Seed Funding 2019-2020
CESR Seed Funding Awarded
2019 Seed Funding Awards Announced to Support Innovative, High-Risk, and/or Enabling Collaborative Research to Enhance Engineering Sustainability and Resilience. Five interdisciplinary teams of faculty members have been awarded $60,000 each to support 18-month collaborative research projects. All five projects represent new collaborations among the faculty members and provide support for graduate student(s) and/or postdoctoral fellow(s). Results from these projects will be presented at a Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience poster session in spring 2021 and will provide preliminary data to support proposals for funding from federal agencies, foundations and/or industry.
Nature-Inspired Enhanced Microplastics Digestion – Capture and Biodegradation by Flexible Fibers with Attached Microorganisms
Lead-PI: Kyoo Chul Park, Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical Engineering
Co-PI: George Wells, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
The overarching goal of the proposed research is to engineer flexible fibers with attached
microorganisms for the energy-efficient capture and biodegradation of unwanted waterborne
microplastic particles. The proposed functional surface design approach is inspired by (i) baleen
whales that capture microscale planktons using the flexible fiber structures and (ii) mealworms that eat plastics using the plastics-degrading microorganisms in their gut.
Sensing Material Properties as Nature Intends
Lead-PI: James Hambleton, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Co-PI: Simge Kucukyavuz, Associate Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences
This exploratory project imagines a highly non-traditional approach to devise novel test methods for characterizing the properties of natural and manufactured materials that are essential to the design of sustainable and resilient infrastructure. The central idea is that the material itself should inform the test method that most effectively reveals the material’s properties.
Multi-Scale Analysis of Electrocatalytic Reactor Processes using a Combined Experimental and Modeling Approach
Lead-PI: Linsey Seitz, Assistant Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Co-PI: Niall Mangan, Assistant Professor, Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics
Renewable energy sources, such as wind and solar, contribute a growing fraction of our global energy supply, largely due to technology advances that have improved capture efficiencies and reduced costs, even compared to fossil-based electricity. By developing sustainable processes to use the electricity from these intermittent sources to produce liquid fuels and chemical products, we can store the energy in a transportable form and buffer from their inherent intermittency.
Towards a Circular Bioeconomy: Recovery of Nitrogen as a Value-Added Product from Farm Animal Manure
Lead-PI: George Wells, Assistant Professor, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Co-PI: Keith Tyo, Associate Professor, Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering
Wet wastes, including manure, municipal wastewater, and food waste, contain valuable nitrogen, carbon, and phosphorus that could be used to make fertilizers, biofuels, and bio-based chemicals in order to offset current non-sustainable production of these important goods from fossil fuels. Instead, these wastes currently require additional energy for treatment and disposal, or at worst are released, causing harm to ecological systems. We propose to develop technology to enable recovery of valuable products from wet wastes, resulting in a significant step toward a more circular bioeconomy.
What is the Air Quality and CO2 Impact of an Electric Vehicle Transition?
Lead-PI: Adilson E. Motter, Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor, Department of Physics and Astronomy
Co-PI: Daniel M. Abrams, Associate Professor, Department of Engineering Sciences and Applied Mathematics
Co-PI: Daniel E. Horton, Assistant Professor, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
This project will quantify the precise impact of the electrification of the transportation sector on the emission of greenhouse gases. Current estimates are ad hoc and rather crude due to difficulties in predicting the battery-charging power source and attendant emissions as well as the efficiency of vehicles in a post-electrification world. This pilot project will circumvent these limitations by combining multiple types of data and computational models with calculations to identify which power plants will power electric vehicles across the country.
CESR Seed Funding Winners 2019
The Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience congratulates its first cohort of seed funding winners. Read the full summaries for the winning projects below.
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About the Center
The Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience at Northwestern Engineering aims to tackle complex sustainability challenges like climate change, water quality, clean energy, and pollution through research and educational efforts that span multiple departments and disciplines.
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SUSPIRE: Sustainable Urban Systems: Predictive, Interconnected, Resilient and Evolving
SUSPIRE Workshop July 16 & 17, 2019
This workshop was organized by Northwestern University, Argonne National Laboratory, the University of Chicago, and many other partners with support from NSF to address natural and climate, technological, and societal disruptions that will transform urban systems. SUSPIRE brought together more than 100 Chicago and Great Lakes area community members and stakeholders drawn from academia, industry, foundations, community organizations, government, technology and environmental organizations, and the arts and humanities to lay the groundwork for a sustainable urban systems research network.
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The Center for Engineering Sustainability and Resilience is part of the McCormick School of Engineering.
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