texas a&m engineer 2006

[ ]

Oil and after

Biomass and clean air

Keeping the lights on

the energy issue

yOur trash,yOur gas

research at the Dwight Look coLLege of engineeringtexas a&M University

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 engineering’s Mark holtzapple will make this happen.

See Story on p. 22.

Texas A&M Engineer is published by Engineering

Communications in the Dwight Look College of Engineering

at Texas A&M University to inform readers about faculty

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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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.

Let us know what you think about what you read in Texas A&M Engineer.

Editor, Texas A&M EngineerTexas A&M Engineering Communications3134 TAMUCollege Station, TX 77843-3134

http://[email protected]

Not printed at state expense.

EC9251 8/06 7.5M

On the coverProfessor 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.

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

WriTErs

Lesley V. KriewaldSusan E. CottonAdam Dziedzic

iLLusTrATioN ANd dEsigN

Roby Fitzhenry

PhoTogrAPhy ANd dEsigN

Matt Zeringue

oNLiNE MANAgEr

Travis Ward

iNTErACTiVE dEsigN

Amy Warren

ProduCTioN AssisTANTs

Jennifer OlivarezChristina Mitchell

EdiToriAL sErViCEs

Gabe Waggoner

research at the Dwight Look coLLege of engineeringtexas a&M University

premiere issue • 2006

Phot

o •

Mat

t Zer

ingu

e

2 T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E E N E r g y i s s u E2006 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 “energy state,” 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 cur-rently 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 University’s aggressive faculty reinvestment is

adding more than 400 new faculty by 2008, with more than 100 new faculty members joining Texas A&m engineer-ing. in the very near future, construction will begin on the $100 million emerging Technology and economic Development Buildings, which will be devoted to engi-neering 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 pro-gram and fueling our passion for providing practi-cal solutions to relevant problems. energy is just one of them.

Through leadership and discovery, we are mak-ing 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

3hTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.Edu

Petroleum under pressuregrowing 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.

1320Energy 101:

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

Tapping the trash alternativeThey say one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. sergio capareda says it’s true.

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36

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29 36

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

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8 13 16 18 20 22 29 32 34 36 40 4121 38

ConTEnTs

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

16 38CoVEr sToryNonstop coast to coastskyrocketing 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?

22

32biomass and clean aircattle 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.

Policy + technology = securitynuclear 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.

8 To drill or not to drillPetroleum 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.

4 T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E E N E r g y i s s u E2006

44 Why the levees brokeUnderstanding 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.

54 it is easy being greenThere’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.

58bright ideasa lot of bright ideas just stay ideas. our engineering technology students learn how to turn their bright ideas into marketable products.

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58 68

DEParTMEnTs

6question & answer

perspective

oil and after: Q&A with stephen holditch

42 Nuclear powernow and in the future

personality

62 bjarne stroustrup

44 50 54 56 58

students

72 Neat stuff our students do

leadership

76 Who’s who in Texas A&M Engineering

chairs & professorships

82 our top faculty

62 64 66 68 70

70

honors & awards

78 Making us proud

grants & contracts

84 Top research

ConTEnTs

68 batteries not requiredMagnetic 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.

50 Physical therapy for failing heartsa 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.

56The science of scentcan sensors and a computer replace a finely honed sense of smell? Maybe. researchers are working on it.

70 Protein origamiProteins 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.

64 Making robots smarterengineers say barcode’s big brother, rfiDs, may help humans put robots to work on Mars.

48


Consumers are buckling under rising prices at the gas station. What’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 pro-duction 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 high- permeability reservoirs.

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.

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-to- liquids 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 world’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.

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.

Q

a

Q

a

Qa

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.

oil anD afTEr Q&a wiTh sTEPhEn holDiTCh


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 classi-fied as technical reserves. in venezuela, the num-ber 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 pro-gresses. 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 bio-fuels for transportation. regardless of the exact path of the future, it will be important for uni-versities 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 century transition from hydrocarbon fuels to the energy source of the future. The path is not clear, but the challenge is clearly understood.

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 tech-nology will be required to bring much of those hydrocarbon resources to market in an environ-mentally 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 transporta-tion. research universities such as texas a&M must lead the way in developing the needed tech-nologies and training the engineers and scientists who will be the leaders in the energy industry.

question & answer

Q

a

Q

a

Q

a

Q

a

Table 1. heavy oil resources and reservesCanaDa

VEnEZUEla

Oil in placeTechnical reserves

Oil in placeTechnical reserves

1.7 trillion STB300 billion STB

1.2 trillion STB272 billion STB

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

Ener

gy C

onsu

mpt

ion,

Qua

drill

ion

BTU

Oil Natural Gas Coal Nuclear Renewables

Source: EIA, International Energy Outlook 2004

will continue to grow.

world demand for fossil fuels

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

stephen holditch [email protected]


By Gene Charleton and

lesley V. Kriewald

illustration, roby fitzhenry

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.

EnErGy


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 proposi-tion. 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.

“geophysicists will often explore technical aspects of seismic imaging of reservoirs, attempting to predict whether or not it will be possible to detect the pres-ence of oil,” says richard gibson, a specialist in seis-mology 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 reser-voir management and professor in the harold vance Department of Petroleum engineering, are evaluat-ing 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 pro-duces 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.”

EriC BiCKElEric 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.

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.

DECisions, DECisionsInformation 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.


Enter decision sciencenew 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 mate-rial, it has to have the poten-tial to affect your decision.

“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 informa-tion 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 hope-fully discover more reserves.” O

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

Drilling for oil can be a multimillion-dollar gam-ble 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 “sub-stantially” more oil available to U.s. producers and reducing our dependence on foreign oil.

Datta-gupta, the Leseur chair in reservoir Man-agement in the harold vance Department of Petro-leum 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 iden-tify the location and distribution of the “unswept” or bypassed oil and untapped compartments in these reservoirs. to do this, Datta-gupta uses high-resolution 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 numbersPetroleum engineers routinely use numerical models to understand and visualize fluid flow in the reser-voir and for future performance predictions. recent advances in seismic imaging meant that today’s geo-logic 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 “upscal-ing” or averaging schemes to reduce the number of computational elements.

iMProVinG ThE oDDsdrilling for oil is one of the biggest gambles there is. New high-resolution computer models may help oil producers reap big-time payoffs.

Eric Bickel [email protected]

(continued)

aKhil DaTTa-GUPTaAkhil 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.

EnErGy

11hTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.EduENgiNEEr.TAMu.Edu

akhil Datta-Gupta [email protected]

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.

The basic idea, Datta-gupta says, is to decou-ple, or split, the 3-D problem into individual 1-D problems that can be solved relatively quickly, resulting in orders of magnitude savings in com-putational time compared to conventional flow

simulation techniques. such decoupling also makes the tech-nique well suited for parallel computation.

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 tar-geted recovery.

“we can quickly look at mul-tiple 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 gameand 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 vari-ety 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 mod-els allows Datta-gupta to identify flow channels and barriers as well as any compartmentalization in the reservoir.

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.

“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

Datta-Gupta says, “if we can

improve domestic recovery

in existing oil fields by 5

percent, it will mean an extra

billion barrels of oil for the

United states.”

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.


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.

PETrolEUM UnDEr PrEssUrE

By susan E. Cotton

EnErGy


Drilling in deep watersDrilling 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.”

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

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 engi-neering researchers say dual-gradient technology should enable drillers to get to reservoirs unreach-able with current technology and make the process safer at the same time.

This is where petroleum engineers hans Juvkam-wold 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.

Juvkam-wold, professor and holt chair in the har-old vance Department of Petroleum engineering, has been working on dual-gradient drilling technol-ogy since the mid-1990s. Assistant professor Jerome schubert began working on the technology as one of Juvkam-wold’s graduate students.

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

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 con-nected 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 pres-sure — 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 conse-quences. Uncontrolled kicks can turn into blowouts that can damage the well, drilling equipment, and the people operating the well.

Blocking the kickafter this shallow section is drilled, drillers place seg-ments 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


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 single-gradient 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.

Drilling deepThe 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.

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 gradientDual-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 drill-ing companies to look at drilling technology that’s different from what they’re used to using, schubert says.

“in their minds, this is untried, expensive technol-ogy 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 invest-ment.” O

hans JUVKaM-wolDHans Juvkam-Wold, holder of the John Edgar Holt Endowed Chair in Petroleum Engineering, has been developing dual-gradient drilling technology for more than two decades.

PLATFORM

10

,00

0’

30

,00

0’

BOP MIDLIFT

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.

Jerome schubert [email protected]

hans Juvkam-wold [email protected]

EnErGy


By Gene Charleton


“The first job of electric power engineers is to keep the lights on,” says electri-cal 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, russell’s research group tackled one

(continued)

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

EnErGy


of the most vexing problems of the electric power distribution system, detecting what are known tech-nically 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 asso-ciated 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.

“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 nowBy 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 sys-tem. 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 arc-ing-fault detector, the first application of fiber optic communications in an electric-distribution substa-tion and the invention of analysis techniques that allow very low-level electrical signals on the distri-

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

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.

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

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


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.

“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 pre-cursor electrical signals would precede the failure of a piece of equipment before it blew up and caused a large scale outage.”

russell proposed a research investigation to the elec-tric 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. further-more, many loads on the electric utility system generate harmonics and load profiles that are very similar to failing equipment. separating the impor-

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

russell and ePri solicited assistance from 11 utili-ties across north america — from south texas and alabama to Quebec and British columbia — which

allowed researchers to place monitoring instru-ments 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 long-term 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 gener-ated 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 sepa-rate normal system activity from failing equipment signals. These algorithms became the “expert” that continually looks at the electric system and identi-fies a failure before an outage occurs.

in 2005 russell and Benner filed 10 patent disclo-sures 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 engi-neer, not a scientist. solving difficult problems is what engineers do.” O

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.

More people are affected annually by numerous small outages than

by the catastrophic failures that make the newspaper headlines.

B. Don russell [email protected]

B. Don rUssEllB. 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.

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. Don

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sell

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Engineering 101 isn’t only for engineering stu-dents; 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 engineer-ing and holder of the samuel roberts noble foun-dation chair in Petroleum engineering.

so to increase students’ knowledge and understand-ing of energy, one of holditch’s faculty members, professor and albert B. stevens chair christine ehlig-economides, has developed and now coordi-nates 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 under-grads in all disciplines, from accounting to zoology. ehlig-economides and holditch say they estimate

A new course and certificate

program introduces undergrads to

all kinds of energy and new ways

of thinking about them.

CErTifiED EnErGy-ConsCioUs

EnErGy 101

By susan E. Cotton

illustration, roby fitzhenry


more than 1,000 students a year, most of them fresh-men, will take the course.

“That’s the vision: a great many students learning about energy and how it affects their lives,” ehlig-economides 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 soci-ety. These energy sources include coal, natural gas, nuclear fission and fusion, oil, and renewables like sunlight, water and wind. Then the students con-sider 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 engi-neering 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,” ehlig-economides says.

and this emphasis on sustainable development is what sets engineering 101 apart from the rest. ehlig-economides 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.

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 Mcfer-rin 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 petro-leum 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

“That’s the vision: a great many students learning

about energy and how it affects their lives,”

Ehlig-Economides says.

Christine Ehlig-Economides [email protected]

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

EnErGy

EDUCaTion


By lesley V. Kriewald


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 remark-ably efficient engine and a sustainable source of fuel, one that doesn’t depend on foreign oil producers. (continued)

EnErGy


The crop-to-wheel initiative focuses both on new fuels and vehicle power train technologies. holtzap-ple, a professor in the artie Mcferrin Department of chemical engineering, and electrical engineer-ing professor ehsani are developing technologies to transform crops into liquid fuels that can be burned in high-efficiency cars.

Garbage to gasfuels 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 feed-stocks, such as sweet sorghum and “energy” cane. alcohol fuels produced from these crops are more productive in terms of net energy per acre than etha-nol 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 rub-bing alcohol. we’re turning something useless into something useful.”

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 com-mon ingredient in nail polish remover. adding hydrogen to the ketones forms mixed alcohols, which can be used as biofuels.

“Mixalco is a robust process that uses naturally occur-ring 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 expen-sive — equipment.”

in addition, biofuels are 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 pho-tosynthesis, unlike carbon dioxide released from the combustion of fossil fuels, which accumulates in the atmosphere. (continued)

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.


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.

EnErGy


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. con-ventional jet engines use high-speed spinning fan blades to accomplish the compression and expansion, but the starrotor engine uses lower-speed positive-displacement 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.”

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, high-pressure 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.

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.


Enter the hybridconventional 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 func-tion 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. incor-

porating 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 pro-vides peaking power that allows the vehicle to accelerate quickly. This compact and efficient traction system has a battery that never needs charging and mini-mizes fuel consumption.” (continued)

Ethanol produced from corn grain may be the most talked-about 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.

MarK EhsaniMark 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.

EnErGy


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.”

someday, there will be an eco-nomic 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 noneBut biofuels won’t replace fos-sil fuels entirely — at least not soon. we have invested tril-lions of dollars in the fossil fuel infrastructure — drilling rigs, refineries, pipelines, trucks and the like — and it will take a long time to replace it. instead, 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 expen-sive, the percentage of biofuels in the mix can be increased.

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.

“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.”

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.


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 fed-eral 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.

Mark holtzapple [email protected]

Mehrdad “Mark” Ehsani [email protected]

“The hydrogen is chemically bound to a biomol-ecule, which can be safely burned without adding net carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. This approach allows us to embrace both fossil fuels and the so-called hydrogen economy, while still building sus-tainable energy systems.”

“There’s a path from where we are to where we’re going,” says ehsani, who holds the kennedy Profes-sorship in electrical engineering.

and, holtzapple adds, “it’s not ‘all or none.’ we can use individual pieces of the technology.”

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 multidisci-plinary, and texas a&M is uniquely positioned to achieve this vision. it’s no accident that this inte-grated 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.

“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.”

The crop-to-wheel idea is unique, holtzapple says, because it’s integrative: it makes sense from begin-ning to end.

“we are the only group that we know of that is solv-ing the problem in an integrated way, from the crop to the wheel.” O

“This is truly multidisciplinary,

and Texas a&M is uniquely

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?”

(continued)

sergio Capareda [email protected]

EnErGy

29hTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.EduhTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.Edu

Cotton is kingIn a project funded by the Cotton Foundation, Capareda is working to convert cotton-ginning 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 woodsCapareda 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.

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.


fill ’er up — with cottonIn 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.

“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.”

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.

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

“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.”

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.

Cattle and clean airIn 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 coal-fired plants and improve air quality in Texas. (See story on p. 32.)

Moving appeal

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.

EnErGy


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.

BioMass

By Gene Charleton

and

EnErGy


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.

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 Department of Mechanical engineering, thinks all that manure is wonderful.

for most people, cattle manure is just something that smells bad on a hot day. for annamalai, an expert in com-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.

“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 pilot-scale coal burners at the U.s. Department of

“we’ve been able to remove

as much as 90 percent of the

nitric oxide from the stack

gases,” annamalai says.

energy’s national energy technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh reached the same conclusion. if experi-ments later this year at a large utility-type facility in california work out the way the laboratory work pre-dicts 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, feed-lot and dairy operators is advising annamalai and his colleagues on how the research can best address agriculture and power generation.

“once it works at the plant in california, i will be excited,” annamalai says.

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

Coal, nitrogen and heatPower-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-gen-erating 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 Pro-tection 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 manureyou 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.

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.

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

“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 reduc-tion technology to using manure to supplement coal for power generation or to heat planned Panhandle-region ethanol plants.

tceQ recently funded annamalai and sweeten to investigate whether trace amounts of manure could reduce the amount of mercury produced in coal

combustion systems. The idea is that small amounts of chlorine in manure would react with mercury, and the resulting compounds could be washed away with water. experiments on this use of manure are under way at the mechanical engineering department’s renewable energy Laboratory.

altogether, these research programs involve about

eight faculty members and nine graduate stu-dents 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 mil-lion tons of manure left each year in amarillo-area feedlots. Dwindling water supplies and the result-ing 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

in annamalai’s process, finely pulverized dried manure is injected into the gases produced in com-bustion 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.

with manure, the biggest potential problem in scal-ing up the process is ash — what’s left behind after the manure is burned. Burning manure with coal leaves behind more ash than coal by itself. at bench- and pilot-plant scale, the additional ash hasn’t been a problem, but full-sized boilers are more complicated, and the additional ash could clog the tubes that carry heat through the water in the boiler, annamalai 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 powerannamalai 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

“it gets them to look at

manure as a valuable

resource instead of

something that they need to

get rid of,” sweeten says.

Kalyan annamalai [email protected]

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.

EnErGy


That’s the cue for nuclear engineer Marvin Adams and his colleagues.

adams is an expert in the numbers of nuclear engi-neering, especially the numbers that engineers and physicists use to understand in detail the processes happening in a nuclear reactor. fission — the split-ting of atomic nuclei — is the process that releases energy inside nuclear reactors, ultimately heating the steam that spins the turbines that turn the gen-erators that give us the electricity that flashes along the wires to our homes.

he knows more than most people about crunch-ing 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 lim-ited knowledge of the heat transfer and fluid flow

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 algebrasolving the equations that describe each of these processes is difficult. combining these already com-plex 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 Large- scale 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 mas-sively parallel computers, machines with 10,000 or more processors running at the same time, is bring-ing solutions to these problems within reach. But we have to work out the most efficient ways to use them, adams says.

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.

nUClEarBy ThE nUMBErs

By Gene Charleton


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.

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 so-called 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 high-fidelity simulation,” adams says, “one where we’re explicitly taking into account the fact that the neu-trons are causing heat generation and altering mate-rials, 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.”

a virtual reactorif 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 reac-tors — 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 stor-age 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 reac-tors operating in the United states,” adams says.

“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 produce.

“with generation iv reactors and advanced fuel recycling, on the other hand, we should be able to operate 1,000 reac-tors for hundreds of years, and one yucca Mountain — three square miles — would hold all the waste they produce. impor-tantly, this reduced waste decays away in hundreds of years, not tens of thousands.”

adams is most interested in understanding how to solve neutron transport prob-lems, but the same equations can be used to describe other complex situations — the behavior of radia-tion 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 trans-ferred during a nuclear explosion or in the heart of a star.

another texas a&M engineering researcher, mechanical engineer kalyan annamalai, is consid-ering 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

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

Marvin adams [email protected]

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.

EnErGy


By Gene Charleton

Bill Charlton is a nuclear engineer, not a diplomat.

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 com-prehensive test Ban framework, but we are not sig-natories to the treaty.

EnErGy

Nuclear

e n e r g 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.

(continued)

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.”

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 technol-ogy oriented. This practice led to situations like the comprehensive test Ban treaty — a good idea with-out 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 nonprolifera-tion, 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 research-ers 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 ter-rorist 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 califor-nia, 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 pros-pect of this institute and working with us,” charlton says. “we have identified various research areas that

“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.


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.

william s. Charlton [email protected]

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

The nuclear schoolhouseBut 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 weap-ons of mass destruction.

nssPi also is working with nuclear scientists in egypt, Mexico and Morocco on nonproliferation issues. algeria is expected to sign on soon. institute

scientists also are working with Doe to develop research programs analyzing india and china.

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 insti-tute of nuclear Power engineering in russia (rus-sian 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.

“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

EnErGy


This is an exciting time to be a nuclear engineer-ing educator or a nuclear engineering student.

Why? Because since the beginning of 2006, 10 utili-ties 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.

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 electric-ity from nuclear power would require about 50 new

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

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.

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 electric-ity 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, con-cern with global warming has produced the current heightened

nUClEar PowErnow anD in ThE fUTUrEWilliam 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.

By william Burchill


p er sp e c ti ve

interest in nuclear power. During the past three years, the scientific com-munity 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 elec-tricity 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/nonprolifera-tion 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 aver-age 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 pro-viding 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 inter-national 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.

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.

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.

william Burchill [email protected]



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.

New Orleans, La., Aug. 30, 2005 — 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

EnVironMEnT


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 to restrain water — protect new orleans on both sides of the Mis-sissippi river.

Those levees failed catastrophically, and katrina’s storm surge inun-dated 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.

Understanding why the levees failed is the goal of the independent Levee investigation team, a national sci-ence foundation-funded group led by researchers at the University of california, Berkeley, that includes 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.

looking for answersBriaud 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.

The levees that failed

did so because of what

engineers call sliding

failures due to the force of

the water or by overtopping

of the levees during the

storm surge, leading to

erosion of the materials the

levees were made of.

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.

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


The levees that failed did so because of what engi-neers 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 waterwater 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 com-paction, or cementation, of the particles.

to test the soils used to construct the levees, Briaud analyzed samples from several sites — from levees

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 super-slow erosion rate may seem like nothing, to ignore it would be to ignore the grand canyon: The colo-rado 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 pre-dict erosion. An erodibility score of 1 or 2 means the soil erodes easily, whereas a score of 4 or 5 indicates resistance to erosion.

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. (continued)

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

EnVironMEnT


“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.”

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

all soils are not equalBriaud 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 mate-rial 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.

“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,” Briaud says.

failUrE anD flooD

For four months, one topic of conversation was off-limits to colleagues Billy edge and Patrick Lynett: the performance of new orleans’ hurricane protec-tion system during hurricane katrina.

edge, head of the coastal and ocean engineering Program and Bauer Professor, is serving on a com-mittee of the american society of civil engineers tasked with studying the performance of new orleans’ hurricane protection system during hurri-cane 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 simula-tions 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

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

Numerical simulations and mathematical models are helping engineers paint the big picture of what went wrong in the big Easy.


“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 redun-dancy in those systems because the levees protect more than just people. it’s houses, factories, harbor facilities, warehouses — it’s not just lives.

“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 [email protected]

Billy EDGE anD PaTriCK lynETTBilly 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.

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.

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 struc-tural 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 out-let 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, noth-ing failed, so the design elsewhere should work.”

and now it’s edge’s turn to review the work of Lynett and others investigating the failures.

“Modeling is extremely important to determine what happened because most of the wind-, wave- and water-level measurement devices failed to cap-ture 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 sink-ing as well. new orleans is going down so fast, sur-veyors 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, loca-tion — that’s what makes the difference.” O

Billy Edge [email protected]

Patrick lynett [email protected]

EnVironMEnT


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.

Phot

o •

Mat

t Zer

ingu

e

50 T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E E N E r g y i s s u E2006 T E X A S A & M E N G I N E E R I N G • T H E E N E r g y i s s u E

By lesley Kriewald

PhysiCal ThEraPy for failinG hEarTsA 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.


hEalTh anD MEDiCinE

51hTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.EduhTTP:/ /ENgiNEErMAg.TAMu.Edu

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

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 conges-tive heart failure, but not being able to do anything about it, frustrating.

congestive heart failure is what happens when the muscles of the heart deterio-rate 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.

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 engineer-ing 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.

criscione says he believes the heart can be rehabili-tated 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.

“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.”

“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,” Criscione says.

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 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.

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 walk-ing or even getting out of bed.

These failing hearts, criscione says, show strain pat-terns drastically different from healthy hearts.

“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.”

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 them-selves, 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.

and that’s where his invention comes in.

“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.

corinnova’s device, called a direct cardiac compres-sion 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.

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.

criscione and corinnova co-founder Dennis rob-bins (who manages the business side of the partner-ship) are currently conducting one-day animal trials on sheep with help from veterinary surgeons teresa fossum and Dave nelson in the college of vet-erinary 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 long-term 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 tri-als, 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 tri-als. 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 [email protected]

hEalTh anD MEDiCinE


It Is Easy 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.

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

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.”

By adam Dziedzic and

lesley V. Kriewald


sila ÇETinKaya anD haliT ÜsTErGraduate 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.

Product reuse can also mean saving money. Çetinkaya says consumers notice 30 percent to 40 percent decreases in the final price of the recon-ditioned products.

But these lower prices on remanufactured or refur-bished products don’t mean lower product stan-dards. Quality control is a crucial component in the process, Üster says.

“You have to do 100 percent inspection on remanu-factured 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

supply chain management is a forward network, Üster says. The reverse — getting goods from the customers back to manufacturers — is called closed-loop 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 prod-ucts that consumers no longer want.

in these reverse networks consumers bring products to a retailer or a collection center. Depending on the particular product, it can be refurbished, remanu-

factured 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.

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 founda-tion-funded closed-loop supply chain manage-ment 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. con-sumers 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 con-sumers. 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 emit-ted 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 land-fill dumping.

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.

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? 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.

sila Çetinkaya [email protected]

halit Üster [email protected]

BUsinEss


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 system-wide model of the olfactory system specifically for chemical sensors,” gutierrez-osuna says.

to understand how the sort of chemical–electronic “nose” gutierrez-osuna 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 them-selves to proteins in specialized cells called receptors on the surface of the inside of your nasal cavity deep inside your nose. chemical reac-tions 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 finger-print. 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.

Can sensors and a computer replace a finely honed

sense of smell? Maybe. researchers are working on it.

ThE sCiEnCE of sCEnT

By susan E. Cotton


Back to the blue cheesein the model proposed by raman and gutierrez-osuna, 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 stimu-lates 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.

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.

• 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.

“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 com-putational 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 sen-sors at the national institute of standards and tech-nology and locusts’ sense of smell at the national institutes of health.

“he’s trying to bridge these two fields,” gutierrez-osuna 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-osUnaRicardo Gutierrez-Osuna studies computer models that may one day enable electronic noses to more closely imitate your sense of smell.

ricardo Gutierrez-osuna [email protected]

By susan E. Cotton

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.

TEChnoloGy


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

brighT idEAs



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 engineer-ing technology majors in the Department of engi-neering technology and industrial Distribution’s two-semester “capstone experience” combine entre-preneurship, ethics, leadership and project manage-ment 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 com-panies 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 experiencein the first half of the sequence, called the project management course, students plan their design proj-ects, 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 com-pany,” Morgan says. “They create their own names, logos, web presence, shirts — the works.”

in fact, the student teams were so good and convinc-ing 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 entrepre-neurship, leadership and ethics seminar series in which 10 executive-level individuals, such as Texas a&M President robert M. gates, serve as round-table 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,” “inven-tion and commercialization: where to Begin” and “Leading vs. Managing.”

senior anthony allison says he thinks the seminar series was the most exciting part of the course.

“i cannot begin to describe the experience of meet-ing with such senior industry members and being

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.”

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.”

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 stu-dents 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 proto-type. 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 conceptat 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.

Morgan says this incubator concept enhances the undergraduate experience by motivating the stu-dents to learn.

and it’s working. in the fourth annual ideas chal-lenge hosted by texas a&M’s center for new

JosEPh MorGan anD Jay PorTErVictor 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.

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.

(continued)

TEChnoloGy

EDUCaTion


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 start-up cash with their project, the expandable vehicle information system, a Bluetooth-enabled dash-board console that can interpret everything from a

car’s malfunctions and steps to correct them to alerts from rear bumper sensors.

The national science founda-tion, or nsf, likes the incuba-tor concept, too. in a prepro-posal evaluation, texas a&M recently selected Morgan and Porter’s concept to go forward as the university’s response to the nsf Partners for innova-tion call for proposals.

in addition to the university’s help in selling the prototypes, a separate private company has opened offices in the Bryan–college station area to partner with Morgan and

Porter through their students to help take the proj-ects from prototypes to products. The company will evaluate prototypes for commercial viability and then take the projects forward.

“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 workPorter 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 busi-ness,” 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 [email protected]

Jay Porter [email protected]

“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.”


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

Project EVisProject 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 high-end features for consumers to install in their cars. (Matthew Johnston, Jud Chilton, Kurt Richardson and Cody Thurston)

auto-TuneAuto-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)

sensor apparatus for Valued EnergyTime-of-day billing will allow power companies to determine the amount of power used by customers on an hour-to-hour 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)

suresense™ wireless sensor systemMedical 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)

Game GuardianThe 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)

TEChnoloGy

EDUCaTion


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

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++.

c++ is a programming language that supports tech-niques like object-oriented programming: its com-mands initiate operations in discrete modules, or objects, in a program. software like the apple iPod user interface, adobe Photoshop, the Mars explora-tion rovers’ visual systems and Microsoft internet explorer are programmed in c++.

“we, that is, the iso c++ standards commit-tee, 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 lan-guage — 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 fea-ture 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 tech-niques, as initially learned by novices, scale to real-world 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

Bjarne Stroustrup invented the programming language C++.

he’s a member of the national academy of engi-neering, 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’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 stu-dents 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 develop-ment 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 com-puter 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-

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


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 program-mers and their applications.

“often, experts have a hard time putting them-selves 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.’

“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

p er s ona l i t y

Bjarne stroustrup 979.845.4094 [email protected] Ph

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ith


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.

and, someday soon, automated robotic construction.

robots are inherently dumb without the right soft-ware, 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 posi-tioning 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 off-nominal 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 mov-ing 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, includ-ing compatibility with various joints and parts, and material properties, such as when to replace a part because of wear or aging.

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.

robotic construction crews may sound like some-thing out of a sci-fi movie, but texas a&M engineers are working to make them a reality.

aerospace engineering assistant professors John hurtado and tamás kalmár-nagy and Distinguished Professor and eppright chair John Junkins are col-laborating with engineering technology professor Ben Zoghi to combine radio frequency identifica-tion (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 identifica-tion 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 cur-rently 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.

(continued)

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


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.

John JUnKins

John hUrTaDo

TaMás KalMár-naGy

“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.”

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.

By lesley V. Kriewald and

adam Dziedzic

TEChnoloGy

roBoTiCs


“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 unambigu-ously good.”

hurtado says one challenge with rfiD technology is pushing it beyond its current capabilities to aid in construc-tion — for precise position-ing, for instance. Presently, rfiD has to be coupled with other sensing technologies such as vision. But a concept Junkins calls “rfiD radar” could give positioning infor-

mation relative to other objects, not just data.

The researchers say one goal is repairable spacecraft. The recent missions to repair the hubble space

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 autono-mous 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 Consor-tium for autonomous space systems (cass), for a

This simple robotic arm is building a tower from RFID-labeled blocks. Junkins says this first experiment is 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 requires imagination,” he says.

ThE PowEr of ThE inTErnETJunkins 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 supply-chain 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.

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.

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.

Behbood “Ben” Zoghi [email protected]

Protecting the hartford library one book at a time


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.

look to the past to see the futurein 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 bar-code, 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

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.”

and takes the items you’ve just bought out of the store’s inventory automatically, kalmár-nagy adds.

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

“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.” O

BEn ZoGhiElectronics 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.

John Junkins [email protected]

John hurtado [email protected]

Tamás Kalmár-nagy [email protected]

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.

warehousing for the chemical industryIn 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.

The real dealNobody 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.

TEChnoloGy

roBoTiCs


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 compo-nents — steel, for instance, which is stronger than the iron present in the alloy.

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 crystal-lographic structure. and because fsMas don’t have

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 exter-nal 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 mag-netization of the fsMas. in other words, you can make these materials magnetic by small change in temperature or by applying load on them.”

and switching repeatedly between nonmagnetic and magnetic behav-ior 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 mod-ule 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.”

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, ren-dering them impractical for use in the sole of a shoe.

bATTEriEs NoT rEQuirEd

“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.”

+ –


iBrahiM KaraManAssistant 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.

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.

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

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.

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 environ-mentally unfriendly refrigerant gases. no one’s inves-tigated 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.

“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

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

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

karaman is currently working to find new materi-als 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 aero-space 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 computation-ally design new fsMas using atomistic calculations in the not-too-distant future instead of using ad hoc approaches to alloy design. O

ibrahim Karaman [email protected]


+ –TEChnoloGy


By Gene Charleton


TEChnoloGy

nanCy aMaToNancy 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.

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 sup-posed to do in our bodies.

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 brittle bone disease. Misfolded proteins in the brain can mean alzheimer’s or mad cow disease.

The protein solutionUnderstanding how proteins fold can help researchers understand why the proteins sometimes fold incorrectly. This understand-ing will help medical scientists develop treatments for diseases caused by misfolded proteins and work out ways to prevent them.

so far, the researchers have applied their technique to moderate-sized protein molecules — consisting of between 50 and 200 smaller molecules.

They use desktop Pcs to compute mathematical descriptions of the “folding landscape” that deter-mines the process that protein molecules go through as they fold. intuitively, the landscape encodes paths that protein molecule “robots” might follow to find their way around high-energy obstacles to “comfort-able” positions.

to study more and larger proteins, they are using the staPL parallel c++ library, also developed in the Parasol laboratory, and the world’s fastest supercom-puter, iBM’s Blue gene.

“so far we have shown that our simulations agree with known experimental results,” amato says. The real significance of our method, though, lies in its potential to discover facts that have not yet been established experimentally and to test proposed therapies to alter undesirable folding behaviors.’’ O

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 hor-mones like insulin, estrogen and testosterone. The antibodies that fight infection are proteins. tendons and ligaments and bones are mostly protein.

a team of researchers led by professor nancy amato, co-director of the Department of computer science’s Parasol Labora-tory, is applying these programming techniques, known as motion plan-ning, to protein folding. Motion planning means computing a feasible, or possibly most efficient, way for something to happen. it could be figuring a safe way for a robot to move through a roomful of obstacles, the most effi-cient way to fold cardboard into a box or activi-ties even more complex — like understanding how stringlike protein molecules fold into the complex shapes they take to do their jobs.

“our motion-planning technique for simulat-ing protein folding is orders of magnitude faster than existing methods — we solve problems in hours on a desktop Pc that take traditional methods months of supercomputer time. essen-tially, we save time by computing approximate solutions that capture the important features of the precise solution,” says amato.

Putting proteins into motionwhen motion planning is applied to protein folding, it means working out how individual parts of the complex protein molecule move into what biologists call the molecule’s native state, the shape in which the parts of the molecule nest together most “comfortably” in terms of the energy in the molecule. The protein’s ability to function properly depends on this shape being right.

figuring out how this works is a knotty problem. Proteins are some of the largest

and most complicated molecules there are.

nancy amato [email protected]

Understanding how proteins

fold will help medical

scientists develop treatments

for diseases caused by

misfolded proteins and work

out ways to prevent them.

hEalTh anD MEDiCinE


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.

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.

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 competi-tion with 10 other universities. its mission will be to operationally test a responsive space platform featur-ing three technology experiments: a simple micro-satellite propulsion system using water as the pro-pellant, 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.

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

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.

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.”

This exercise will provide valuable information for the aggie team as they complete aggiesat-l.

“The microcontroller on our shot ii payload mimics the generic control board design for aggie-sat-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 deter-mine 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 micro-controller 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!”

Engineering students ready microsatellite for competition

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.


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.

stu d ents

The 2006 Formula SAE Team designed, built and drove this racecar all the way to No. 1 at the Formula SAE West competition.

The first student chapter in the history of the insti-tute 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 chap-ter of a professional society. students in the depart-ment 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 inter-national 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 presi-dent karen Miller, graduate student in the Depart-ment 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 Laborato-ries, and the nuclear Threat initiative. other activi-ties will include social events and a research paper contest at the national inMM meeting.

chapter adviser and associate professor william charlton says this orga-nization is extremely important for the stu-dents 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 think-ing creatively about how to prevent the spread of nuclear and radiological weapons,” charlton says.

aggies form first-ever inMM student chapter

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

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.

“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 doc-toral 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 asso-ciated 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 incor-rect 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.

student engineers take part in nsf research experiences Undergraduate students from texas a&M and other universities have partici-pated in the six national science foundation research experiences for Under-graduates (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 students worked in teams with faculty members and graduate students on research projects in aerospace, chemi-cal, civil, electrical and com-puter engineering, as well as computer science.

“we want to challenge the stu-dents,” 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.”

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 program allows for

participation from diverse

groups of students,” said

Valerie Taylor.


stu d ents

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 manufac-turers 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 mechan-ical 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 manufactur-ers 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 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 hurri-canes 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 staf-ford 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 manufac-

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.

turers a few months after our visit, and they claim to imple-ment 60 percent of our recommenda-tions 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.

The center typically employs about a dozen under-graduate and graduate students each semester. for clients, the students identify energy conservation projects; gather data in plants, including interview-ing 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 posi-tions 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 real-world 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 engineer-ing employees,” heffington says. “aggies do a really good job.”

Engineering students celebrate 20 years of helping small business maximize energy efficiency


Dwight look College of Engineering administration

g. Kemble bennettViCE ChANCELLor ANd dEAN of ENgiNEEriNg

John NiedzweckiAssoCiATE ViCE ChANCELLor ANd ExECuTiVE AssoCiATE dEAN, ACAdEMiCs

Theresa MaldonadoAssoCiATE ViCE ChANCELLor ANd AssoCiATE dEAN, rEsEArCh

Lisa McNairAssisTANT ViCE ChANCELLor ANd AssisTANT dEAN, fiNANCE

Cathy reileyAssisTANT ViCE ChANCELLor, ExTErNAL AffAirs

Marilyn MartellAssisTANT ViCE ChANCELLor, PubLiC AffAirs

deena WallaceChiEf of sTAff

Katherine rojo del bustoAssisTANT dirECTor, rEsEArCh AdMiNisTrATioN, TExAs ENgiNEEriNg ExPEriMENT sTATioN

Jo howzeAssoCiATE dEAN, ACAdEMiC ProgrAMs

César MalavéAssisTANT dEAN, rECruiTMENT ANd iNTErNATioNAL ProgrAMs

N.K. AnandAssisTANT dEAN, grAduATE ProgrAMs

ray JamesdirECTor, sTudENT AdVisiNg ANd dEVELoPMENT

diane hurtadorEsEArCh iNiTiATiVEs offiCEr

dEPArTMENT hEAdshelen reeddEPArTMENT of AErosPACE ENgiNEEriNg

gerald riskowskidEPArTMENT of bioLogiCAL ANd AgriCuLTurAL ENgiNEEriNg

gerard CotédEPArTMENT of bioMEdiCAL ENgiNEEriNg

Kenneth hallArTiE MCfErriN dEPArTMENT of ChEMiCAL ENgiNEEriNg

david rosowskyZAChry dEPArTMENT of CiViL ENgiNEEriNg

Valerie TaylordEPArTMENT of CoMPuTEr sCiENCE

Costas georghiadesdEPArTMENT of ELECTriCAL ANd CoMPuTEr ENgiNEEriNg

Walter buchanandEPArTMENT of ENgiNEEriNg TEChNoLogy ANd iNdusTriAL disTribuTioN

brett PetersdEPArTMENT of iNdusTriAL ANd sysTEMs ENgiNEEriNg

dennis o’NealdEPArTMENT of MEChANiCAL ENgiNEEriNg

William burchilldEPArTMENT of NuCLEAr ENgiNEEriNg

stephen holditchhAroLd VANCE dEPArTMENT of PETroLEuM ENgiNEEriNg


Mark albers ’79 PresidentExxonMobil Development Co.

C. skip alvarado ’68 Vice PresidentFluor Corp.

Brad anderson ’82 Sr. Vice President & GM, Dell Product GroupDell Inc.

Debra l. anglin ’77 PresidentPate Engineers Inc.

Dionel E. avilés ’53 PresidentAviles Engineering Corp.

w.M. (Mike) Barnes ’64 Rockwell International, Retired

Craig C. Brown ’75 President, OwnerBray International Inc.

Jerry M. Brown ’59 Amoco USA, Retired

James r. (Bob) Collins ’63 Managing Director, Collins and Collins LLCDistinguished Lecturer, Texas A&M–Commerce

william E. (Bill) CorbettVice PresidentURS

ralph f. Cox ’53 PresidentRABAR Enterprises

Tim DehneSenior Vice President of R&DNational Instruments

susan Dio Commercial ManagerBP

r.D. (rod) Erskine ’66 Chairman and CEOErskine Energy

Thomas E. (Tom) fisher ’66 PresidentM2P Financing

Peter C. (Pete) forster ’63 Chairman and CEOClark Construction Group LLC

Joe r. fowler ’68, ChairPresidentStress Engineering Services

J.l. (Corky) frank ’58 Marathon Oil, Retired

r.E. (ray) Galvin ’53 Chevron USA Production, Retired

walter (walt) Gillette Boeing Co., Retired

Mike GreeneChairman and CEOTXU 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 PartnerAccenture

J.r. (Bob) Jones ’69 PresidentJones and Carter Inc.

Tommy E. Knight ’61 Brown & Root International, Retired

Tim leach ’82 Chairman and CEOConcho Resources Inc.

Ken r. lesuer ’57 Halliburton, Retired

raymond l. leubner ’73 Corporate Vice President Applied Materials

Marcus J. (Marc) lockard ’72 Chief Executive OfficerLockard & White Inc.

Tommie E. lohman ’59 ChairmanTelco Investment Corp. Joe B. Mattei ’53 PresidentEEM Enterprises Inc.

a. Dwain Mayfield ’59 PresidentADM Global Resources

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

Patty P. Mueller Vice President/FinanceMueller Energetics Corp.

william J. neely ’52 Dow Chemical Co., Retired

Joseph h. (Joe) netherland Jr. Chairman, President and CEOFMC Technologies Inc.

sharon l. nunes Vice PresidentBusiness, Development, Strategic Growth InitiativeIBM Corp.

Erle a. nye ’59 Chairman EmeritusTXU Corp.

T. Michael (Mike) o’Connor O’Connor Ventures Inc. Thomas C. (Tom) Paul ’62 General Electric, Retired Mark B. Puckett ’73 PresidentChevron Energy Technology

David w. reed ’83 Vice President, Logic Fab OperationTexas Instruments Inc.

Joe C. richardson ’49JCR, Jr. Operating J. stephen rottler ’80 Vice PresidentWeapons Engineering and Product RealizationSandia National Laboratories

Christopher (Chris) seams ’84 Executive Vice PresidentSales, Marketing and OperationsCypress

Dennis l. segers ’75 President and CEOTabula Inc.

Charles w. (Charlie) shaver ’80 President and CEOTexas Petrochemicals LP

T.a. smith ’66 Voridian, Retired

lisa a. stewart PresidentEl Paso Corp.

william D. (Bill) sullivan ’78 Consultant

Van h. Taylor ’71 SBC Communications, Retired

David G. Tees ’66Texas Genco, Retired ronnie ward ’73 Consultant

Delbert a. whitaker ’65 Texas Instruments, Retired

James E. wiley sr. ’46 Partner Wiley Brothers Investment Builders

advisory Council

leadership


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.

John M. Niedzwecki AssoCiATE ViCE ChANCELLor ANd ExECuTiVE AssoCiATE dEAN, ACAdEMiCs

444 faculty

12 departments

32 endowed chairs

50 professorships

faculty facts


Anastasia Muliana, as-sistant professor in the Department of Mechani-cal Engineering, has re-ceived 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-perfor-mance aircraft, marine

construction, and in bridges, tunnels and pipelines. The prestigious NSF CAREER awards are made to outstand-ing 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 charac-teristics. 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.

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 engi-neering theory and prac-tice 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 recent-ly 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.

Terry Alfriend, a professor in the Department of Aero-space Engineering, received the 2005 International Scientific Cooperation Award from the American Associa-tion 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 An-nual Meeting in St. Louis.

Thomas A. blasingame, holder of the Robert L. Whit-ing 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 ac-tion as to set them apart from other contributions.

Joseph M. bracci, professor and head of the Construc-tion, 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 contribu-tions to production or use of concrete materials, products and structures in the areas of education, research, devel-opment, design, construction or management.”

g. Kemble bennett, vice chancellor and dean of engineer-ing, 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 Engineer-ing, 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 construc-tion of foundations, earthworks, retaining structures or underground construction. Briaud also is the 2006 win-ner of the Canadian Geotechnical Society’s G. Geoffrey Meyerhof Award for significant contributions to geotech-nics research and education.

Walter W. buchanan, head of the Department of Engi-neering 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 Ad-vancement 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.”

honors & awards


Paul Cizmas, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering, has been appointed to an aero-space 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 con-ducting an 18-month study examining the Department of Defense’s future propulsion needs and the current commercial propulsion technical base.

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 outstand-ing 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.

Conrad dudek, professor of civil engineering, received the first-ever Innovation in Education Award from the In-ternational 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 Opera-tions and Management.

W.H. Bauer Professor and Coastal and Ocean Engineer-ing 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 Depart-ment of Mechanical Engineering, received the 2006 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Foun-dation 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 president-elect of the Accreditation Board for Engineering Technol-ogy Inc., the accreditation body dedicated to ensuring quality in applied science, computing, engineering and technology education.

Natarajan gautam, associate professor in the Depart-ment 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.

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.

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 ap-plication of hydraulic fracturing in production of tight gas reservoirs.

Mark holtzapple, professor in the Artie McFerrin Depart-ment 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 Confer-ence 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 Ameri-can Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control Award. The Aerospace Guidance, Navigation and Control Award recognizes impor-tant 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 Me-chanical Engineering, has won the American Society of Me-chanical 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, bear-ings and gears.


John Lee, the L.F. Peterson Chair in Petroleum Engineer-ing, has been elected to membership in the Russian Na-tional 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 innova-tion, 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 in-cludes 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 Mechani-cal Engineering and associate dean of graduate stud-ies 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 com-posites community who has made a significant impact on the development of composite materials through applied research, practice, education, service, advocacy or leader-

ship.” Ochoa is currently serving as the director of Aero-space 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 King-dom. 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 far-reaching 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 Achieve-ment 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 Profes-sorship 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 Confer-ence. The Tapia award recognizes Taylor’s excellence in scientific scholarship, her achievements within the scientific community and her dedication to ethnic diver-sity 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 Hop-per 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.

honors & awards


a.P. and florence wiley Chair in Civil Engineering David V. RosowskyCIVIL ENGINEERING

albert B. stevens Chair in Petroleum Engineering Christine Ehlig-Economides PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

College of Engineering Chair in Computer science Bjarne Stroustrup COMPUTER SCIENCE

Delbert a. whitaker Chair in Electrical Engineering Costas Georghiades ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

E.B. snead Chair in Transportation EngineeringDallas 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 PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

l.f. Peterson Chair in Petroleum EngineeringW. John Lee PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

leland T. Jordan Chair in Mechanical Engineering Dara Childs MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

lesuer Chair in reservoir Management Akhil Datta-Gupta PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

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

Mike o’Connor Chair i in Chemical EngineeringSam Mannan CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Mike o’Connor Chair ii in Chemical EngineeringThomas K. Wood CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

oscar s. wyatt Jr. Chair in Mechanical Engineering J.N. Reddy CIVIL ENGINEERING

r.P. Gregory Chair in Civil Engineering John M. Niedzwecki CIVIL ENGINEERING

robert whiting Chair in Petroleum EngineeringDan Hill PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

royce E. wisenbaker ’39 Chair ii in EngineeringDavid C. Hyland AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

samuel roberts noble foundation Chair in Petroleum Engineering Stephen Holditch PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

spencer J. Buchanan Chair in Civil EngineeringJean-Louis Briaud CIVIL ENGINEERING

TEEs Distinguished research Chair Marlan O. Scully PHYSICS

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 EngineeringEdgar Sánchez-SinencioELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

wofford Cain ’13 senior Chair of Engineering in offshore Technology Jose M. Roesset CIVIL ENGINEERING

Chairs Professorshipsa.P. and florence wiley Professorship i in Civil Engineering Paul N. Roschke CIVIL ENGINEERING

a.P. and florence wiley Professorship ii in Civil Engineering Norris Stubbs CIVIL ENGINEERING

a.P. and florence wiley Professorship iii in Civil Engineering Robin Autenrieth CIVIL ENGINEERING

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 BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Charles D. holland Professorship in Chemical Engineering Rayford G. Anthony CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

Charles h. and Bettye Barclay Professorship in Engineering Gerard L. Coté BIOMEDICAL ENGINEERING

Chevron Corp. Professorship i in Engineering Don Phillips INDUSTRIAL ENGINEERING

Chevron Corp. Professorship ii in EngineeringJennifer L. Welch COMPUTER SCIENCE

Dow Professorship in Chemical EngineeringYue Kuo CHEMICAL ENGINEERING AND ELECTRICAL AND

COMPUTER ENGINEERING

E.B. snead Professorship i in Civil EngineeringEyad Masad CIVIL ENGINEERING

E.B. snead Professorship ii in Civil EngineeringAmy Epps-Martin CIVIL ENGINEERING

Eugene E. webb Professorship in Electrical Engineering Mladen Kezunovic ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

ford Motor Company Design Professorship i in EngineeringJo W. Howze ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING


chairs & professorships

ford Motor Company Design Professorship ii in EngineeringRichard M. Alexander MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

G. Paul Pepper Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Kalyan Annamalai MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Psa Professorship in Chemical EngineeringPerla Balbuena 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

J.w. runyon Jr. Professorship i in Electrical Engineering B. Don Russell ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

J.w. runyon Jr. Professorship ii in Electrical Engineering Chanan Singh ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

Kenneth r. hall Professorship in Chemical Engineering David M. Ford CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

lanatter and herbert fox Professorship in Chemical EngineeringJorge Seminario CHEMICAL ENGINEERING

l.f. “Pete” Peterson ’36 Professorship in Petroleum Engineering Richard Startzman PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

leland Jordan Career Development Professorship Hong “Helen” Liang MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

leland T. Jordan Professorship in Mechanical Engineering David Claridge MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Mast-Childs Professorship in Mechanical Engineering Luis San Andrés MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

Mcferrin Professorship in Chemical Engineering Mahmoud M. El-Halwagi 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 ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

raytheon Co. Professorship in Computer science Udo Pooch COMPUTER SCIENCE

rob l. adams Professorship in Petroleum Engineering Maria A. Barrufet PETROLEUM ENGINEERING

robert M. Kennedy Professorship i in Electrical Engineering Mehrdad “Mark” Ehsani ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

robert M. Kennedy Professorship ii in Electrical Engineering Shankar P. Bhattacharyya ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

royce E. wisenbaker Professorship i in Engineering Valerie E. Taylor COMPUTER SCIENCE

royce E. wisenbaker Professorship ii in Engineering Steven M. Wright ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENGINEERING

stewart & stevenson services inc. Professorship i in Engineering S. Rao Vadali AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

stewart & stevenson services inc. Professorship ii in Engineering William Saric AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

Tenneco Professorship Ramesh R. Talreja AEROSPACE ENGINEERING

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


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.

$179 million in research expenditures (2005)

289,000 square feet of laboratory space

35 multidisciplinary research centers

research facts

Phot

o •

Mat

t Zer

ingu

e


grants & contracts

John Ayala, Texas Center for Applied TechnologyRestricted projectRestricted 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 EngineeringRestricted projectRestricted 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 GeneticsInstitute for Intelligent Bio-nano Materials and Structures for Aerospace VehiclesNASA 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 ExtensionRenewable Energy and Environmental Sustainability Using Biomass from Dairy and Beef Animal Production FacilitiesU.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 DistrictAustin Independent School District$1,524,160

Andrew McFarland, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Carlos Ortiz and Ben Thien, Energy Systems LaboratoryBioaerosol Sampling and DetectionU.S. Army Edgewood Research, Development and Engineering$1,335,000

John Junkins, James Turner, Helen Reed, Srinivas Vidali, David Hyland, Daniele Mortari, John Hurtado, Ergun Akleman, Tama’S Kalm’R-Nagy, Department of Aerospace EngineeringConsortium for Autonomous Satellite SystemsU.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 CollegeSouth Texas Rural Systemic InitiativeNational Science Foundation$1,200,000

Joe Gonzalez and James Wall, Texas Center for Applied Technology; Amarnath Banerjee, Department of Industrial and Systems EngineeringContinuation 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 EngineeringInnovation in Nuclear Infrastructure and EducationU.S. Department of Energy Idaho Operations Office$1,040,000

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

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 EngineeringChemical Engineering Undergraduate Curriculum ReformNational Science Foundation$1,002,391

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

David E. Claridge, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Song Deng, Energy Systems Laboratory; Jeff Haberl, College of Architecture; W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical EngineeringTexas A&M University Physical Plant FY 2006 TAMU Building Energy Management, Plant Performance, Savings Analysis and Field StudyTexas A&M University Physical Plant$999,500

Dara W. Childs, Luis San Andres, Hong Liang, Department of Mechanical EngineeringRestricted ProjectRestricted Sponsor$992,176

Rodney Bowersox and Sharath Girimaji, Department of Aerospace Engineering; Simon North, Department of ChemistryHypersonic Transition and Turbulence with Non-Equibrilium Thermo-ChemistryU.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research$873,171

Michael Daniel, Texas A&M University–Kingsville; Lee W. Sloan, Del Mar CollegeAlliance for Improvement of Mathematics Skills Pre-K – 16National Science Foundation$814, 234

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

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

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


Thomas Wood, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringPlant Biofilms Inhibitors to Discover Biofilms GenesNational Institutes of Health$593,181

Song Deng, Guanghua Wei, Energy Systems Laboratory; W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical EngineeringContinuous Commissioning® Assessments/Operations and Maintenance of North Atlantic Region Medical FacilitiesWingler & Sharp, Architects & Planners Inc.$558,182

Carol Stuessy, Department of Teaching, Learning and Culture; Timothy Scott, College of Science; James McNamara, Department of Educational PsychologyPolicy Research Initiatives in Science Education (PRISE) to Improve Teaching and Learning in High School ScienceNational 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 StationField Testing of Environmentally Friendly Drilling SystemsU.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 EngineeringB-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 EngineeringTexas A&M Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, Phase III program: Cultivating the Future$500,000

Jorge Seminario and Perla Balbuena, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringA Theory-Guided Approach to Design of Molecular Sensing Devices and SystemsU.S. Army Research Office$500,000

W. Dan Turner, Department of Mechanical Engineering; Song Deng, Guanghua Wei, Joseph Martinez, Energy Systems LaboratoryContinuous Commissoning® Assessments/Operations and Maintenance of Great Plains Medical FacilitiesWingler & Sharp, Architects & Planners Inc.$479,464

Nancy M. Amato, Lawrence Rauschwerger, Valerie Taylor, Department of Computer ScienceCRI Infrastructure Acquisition: A Cluster Testbed for Experimental Research in High- Performance 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; Jyh-Cham Liu, Department of Computer ScienceRetention Through an Applied Physics, Engineering and Mathematics (PEM) Model – STEPSNational Science Foundation$402,328

Anastasia Muliana, Department of Mechanical EngineeringCAREER: Time-Dependent Multi-Scale Frameworks For Mechano-Thermo-Hygro-Visco and Damage Behaviors of Composite Materials and StructuresNational Science Foundation$400,000

Bruce Herbert, Department of Geology; Cathleen Loving, Department of Teaching, Learning and CultureProfessional Learning Community Model for Alternative Pathways in Teaching Science and MathematicsNational Science Foundation$389,072

Hong Liang, Department of Mechanical Engineering CAREER: Integrated Research and Education in Multi-Scale Chemical-Mechanical Manipulation and NanofabricationNational Science Foundation$388,988

Emmett Ward, Richard Mercier, Jun Zhang, Charles Aubeny, Moo-Hyun Kim, Kuang-An Chang, Hamn-Ching Chen, Offshore Technology Research CenterCooperative Agreement Between OTRC and DOI-MMSU.S. Department of the Interior Minerals Management Service$386,013

Stephen Holditch, Harold Vance Department of Petroleum EngineeringRestricted projectRestricted sponsor$382,500

Richard Mercier, Offshore Technology Research CenterOffshore Technology ConsortiumVarious sponsors$380,000

James Wall, Texas Center for Applied TechnologyIPA assignment for Andrew MarkU.S. Army Corps of Engineers$380,287

Othon Rediniotis, John Junkins, John Valasek, Department of Aerospace EngineeringUAV Hingeless Flight Controls via Active Flow ControlAeroprobe Corp.$375,000

Sila Çetinkaya, Halit Üster, Department of Industrial and Systems EngineeringAn Integrated Outbound Logistics Model for Frito-Lay: Coordinating Production Output and Distribution DecisionsFrito-Lay Inc.$370,000

Lihong Wang, Department of Biomedical EngineeringMelanoma Detection by Optical SpectroscopyNational Institutes of Health$353,951


grants & contracts

Thomas Wood, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringDirected Evolution of a Cyanobacterium Hydrogenase to Produce HydrogenUniversity of Connecticut$350,537

James Wall, Texas Center for Applied TechnologyIPA for Jeff WilkinsonU.S. Army$339,978

Sam Mannan, Yanjun Wang, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringMarcus Oil and Chemical Safety ProgramMarcus Oil & Chemical$331,000

Rayford Anthony, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringMethane Conversion Catalyst (Marcus Oil)HRD Corp.$322,191

John Attia, Cajetan Akujuobi, Matthew Sadiku, Lijun Qian, Prairie View A&M UniversityModeling and Testing of Advanced Mixed-Signal SystemsNational Science Foundation$318,008

Lihong Wang, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Gheroghe Stoica, Department of Veterinary PathobiologyFull Polizaration by OCTNational Institutes of Health$316,129

Carl Benner and B. Don Russell, Department of Electrical and Computer EngineeringRestricted ProjectRestricted Sponsor$300,000

Jay Humphrey, Department of Biomedical Engineering; Emily Wilson, Department of Medical PhysiologyEx Vivo Delineation of Mechanisms of Cerebral VasospasmNational Institutes of Health$295,000

Daniel Davis, Dimitris Lagoudas, Department of Aerospace EngineeringRestricted projectRestricted sponsor$279,000

James Moore Jr., Department of Biomedical EngineeringStented Artery Wall StressesNational Institutes of Health$276,526

Jaakko Jarvi, Department of Computer ScienceCollaborative Research: Lifting Complier Optimizations via Generic ProgrammingNational Science Foundation$274,709

Dara W. Childs, Turbomachinery LaboratoryRestricted projectRestricted sponsor$262,500

Richard Mercier, Offshore Technology Research CenterMODEC/Sea Telemark TLP Model Tests$259,112

Ben Thien and Carlos Ortiz, Energy Systems LaboratorySubcontract with University of Texas–AustinUniversity of Texas–Austin$254,658

Tahir Cagin, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringIRTR-ASE-SIM: Collaborative Research: De Novo Hierarchical Simulations of Stress Corrosion Cracking in MaterialsCalifornia Institute of Technology$253,870

Victor Ugaz, Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical EngineeringCollection, Focusing and Metering of Biomolecules Using Addressable Microelectrode Arrays for Portable Low-Power BioanalysisNational 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.


U.S. NEwS & woRLD REPoRT AmeriCA’s BesT COLLeges 2006

TOp 10 puBLiC UnDergraDUate PrograMs

1st agricultural engineering

1st Petroleum engineering

2nd Nuclear engineering

7th Aerospace engineering

7th Civil engineering

7th industrial and systems engineering

9th electrical and computer engineering

10th mechanical engineering

rANkeD 8th aMong PUBLic institUtions in Both UnDergraDUate anD graDUate PrograMs

U.S. NEwS & woRLD REPoRT aMerica’s Best graDUate sCHOOLs 2007

TOp 10 puBLiC PrograMs

1st agricultural engineering

2nd petroleum engineering

3rd nuclear engineering

6th Aerospace engineering

6th industrial and systems engineering

8th Civil engineering

Dwight look College of Engineering

texas a&m engineer 2006

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