overall sense of systems and sustainability; Design for Appropriate Technologies (ME 486) allows students to design solutions for real problems; and Applied Methods in Sustainable Engineering and International Development (ME 389) puts students in the field, where they’ll implement on location the designs developed in ME 486.

For the past several years, Bryden and Richard LeSar, professor and chair of materials science and engineering, have been working with their students on technologies for a village in Mali, Africa, where more than half the population lives in extreme poverty.

“Students learn the multicultural aspects of poverty and how important those factors are in engineering design,” Bryden says. “They have to answer tough questions like, ‘How do I design something for someone with low literacy, who doesn’t speak the administrative language of the country?’ Or, ‘How can this technology operate in a place without running water or electricity?’ ”

A village takes ownership

With a long-standing interest in international development, ME junior Keysha Hennings started answering some of those questions while working on a water valve project for ME 389. Once in Mali, she and her fellow students had the opportunity to speak with local villagers through a translator. According to Hennings, the discussions were more about the villagers’ daily lives than the student projects, so students had a better idea how to design something that fit into the villagers’ lifestyles rather than impeding them.

After all, observes Hennings, a primary objective of the engineers is to act as catalysts and resources for the villagers, rather than just dropping in with a technology and leaving. Hennings’ experience therefore taught her as well the importance of local ownership of the technologies.

“For an appropriate technology to be sustainable, the people using it have to feel like it is their own, taking responsibility for repairing or improving it,” Hennings says. “If these villagers don’t take charge and get involved with the projects, they won’t end up using the technologies.”

The water valve project Hennings and other engineering students collaborated on involved the community water tank, which frequently ran empty from leaks. The villagers use the valve on the tank about 200 times per day, a rate that exceeds the life cycle of the valve on the side of your house in little more than a month.

“These solutions take ingenuity,” Hennings says. “You are working with bicycle inner tubes and sticks instead of metal rods and Teflon tape.”

With improved water, as well as benefits from the lighting and cook stove projects the class has been working on, villagers in these rural areas will be safer and have more time to spend on income-generating activities for themselves and their village.

Putting goodwill to work

New to campus in 2008, Engineers Without Borders (EWB) plans to visit Mali this fall to assist with Bryden and his students’ efforts, as well as instituting its own projects in the west African nation to address sanitation, health care, clean and safe energy, and daily nutritional needs.

Organized independently in several different European nations in the 1990s before coming to the United States in 2001, EWB works to advance the quality of life in poor nations by meeting basic needs and providing social engagement to support community development. Currently a doctoral student studying mechanical engineering and international development, president and founder of the Iowa State chapter Nathan Johnson (BSME’04, MSME’05) says EWB gives students an opportunity and direction for putting their goodwill to work.

“Students are interested in addressing humanitarian issues,” Johnson says. “With EWB, they find a common vision and a pathway for developing skills to meet needs of the next generation across the globe.”

The organization is open to all disciplines in an effort to bring cross-disciplinary insight to projects. As EWB continues to develop as a student organization, leaders are planning awareness events to help build knowledge about global issues.

“Once you start thinking about poverty, sustainability, and how your skills can make a difference, your worldview changes,” Johnson says. “It’s energizing to see how students grow throughout their involvement in the organization.”

A five-year commitment

Five EWB members traveled to a village in Belize for two weeks this summer for a “first contact” visit. Once there, they learned the needs of households and the community by preparing meals, tending gardens, and caring for children. Living with them and participating in their lives this way, they found the villagers were greatly concerned about clean water, clean cooking energy, household gardening, and creating jobs.

A future project in EWB plans is to create a bus stop, a source of pride for the community and especially important for villagers needing medical care. “Without this mode of transportation,” Johnson explains, “many villagers who are sick don’t seek the medical care they need. And those who do go to the hospital have to endure harsh weather, which can lead to greater illness, especially in pregnant women.”

Additionally, the group will focus on improvements to the village school such as continuing a literacy program, developing a health program, and building a school garden for a feeding program, using solar fruit dryers to extend the shelf life of the food grown in the garden.

As new members join, they hope to meet requests for projects in Haiti, Rwanda, and Tanzania. Yet, while the group works on as many projects as possible, EWB is careful to ensure it can maintain a five-year commitment to areas where they plan to implement engineering solutions.

“We have an important responsibility to educate villagers about their options so they can develop accurate expectations of our work,” Johnson says. “This educational component can take a long time, but it is crucial as we work to maintain a delicate balance between the politics and perceptions that surround the work we do.”

Mobilizing worldwide service

For the past three years, student members of EWB’s peer organization, Engineers for a Sustainable World (ESW), have been working on several development projects, including household energy and water harvesting in the Kamuli District of Uganda, where they learned firsthand how appropriate technologies can help areas lacking electricity or clean drinking water.

The students are now extending that knowledge to assist the villages of Purkal and Jaspur in northern India. There, in collaboration with EWB at Kansas State, the Dehradun Institute of Technology (DIT) in India, and Purkal Youth Development Society, an Indian NGO, they will work on solar street lighting, solar fruit dryers, and rainwater harvesting.

Members of the several groups met for the first time in India last spring to share their research and ideas, assess the sites, and begin engineering solutions for the projects. Divided into student teams, each had representatives from the different universities.

According to Alok Bhandari, associate professor of agricultural and biosystems engineering, this sort of teamwork is an essential part of developing sustainable technologies.

“It can take awhile for a community to accept a new way of doing things,” Bhandari says. “In this case, DIT students and faculty who are invested in the projects will be on-site at all times, helping villagers work through issues.”

Pride in meeting needs

Pasha Beresnev, a senior in civil engineering, worked on the rainwater harvesting project, exploring how villagers might collect clean water for domestic use and build water storage tanks for farming. The teams researched filtration systems for rooftop water harvesting and scouted locations for large-scale units requiring space for two tanks, one for sedimentation and one for storage.

The students faced an unanticipated challenge in the landscape of the area. The village was located on a hill in an area prone to earthquakes, with limited flat areas for large water storage. That’s where having multiple perspectives on the issue made a difference.

“Because there were new ideas and opinions always being shared,” Beresnev notes, “we left India encouraged that we had a strong foundation to begin building our prototypes.” Students from each university will now begin developing solutions to test, he says, with plans to implement the best solutions in the near future.

As a faculty member, Bhandari has been involved in several service-learning projects. With each project, he is amazed at how much students learn in the field, and how they come to appreciate that their work means something to someone.

“When you work to improve the quality of life for people, you are changing local economics and creating sustainable approaches for generating wealth,” Bhandari says. “That’s something students and faculty can take pride in—but with the understanding that, while we have success in one place, there are so many more that need our attention.”

Despite long lines at service stations, cheap gas up to the ’70s embargoes made ethanol and other alternative fuels unattractive to the public. And without a robust biofuel industry competing for corn and soybeans, food oils weren’t expensive either. Hammond patented his discovery anyway, but for years it served only as a research tool, never achieving commercial viability.

A temporary retreat from $4 gasoline notwithstanding, those “bad old days” are back, this time in the form of climate change and a global economic crisis that could make consumers long for the 1970s. Fortunately, Hammond and his yeast are back too, along with a team of collaborators looking to exploit his original scheme to produce oil—only this time for fuel.

Led by Hammond’s protégé, microbiologist Sam Beattie, several collaborators from the Department of Food Science and Human Nutrition enlisted environmental and biological engineer Hans van Leeuwen and others from the College of Engineering. Their goal? To use existing techniques—and some novel twists—to produce industrial oil or biodiesel in a virtually closed carbon loop, combining economic viability with environmental sustainability.

A new use for old techniques

Beattie knew precisely what he needed in turning to van Leeuwen and his engineering colleagues. As a young researcher, van Leeuwen first used fungi to treat industrial wastewater, a practice he continued through faculty positions in South Africa, Australia, and, ultimately, at Iowa State, where in 2000 he joined the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering.

Once in Ames, van Leeuwen became intrigued with the possibility of bringing his expertise in industrial wastewater treatment to ethanol production, where he saw an opportunity to extract greater value from stillage, the wastewater that remains after distilling ethanol from the fermentation and removing distillers dry grains for use as animal feed. Convinced that certain organisms might thrive on the low-value waste stream, van Leeuwen returned to his fungus and made a surprising discovery.

“The fungi grow like mad in thin stillage,” he says. “They love it! But you end up with a lot of tiny organisms in water; it may not have as many dissolved substances, but you have all these suspended molds. And they’re not easy to remove.”

Undaunted, van Leeuwen introduced aeration techniques that cause the filamentous fungi to attach to each other and form small spheres about one-half inch in diameter that are easily screened from the stillage. “Those make a marvelous animal feed that contains certain proteins lacking in most vegetable diets,” he notes.

Through this innovation, van Leeuwen turned a money-losing waste stream into another potential value-added product for an ethanol industry that needs every advantage to compete in the alternative energy market. So when Beattie approached him, van Leeuwen was soon convinced of the potential in a similar process that might revive Hammond’s quest for a commercial application for his yeast.

“We envisioned a kind of two-stage process,” Beattie recalls. “We have the white-rot fungus producing sugars, and the yeast grow on that, producing yeast biomass—billions and billions of yeasts.”

However, Beattie adds, while sugars and nitrogen may reproduce yeast in great quantities, nitrogen inhibits yeast cells from gaining the mass they need to convert sugars into oil.

“What we have is lots of skinny yeasts,” Beattie continues. “So we’re going to turn those around, put them back into a sugar solution without the nitrogen, and let them go to town on that. And they’ll get fat.”

Innovation for a critical step

Yet rather than corn, Beattie and van Leeuwen decided they would use lignocellulosic feedstocks such as switchgrass and corn stover that require further processing—and further expense—to extract the sugars the yeast would then convert to valuable oils. That required additional expertise in the person of Tae Hyun Kim, a young chemical engineer on the agricultural and biosystems engineering (ABE) faculty.

In order to prepare a cellulosic feedstock for conversion into sugars, engineers must first remove the feedstock’s lignin, the organic biopolymer that is linked with cellulose and hemicellulose and gives it strength. By pretreating the feedstock with a 15% aqueous ammonia solution, Kim discovered, he could remove up to 70% of the lignin, sufficient for commercial enzymes to break down cellulose into the monomeric sugars on which the yeast could feed.

Ammonia pretreatment, Kim says, has significant advantages for stripping lignin from cellulose. Other alkaline treatments, for example, are highly effective at removing lignin, but the residual chemicals can damage the enzymes and yeast in the downstream processing. And, in addition to its toxicity, dilute acid pretreatment is non-volatile and therefore cannot be recovered and recycled, unlike aqueous ammonia. Finally, Kim’s signature innovation to ammonia pretreatment lies in a technique that allows him to process the biomass from 30 to 60 degrees Celsius—as low as room temperature—resulting in significant energy savings at the refinery.

“So after a lot of discussion among the group,” Kim says, “we concluded that an ammonia-based pretreatment was best for our process. It has a lot of desirable characteristics, and we can obtain a high purity of lignin.”

The process, Kim notes, is very simple with good economics: the ammonia is recovered and reused, and the lignin can be sold for binder, soil amendments, and road construction materials.

‘We’re imitating nature’

Once separated from the lignin, van Leeuwen introduces into the biomass a white-rot fungus of the genus Phanerochaete that can break down the polymer chains of the cellulose into a variety of monomeric sugars, which are then fed to the oil-producing yeast.

“In a way, what we’re doing is biomimicry,” van Leeuwen notes. “We’re imitating nature.”

Depending upon the variety, the yeast will either ferment the sugars into ethanol or, as with Hammond and Beattie’s specimen, gorge on the sugars and convert them into oil. Along with any remaining residues, the fungus, van Leeuwen observes, can be used as animal feed or a soil amendment.

Yet the challenge of this method lies not so much in getting yeast to fatten on the sugars—removal of nitrogen from the biomass does that—but instead in harvesting oil from the yeast. So Kim’s ABE colleague David Grewell brings to the project a unique set of skills and knowledge in ultrasonics that, like van Leeuwen’s work with fungi, was developed in order to treat municipal and industrial wastewater.

“This technology is directly applicable,” Grewell observes. “We can take equipment used in municipal wastewater treatment residues and drop it right into biofuels production, whether turning corn into ethanol or switchgrass into some type of fundamental chemical building blocks or biodiesel.”

Tuned precisely, the ultrasound not only ruptures yeast cells to release their oil, but also can significantly increase esterification rates when used in conjunction with specific heterogeneous catalysts, such as those developed by Professor John Verkade of Iowa State’s Department of Chemistry. This, Grewell says, has the added benefit of eliminating another step in the production chain of the biofuel.

“We hit the yeast with the ultrasonics,” he notes, “and at the same time that oil comes out, it’s pretty much instantaneously and directly turned into biodiesel.”

Grewell is quick to note that the application of ultrasonics to increase biofuels production isn’t new, and that researchers have been publishing papers on the technique since the 1970s. Besides the comparatively low demand for biofuels even in the face of OPEC embargoes, however, early efforts were limited by their inability to scale up equipment and techniques to production levels.

Not today: over the past 10 years, Grewell says, power supply technology and the design of transducers capable of turning electricity into the mechanical energy needed for large-scale ultrasonics have combined with greater knowledge of the mediums to which the technology is applied to allow research to go beyond bench-scale applications.

Getting the economics right

The greatest challenge facing them, team members agree, is the economics of “green” energy in the face of continuing volatility in traditional energy markets, particularly oil. Recently, that volatility has thrown much of the biofuels industry—particularly ethanol—back on its heels, as gasoline and diesel shot to more than $4 a gallon in 2008 only to tumble back to earth this year.

As a result, refineries that would benefit most from processes the team is developing have retrenched their R&D and are reluctant to venture into new areas as they struggle to remain viable. One Iowa producer, van Leeuwen notes, expressed interest in his fungal treatment of ethanol stillage to recycle the effluent back into production but hesitated on concerns that ramping up the unproven methods might hamper an operation already strained economically.

“This is critical,” van Leeuwen says. “They want to do this, but at the same time they don’t want to do this experimentally.”

In order to combine these various components that have succeeded separately in bench-scale tests, van Leeuwen is constructing a pilot refinery at the Biomass Energy Conversion Center, a facility of the Iowa Energy Center administered by Iowa State that serves as a bridge between lab experiments and real-world applications. There, he will demonstrate his proof-of-concept for recycling water in a closed-loop ethanol production process while simultaneously producing high-grade animal feed from the fungus used to purify that water. If successful, not only would producers save up to one-third of energy costs over the ethanol production process, they would also have a valuable byproduct that could benefit Iowa’s livestock industry.

A similar proof-of-concept will be needed to make oil from lignocellulosic feedstocks. Led by Beattie, the team is seeking funding for that effort, but the project must compete with many others pursuing a limited pool of funds. The researchers know this so are especially quick to tout the ecological advantages of the process.

“We can capture every aspect of the cellulosic material,” Beattie emphasizes. “We harvest the lignin if it’s available, we sell the lignin if there’s a market for it; otherwise, we burn that material for energy. The glycerol left over from the biodiesel can be fed back to the yeast as an energy source. So everything gets recycled. Even the water gets recycled.”

Making the ‘sell’

Those cost savings and value-added byproducts must be there. Global warming or any other form of environmental degradation notwithstanding, van Leeuwen insists, no producer is going to place the welfare of the planet over profits.

“That’s not something that’s going to happen with private enterprise,” he says. “No one is going to sacrifice their share of all this money to make their own small contribution to rising ocean levels, right? That’s a very, very hard sell.”

Still, if the response of the research community is any indication, that “sell” is looking better with each passing year: van Leeuwen’s ethanol and biofuels research projects—including those discussed here—have won the Grand Prize for University Research Award from the American Academy of Environmental Engineers in each of the past three years, and last year his efforts to grow microscopic fungus in ethanol stillage resulted in the prestigious R&D 100 Award.

Of course, accolades from the research community are no guarantee of success in an unforgiving commercial marketplace. But if Sam Beattie’s confidence in the project is any indication, you shouldn’t bet against that lignocellulosic biodiesel refinery one day rising above the Iowa prairie.

“If someone were to give me $30 million tomorrow, I’d build it,” Beattie says.

Pass It On:

]]> http://innovate.engineering.iastate.edu/?feed=rss2&p=739 1 http://innovate.engineering.iastate.edu/?p=802 http://innovate.engineering.iastate.edu/?p=802#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 16:33:14 +0000 Dennis Smith http://innovate.engineering.iastate.edu/?p=802 On a warm spring day after the end of classes, Jim McCalley ponders the fate of America’s electric grid, the lumbering, patchwork system that in 2003 was brought to its knees by a few trees overgrowing transmission lines in Cleveland.

Just that morning the New York Times had run a feature on the early 20th-century inventor Nikola Tesla’s project to build a “global system of giant towers meant to relay through the air not only news, stock reports and even pictures but also … free electricity for one and all.”

Tree-proof electrical power. McCalley chuckles at the notion—but then checks himself.

“I was just reading,” he says, “an article that said Pacific Gas and Electric out in California—a company I used to work for—is supporting a start-up that wants to put solar cells in space, pick them up, and transfer the power back to earth.”

Critical questions

Jim McCalley is no Nikola Tesla. And, lucky for us, his funder isn’t J. P. Morgan, the financier and industrialist who yanked his support from Tesla, shuddering at the specter of “free electricity for one and all.”

Still, McCalley’s latest project, the 21st Century National Energy and Transportation Infrastructures Balancing Sustainability, Costs, and Resiliency—or “NETSCORE-21”— seems at least as ambitious as Tesla’s doomed dream. Over the next four years, NETSCORE will lay out nothing less than a national road map for energy production, transmission, and consumption over the next forty years, with special focus on the increasingly integral relationship of the electric grid to America’s transportation sector.

Supported by a nearly $2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, McCalley and his collaborators are developing software that will help policy makers, utility regulators, fleet managers, and others implement optimal solutions to critical challenges. Which paths will we take? How much of what kinds of technology will we build? And where will we build it? When will we build it?

There’s no single “right” answer to any of these questions, McCalley insists, but rather a number of potentially good answers. In fact, he says, a given question can be divided into 8 or 10 different trajectories, each having its own unique characteristics.

“Those trajectories will provide society the ability to talk,” McCalley says, “to be informed. How much will it cost? What will it buy in terms of grid strength and reliability and resiliency? And what’s it going to buy us in terms of environmental impacts or relief from those impacts, including carbon?”

Still, McCalley is quick to emphasize that, while the work is all about fostering interdependent energy and transportation sectors that are sustainable, NETSCORE isn’t necessarily a “green” project.

“What we do has three very clear objectives: low cost, low environmental impact, and a resilient infrastructure,” McCalley observes. “Those are the pillars, and we want solutions that are good in each of those areas. It’s pretty clear that some level of green or renewable needs to be in each. But how much?“

Strength through diversity of resources

That’s a question Nadia Gkritza, an assistant professor of civil engineering, will play a big part in answering. Although a relatively new PhD, Gkritza brings to the project significant training and practical experience in economics and statistics, transportation planning, and the bioeconomy, knowledge that partners well with each of McCalley’s focus areas.

The first order of business, she says, involves taking stock of current use and resources, and then projecting changes to the overall national energy portfolio as new technologies and alternative resources come online. However, a core assumption of the project is that, regardless of the ultimate sources of energy, the most efficient means of transmitting energy will be through America’s electric grid, and that the increasing profile of electrified transportation, from high-speed rail to plug-in electric hybrid vehicles (PHEVs), will make extraordinary demands on that grid.

“Resiliency,” in this sense, goes beyond the simple ability of the physical grid to survive attacks by terrorists or even trees. It demands as well that the nation not overly rely on a given source of energy, as we still do today on oil for transportation and coal for electricity—that’s a 20th-century model, says Gkritza—but instead develops a variety of energy resources.

“We recognize that only one renewable source will not be enough to generate the energy we need,” Gkritza observes. “So we’re seeing different areas that have potential, some for biomass and wind like the Midwest, some for solar and geothermal, probably on the West Coast.”

Likewise, Gkritza acknowledges, there is no one-size-fits-all solution to the question of transportation. While many experts assume an increasing presence of PHEVs on American roads, gas- and diesel-powered fleets will have a dominant presence for years to come. Further, much long-haul freight in the United States still ships by truck, and few are proposing hybrid (let alone purely electric) technologies for those fleets.

Optimizing our energy future

While Gkritza favors a much higher profile for electrified rail for both passenger and freight in the United States, these face significant economic and political barriers in what is, after all, a largely deregulated market. Unlike Europe, she notes, rail right-of-way in the United States is largely privately held. Short of nationalizing railroads, significant subsidies and other incentives would be required to encourage an industry that runs on diesel and makes its money shipping coal to move toward a more diversified—and electrified—business model.

That’s where Lizhi Wang of the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Systems Engineering comes in. With a background in using optimization techniques to solve problems in electricity markets, Wang came to Iowa State in 2007 with a view to applying his knowledge to PHEVs in particular, but agreed to take on the expanded task of developing algorithms to include the total scope of NETSCORE’s long-term challenges across a range of possible scenarios.

Simply stated, “optimization” doesn’t prescribe a specific outcome so much as it first defines the relationships of all known factors in a problem set, then determines the most effective means of directing resources toward any given objective. In a two-dimensional optimization problem, Wang notes, you determine your objective, assess your resources and constraints, and then decide which approach in a field of possible solutions will take you furthest toward achieving that goal.

“But consider,” says Wang. “with NETSCORE, we have a thousand dimensions, and we want to get as far as we can toward a specific direction: the optimal solution is not that obvious. So I’m designing algorithms to achieve the optimal solution as quickly as possible.”

Wang is not talking about a spatial model—that’s just a metaphor—but rather the multiplicity of factors in a problem set, each of which exponentially increases the difficulty of optimizing the other factors; e.g., a given decision regarding electrical production or transmission can have an immediate effect on the transportation side of the equation, and vice versa.

“We have to consider both sides,” Wang reminds. “To the extent we use electricity to power our transportation needs, we increase our burden on the electric grid and have a decreased demand on biodiesel and gasoline.”

‘The problem with planning’

That’s not to suggest that NETSCORE seeks to model the totality of American energy production and consumption; nor does it presume to prescribe universally valid solutions at all levels of social and economic activity.

In evaluating current infrastructure, McCalley observes, there’s a level of “granularity” below which it doesn’t make sense to go. For example, he says, NETSCORE may factor in all transmission lines at 230 KV and above but is unlikely to include the 69,000-volt line running from the City of Ames power plant. Likewise, while the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System and major state roads will factor into transportation models, city-level street grids may not.

“But for those levels we do want,” McCalley asks, “how do we get the information? That’s an issue, because there’s a critical infrastructure thing here that the homeland security people are concerned about.

“We concluded that we need to get halfway there, not 100%,” McCalley continues. “And if you get halfway there with respect to the integrity of your data, it’ll probably be enough to illustrate things that would be very effectively used in follow-up.”

But modeling the current infrastructure—even only half of it—isn’t even half the battle. More than the availability of hard data, what makes optimization especially difficult is the educated guesswork that goes into projecting, over the next 40 years, trends in technology, the economy, and social and political stability, both domestic and international.

While McCalley and company would like nothing better than to beam electrical energy directly to consumers wirelessly from space or even Tesla’s terrestrial towers, the grid of tomorrow is far likelier to involve the construction of massive new transmission lines, along with the inevitable resistance from communities whose paths they’ll cross. An unforeseen technological breakthrough—say, cold fusion in your garage or a thousand-mile PHEV battery—could render their models obsolete. Or, more prosaically, gasoline could cost $10 a gallon—or $2.

And, of course, there’s the greatest variable of all in the looming shadow of global climate change.

“That’s the problem with planning,” Gkritza concedes. “You cannot validate most of the assumptions you make about what will happen in the future until it happens. But we’ll run different scenarios based on different policies—a cap-and-trade, a carbon tax, subsidies for plug-in vehicles.

“The plan is likely to have some high- and low-range scenarios,” she adds. “There are more aggressive things that might happen if the political will is there, and some less aggressive, more incremental changes.”

Farewell to the dinosaurs

The task before them inspires nothing if not humility, and team members are quick to emphasize that NETSCORE does not pretend to offer an “ultimate” solution to the nation’s energy crisis, only some perspective on what some of the solutions—that’s plural—might be. Or, as McCalley would have it, not so much a “master plan” as a tool for master planners to gain perspective and longer-range vision as they make critical choices.

Yet it’s not that NETSCORE engineers don’t share some core convictions about energy in America by mid-century. One bedrock principle, simply put, is that you don’t use energy to move energy—think of those endless rail cars shipping coal from mines in Wyoming and West Virginia to midwestern and eastern power plants, or vast fleets of trucks transporting stocks of gasoline from distribution centers to retailers.

For McCalley, that means two things: First, electricity must be produced at the source of its feedstock, whether coal, wind, solar, or geothermal. And, second, internal combustion engines inevitably must go the way of the dinosaurs whose fossils fuel them, to be replaced by PHEVs and, eventually, totally electric vehicles.

Together, these twin imperatives demand an electric grid that is more robust, resilient, and, yes, smarter than the one we have today. And “smart” means a grid with communications capabilities among producers, distributors, and consumers of electricity that can compensate for the variability of generation from intermittent sources such as solar and wind.

“We’re going to hit a barrier with wind,” McCalley says, “because it doesn’t do a good job following the load. But that barrier tends to go away if you build in the ability to control load at the customer level.”

A smart grid, he adds, demands not only smart consumers and producers, but also smart appliances—everything from air conditioners to swimming pool heaters to auto rechargers—that can shut down automatically for brief periods at minimal inconvenience to compensate for that portion of the power supply dependent upon intermittent sources. And it will mean two-way communication between smart car batteries and home recharging stations, whereby homes can temporarily draw power from a charged battery to compensate for minor fluctuations in supply from the grid.

“These offer some level of controllability to modulate the load to match generation,” adds McCalley. “We’ve always matched the generation to the load, and that’s where wind has a problem.”

‘The will is there’

But that’s just a technical challenge, one the NETSCORE team feels electrical and computer engineers such as McCalley can eventually meet. More formidable are the human factors, along with the assortment of carrots and sticks that policy makers will have to deploy in order to encourage cooperation among the producers, transmitters, and consumers of energy whose individual short-term perspectives don’t always match their collective long-term interests.

McCalley, for one, is both confident and optimistic. No, NETSCORE won’t realize Tesla’s techno-fantasy (and Morgan’s economic nightmare) of “free electricity for one and all.” But it can, he feels, prod the nation toward a different kind of freedom from dependency on foreign oil and ecological anxiety.

“The political will, the social will, the economic will is all there today to make the change,” McCalley reflects. “It’s never been there before for energy like this.”

RELATED: View President Obama speech about the Smart Grid

Sarah Ryan, a professor of industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, helps industries achieve sustainability by developing integrated mathematical models that help decision makers deal with risk and uncertainty as they strive to balance our increased demand for energy, products, and services with preservation of the earth’s environment—all the while remaining profitable as businesses.

“A company may be operating optimally from an economic standpoint in the short term,” says Ryan. “But if it is using nonrenewable resources or polluting the environment, it will not be sustainable in the long term. On the other hand, an industry can be ‘green’ and take all kinds of environmentally friendly actions. But if it is not profitable, it is not going to survive.”

A rational view of systems

Ryan’s interest in decision-making tools began soon after she finished her PhD at the University of Michigan in 1988, where her studies focused on optimization over time. In her first appointment at the University of Pittsburgh, she studied electric power issues, observing how the inconsistent availability of different generating plants complicated planning processes.

Ryan gained perspective on that challenge as well as capacity expansion issues when, in the early 1990s, she joined the utilities division of a chemical manufacturing plant that generated its own electric power and steam for process heat. As the company grew and production increased, she notes, the plant’s boilers became increasingly strained. Managers, therefore, needed to determine the most cost-effective schedule for either replacing existing equipment or installing additional boilers to meet increased demand—a formidable challenge, given the uncertainties of markets and equipment needs over time.

“They didn’t know exactly what demand was going to be,” Ryan says. “So they drew on their day-to-day experience to forecast demand and developed methods over the years that would give them an approximate idea of when to install new boilers.”

After returning to academia in 1995, Ryan focused on developing models to quantify—and thus rationalize—responses to these kinds of problems. Using a combination of probability and optimization modeling, the models allow decision makers to see how various components of an issue interact with each other over time. By recognizing this interdependence, Ryan says, managers can make decisions that provide the best results for each contributing part, as well as for systems as a whole.

Sustaining ‘sustainable’ energy

A 2007 AT&T Faculty Fellow in Industrial Ecology, today Ryan has sharpened her focus on the interdependence of economic and ecological factors in demonstrating how these information modeling techniques can help companies make decisions that reduce their consumption of both materials and energy.

Nowhere are these capabilities more needed than in the energy industry itself, with the wind industry offering a case in point. Although a green technology, the fact that wind produces power from a seemingly “free” and inexhaustible feedstock does not alone make wind sustainable, as it is still subject to the laws of economics.

The challenges are many: How do we integrate wind with other forms of energy? How do we minimize capital costs? How do we forecast the availability of wind with any degree of reliability? Where do we build wind farms, and how do we transmit their intermittent power to urban load centers over a grid currently ill equipped to handle that intermittence?

Yet another set of questions involves the ecology of developing, manufacturing, transporting, erecting, maintaining, and disposing of wind blades and turbines once they’ve completed their service lives. Formed of composite materials, the blades can be up to 150 feet long, making disposal a costly endeavor—both in dollars and environmental impact.

“We want to know how all of these pieces—people, materials information, equipment, and energy—fit together to make the whole industry sustainable,” Ryan says.

The confluence of systems

Yet wind represents just a small piece of the total energy picture. Supported by the National Science Foundation and Iowa State’s Electric Power Research Center, Ryan is currently working on several multidisciplinary projects to improve the efficiency, reliability, and environmental impacts of the larger U.S. energy infrastructure.

Electricity transmission networks, for example, are heavily dependent on other systems: if a bottleneck in the transportation network prevents the delivery of low-cost fuel, utilities might be forced to substitute more expensive alternatives, resulting in higher prices to consumers. So Ryan is also modeling the transportation networks for fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas.

To better understand these challenges, last year Ryan spent five months at the University of Auckland’s Electric Power Optimization Centre studying New Zealand’s electricity market, which is similar to but smaller than the U.S. market. There, her students updated and modified a fuel transportation network model developed by ECpE Professor Jim McCalley’s students that defines the network’s parameters, variables, and constraints.

“The parameters are the constants in the equations,” Ryan explains. “Coal, for example, costs so much per unit. The variables include how much coal you ship from one location to another, and the constraints are you can’t ship more coal than what is available—plus you don’t want to ship more coal than is needed by the consumer.”

A second model then provided the perspectives of utilities producing the electricity, as well as the system operator managing its transmission. The producer seeks to maximize profits, which are determined by the cost of fuel and the amount and market price of the electricity generated. Constraints include the fixed capacity of each generator to produce power. In addition, the utility must anticipate how its generation decisions might impact price—and at what point consumers might reduce consumption in order to lower their bills.

Ryan then put the equations from both models onto a single platform to solve everything at once. “We did this partly to get a better understanding of the whole system,” she explains, “but the real goal was to figure out where to expand the system in the most efficient and cost-effective way so that everybody—producers and consumers—is better off.”

A model for the developing world

Sustainability may be a global challenge, yet Ryan’s work focuses on the developed world because, she observes, that is where most of the world’s energy and resources are consumed.

“In the United States, we use far more resources and energy than we probably have the right to,” Ryan says. “So I think improving the processes in the developed world will have the biggest impact.”

That’s a sentiment shared by NSF program director Cerry Klein, who points out that, given the continued successful development of modeling technologies such as Ryan’s, the world will follow our lead.

“The two largest nations—China and India—are working hard to catch up with the rest of the world in jobs and income,” Klein acknowledges. “ Consequently, emissions are not a big concern to them.

“Their business leaders, however,” he continues, “are very technically oriented. If we can share mathematical models with them that explain why sustainable practices are cost effective—and they see our own successful enterprises that have used these models in decision making—they will be more willing to adopt these ideas.”

Implicit in our approach is a description of society as a system, by which we mean a set of interrelated processes (e.g., cultural, economic, technological) that form a unified whole. A sustainable society is one that equitably meets societal needs while maintaining the integrity of the environment and ecosystems. Thinking of a society as a system is essential. The optimal technical solution for a given situation may not always be the best solution for society as a whole. Thus, traditional linear, sequential optimization strategies are inadequate.

One way to define engineering is “design under constraint.” With this view, engineering as part of a societal system faces a new set of constraints. As we move toward the future, the physical constraints on technology will be increasingly stringent as we face potentially high energy costs, a need for low emissions of greenhouse gases, scarcity in other natural resources, both actual and political, and so on. Equally demanding will be the societal constraints.

The idea that technology should reflect societal constraints is not new. Schumacher, in his 1973 book Small is Beautiful, introduced the concept of an appropriate technology, by which he meant a technology that is appropriate to the environmental, educational, cultural, and economic situation for which it is intended. The principles of appropriate technology have been most commonly applied in the developing world, where, for example, bringing advanced technology that requires power sources, extensive maintenance, and materials that are not readily available to a village with no electricity, a semi-literate population, and few resources, is not appropriate. More subtle, but very common, problems arise when applications of technology do not appropriately take account of the local culture, leading to many failed projects. Indeed, the developing world is littered with failed technological solutions developed by well-meaning people who did not work within the local culture, education, and environment. Appropriate technology is not, however, a concept restricted to the developing world. Technology must reflect its impact on all societies. For example, cultural differences often lead to failures to adopt technologies in the developed world as well. The car-centric United States offers a clear example, in which it has been much less willing to adopt mass transit solutions than European nations.

Teaching sustainable engineering in the context of societal systems and appropriate technology thus provides students a change in viewpoint, in which they receive a broader sense of the impact of engineering on society. This puts into perspective a series of interrelated courses that has been introduced in our engineering curriculum over the past few years. A schematic view of these courses is shown in Figure 1. Taken as a whole, they present a range of technical and societal issues, with the balance between them depending on the class. While the courses make an interconnected set, linking to and growing from each other, they are independent and thus can serve the needs of a broad group of engineering students.

One class (Sustainable Engineering for International Development) was started a few years ago as a collaboration between a number of departments in the college. This fall, the Departments of Mechanical Engineering (ME) and Materials Science and Engineering (MSE) have formed a section that is specifically geared toward meeting the goals outlined above, incorporating complex systems, sustainability, and an analysis of water, energy, and materials issues in U.S. towns and African villages. This course, while predominantly technical, contains a significant focus on economics, anthropology, etc. The ME course Design for Appropriate Technology offers a new take on design, with a focus on creating appropriate solutions for specific applications in the developing world. Students are asked to respond to defined needs of people in a poor village in Africa. They have access both to previous designs as well as assessments of how well those designs have worked in a practical application. While this course is predominantly technical, its problems are motivated within a societal context.

The final course in this sequence is the most unique. Applied Methods in Sustainable Engineering for International Development is a summer course taught in a small village in Mali, a country in western sub-Saharan Africa. Students immerse themselves in this disadvantaged village (extreme poverty, subsistence-level farming, no electricity), implementing projects from the senior design course and creating the systems-level description of a village used by both the above-mentioned courses. We have many goals in this course, including creating an environment in which students can learn how to work effectively in a culture that is very different from their own; i.e., that they become what is known as culturally competent. However, the major goal of this course is to change how students view the role of engineering in society and how they view themselves as engineers.

We are still in the beginning stages of learning how to teach this broader view of sustainable engineering. Other universities have also been developing new curricula based on these ideas, and, indeed, a few have even created centers focused on these issues. The key point for all of us is that the technological solutions that are being proposed for sustainability, including green designs, renewable energy, and a host of others, cannot meet our future challenges unless we find appropriate technologies and paths for our society and ourselves. Our job in the university is to ensure that we prepare engineers who can do so.

These trends demonstrate that governments, corporations, and individuals are recognizing the need for sustainability and implementing the changes required to achieve it. The danger is that the various definitions of sustainability and the actions credited to the idea are so wide ranging that a more important action—to prioritize our efforts—may fail to be addressed.

Over two decades ago, the United Nations Commission on Environment and Development defined it as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Meeting needs in this sense is an economic activity that relies on natural resources now and in the future; sustainability simply requires a long-term perspective with a priority on meeting needs. On a macro scale, we know that the economy is embedded in the environment. A study recently published in Science magazine found that any economic benefits gained by deforestation in Brazil are short lived, as people’s well-being quickly reverts to a condition no better than it was before—the deforested land cannot sustain them. On a micro scale, many firms have found that green practices reduce cost, green products add revenue, and green systems reduce the volatility of the business cycle. For example, manufacturers are embracing remanufacturing as a complementary service that is robust to downturns while also reducing material and energy use.

Around the same time that the UN commission wrote its report, I was completing my doctoral dissertation on infinite horizon optimization, a formal way of setting up and solving problems with finite time horizons to find solutions that remain optimal no matter how long those time horizons are extended. What’s the connection? I find it in the dictionary definition of the root word “sustain.” The first three meanings are to give support to, to nourish, and to prolong. I took some ribbing for devoting so much time and energy to a very esoteric-sounding topic. My response, then and now, is this: What nation, corporation or individual wants to plan for its own demise? In the long run we are all dead, as John Maynard Keynes famously commented, yet we all do what we can to prolong our descendants’ nourishment and support. These days my research is less abstract, but I’m more mindful than ever that even short-term problems need long-term solutions. When the time horizon is extended, perceived conflicts between economy and environment tend to vanish.

From thought to action

What does sustainability mean for engineering and the College of Engineering at Iowa State University?

Under the premise that sustainability ties economy with environment, engineering’s vital role in achieving sustainability is twofold: to reduce the negative environmental impacts associated with engineered systems, processes, and products; and to reduce the material and energy consumption per unit of production of goods or services. Engineers of all disciplines are needed to develop new materials, energy conversion technologies, manufacturing processes, systems for delivering goods and services, and methods for reducing pollution. Engineers must also communicate with policy makers to help ensure that regulations account for technological constraints and that incentives achieve the intended outcomes.

In research, we must apply all our skill and creativity to solving problems of consequence. The college’s 2050 Challenge articulates a strategic focus on sustainability. Researchers in all disciplines are addressing this challenge through basic science and technology development for meeting human needs in the short and long term. Iowa State engineers are developing more effective ways to use renewable energy, including biorenewable fuels, wind and solar power, and fuel cells. Transportation engineers are finding ways to reduce emissions, use more sustainable fuels and technologies, and promote more efficient passenger and freight movement. Agricultural and environmental engineers are developing more sustainable systems for food production, water supply and quality, and water conservation in the built environment. Interdisciplinary teams are designing closed-loop supply chains to reuse materials and examining interactions between energy and transportation systems for resiliency and efficiency gains.

A long-term view and an awareness of the broad impacts of our work are essential to avoid unintended consequences of quick technological fixes. A systems perspective is necessary to recognize the interdisciplinary and interconnected nature of the challenge as well as its nontechnical aspects. In industrial engineering, we teach students to design, develop, implement, and improve integrated systems that include people, materials, information, equipment, and energy. We have the systems perspective, but we still need to cultivate the long view and the broad awareness of impacts.

In education, efforts to promote sustainability must recognize several realities. Our students are excited about improving the quality of life for this and succeeding generations. Employers hire them based on their disciplinary knowledge and skills. Most college alumni will spend their careers in businesses that operate primarily in the industrialized world with clear sustainability goals. Government policies related to sustainability are expected to increase in significance and reach. For accreditation, each undergraduate program must demonstrate that its students attain outcomes that specifically address sustainability constraints as well as the global, economic, environmental, and societal context of engineering solutions.

To prepare our students for career-long effectiveness and leadership, an appreciation of sustainability must permeate each curriculum. Currently, dozens of courses across all departments have some sustainability emphasis. Course work is complemented by internships and co-ops, including regular participation by Iowa State students in the Iowa Department of Natural Resources’ Pollution Prevention internship program. Student organizations such as Engineers for a Sustainable World, Team PrISUm (solar car), and the Water Quality Club also provide valuable experiences.

Faculty and student commitment to sustainability is strong, but there is room to improve the basic sustainability training of each student. We must imbue every student with a long-term perspective, the habit of considering broad impacts, and an understanding of how their own discipline can contribute to meeting human needs in the long run.

Still, the sun is shining on Lin’s career. His work in creating novel self-assembling micro- and nanoscale structures has achieved international recognition since he first came to Iowa State five years ago. And, fittingly, his recent project seeks to apply his unique insights into materials structures to the use of quantum dots in titanium dioxide (TiO2) nanotubes for solar energy technologies.

A multidimensional architecture

These are just the latest in a series of innovations Lin has recently made, breakthroughs that have seen his work featured in the pages—even on the covers—of some of the leading journals in his field.

Barely into the first of a five-year National Science Foundation CAREER Award, Lin’s pioneering techniques for creating hierarchically ordered structures through the synergy of evaporation-driven self-assembly at the microscopic scale and spontaneous self-assembly at the nanoscopic level have won the covers of Soft Matter and Angewandte Chemie International Edition, which designated his contribution a “very important paper.”

Lin’s one-step method confines a polymer or nanocrystal solution in a geometry consisting of a curved upper surface on a flat lower substrate, yielding a confined microfluid. The evaporation of solvent at the capillary edge triggers the “stick-slip” motion of the microfluid contact line, depositing hundreds of highly ordered concentric polymer or nanocrystal patterns—“coffee ring”-like deposits, Lin calls them—over the substrate.

“These structures,” Lin observes, “consist of whatever nanoscale materials we use as building blocks—block copolymers, conjugated polymer nanofibers, quantum dots, DNA-based nanocomposites—thereby exhibiting two or more independent characteristic dimensions: microscale structures with self-organized nanoscopic constituents residing along these various dimensions, a hierarchically ordered structure.”

Depending upon their constituents and architecture, Lin adds, the structures can demonstrate varying degrees of conductivity and optoelectronic properties, with potential applications in sensors, processing, and data storage. Recently, Lin used the technique to develop a “snakeskin” architecture incorporating conjugated polymer nanofibers he says shows significant promise for light-emitting diodes and thin-film transistors.

“People are using conjugated polymers for electronic materials,” says Lin. “But when the thickness of the polymer deposit on the transparent substrate is over a certain limit, the film becomes opaque, and light will not pass through.”

By contrast, the open spaces in Lin’s snakeskin structure expose the glass substrate. Besides requiring fewer materials to fabricate, he says, such a structure is more transparent and, depending upon its components, potentially more conductive.

Probing the theoretical bases

To date, Lin’s work in self-assembling nanoscale structures has been only a prelude to their application across a range of technologies. To achieve that goal, he must better understand the theoretical bases of his techniques in order to reproduce a given architecture uniformly and over much larger scales than with his lab-scale prototypes.

“In order to understand how these complex structures form,” Lin says, “you have to have very good knowledge of fluid dynamics, surface and interface science, colloidal chemistry, and polymer physics. You have to know why you have these ordered structures and be able to predict their length scale of periodicity and dimension.”

Lin is convinced that his CAREER project will develop that theory and so is already investigating potential applications in sensors. And, significantly, he’s busy developing new approaches to fabricating photovoltaic cells to harness solar energy more efficiently and cheaper than today’s silicon-based arrays.

Currently, Lin is in the midst of a three-year NSF project to produce an efficient nanocomposite of quantum dots within a conjugated polymer matrix for solar applications. But instead of physically “mixing” quantum dots with conjugated polymers, Lin has devised an approach for controlling the interface between these two semiconductors that promotes faster electron transfer from one to the other.

“I want to directly graft this very long chain of polymeric ‘spaghetti’ onto quantum dot surfaces,” he says. “By grafting the conjugated polymers onto quantum dots, rods, or wires, we can better exploit the polymer’s semiconductor-like optical and electronic properties for use in solar cells.”

Turning new techniques toward the sun

Lin’s larger ambition is to replace the organic dyes currently used in dye-sensitized solar cells with TiO2 nanotubes “sensitized” with inorganic quantum dots.

Dye-sensitized cells, Lin notes, are relatively recent innovations that typically use ruthenium-based dyes to generate the electron-hole pairs known as “excitons” upon absorbing the sun’s rays. In turn, the electrons must travel rapidly to the TiO2 photo anode to generate photocurrent before they recombine with their holes, after which the exciton would rapidly dissipate.

Yet current approaches are compromised by the need for electrons to “hop” between the randomly distributed TiO2 nanoparticles as they make their way to the electrode. This raises the possibility of increased scattering of free electrons and electron trapping at the interfaces, thus reducing electron mobility.

Instead, Lin seeks to replace the TiO2 nanoparticles with uniformly arrayed nanotubes, seeding these with highly semiconducting materials to act as a “bridge” to rapidly transmit electrons directly to the electrode without hopping. “That increases transfer efficiency,” Lin says, “which in turn increases power conversion efficiency.”

Next, Lin is refining techniques to “seed” the nanotubes with quantum dots. These, he says, offer multiple advantages, including their ability to absorb a wide spectrum of sunlight due to optical properties that are “tunable” as a function of particle size. Also, whereas organic dyes can produce only one exciton for each photon absorbed, quantum dots can generate multiple excitons from a single photon when incident energy is higher than the bandgap of quantum dots, thereby enhancing a cell’s solar conversion efficiency.

‘It’s quite good’

While today he better understands the fundamental photo physics of these varied architectures with regard to light harvesting, charge injection, and charge collection, Lin acknowledges that his approach has some distance to travel to reach the 11% conversion efficiency of today’s best dye-sensitized cells, let alone the 12–18% of silicon cells. But his early efforts have already increased the efficiency of a dye-sensitized TiO2 nanotube solar cell from 4.34% to 5.24%—a 20% increase. And, just this spring, one of his students used an oxygen plasma treatment to increase that gain to 7.37%.

“We’re still in the early stage of developing this type of cell,” Lin reminds. “So I am confident we can go even higher than 11% over time.”

Lin’s is a confidence born of a career that by analogy mirrors the self-assembled, highly ordered structures he has pioneered, and now seeks its application to real-world challenges. For there’s both elegance and inevitability to his ambitions, as he describes his creation.

“You can see this beautiful structure here,” Lin says as he traces a finger over a photo of his TiO2 nanotubes. “The bottom of the tube is closed; the top is open. Some of this is broken, but you can see it’s really straight and perpendicular to the membrane surface.

“This is the work we published,” he offers. “And it’s quite good.”

Patchett grew up in Muscatine, Iowa, where he had an up-close view of the mighty Mississippi. Yet his interests extended beyond the water, spending hours exploring nearby woods and their arrays of trees and plants, a childhood that helped lead him to his life’s vocation.

Thumbing through an Iowa State catalog in the early ’70s, Patchett discovered landscape architecture, a field he’d never heard of, yet one that aligned perfectly with his love of nature. He began his career with a landscape firm in Muscatine after graduating in 1975, but two years later found himself back at Iowa State studying environmental sciences as a landscape architecture graduate student.

Patchett took every water-related course he could, including studies in hydrology and water resources offered through the Department of Civil Engineering. “I was intrigued by the inseparable connection between land and water,” he explains. “I wanted to understand how what we do with the land influences water quality and water management.”

The value of multidisciplinary teams

His master’s completed, Patchett went to work for the Story County Conservation Board. And with wildlife biologists, foresters, and others with strong science backgrounds as co-workers, he soon learned the value of multidisciplinary teams.

“Landscape architects bring a special strength to the table,” he says. “It is the ability to synthesize a rather broad range of disciplines into a solution that no one profession has the technical training and depth of skills and life experiences to do by itself.”

By 1985, Patchett was completing his second Iowa State master’s—this time in civil engineering—and was already at work on his PhD in natural resources at the University of Michigan. His quest to combine landscape architecture, hydrology, and natural resources paid off when, in the late 1980s, urban planning and landscape design firm Johnson, Johnson and Roy asked him to join its newly established environmental services studio in Ann Arbor to work on regulatory compliance for wetlands.

When the firm expanded to the Chicago area in 1990, Patchett helped to get the office operational. He soon had what he calls his professional “epiphany” when he shared his frustration about designing wetland mitigation areas with Gerould Wilhelm, a research botanist and taxonomist with The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois. It seemed that no matter how adept Patchett and his colleagues were in using a diverse suite of native plants in designing these areas, invasive species such as cattails and reed canary grass quickly took over.

Countering water mismanagement

“Jerry explained the historical context of hydrology and the evolutionary relationship between terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems,” Patchett says. “Historically, all of our streams, lakes, rivers, and wetlands were formed and sustained predominantly by groundwater discharge. No matter how hard it rained, very little water ended up as surface runoff.

“Today, it’s 180 degrees different,” he continues. “We have long-standing practices in structures and land-use design that have made water a polluted run-off item. As a result of this mismanagement, we have created all sorts of problems, not the least of which is flooding—1993 and 2008 are prime examples.”

Patchett responded to these insights by founding the Conservation Design Forum in 1994, assembling a multidisciplinary team of landscape architects, planners, environmental scientists, and water resource engineers to help carry out the mission, with Wilhelm as principal botanist and ecologist. Located in Elmhurst, Illinois, CDF is a “water-centric” firm based on the premise that all forms of land use should treat rainfall as a precious, life-sustaining resource and never allow it to become a waste product.

In its early years, Patchett notes, many of CDF’s ideas were actually illegal. City codes and ordinances often allowed only conventional curb and gutter systems that didn’t fit CDF’s plans. In addition, regulations often thwarted practices such as harvesting rainwater for reuse in buildings or incorporating plants taller than 12 inches.

Education, therefore, necessarily became a key part of any project. So Patchett and his team would meet with city councils, planning and zoning commissions, and engineering, planning, and public works directors in order to explain how their proposals would benefit the environment and the community. They designed and built demonstration projects to illustrate these benefits, spurring changes to codes and ordinances.

Breaking new ground—overhead

That educational imperative inspired Patchett and CDF to establish the Conservation Research Institute, a nonprofit affiliate dedicated to applied research and education, as well as the Conservation Land Stewardship, a landscape contracting and management firm that restores native landscapes and constructs infrastructure such as green roofs and bioretention systems.

Long practiced in Europe, CDF introduced green roofs to its projects in the late 1990s with guidance from Atelier Dreitseitl, a German design firm that sent an engineer to the United States to share his expertise with Patchett’s team. In short order, CDF served as lead designer when Chicago received a federal “Urban Heat Island Initiative” grant in 1999 to convert city hall’s rooftop into a green roof pilot project that captured the American Society of Landscape Architects’ Merit Award of Design.

“The Chicago City Hall is probably the most famous green roof in the world,” says Patchett, “It is a beautiful garden, but more importantly it was designed to increase our understanding of the functions and values of green roof systems. We’ve learned a lot regarding types of systems, heating and cooling benefits, success rates of native and nonnative vegetation, and reductions in rainwater runoff.”

Iowa State joined this revolution last spring with a CDF-designed roof on the College of Design addition. “It’s a perfect setting for the first roof garden on campus,” says Patchett. “Students in architecture, landscape architecture, and civil and construction engineering can learn from how we incorporated sustainable design practices. It is a natural fit.”

CDF has also contributed planning for two new buildings on Iowa State’s engineering campus—the Biorenewables Research Laboratory, currently under construction, and the proposed adjoining agricultural and biosystems engineering building. The plan includes storm-water management components such as a rain garden and plantings, a cistern collection system, green roofs, and possible native grass areas.

A special challenge for Iowa

Initiatives such as the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) program have raised awareness and acceptability of sustainable practices. And Patchett himself makes a host of presentations each year to persuade people from all walks of life—developers, architects, engineers, builders, community leaders, farmers.

Still, Patchett knows much work remains in order to convince people to look at the issues holistically, to see how incorporating sustainable land-use practices will restore health and biodiversity to the land—especially in agriculture.

“I drive across Iowa,” he reflects, “and it brings tears to my eyes seeing what is happening to the land—the deeply gouged ditches and streams that didn’t use to exist.

“I want to influence change that revolves around biodiverse grassland restoration, that includes grazing, food and fiber production, and the restoration of our terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.”

MacDonald’s installation featured a model of an apartment that included a coffee table with tree trunks for legs, a cell phone and charger lying atop a pile of coal, and an oil rig next to a light switch. The artwork, she says, represented the natural resources consumed by man-made objects and attempted to align viewers’ perceptions with realities of the environmental impact of consumer goods.

MacDonald thought the installation might inspire her to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle by bringing environmental impacts front-and-center but instead found the piece depressing and overwhelming. That’s when she began exploring the factors that influence people’s decisions to purchase environmentally friendly products.

Feelings inform purchasing decisions

An assistant professor of mechanical engineering with a courtesy appointment in the College of Design and the Michael and Denise Mack 2050 Challenge Scholar, MacDonald takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding consumers’ thoughts and perceptions. Integrating engineering and psychology, her work emphasizes the significant impact context has on determining consumer preference, a factor that at times, she notes, even outweighs the product’s actual capabilities.

Emotions have an especially strong influence when making decisions to purchase “green” merchandise. Consumers, MacDonald notes, have to trust in the products and believe in the social good that comes from their use before they will accept—let alone demand—sustainable products.

“Without demand, even the best engineered goods may not last in the market,” she says. “That’s why recognizing there are both fundamental engineering decisions and psychological human decisions involved in developing and marketing sustainable products is so important.”

Collecting consumer data

Because of the multiple factors that go into consumer decisions, measuring preferences is a complex process. For example, MacDonald recently compared how different populations perceive paper towels made with recycled content through experiments at a computer station.

“The social desirability of using recycled products was so strong that a good portion of the subjects in the experiment refused to buy towels without recycled content, even though they did not currently buy recycled paper towels or know how much recycled paper their current brand had,” MacDonald explains.

Whether or not the product actually worked was not the most important factor, McDonald observes. And though the consumer urge to do the right thing made it challenging for her to measure customer preference for sustainable products in an experimental context, it did lead to other important conclusions.

MacDonald found, for instance, that people associate quilted lines on paper towels with absorbency. With findings like these, she says, engineers can design a product that communicates its quality to the customer, resulting in greater sales of a product that is also better for the environment.

Sustainability meets practicality

Keeping a scientific standard of sustainability in mind, MacDonald designed an umbrella called the Crayella. The umbrella, which won the Treehugger.com and I.D. Magazine Umbrella Inside Out competition, is made of recycled polypropylene and aluminum. The design contains half the components of a regular umbrella, creates no waste fabric scraps, and requires no chemical waterproofing processes. Also, one of the more sustainable features of the umbrella design is that it encourages the “upcycling” or reuse of broken frame components to create new umbrellas.

MacDonald’s ultimate research goal is to understand how to get consumers to evaluate sustainable products on multiple levels, considering factors such as the overall process she proposed for the Crayella.

“While including recycled content in a product is a good start, a product’s overall sustainability is evaluated from production to disposal,” she says. “If we can get consumers looking at the big picture, to understand life-cycle impact, we can have wider-spread use of truly sustainable products.”

“I was influenced to be concerned about sustainability and the environment by my father,” Soupir recalls. “He was always very green in the way we did things.”

Composting, solar panels, cultivating native grasses—Soupir learned to walk the walk at home. But it was her talent for math and science that later inspired her to seek a career as an environmental engineer dedicated to protecting water resources from the pathogens created by industrial agriculture.

A clear choice for the future

After earning a BS at Kansas State and her MS and PhD in biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, Soupir responded to openings in her field at Iowa State and the University of Illinois. But though offered positions at both schools, for Soupir the choice was clear: “I felt the tools to be successful were more in place here,” she says.

Not that the choice was simple. Soupir originally applied for a position in agricultural and biosystems engineering but was asked if she would consider as well one of the college’s first interdisciplinary “cluster” appointments between ABE and civil engineering. She’d had civil engineers on her committee at Virginia Tech, after all, and, given her research interests, the pairing seemed natural.

The ultimate objective of her work today, says Soupir, is to design systems to prevent pathogens from moving into water bodies. But to do that, she adds, she must first understand how they move.

“It’s worked out well having a courtesy appointment in civil engineering,” Soupir notes. “Chris Rehmann, my mentor, helps significantly. On hydro-epidemiology, for instance, I’m more focused on the fate and transport of pathogens; he’s a modeler of mixing in streams and lakes. So the two of us have been able to combine our research interests very well.”

Beyond the usual suspects

A relatively recent concept, “hydro-epidemiology” combines the microbiology of pathogens, including determining their origins, growth, and ultimate disposition in water bodies—Soupir’s expertise—with understanding the dynamics of the hydrological systems by which those pathogens are dispersed throughout watersheds.

Yet while runoff and manure spills from large-scale agricultural operations are routinely cited as sources of water-borne pathogens, Soupir stresses that tracing the precise origins of pollutants is considerably more complicated than simply fingering “the usual suspects.” Effective remediation, she says, involves painstaking detective work.

“There are so many different factors,” Soupir says. “How does it get on the land? Is it interacting with manures? With soils? Is it surface supplied? Chisel plowed? Does it rain right away or three weeks later? Is there tile drainage? Does it move through the soil or with surface runoff?

“And then,” she continues, “what kind of management practices can reduce the transport? From a policy view, it’s been very reactive—regulation of nonpoint sources has been a challenge.”

An appeal to community

Yet beyond detection and modeling, effective remediation involves solutions based at least as much in community and consensus building as in more stringent regulation. The ability to enjoy healthy lakes, streams, and rivers, Soupir insists, will motivate people to change their ways and work together as stakeholders in a watershed.

In the meantime, Soupir and her colleagues look forward to developing new models to improve their understanding of the many factors affecting the persistence on land and movement to water of fecal indicators, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and other pathogens, then using those relationships to predict their fate and transport on a watershed scale. With that information, she says, engineers can better work with communities to develop policies and best practices that strike the optimal balance between economic viability and environmental sustainability to protect and preserve this most precious of natural resources.

“There are more and more demands on water from agriculture, from industry, and for human consumption,” Soupir reflects. “So we want to keep it clean so we can use it.”