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Lance Manuel - New Editor-in-Chief of ASME Journal of Offshore Mechanics and Arctic Engineering
A research team in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering led by Assistant Professor Zoltan Nagy has an ambitious goal: save energy by teaching lights to think. The results of their design and experiment, LightLearn, were recently published in the Building and Environment journal.
Since lighting consumes nearly 20% of a typical electricity budget in buildings, Nagy and his team sought to increase energy savings by designing a lighting system that centers on the comfort level of a room’s occupant. LightLearn is a programmable system that uses reinforced learning to adapt to lighting preferences for each room’s occupant.
“It is important to focus on the occupant because, ultimately, we build buildings for people,” says Zoltan Nagy, an assistant professor at CAEE. “Our goal is to provide a comfortable environment while eliminating energy waste.”
The team tested LightLearn in five offices in Ernest Cockrell Jr. Hall on campus. The offices had different amounts of natural light, and occupants had varied comfort levels for lighting. The team found that their system reduced the amount of time that lights were on compared to traditional motion sensors, with significant savings in electricity costs. LightLearn was also favorably rated by the occupants.
Historically, sensors have been used to reduce energy waste when lights are left on longer than needed by a room’s occupant. While motion sensor technology does save a lot of energy, the system has room for improvement.
Two areas the research team seeks to improve are the programmed time delay before lights are switched off lights and the unexpected cutting of lighting if a room’s occupant is particularly motionless.
Electricity is also wasted if lights turn on when there is not enough daylight. While technology such as luminosity sensors can help minimize energy waste from this issue, they don’t account for individual preference for natural versus artificial light.
“We are working to develop an intelligent system that understands the unique situation of an occupant and room environment and then decides the optimal action for both occupant comfort and energy savings,” says doctoral student June Young Park. “Our research shows that you can save about 21% more energy without sacrificing occupant comfort by developing a controller that adapts to each room’s conditions.”
In addition to Park and Nagy, two UT Austin undergraduates, Hagen Fritz (Civil Engineering) and Thomas Dougherty (Mechanical Engineering), worked on this research. Funding for this project was partially provided by Green Fund, a competitive grant program funded by UT Austin tuition fees to support sustainability-related projects and initiatives proposed by university students, faculty or staff.
Chandra Bhat - New Editor-in-Chief of Transportation Research Part B
Dr. Frank will receive the John A. Roebling Medal, which recognizes lifetime achievement in bridge engineering.
Dr. Karl Frank is widely recognized as one of the top experts in the world on the design and behavior of steel bridges. His contributions have led to numerous provisions throughout the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials (AASHTO) design specification and he is the first individual often called upon on structural failures or when complex problems arise in the steel bridge industry. His contributions to AASHTO have been so significant that they literally have influenced the design of every single steel bridge constructed today.
After retiring from the University in 2010, Professor Frank took on the role as Chief Bridge Engineer for Hirschfeld Industries – one of the largest fabricators in North America. Professor Frank retired from Hirschfeld in 2017 and has since served as a consultant for the National Steel Bridge Alliance. Professor Frank holds the title of Emeritus Professor at the University and was inducted as an Honorary Member into the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering - Academy of Distinguished Alumni in 2018.
Presented by the Engineers’ Society of Western Pennsylvania, The International Bridge Conference (IBC) is the pre-eminent arena for the bridge industry in North & South America, Europe, Australia, Asia, and Africa. The IBC annually attracts over 1,000 bridge owners and engineers, senior policy makers, government officials, bridge designers, construction executives, and suppliers from throughout the United States and abroad. Now in its 36th year as an annual conference, the 2018 participants came from 41 states and 15 countries. The IBC is planned by an all-volunteer group and provides continuing education and networking opportunities to members of all facets of the bridge industry.
Dr. Frank will be awarded this well-deserved distinction during the International Bridge conference in National Harbor, Maryland this June.
Manish Kumar will join the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin as an associate professor in the Fall of 2019.
He is currently an associate professor of Chemical Engineering, Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Biomedical Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. He is also affiliated with the university’s Materials Research Institute, the Institute for Natural Gas Research, and the Institutes of Energy and the Environment.
Kumar’s background combines industrial applied research as well as multidisciplinary academic research. His experience includes large water treatment and wastewater reuse projects; beneficial use of municipal and industrial wastewater; pilot scale membrane studies; development of novel bio-enabled and bio-inspired materials and processes; use of synthetic biology for environmental applications; membrane protein biophysics and structural biology; and the exciting new area of artificial water channels.
“We are very excited Dr. Kumar is joining our faculty,” said Department Chair Robert Gilbert. “He is a rising superstar in membrane processes and bioinspired membranes for wastewater treatment and water reuse. His addition puts us at the forefront of wastewater engineering in the 21st century.”
Kumar received his bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the National Institute of Technology in Trichy, India in 1998. He later earned a master’s degree in Environmental Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in 2000. He launched his engineering career with NCS, Inc., working on arsenic treatment, as well as membrane water and wastewater treatment projects.
In 2001, Kumar joined the Applied Research Department of MWH Global (now Stantec Inc.), where he worked on a range of applied research projects, including membrane water and wastewater treatment and UV disinfection of wastewater.
He returned to UIUC in 2006 to continue his graduate studies under the guidance of Dr. Mark Clark and Dr. Julie Zilles. His Ph.D. research resulted in one of the first reports on biomimetic membranes for desalination.
After earning a doctoral degree, Kumar was a postdoctoral fellow with Dr. Thomas Walz at Harvard Medical School, where he examined the structure and function of the eye lens Aquaporin (AQP0) in lipids and block copolymers using cryo-electron microscopy. In 2011, he joined the faculty at Penn State as an assistant professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering.
His technical interests include studying and mimicking biological processes and materials at the molecular scale to describe biological phenomena and then develop materials and processes that bring the exquisite specificity and functionality of biological molecules and processes to engineering scales. He is currently focused on cell membrane components - lipids and membrane proteins - and ways to mimic their function in synthetic systems and environmental engineering applications.
Kumar also has extensive experience teaching undergraduate and graduate courses and will offer courses in environmental and water resources engineering at UT Austin.
“I am particularly enthused by the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering’s strategic vision concerning the nexus of cities, water and energy due to my own work and passion to contribute to work at this nexus,” said Kumar. “I look forward to contributing to the high performance, innovation-driven culture in Texas and at UT Austin.”
Salvatore Salamone - USDOT Grant for Pipeline Safety Technology Research
The U.S. Department of Transportation awarded a $300,000 grant to Associate Professor Salvatore Salamone in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering for his pipeline safety research.
The Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) awarded the grant for Salamone’s research on pipeline corrosion, which could help prevent environmental disasters such as oil spills. Overall, PHMSA awarded a total of $3.8 million to 11 universities as part of its Competitive Academic Agreement Program (CAAP) for pipeline safety research and innovation.
Established in 2013, the CAAP has invested in research through cooperative agreement awards and is responsible for introducing science and engineering students to pipeline design, mitigation, and corrosion issues.
Salamone is a leading researcher in detecting and estimating pipeline corrosion using high-frequency waves. He says the research's success could reduce the large cost of pipeline maintenance and detect corrosion, one of the leading causes of pipeline failure.
The grant also covers graduate student funding for UT Austin studies. Postdoctoral researcher Arvin Ebrahimkhanlou said this funding has a direct impact on the students participating in the research.
“The award sponsors important research and also has a positive educational component,” Ebraimkhanlou said. “The people who are working on the project are able to continue their education and become experts in this area so that in the future they can be hired by the industries who are going to use and implement these types of technologies.”
“Through the PHMSA award, our team will be able to perform in-depth studies and experiments to develop a state-of-the-art structural health monitoring system for pipeline corrosion inspection,” said Stylianos Livadiotis, research assistant and civil engineering graduate student. “This system will have the key characteristics of being economical, automated and capable of diagnosing the early stages of corrosion damage.”
Juan Murcia-Delso, an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, received a funding award to work on a collaborative research project with engineering colleagues as part of ConTex, a joint initiative of the University of Texas System and Mexico’s National Council of Science and Technology (CONACYT) to enhance academic and research cooperation between Texas and Mexico.
Murcia-Delso, whose primary research focus is in structural engineering, will partner with Sergio M. Alcocer of Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) on a project titled "Assessment of Seismically Retrofitted Concrete Buildings Following the 2017 Earthquake in Mexico City." Alcocer is an alumnus of the department, receiving his Ph.D. in civil engineering in 1991. He is also a National Academy of Engineering member and was the Cockrell School of Engineering's 2015 Commencement speaker.
As part of their research, the team will inventory pre-1985 retrofitted and unretrofitted concrete buildings to build a database that will help monitor resilience plans, conduct a detailed assessment of retrofitted concrete buildings' performances, and document current interventions in concrete buildings in Mexico and the U.S.
Alcocer and Murcia-Delso, along with Dr. David Murià-Vila, also from UNAM, will use their combined expertise in concrete structures, earthquake engineering, computational simulation, structure rehabilitation, and structural health monitoring to help reduce building vulnerabilities and enhance disaster resiliency in Mexico City.
“I think the reaction of society to organize – especially with social media – was very impressive in Mexico City after the 2017 earthquake,” Murcia-Delso said. “As an engineer, you feel you have to contribute to support that kind of community response. As a researcher, there is a lot to be learned from things that didn’t work and, in this case, to learn of things that worked. That’s one of the motivations of this project – to look at buildings that were upgraded after the earthquake in ’85 to see if those upgrades worked. And, in many cases, they did work.”
Tan Bui-Thanh, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, is also a Cockrell School of Engineering 2018 ConTex award recipient. With a primary research focus on computational mechanics, Bui-Thanh will partner with Marcos Capistrán of CONACYT on a project titled "High-Resolution Magnetic Resonance Elastography with Uncertainty Quantification."
The ConTex awards are the latest in the state's, UT System's and UT Austin's efforts to continue strengthening academics, research collaboration and program initiatives with Mexico. Established in 2016, the ConTex program represents a long-term commitment to expand cross-border partnerships and create opportunities to share knowledge relevant to issues of common interest to the United States and Mexico. ConTex gives researchers the opportunity to make new discoveries and scientific breakthroughs, offers students a chance to use their knowledge and skills in a real-world environment, and offers outstanding preparation for entering the global workforce.
Better Water Purification Methods Are the Aim of New Research Center
NSF Research Traineeship Award - Transforming STEM Graduate Education
