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COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON ANNUAL REPORT 2013 College of Engineering UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON

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COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN-MADISON

ANNUAL REPORT 2013

College of Engineering UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON

Message from the Dean

Ian Robertson: On becoming an engine of materials research innovation

Materials play such a foundational role in advancing civilization that they are essentially the shorthand of human history, as defined by the Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age.

While those three distinct eras span millions of years, the modern materials challenge will be defined by accelerating the pace of innovation. The White House Materials Genome Initiative seeks to unlock the power of materials by doubling the speed at which we discover, develop and manufacture new materials.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering will play a central role in this national initiative, with the summer 2013 announcement of the Wisconsin Materials Institute (WMI). This initiative will build on the impressive multidisciplinary strengths of UW-Madison not only in materials science, but in the computational tools and big data analytics we bring to the challenge.

Our 2013 annual report highlights some of the talented people and ideas behind UW-Madison’s materials science reputation. For example, Padma Gopalan, associate professor of materials science and engineering, is doing some impressive work on polymer self-assembly and how the resulting nanostructures can have useful properties in microelectronics, solar energy and medicine. She also leads our National Science Foundation-funded Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center.

Also featured is electrical engineer Luke Mawst, who is part of a team developing high-power semiconductor lasers that have implications for biomedical devices, environmental monitoring devices, missile avoidance systems and food packaging processes. Our third profile is of Dane Morgan, a materials science and engineering associate professor who leads the computational materials group that employs atomic-scale modeling to understand and design new materials. Morgan also serves as co-director of WMI.

The work of Padma, Luke and Dane provides a glimpse into some of the valuable research taking place here, but represents just a small sample of our expertise. Indeed, all three scientists emphasize the multidisciplinary, collaborative climate that exists among UW-Madison materials researchers, a community of more than 200 people. The disciplines represented in WMI will include most engineering departments, but also computer science, physics, chemistry, mathematics, pharmacy, library sciences, the medical school and others.

There are profound challenges embedded within today’s materials research landscape. For example, we not only need to discover new materials, but become better stewards of existing materials. One challenge will be in the area of materials recovery and developing systems to reclaim and reuse valuable and rare materials. Another will be in finding substitutes for some critical materials

Nick

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that are often concentrated within one country or region, posing competitive and security issues for the United States.

A 2012 European Commission report estimated that 70 percent of all new product innovation in the next decade will be based on the discovery and synthesis of materials with new and improved properties. Meaningful materials innovation will remain at the heart of cultural progress and drive important advances in energy, national security, human health and manufacturing.

Yet, materials advances mean little if they exist only in a university laboratory. At UW-Madison, our discoveries and knowledge must translate to industry as a catalyst for economic development and global competitiveness. Through our advanced manufacturing activities, we are collaborating with our state and U.S. industry partners on ways they can apply leading-edge materials, manufacturing processes, technological capabilities and data in their products and facilities.

We are setting the stage for the University of Wisconsin-Madison to be a global leader in this pursuit.

View our annual report in video on the college playlist at youtube.com/engineeringuw

UW-Madison College of Engineering

@UWMadEngr

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badgerengineers.engr.wisc.edu

CONNECT WITH THE COLLEGE

University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering (Official)

32-34 • Industrial Advisory Board 32-34 • Early Career Advisory Board

Features 4 MATERIALSINNOVATORS

Meet Luke Mawst, Dane Morgan and Padma Gopalan, three engineers whose contributions are playing a major role in national efforts to advance materials.

10 BEYONDTHEBUCKYWAGON

Pierce Manufacturing seeks to strengthen ties with engineering students.

By Scott Gordon

11 STUDENTSHUNGRYFORBUSINESSSUCCESSSAVORCAMPUSRESOURCES

UW-Madison connections help student inventors push their products into the marketplace.

By Mark Riechers

12 GEOLOGICALENGINEERSROCK These interdisciplinary alumni have the breadth

and flexibility to contribute in a variety of industries.

Also: College interdisciplinary degree programs By Renee Meiller

College departments 14 BiomedicalEngineering • Light reflects risk of cancer • Fighting disease by re-creating it

• Technology helps heal humans and horses

16 ChemicalandBiologicalEngineering • For Platypus Technologies, liquid crystals fit the bill • Growing the suite of bio-based chemicals

• Dow Chemical invests in university talent and tech

18 CivilandEnvironmentalEngineering • Quicker, quake-proof skyscrapers • Innovation lifts limits of landfill liners • For building owners, IPD is A-OK

20 ElectricalandComputerEngineering • A ‘smart’ move for electronics • A control theorist crashes the market

• Closing the loop on big data … one beer at a time

22 EngineeringPhysics • Cold-spray coating knowledge is a hot commodity • Understanding how a Pegasus plasma forms

• Stiff, strong and stable composites

24 EngineeringProfessionalDevelopment • A new opportunity for P.E.’s to talk about ethics • Revamped process speeds DOT project closeouts

• Unique expertise and education for the world

26 IndustrialandSystemsEngineering • Increasing the ‘reward’ in high-risk scenarios • Laying the groundwork for safer air aid

• Centers work for state business and industry

28 MaterialsScienceandEngineering • How waste wood works for forests • Future looks bright for carbon nanotube solar cells • Advancing industry through materials research

• and education

30 MechanicalEngineering • Campus spin-off keeps computers cool • Fuel simulation for the real world • ‘Smart’ medical material aims to unfurl at 98.6

BY THE NUMBERS: 2012-2013 32 College of Engineering facts and figures

34 Student achievements

©2013 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. Published September 2013. Printed via gifts administered through the University of Wisconsin Foundation.

ANNUAL REPORT 2013Volume 40, Issue 2

Editor: Renee Meiller, [email protected]

Writers: Scott Gordon, Brian Mattmiller,

Renee Meiller, Mark Riechers, John Steeno

Design:Phil Biebl

Photography: Nick Berard, Scott Gordon,

Renee Meiller, David Nevala, Mark Riechers

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

IanM.Robertson Dean

StevenCramer Associate Dean for Academic Affairs

CathleenWalters Associate Dean for Advancement

Contact the college:Renee Meiller, alumni relations

(608) 262-2481, [email protected]

Prospective students:Nancy Hansen

(608) 262-2473, [email protected]

Professional education:Department of

Engineering Professional Development(608) 262-2061 or (800) 462-0876

[email protected]

There’s no better way to re-connect to everything

wonderful at UW-Madison.

o

ON THE COVER: A thin film of liquid crystal floating at the air-water interface. Read more about how engineers are using liquid crystals on page 16. (Image: Becky Carlton)

Ann Leahy(608) 265-6114, [email protected]

donate.engr.wisc.edu

MAKE A GIFT TO THE COLLEGE:

www.engr.wisc.edu

4 5

on quantum cascade lasers. The expertise we have in designing and developing very high power semiconductor lasers, we rely on that now for producing these quantum cascade lasers, so we’re pushing the envelope and taking them to higher powers.

TellusaboutwhatyoufindpromisingaboutthefederalMaterialsGenomeInitiative.

It will foster collaborations, very similar to what we’re doing, but at a much larger-scale coordination. These multi-university, industrial collaborations are key to driving the technology. We’re not experts on everything. We focus our research, say, on one aspect of materials development, but things like looking at reliability of devices, it’s hard for us to do that in a university setting, so we need collaborations with industry to do that, and that provides feedback for our materials research. The initiative may foster more of these interdisciplinary collaborations, and I think that’s key to moving materials technology and manufacturing forward.

Faculty, staff and students from across the UW-Madison campus conduct materials research in a variety of areas. Here, we introduce you to three engineers whose contributions

are playing a major role in national efforts to advance materials.

Q&A with LUKE MAWST

Talkaboutyourresearch.What,simply,doyoustudy?

The main thrust of my research is really looking at new semiconductor compounds and the application of these compounds into optoelectronic devices. Most people are familiar with the most common semiconductor material, silicon. But there’s a whole other class of materials for opto-electronics (like semiconductor lasers), materials that emit or detect light. They’re more complex materials in a sense that we take multiple elements from the periodic table and combine them, things like gallium and arsenic, for example, to form gallium arsenide.

And then we can keep adding elements. We’re synthesizing materials with as many as five or six elements all combined together into a crystalline structure. These additional elements give us a lot of added flexibility to design the electronic and optical properties of the materials, which is advantageous for devices. We call them multinary materials.

Whatarethekeytechnicalissuesyoufocusonandhowdoyoucollaboratewithothersoncampustodevelopsolutions?

Some of our research occurs under the umbrella of the interdisciplinary, National Science Foundation-funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at UW-Madison. It involves collaborations with Chemical Engineering Professor Tom Kuech, and Materials Science and Engineering Professor Sue Babcock and Associate Professors Dane Morgan and Izabela Szlufarska, as well as collaborators at Duke and Michigan.

Under the MRSEC, we look at multinary compounds that have never been produced before, so there are challenges in combining these elements in a controllable manner such that we can produce a material system with the desired optical properties.

An example of the applications of these materials is in high-efficiency photovoltaics, or solar cells. We’ve been the first to successfully grow these five-element materials using metalorganic vapor phase epitaxy, or MOVPE. We’ve integrated the materials into solar cells in collaboration with our industrial partner, MicroLink Devices.

Industry also is working closely with us on virtual substrates. With commercially available substrates, you’re limited to a certain lattice constant, the atomic spacing, and that limits what materials you can grow on top and what devices you can make. Many devices require thick layers of materials with uniform composition.

Here, we grow virtual substrates in a growth system called hydride vapor phase epitaxy, or HVPE, which allows us to grow very thick layers in tens of minutes. It’s potentially a low-cost growth technique for these virtual substrates.

Professor, electrical and computer engineeringCo-founder, Alfalight / Co-founder, Intraband

Innovation Institute to broaden U.S. palette of advanced materials

Sporting sleek cases, sensitive touch screens,

and an ever-increasing array of features,

today’s smartphones and tablets provide

consumers unparalleled mobile computing capability.

Yet, these and many other technologies are

critically dependent on sophisticated new materials

that can solve challenges in areas ranging from clean

energy and national security to human health and

well-being. And currently, a new material’s journey

from discovery to commercial product typically takes

as long as two decades.

With expertise in manufacturing; materials

science, engineering and processing; and computer

science and engineering, UW-Madison is tackling

today’s materials challenges through the inter-

disciplinary Wisconsin Materials Institute, or WMI.

In June 2013, the White House named UW-Madison

a partner institution in its Materials Genome Initiative

for Global Competitiveness, a national effort to

double the speed with which the country discovers,

develops and manufactures new materials.

Building a materials innovation infrastructure is

key to the initiative. The UW-Madison College of

Engineering pledged an initial investment of $5 million

to create WMI. A cross-disciplinary technological

hub, WMI will provide infrastructure for researchers

in such areas as mathematics, statistics, computer

sciences, information science, chemistry, medicine

and engineering, and create synergy among materials

researchers at UW-Madison and elsewhere.

Milton J. and A. Maude Shoemaker and Beckwith-

Bascom Professor of Chemical and Biological

Engineering Thomas Kuech and Materials Science

and Engineering Associate Professor Dane Morgan

are co-directing the institute.

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Tom Kuech, Sue Babcock and I recently won an NSF Partners for Innovation grant that involves three industrial partners looking at transitioning the materials research and processes we have developed here into commercial products, specifically in high-efficiency solar cells and high-performance semiconductor lasers.

Whatimpact,bothtechnicallyandinapplication,doyouthinkyourworkhasforthestateandthenation?

One end application is high-efficiency solar cells for renewable energy. There are efforts in the United States to develop these high-efficiency technologies. We’re working with Ajou University to try to realize the higher-efficiency cells.

Another application is homeland security—for example, detection of dangerous toxic materials or explosives. Very-high-power lasers in the mid-infrared range can be used in applications such as remote infrared sensing. Those detection schemes use lasers in the mid-infrared range, wavelengths from 3 to 10 microns. But there’s a lack of reliable high-output-power devices. I collaborate with Electrical and Computer Engineering Professor Dan Botez

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Q&A with DANE MORGAN

Talkaboutyourresearch.What,simply,doyoustudy?

I use computational modeling to understand and predict materials properties for a wide range of applications. By solving the fundamental quantum mechanical equations that describe atomic interactions, I can predict how atoms will behave with very limited experimental input. In terms of applications, a major focus of my work is energy technologies, including fuel cells, batteries and nuclear materials, but I also work in the areas of high-pressure and aqueous mineral geoscience and defect properties in semiconductors.

Whatarethekeytechnicalissuesyoufocusonandhowdoyoucollaboratewithothersoncampustodevelopsolutions?

The precise research challenges are specific to different applications, but a theme is the challenge of connecting the length scales of atoms—where I can make very precise predictions—with the much larger length scales of the technologies we use. This is often called the challenge of multiscale modeling. I generally bridge scales using thermodynamic and kinetic theories that are able to connect atomic processes—for example, the energy of a lithium atom in a crystal—to macroscale properties—for example, lithium battery voltages.

I collaborate with many of my UW-Madison colleagues to bring the inter-disciplinary skills needed to solve complex problems. For example, I work with a wonderful team (Chemistry Professor Robert Hamers and Associate Professor Mahesh Mahanthappa, and Chemical Engineering Professor Tom Kuech) with skills in electrochemistry, coatings and polymer chemistry to try to understand how to improve the performance of lithium batteries. I am also part of the UW-Madison Materials Research Science and Engineering Center integrated computational group. Led by Materials Science and Engineering Associate Professor Izabela Szlufarska, the group brings together modelers from all over campus with complimentary simulation skills.

Whataresomefutureopportunitiesorchallengesinyourresearcharea?

Perhaps the most exciting opportunity to me right now is the recent advances in “first-principles” prediction, in which one can solve the fundamental quantum mechanical equations describing electrons and atoms to predict their properties without experiments. Such first-principles methods are now robust enough to take advantage of the full power of modern computers, which creates an unprecedented ability to generate valuable materials property data. It is no exaggeration to say that for some properties, first-principles calculations can now produce, in only a few years, more data than has been obtained in all of human history. For example, I can predict the stability of compounds and their elastic constants at a rate of dozens a day

technologies. Perhaps not surprisingly, given my area of research, this focus of the MGI is something I very strongly support. In particular, the MGI is pushing people to create the necessary connections among experiments, simulation and data methods to make transformative advances in materials development. Such interdisciplinary integration is technically difficult and requires researchers to step out of their comfort zone, but holds enormous promise. In fact, the MGI is directly leading to this type of integration on our campus. I am co-director, with Chemical Engineering Professor Tom Kuech, of the Wisconsin Materials Institute (WMI), which was established in 2013 at UW-Madison as part of the university’s role as a partner institution in the MGI. In WMI, we are helping establish relationships among materials

researchers, computer scientists, statisticians, mathematicians, bio- informatics experts and others to create integrated approaches to accelerate materials design.

I hope that MGI will help us create a more seamless coupling between experiments, modeling, data and intelligent algorithms. We have not yet arrived at the point where—as on Star Trek—I can just ask my computer to create a new material or device out of thin air. But in the spirit of the MGI, if we can integrate such methods as first-principles design, data mining and optimization algorithms, robot controlled experiments, and 3-D printing, perhaps we are not as far from Star Trek as we might think.

on a big cluster of computers. However, a key challenge is to connect these first-principles predictions to materials understanding and design. Knowing an elastic constant does not in itself tell me how to make a lighter battery or safer nuclear fuel cladding, but such data can greatly accelerate the design process if we can use it effectively.

Whatimpact,bothtechnicallyandinapplication,doyouthinkyourworkhasforthestateandthenation?

In Wisconsin, the United States and the world, we face an unprecedented energy challenge to use our carbon fuels more efficiently and develop non-carbon-emitting energy resources. Multiscale materials modeling, grounded in the ability to predict new properties from first-principles atomic calculations, can help us solve these challenges. In my group, we are searching for more active catalysts for fuel cells, more radiation-resistant materials for nuclear reactors, and more stable electrodes for lithium batteries, all of which can help drive new energy technologies. We are also developing tools to automate steps that can accelerate materials research. For example, I am working with Associate Professor Paul Voyles to integrate optimization methods, atomistic modeling and experimental data to enable the computer to automatically extract the complex structures of amorphous metals. This type of automation will enable researchers to solve materials science problems faster, thereby increasing the rate of development of new materials technologies.

TellusaboutwhatyoufindpromisingaboutthefederalMaterialsGenomeInitiative.

The MGI is committed to enabling modern computation to dramatically accelerate development of new materials for advanced

Associate professor, materials science and engineering and engineering physicsCo-director, Wisconsin Materials Institute Da

vid N

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Gopalan joined UW-Madison 10 years ago, as a part of the functional organics cluster hire. She frequently collaborates with scientists across the spectrum, from physics and chemistry to, more recently, biomedical engineering. One current project is looking at how nanostructures help direct the differentiation of stem cells.

“That crossover from chemistry all the way to medicine is truly exciting for me,” she says. “We are able to bring in traditional materials science surface characterization

tools and very precise quantification tools that biologists don’t use right now. We create new materials platforms as templates to study stem cell behavior, but bring in tools to build a funda-mental understanding of cause and effect.”

Gopalan is trained as a chemist, but her choice of materials science allows her to delve into many different scientific worlds. She has dozens of collaborations in her work with the Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) and the Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center (NSEC), which she currently directs. “There are no hard walls, there are no hard boundaries, and that’s what I love about what I do here,” she says.

The Materials Genome Initiative has the potential to be transformative, both nationally and at UW-Madison, Gopalan says—in much the way NSEC and MRESEC have changed the research culture of the campus. “The initiative will bring in computational modeling and theorists to work hand in hand with experimentalists like myself,” she says. “Much of the theory has lagged behind the experimental side, in terms of narrowing down the experimental parameters and creating a more predictive role.”

Associate professor, materials science and engineeringDirector, Nanoscale Science and Engineering Center

8 9

Bringing nature’s complexity to polymer synthesis

PADMA GOPALAN

PadmaGopalan’sresearchfocusesondesigning,synthesizingandcharacterizingnewtypesofpolymerswiththeabilitytoself-assembleintoawiderangeofusefulnanostructures.Yetoneof

herfavoritenanostructurescomesnotfromthelabbutfromnature,onthewingsofablueMorphobutterfly.

Seeing a blue Morpho, one would assume its deep-blue wing color is the result of pigmentation. In fact, the wings contain complex, tree-shaped nanostructures of silica that reflect light and wavelength to create the perfect blue color.

Those elegant wings are self-assembled nanostructures in their purest form.

“It’s a never-ending quest for synthetic chemists like me to see how much of that type of nature we can mimic in the synthetic world,” says Gopalan, an associate professor of materials science and engineering. “The complexity is at a whole different level in nature compared to the synthetic systems we make.”

Gopalan’s research team works on synthesizing self-assembled nanostructures in polymeric materials anywhere in scale from 100-plus nanometers to sub-10 nanometers. These incredibly precise structures have applications in microelectronics, photonics, energy and bioengineering, but the key to their usefulness is control and replication across a larger scale.

“What we are looking for are the underlying rules of self-assembly,” Gopalan says. “How does the chemical structure influence the self-assembly, and how does the self-assembly influence the morphology and the macro-scopic properties?”

Part of the fascination of Gopalan’s work is in the materials themselves, which are classes of block copolymers. These are comprised of chemical tandems that act like oil and water connected together, and the resulting thermodynamic factors govern the self-assembly process. “The information for self-assembly is already encoded in the chemical structure of the polymers we make,” she says.

That’s where the polymer design aspect comes into play in Gopalan’s lab. Can they mix in the right components, in the right portions, so that they self-assemble to produce valuable electronic, optical or magnetic properties? Gopalan has a number of patents through the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, including a few that have recently been licensed by the semiconductor industry.

David

Nev

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ierce Manufacturing wants College of Engineering students to know it as more than just the name on the front of the iconic UW-Madison Bucky Wagon.

Mechanical Engineering Faculty Associate Glenn Bower began a partnership with the Appleton, Wisconsin-based fire-truck company in 2009 when he brought the company into his effort to restore the badly deteriorated Bucky Wagon—originally a 1932 fire engine.

Now, Pierce’s parent company, Oshkosh Corporation, wants to recruit more UW-Madison engineering students to improve the fire trucks and occupational vehicles of the future. “We’re only 90 miles away, and the university doesn’t really know who Oshkosh Corporation is,” says Tom Quigley (BSME ’94), vice president of engineering for the company’s fire and emergency division.

Quigley hopes to convince more Badgers to work at Pierce and live in Wisconsin for the long haul, not just as a stepping stone. He’d also like to partner with engineering students who can provide a fresh perspective on the design of Pierce products.

Pierce and Bower teamed up in 2012 to present some of Bower’s students with a challenging senior design project for a Pierce aerial ladder fire truck. And while Pierce hasn’t been able to use the students’ proposal, their work may assist Pierce engineers in future efforts at product development. Quigley now hopes to share design projects with Bower and his students every year.

The students had a counterintuitive advantage in the design process, says Kathryn Clouse, the senior design engineer at Pierce who worked most directly with them.

Because they didn’t have a sense of “what the industry is expecting to see,” they were able to be bolder with their ideas. “They said, ‘This isn’t necessary structurally. Can we take it out?’” Clouse says. “Ultimately, we

wound up having them leave some things in, but those are the types of ideas that we’re looking for, and that’s something in our back pocket for the future.”

The students, for their part, got a sense of what it’s like to do an engineering project in the workplace,

and were forced to revisit some fundamentals. “Hand calculations were necessary for this project,” Clouse says. “They were trying to use a computer model to analyze the structure before they really understood the structure. That’s when I said, ‘Wait, back up.’”

Bower reinforced that workplace experience by taking the students up to Appleton over their Christmas break. “They gave a presentation to about 15 of the engineers at Pierce, and then the engineers rifled questions at them,” he says.

Ultimately, the consensus among Pierce engineers was that UW-Madison students are more than capable of delivering strong results and a highly professional project-update presentation. “We were trying to verify that, by partnering with the university, we would be able to get quality work,” Clouse says. “The team certainly exceeded my expectations for the project.”

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Beyond the Bucky Wagon: Pierce seeks to strengthen ties

with engineering students

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ike any engineer worth his or her salt, Eric Martell (right) can identify and analyze a problem when he sees it. Particularly when it’s sandwich-related.

One fateful lunch hour, a driver for Silver Mine Subs told Martell he’d save time and money by calling in orders instead of ordering through a clunky (and expensive) third-party ordering website. “I just thought, ‘It’s 2010. There has to be a better way to do this,’” says Martell, a 2012 computer engineering and computer science alumnus. Three years later, EatStreet—the food ordering website Martell and former roommate and business partner Matt Howard created as an answer to the hungry student’s dilemma—is being used by more than 1,000 restaurants in 23 cities.

The site offers easy-to-use ordering tools and websites for locally owned campus staples in need of a turnkey web presence. “In a lot of ways, I think that we kind of keep money in our communities, wherever we are,” says Martell.

Before it had thousands of users, EatStreet was a project being pitched to judges in the G. Steven Burrill Business Plan Competition and NEST software competition, two of many UW-Madison opportunities for student entrepreneurs looking to test their innovative business ideas.

Even though they didn’t win the Burrill competition, Martell says the feedback he and his partner received as part of the campus entrepreneurship community provided a first push toward realizing their business. “The judges and industry experts that were brought in offered us some really helpful advice; they’re advisors and partners that we continue to work with,” says Martell.

C-Motive Technologies seeks to shrink electric motors and build them from entirely sustainable materials, replacing steel and copper with aluminum plates to establish electric fields over an air gap. It’s a design conceived by electrical and computer engineering PhD students Dan Ludois, Justin Reed and Micah Erickson and mechanical engineer Kyle Hanson, who leveraged the university community’s fertile ground for startups to grow a side project into a full-fledged business.

“Within ECE, the most instrumental individuals were our advisors, Professor Giri Venkataramanan and Grainger Professor of Power Electronics and Electrical Machines Tom Jahns,” says Reed, president and CEO of C-Motive and a current ECE graduate student. “From the very beginning, they have been very supportive of our venture, and that’s incredibly valuable when your time is spread so thin between your degree and your startup.”

Resources for early-stage companies like these abound on the UW-Madison campus. When the time came to protect their invention, the students turned to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which patented the design on their behalf. And when they needed to put the business down on paper, both C-Motive and EatStreet leveraged the Law and Entrepreneurship Clinic within the UW Law School as an invaluable

legal resource. “For the first year or so, we didn’t have to pay a cent in lawyers’ fees,” says Martell.

Chris Beley says one benefit of participating in

university competitions was learning about resources that

aren’t always advertised. The 2012 computer sciences and electrical

engineering alumnus won the 2012 Qualcomm Wireless Innovation Prize for his data management system, Flextory. Beley says staying connected with innovation competition organizers and campus resources helped him network with Madison-area mentors, including Merlin Mentors and Capital Entrepreneurs. “All of these people are willing to help if you just ask,” he says.

Consultants at places such as Hybrid Zone X on campus, Gener8tor in Milwaukee and the Wisconsin Entrepreneurship Network (a partnership between UW-Extension and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.) offer the final bits of wisdom engineers often need to launch a concept into the marketplace. “Cheryl Vickroy of the Wisconsin Entrepreneurs’ Network really helped us shift focus from the technology itself to the business surrounding the technology,” says Reed. “Having been so focused on technology for so many years, making this change of mindset was quite challenging for us.”

Tangible resources aside, student entrepreneurs unanimously agree on the biggest asset available to engineers graduating from UW-Madison: other engineering alumni. “The prestige that goes along with the University of Wisconsin-Madison College of Engineering goes a long way, in my experience,” says Martell. “I’ve gone out to Silicon Valley and New York to raise money, and no one will close the door on a UW engineering grad. That’s a fantastic credential that the university continues to create.”

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Students hungry for business success savor campus resources

Inadditiontoitsninedepartments,theUW-MadisonCollegeofEngineeringofferssixdegree-grantingprogramswithstrongemphasisoninterdisciplinarystudies.ParticipatingUW-Madisonfacultymembersarebasedintheseschoolsandcolleges:

College of Agricultural and Life Sciences,

College of Engineering, College of Letters and

Science, Wisconsin School of Business, School of

Education, School of Nursing, School of Medicine

and Public Health, School of Pharmacy

Interdisciplinary Degree Programs

12 13

It’s a unique, interdisciplinary degree that prepares students to work in industries ranging from energy and environmental remediation to mining, excavation and construction.At UW-Madison, geological engineering undergraduates receive not only

rigorous training in mechanics and in fundamental engineering, but also a strong geoscience education. “What industry people tell me is that our geological engineers understand all of these things and are able to do them well,” says Wisconsin Distinguished Professor Craig Benson, chair both of geological engineering and civil and environmental engineering. “They really like our geological engineers and want more of them.”

Take, for example, Barr Engineering, a Minneapolis-based engineering and environmental consulting company that serves such industries as fuels, power, mining, manufacturing and natural resources. “We specifically recruit from the UW-Madison geological engineering program for interns and full-time employees,” says Sara Gaffin (BSGLE ’99), a senior geological engineer at Barr who manages personnel for a multidisciplinary department of approximately 170 people. “I see the value of the degree and I know how it really prepared me for my career in consulting—and it’s easy for me to make the pitch for us to target geological engineering students.”

One aspect of the UW-Madison geological engineering undergraduate educational program that differentiates it from its peers is the rigor of its curriculum. While some geological engineering degrees focus primarily on the geosciences, UW-Madison students get a healthy dose of both geology and engineering. “There’s also a diversity of perspectives

assessment of natural landfill capping, or a deep geothermal well system. “When I’m talking to the students, I’m amazed at the diversity of projects they’re working on,” says Schaper. “And students are hearing about each other’s projects and learning from that.”

Faculty work in applied areas and, in the case of engineering, also are licensed professional engineers. “There’s a real practice orientation in our design courses so that students get fundamental engineering science and pragmatic application of real-world principles in real projects,” says Benson.

In the end, students earn, in one 125-credit program, bachelor’s degrees in geological engineering and in geology and geophysics. They also leave UW-Madison prepared to contribute at high levels in a variety of industries and positions, but also able to learn the basics that will enable them to succeed in those settings. “To have the background in both of those very different focus areas helps them to be able to relate to many different people, and we see the value in that,” says Gaffin. “A science degree prepares you to look at data, while engineering is focused on problem-solving. A geological engineer understands those two critical components, and as a result, can develop the best solutions for our clients.”

in how to look at problems,” says Benson. “And students meld that together through their training. They get experience from both sides and that provides them with their well-roundedness.”

That breadth and flexibility serve geological engineering graduates well at Shell Exploration & Production Co., says David Schaper (MSGLE ’02), a petrophysical engineer whose unit includes a mix of geological engineers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers, geologists, physicists and others. “For petrophysical engineering, there’s not a degree,” says, Schaper, who serves on the UW-Madison geological engineering board of visitors. “We tend to bring people in from various backgrounds and then do lots of classroom and on-the-job training. I think it’s an easier transition for geological engineers because they understand both sides of the equation. They come in with a very strong geology background.”

Beyond the UW-Madison geological engineering core curriculum, courses are design-centric and application-driven and immerse students in hands-on laboratory, fieldwork and research experiences, including geologic mapping,

EnvironmentalChemistry&TechnologyProgramMarc Anderson (chair)Tel: 608/263-3264 • Fax: 608/[email protected]/interd/ect

FreshwaterandMarineSciencesProgramSteve Loheide (chair)Tel: 608/263-3264 • Fax: 608/262-0454 [email protected]/fms.index.html

GeologicalEngineeringProgramCraig H. Benson (chair)Tel: 608/890-2420 • Fax: 608/[email protected]

ManufacturingSystemsEngineeringProgramFrank Pfefferkorn (director)Tel: 608/262-0921 • Fax: 608/[email protected]

MasterofEngineering(Polymer Engineering and Science)Tim A. Osswald (co-director)Lih-Sheng (Tom) Turng (co-director)Tel: 608/262-7473 or 608/263-9538Fax: 608/[email protected]/PolEngSci.html

MaterialsScienceProgramRay Vanderby (director)Paul Evans (associate director)Tel: 608/263-1795 • Fax: 608/[email protected]/interd/msp

Geological engineers rock: Interdisciplinary alums solid in industry

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Throughout their education, geological engineering students

apply their multidisciplinary classroom education through research projects

and field work experiences.

Like many good lab discoveries, this one came about by accident. While trying to engineer

healthy heart valves, Associate Professor KristynMasters was discouraged that cells her student was culturing were forming nasty-looking nodules. These nodules can be present in disease and made the sample cells impossible to use for their intended purpose.

“It was very frustrating,” Masters says. “One day, it just sort of clicked in my head: We’re making these nodules really well. No one really understands how these form or why these form or what conditions they form in.”

That’s when she shifted her research focus from creating healthy tissue to exploring the disease process.

The ultimate goal of her research is to find drugs that can target the major pathways involved in heart valve disease. Masters emphasizes there is no medication currently available that will stop

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Biomedical Engineering www.bme.wisc.edu

Technology helps heal humans and horsesProfessorRayVanderby always thought there was more information

in an ultrasound signal than people were using. Vanderby and his students specialize in tissue healing and regeneration in musculo-

skeletal tissues—and they can use all the information about damaged tissue they can get. That’s where ultrasound can be an added benefit. “If we’re only taking a picture of a damaged area and not the rest of the information out of sound waves,” he says, “we’re leaving useful information behind. A picture doesn’t tell you if it’s structurally sound or if it has mechanical integrity. But with sound waves, you can get that information.”

So when his student Hirohito Kobayashi approached him about researching sound wave propagation, Vanderby was interested. In 2007, using the pair’s UW-Madison ultrasound research, Vanderby and Kobayashi co-founded a technology company, Echometrix.

In fall 2012, the FDA approved Echometrix to bring EchoSoft, its first commercial product, to market. EchoSoft is a system that tracks motion, deformation and ultrasonic echo magnitude change for use in conjunction with ultrasound images. Physicians can use EchoSoft to gain a quantitative

assessment of the stiffness of muscles, ligaments and tendons to help them diagnose and treat injuries.

The pair originally envisioned helping treat injuries suffered by workers, soldiers and human athletes. However, the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine has found EchoSoft to offer reliable, valuable results for its own patients. “We’re applying this technology to athletic horses,” Vanderby says. “There aren’t a lot of animals that get the same tendon injuries that humans get, but horses do. And since horse owners have so much invested in them, knowing when there’s an injury and when it’s healed is very valuable information.”

Vanderby believes that EchoSoft’s universality will help to expand its applications beyond diagnosing musculoskeletal tissue damage in humans and horses. By being aware of the ultrasound hardware currently in use, the team at Echometrix designed EchoSoft to work with virtually any computer that receives ultrasound images. “Commercially, we’re focused on ligaments and tendons because that’s what’s available in my lab,” Vanderby says. “But that’s just a starting point.”

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“If you do this with tissue,” he says, “you learn something about the tissue’s scattering properties. And, even more importantly, those tissue scattering properties appear to have a very clear link with risk of cancer.”

It’s from this research that Rogers plans to create a low-cost process to screen for cancer. Using an idea called field carcinogenesis, the goal is to be able to detect risk by viewing a surrogate site within the body. “You don’t have to look at where the tumor may actually form,” he says. “You can identify places where these changes in scattering properties are indicative of risk, even at a more accessible site.”

The ability to use a more accessible site on the body to screen for cancer could lead to less expensive, less invasive cancer screenings. “The challenges with cancer are astounding,” Rogers says. “Coming up with ways that you can cost-effectively screen people and identify people with risk is better for individuals and it’s better for society.”

Fighting disease by re-creating it

heart valve disease once it starts. “That’s because we don’t know what this process is yet,” she says. “Once we identify all the things going on inside the cell that regulate these processes, we can identify drugs that are inhibitors of the different pathways that lead to disease.”

Heart valve disease is not the only disease Masters is trying to reverse engineer. With Assistant ProfessorPamelaKreeger, Masters

also is trying to replicate a cancer environment. Using a similar process to create tumor tissues, Masters and Kreeger hope to better understand the cancer process and to figure out why some anti-tumor drugs are more effective than others.

One of the major future challenges Masters and her students will face is replicating the different stages of a disease. Previously, the team has only been able to examine diseases in a single time-point, like a crime-scene reconstruction. But, by re-creating the stages of disease, Masters hopes to be able to distinguish whether factors are present in disease as a result of the disease or because they caused it. “The ultimate question here is what is the initiating factor,” she says. “And that is much, much trickier than replicating diseased tissue.”

The National Institutes of Health funds Masters’ research.

Light reflects risk of cancer

Seated at the intersection of an academic department and two research institutes, Assistant ProfessorJeremyRogers finds himself in what he

calls a perfect opportunity. A co-investigator in the UW-Madison Laboratory for Optical and

Computational Instrumentation (LOCI) and a member of the McPherson Eye Research Institute, Rogers welcomes the highs that come from collaboration. “The institutes are really interesting because they bring people together from very different backgrounds,” he says. “You get everybody together and it’s really amazing what we can do. The institutes really facilitate that.”

Rogers comes to UW-Madison after earning a PhD in optics from the University of Arizona and doing a postdoc at Northwestern. While at Northwestern, Rogers began researching a process that will screen for cancer using a spectroscopy method that obtains data from inside the body using specialized optics inside an endoscope.

Rogers’ research stems from a phenomenon called coherent backscattering, where he measures the intensity of light waves reflected off individual cells.

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Postdoc Sarah Kuehl, School of Veterinary Medicine Associate Professor Sabrina Brounts, and Professor Ray Vanderby are testing their technology on horses, which often experience tendon injuries like human injuries.

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Chemical and Biological Engineering www.engr.wisc.edu/che

In 1999, researchers in New York City identified the first case of West Nile virus, which over the next five years spread across the country. Infected

mosquitoes transmit the virus into reptiles, amphibians, and some mammals—including humans—and into more than 100 species of birds, which “host” the virus.

At the time, identifying the disease in dead birds was cumbersome and time-consuming because existing tools required a different diagnostic reagent to detect antibodies in each species. “We developed a way to use liquid crystal to report antibodies to West Nile virus in a way that was species-agnostic,” says John T. and Magdalen L. Sobota Professor NicholasAbbott, who with Christopher Murphy and Barbara Israel (then both faculty in the School of Veterinary Medicine), co-founded Platypus Technologies in 2000 to commercialize the technology.

Liquid crystals, which are materials that combine properties of solids and liquid, are known to change their ordering and optical appearance in response to stimuli such as temperature or electrical fields. As a result, they are useful in everything from cell phone displays to environmental sensors.

Over the past 13 years, the Platypus founders have developed a variety of liquid crystal-based technologies for protein and cell-based studies and environmental monitoring. In August 2013, the company debuted a wearable sensing badge that allows, for example, workers in an oil refinery to accurately monitor

their exposure to hydrogen sulfide in real time. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulates worker exposure to the chemical, which is a highly toxic, flammable gas—and currently, hydrogen sulfide samples gathered in the workplace are analyzed days later in a laboratory.

The badge is somewhat like a detector worn by radiological workers. “A worker can read it at the end of a shift,” says Abbott.

In addition to its own technologies, the company also licenses several UW-Madison patents from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. And, says Abbott, one key to long-term success, simply, is persistence. “It takes a long time to translate a university discovery into a technology,” he says. “We’ve been at it more than 10 years.”

When Steenbock and Michel Boudart Professor JamesDumesic looks at a dried corn stalk, he sees the energy embedded within it.

For years, Dumesic and his colleagues have made major contributions to the science and process of converting plant waste into transportation fuel.

And while renewable fuels historically have been the end goal, the researchers now are focusing on a suite of useful chemicals they can create throughout the conversion process. “The biorenewables area has moved from focusing on biofuels to now looking at biochemicals, and we have some very good technologies for making these furan-based chemicals,” says Dumesic.

Recently, for example, his group demonstrated an efficient process for simultaneously converting two differing components of plant biomass into either furfural or levulinic acid, which are valuable non-petroleum-based commodity chemicals. In the United States, furfural is used to manufacture

everything from plastics to pesticides—yet manufacturers import it almost exclusively from China—and levulinic acid is a value-added biochemical used to make solvents, monomers for the polymer industry, and fuel additives.

Now, Dumesic and colleagues at Iowa State University have founded Glucan Biorenewables to take advantage of sustainable processes they have developed for converting plant sugars into furan derivatives. The company

aims to be a reliable U.S. source for such chemicals.

The team, which includes Brent Shanks,

an Iowa State professor of chemical and biological engineering; Peter Keeling, the Iowa State National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center for Biorenewable Chemicals innovation director; and CEO Victoria Gonzalez, received grants from the NSF Small Business Innovation Research program and the state of Iowa. Currently, the group is raising funds to conduct pre-pilot testing and is seeking venture capital funding for a pilot plant.

In an effort to strengthen disciplines that align with its strategic goals, Dow Chemical

Company has invested $14.5 million over five years in research at UW-Madison. Part of a broader funding program Dow launched in 2011 at 11 universities, the initiative combines expertise in engineering and chemistry in a quest for innovative, sustainable solutions in such areas as chemical production and energy generation and storage.

The company’s motivation to support university partners is driven by its interest in helping those institutions stay strong in disciplines important to Dow. Based in part on the strength of the UW-Madison chemistry and chemical engineering programs, the company established its partnership with the university in late 2011. “It’s about technology and talent,” says Lou Graziano, director of university R&D strategy for Dow Sustainable Technologies & Innovation Sourcing.

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Growing the suite of bio-based chemicals

On the university side, bright, motivated undergraduates conduct research alongside graduate students. Through the partnership, they gain experience interacting with an industrial partner and potential employer.

Several UW-Madison faculty teams are collaborating on research with Dow scientists, who invest at least a quarter of their time in projects that include studying new materials and new methods for coating battery components; using catalysis to convert natural gas-derived raw materials into higher-value chemicals; investigating catalytic systems for green chemical production; developing novel membrane reactors for safer, more controllable reaction conditions; and improving solar

power generation through advanced collectors, thermal storage and system design. “We’d love to see some innovative solutions and IP that have commercial relevance for us,” says Graziano. “But our primary goal is to build a sustained, mutually beneficial relationship with Wisconsin through collaboration in the disciplines that are essential to continued success.”

It’s a collaboration with chemistry

Dow Chemical invests in university talent and technology

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Civil and Environmental Engineering www.engr.wisc.edu/cee

performance and reduced congestion,” says Pfeiffer. “We thought it was good enough to merit a detailed review.”

Pfeiffer, who earned his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering in 1978 from UW-Madison, engaged two independent peer reviewers. After some minor modifications, he ultimately approved The Martin’s coupling beam design.

Generally made from bentonite clay sandwiched between textile

or membrane layers, geosynthetic clay liners are the “gold standard” for preventing industrial, hazardous and municipal solid wastes from seeping into the environment. Such liners are particularly effective barriers, because as the clay absorbs water, it swells and the pore spaces between its particles shrink.

Yet, even these high-performing liners can’t contain everything. “Over approximately the past decade, university research—with UW-Madison leading the way—has shown that certain chemistries can negatively impact the hydraulic performance of bentonite-based liners,” says Chris Athanassopoulos, technical services manager with environmental solutions company CETCO. “These limitations could prevent the use of these liners in important emerging markets.”

Take, for example, red mud, a toxic byproduct of the process for refining bauxite ore to produce aluminum oxide. Because it is highly alkaline, red mud can dissolve even geosynthetic clay barriers used to contain low-level radioactive waste.

Rather than fight that high pH, however, CETCO began an effort to engineer polymer-based bentonite clays that would work with it. Essentially, the

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company has amended its clay with polymer molecules that ride the liquid waste through the clay and fill its pores. “We’ve got large molecules clogging the large pores. They’re really resilient and aren’t degraded by the chemicals flowing through the barrier,” says Wisconsin Distinguished Professor CraigBenson, who is working with CETCO to study the mechanisms underlying this process. “We’ve never made anything more impervious. It’s blown all the other products away.”

Benson tested and confirmed the material’s long-term performance in

contact with leachates known to be problematic for standard bentonite. “Data from a well-known, well-respected independent industry expert was valuable in gaining acceptance from engineers, owners and regulators,” says Athanassopoulos. “This year, we are seeing the new products gain some traction, with important project wins in North America and overseas.”

He says the company’s long-standing partnership with UW-Madison has been mutually beneficial. “In working together to study the limitations of traditional liner systems with high-strength wastes, and the potential application of polymer-modified clays, there has been a healthy exchange of information between our company and the university, with both sides learning and benefiting,” he says.

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eel back the outer layers of a skyscraper built in an area vulnerable to earthquakes and

you’ll find a tangle of steel-reinforced concrete beams that span doors, windows and other openings in the structure’s many supporting walls.

Those coupling beams play a critical role in helping a skyscraper withstand the effects of an earthquake. Yet, says structural engineer

Cary Kopczynski, coupling beams reinforced with rebar are congested and difficult to build.

Kopczynski’s Bellevue, Washington, structural engineering firm designs high-rise buildings in seismically active areas on the west coast. Nearly a decade ago, he began exploring ways to simplify coupling beam construction.

Along the way, he met C.K. Wang Professor GustavoParra-

Montesinos, whose research centers around using fiber-reinforced concrete to improve the behavior of buildings during an earthquake. With University of Michigan colleague James K. Wight and students, Parra-Montesinos developed and tested a fiber-reinforced concrete coupling beam design that virtually eliminates the otherwise standard labyrinth of rebar—yet maintains the building’s integrity during an earthquake.

Kopczynski recognized the design’s potential and incorporated the design into The Martin, a luxury high-rise apartment building that opened in 2013 in trendy Midtown Seattle. Since the new design wasn’t part of the American Concrete Institute building code, Kopczynski worked closely with Steve Pfeiffer, engineering and technical codes manager in the Seattle Department of Planning and Development staff. Kopczynski’s presentation to the department included detailed results of Parra-Montesinos’ and Wight’s research. “What they were claiming was better

For Boldt, adding lean manufactur-ing philosophies also helps eliminate redundancy and waste, resulting in projects the company’s clients say exceed their expectations.

The approach sounds like a logical choice—yet it’s a choice that also comes with a culture change and some solid evidence.

That’s where Professor AwadHanna comes in. Drawing on extensive connections in the construction industry, Hanna and his collaborators collected and analyzed data about virtually every IPD project in the nation. In addition to cost of project and time to completion, they also measured factors such as quality, worker safety, ease of communication and customer satisfaction, among others.

Now, Hanna’s database is the largest IPD project database in the world and the study showed IPD outperformed other traditional project delivery approaches. “We get that from our customers, but Dr. Hanna expanded it,” says Boldt.

As a result, he says, his company is better able to help its clients under-stand the risks—and rewards—of an integrated lean project delivery approach.

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This Seattle high rise includes streamlined coupling beams.

Boldt used IPD to construct the Sutter Health Anderson Lucchetti Center in Sacramento, California. (Image: The Boldt Company)

Innovation lifts limits of landfill liners

Although The Martin is its first application, Kopczynski believes the design will see broader use in the future. “It enabled us to remove a significant portion of the reinforcing bar—and the bars that it removed are the most challenging to place, so they’re more likely to be constructed properly,” he says. “It streamlines construction, reduces cost and speeds up the schedule. And a lot of good things happen.”

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n America,” says Tom Boldt, “we revel in low price.” It’s true, particularly in tough economic times. We’re a nation of cost-

and value-conscious consumers seeking to get the biggest bang for our buck. However, in many situations, the lowest price doesn’t automatically guarantee a high-quality product or a high level of customer satisfaction.

Take, for example, the commercial construction industry. “Clients will look at a project and say, ‘We thought we had a great contract, engineer, architect, contractor—and we still had problems. Who’s at fault?’” says Boldt, who is chief executive officer of The Boldt Company. “As we look at all these things, we say, ‘How can this be improved?’”

Based in Appleton, Wisconsin, with full-service offices around the country, Boldt is among the largest professional construction services firms in the United States. The company is a national leader in using lean construction practices to deliver innovative, high-value solutions that save clients time and money. And in addition to conventional construction approaches such as design/bid/build, Boldt has added integrated lean project delivery (a term it has trademarked) to its suite of services.

Integrated project delivery, or IPD, is an emerging, collaborative approach through which clients, designers and key contractors unite to plan and construct a project. As partners, they meet regularly, tackle issues immediately, and share equally in risk and reward.

Computers serve as powerful tools for categorizing, displaying and searching data, but they’re only the medium for big data. “We really need people to interact with the machines to make them

work well,” says McFarland-Bascom Professor RobNowak. Unlike machines, people work at a finite speed and at rising costs. Nowak

wants to improve interactive systems that can optimize the performance of both humans and machines tackling big data problems together.

Typically, human experts—people who categorize data—will receive a large, random dataset to label. The computer then looks at those labels to build a basis of comparison for labeling new data in the future. Nowak suggests the model should be flipped. “The machine gets the set of examples, then asks a human for further classification of a specific set of data that it might find confusing.”

With support from the National Science Foundation and Air Force Office of Scientific Research, Nowak has been exploring an active learning model, in which the machine receives all the data up front. Initially, the machine makes very poor predictions, improving as a human expert supplies clarifications for confusing data.

To explore these sorts of human-machine interactions, Nowak and his student Kevin Jamieson have applied the idea to a technology that’s a natural fit in Wisconsin—an iOS app that can predict which craft beers a user will prefer. Using data gleaned from searching through thousands of beer reviews on Ratebeer.com, the researchers’ algorithm presents the user with two beer options, then has them choose their preference, slowly winnowing the options down toward to the user’s ideal beer.

“Basically, if I already know that you prefer Spotted Cow to Guinness, then I’m probably not going to ask you to compare Spotted Cow to some other stout,” says Nowak. “Because there are relationships between every beer, I don’t have to ask you for every comparison.”

These sorts of “this-or-that” determinations tend to be more stable than categorizations based on ranking scales or other more subjective measures,

which are more vulnerable to psychological priming effects and can change over time. The finer-point comparisons from humans offer the machine more reliable data to improve its categorization and prediction abilities.

And most importantly, these comparisons allow machines to process data much, much faster, since they require less human help to categorize the data. Nowak says the app can make a personalized beer recommendation based on only 10 to 20 comparisons. That sort of efficiency becomes important as data sets get bigger and human labor can’t keep up.

“There’s no research to be done on the infrastructure side,” he says. “We have big data infrastructure. What we don’t understand is how to optimally yoke humans and machines together in big data analyses.”

Closing the loop on big data … one beer at a time

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Rob Nowak and Kevin Jamieson.

Electrical and Computer Engineering www.engr.wisc.edu/ece

A ‘smart’ move for electronics

Honking cars, flashing lights, clicking keyboards. We face a daily bombardment of noises, sights and smells that the thalamus—a relay

center for sensory data flowing into the brain—sorts into useful information. That frees up our frontal lobe to ruminate on the important questions ... like

which coffee shop to visit. However, most electronic devices aren’t as flexible when it comes to sorting through sensory information. Information

has to be parsed by a central processor byte by byte, says Philip Dunham Reed Professor MikkoLipasti.

And, processing data constantly is a quick route to a dead battery.

Lipasti and his collaborators think that by drawing some inspiration from our own brains, researchers

might be able to build smart devices that can efficiently sort out the environmental information that matters. “The

mammalian nervous system is very good at filtering out uninteresting information,” says Lipasti. “We’re trying to deploy a synthetic version of that into silicon.”

Part of a research area known as neuromorphic computing, the core technology is something Lipasti has been working on

since 2006. The idea itself would be realized in two parts—a low-power processor for monitoring environmental data and a software

interface that other applications can use to listen for specific stimuli. “An application can tell our processor, ‘When X happens, wake me up and let me know, because that means that the elderly person has fallen,’” says Lipasti.

He’s closer than ever to bringing it to market via Thalchemy, a startup company founded with Atif Hashmi, Andrew Nere and Professor EmeritusJimSmith.

The National Science Foundation saw potential in the concept and admitted the team to its Innovation Corps program, which provided funding and a seven-week entrepreneurial boot camp where experts asked basic but critical questions about the technology’s product potential. “You have to find out if you have anything that anyone would want to buy,” says Lipasti.

Insurance and health information companies in particular have shown interest in the potential safety benefits. “For example, we can build a continuous sensor that will know when you get behind the wheel of your car, triggering the phone to disable text messaging,” says Lipasti.

The excitement really will start once the tools his team is building are finally in the hands of developers, since they’ll be able to use them in ways he can’t even imagine yet. “If you can infer the context of a device, you can infer all kinds of cool things,” he says.

The team also has received funding from the National Science Foundation Small Business Innovation Research Program, the UW-Madison Graduate School, and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

Professor B.RossBarmish hopes his current National Science Foundation-

funded research will build a bridge between control theorists and financial scholars.

Barmish starts with notions that defy the predictive statistical approach by which financial scholars tend to swear.

“Instead of using statistics and saying, ‘Well, something worked in the past,’ I say, ‘No, here’s a theoretical basis that doesn’t depend on the past or future,’” Barmish says.

Enter control theory, a field of applied mathematics that has addressed the control and stability of systems ranging from physical machinery to economics. Barmish is particularly interested in “robustness”—the ability of a system or approach to hold up under uncertainty and disturbances. It’s easy to see, then, why he’d be drawn to the volatile and complex world of financial markets.

The day-to-day work of his current research involves running simulations of what returns a control-theory approach might yield

with certain stocks. Barmish models a trader’s decisions as a sort of feedback loop, responding to returns on investment with patterns determined by various algorithms. To simplify it greatly, sometimes this can mean investing more money as returns increase, or investing less as returns decrease.

The IEEE Control Systems Society has awarded Barmish the 2013 Henrik W. Bode Lecture Prize, which recognizes distinguished contributions to control systems science or engineering. In his abstract for the Bode lecture, which he’ll deliver in December 2013 at the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in Florence, Italy, he boldly proposes a new theoretical framework for stock trading.

Barmish’s ultimate goal isn’t to give traders new “market-beating” tricks, he says, but to show that control theory can explain strate-gies that previously have been studied only in a statistical framework. “My accountability has to be to the application area,” he says.

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Back in the mid-1980s, Fisher Barton founder Richard Wilkey (BSMetE ’59) was looking for coatings to extend the life of the lawnmower blades his Wisconsin-based company manufactured. For help, he looked to

FrankWorzala, then a professor of metallurgical and mineral engineering, and Worzala’s master’s student Bill Lenling (BSMetE ‘84, MSMetE ‘86), who was seeking research funding.

Ultimately, the project was so successful that Wilkey spun the coatings idea off as Thermal Spray Technologies, or TST. And, after initially working on thermal spray coating technologies at Sandia National Laboratories, Lenling joined TST and now is company president.

Thermal spray coating is a process in which particles of a material are sprayed onto a surface at high velocity, and the particles essentially melt and spread evenly across the surface. TST develops thermal-sprayed coatings—which, for example, improve wear, oxidation or corrosion resistance; electrical conduction or insulation, and biocompatibility—for products in such industries as aerospace, electronics, food processing, biomedical and energy.

While thermal-sprayed coatings are the company’s focus, UW-Madison has the facility and expertise that will enable TST to explore other options. “Cold spray does neat things other processes can’t do,” says Lenling. “Cold

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Engineering Physics www.engr.wisc.edu/ep

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spray is more like friction welding of the particles on each other. So, you don’t have high-temperature reactions, and there are applications where that can be very important.”

UW-Madison is the only U.S. university with a high-pressure cold-spray system, which Distinguished Research Professor KumarSridharan acquired through a U.S. Department of Defense instrumentation grant. One of a handful of U.S. cold spray coating experts, Sridharan and his students currently are using the system to conduct cold-spray research for the U.S. Navy and for accident-tolerant nuclear reactor claddings.

Now also—as Wilkey did more than two decades ago—Lenling and TST technology director Daryl Crawmer have turned to UW-Madison to explore cold-spray applications. They are collaborating with Sridharan on research that could help them decide if a foray into cold spray coating technology is a worthwhile pursuit for the company. With a UW System applied research grant, they’re studying the technique for increasing the durability and corrosion resistance of high-density electronics for the semiconductor industry. “This collaboration can help us figure out if we can make a business investment into the technology,” says Lenling. “It’s the kind of thing that will help us keep up with our competitors.”

It was a sweltering day on Long Island, and young RodLakes and his family were stuck in

the middle of a traffic jam. Up the road, there was a drawbridge. Its two halves had expanded due to the heat and, instead of closing properly, the pieces overlapped.

Though at the time Lakes didn’t realize it, the experience neatly illustrated the concept of thermal expansion: Heat a material, and it will expand; cool the material, and it will contract. “That’s part of why things fail,” says the professor. “They expand and contract and fail to fit, or crack from thermal stress.”

While a laptop computer failure due to that warming and cooling might be personally catastrophic, the effects of thermal expansion are magnified in such aerospace applications as satellites or space telescopes, which don’t enjoy the benefits of an atmosphere that can help regulate their temperature.

Nearly two decades ago, Lakes encountered research that suggested there were high and low bounds on thermal expansion in a composite material, and he set out to create a lattice that pushed the high and low boundaries of thermal expansion in composite materials. His analysis

yielded an open, honeycomb-shaped structure in which bilayer materials form the ribs. “If I make the rib elements of two different materials, I can get any expansion I want,” says Lakes. That was 1996.

Since then, other researchers have followed up, and recently, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency announced plans to build on the idea, particularly for applications in space.

Now, using common materials such as steel, aluminum and invar, Lakes and master’s student Jeremy Lehman have developed lattices that are tuned to exactly zero expansion, yet are optimized to be as stiff and strong as possible.

Because the UW-Madison experiment Pegasus is among the world’s most compact tokamaks, the device plays a unique role in global efforts to develop fusion as a viable energy source.

In particular, Pegasus—a very-low-aspect-ratio tokamak that has a small center hole and nearly spherical shape—serves as a testbed for plasma startup techniques that ultimately could scale to larger tokamak devices.

For example, led by Professor RayFonck, Pegasus researchers demonstrated a technique that enables them to start the experiment and create a stable plasma by injecting current through a small plasma torch as an alternative to traditional induction-based startup.

Now, Professor CarlSovinec and student John O’Bryan are solving theoretical models that help them understand how the plasma grows, from its start as a simple, localized current across electrodes through its evolution into a plasma that fills the entire tokamak.

Starting and sustaining a plasma in a tokamak isn’t as simple as flipping the “on” switch to power up the device. Rather, the process entails physical effects that span spatial and temporal scales and involve a phenomenon called magnetohydrodynamic activity—essentially, how electrical and magnetic fields interact to move, or “drive,” the plasma.

Sovinec is among the developers of the NIMROD code for solving magnetohydrodynamic equations. With support from the U.S. Department of Energy, he and O’Bryan used the code to conduct numerical simulations of the Pegasus startup technique on computers both at UW-Madison and at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Their simulations reproduced the initial behavior in which the current in Pegasus follows the vacuum magnetic field set by the experiment’s external magnetic coils. It snakes up a helical path—somewhat like a loosely coiled spring. The simulations also show how those passes interact with each other as the current increases, the plasma doubles back around, and fills itself in.

The research, says Sovinec, will help Pegasus scientists implement the technology on a larger scale—the National Spherical Torus Experiment tokamak at Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. “The more we learn through simulation, the more we can understand and optimize noninductive startup and make it work well at Princeton,” he says.

From helix to donut: Understanding how a Pegasus plasma forms

In Wisconsin, cold-spray coating knowledge is a HOT commodity

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Early-stage plasma

Plasma filling itself in

Stiff, strong and stable composites

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For a state department of transportation, concluding a construction project isn’t simply a matter of dropping a final check in the mail to the

contractor.Rather, the highly administrative closeout process includes such tasks

as ensuring the project objectives have been met, auditing labor and payroll records, and reviewing and reconciling material tests and material quantities, among others. For the Wisconsin Department of Transportation, it was a process that could take as long as 12 months—and one the department hoped to improve.

The DOT received a unique opportunity to standardize and streamline the construction closeout process across its eight regional offices in July 2012, when the Wisconsin governor directed state agencies to identify ways to operate more efficiently. DOT officials contacted Director of Corporate EducationCarlVieth and Assistant Faculty AssociateJeffOelke, a lean process improvement expert, for help.

Working closely with staff in each of the eight regional DOT offices, Oelke and PhD student Dee Miller developed a glossary of terminology and adopted each office’s best practices to optimize and standardize the closeout process across the state. The group also defined the roles and responsibilities of people involved in the process, created a flowchart, improved software that tracks the progress of a construction project, and updated procedures in the DOT standard specifications and construction and materials manual. Now, members of any closeout team in any regional office can network, share advice and problem-solve together.

Already, the new team-based closeout approach has had a positive effect on staff morale. “This teaming has generated a greater understanding of roles and responsibilities and, more importantly, developed a respect for others and a recognition of how important everyone is to the successful completion of our projects and our work,” says Beth Cannestra, who directs the DOT Bureau of Project Development.

Throughout the project, Oelke and Miller mentored DOT staff, giving them the knowledge and tools to lead future process improvement projects. And in the long run, both the DOT and contractors will benefit,. “We will have project issues resolved in the field and at a time when they are best resolved,” says Cannestra. “Contract payments will be made closer to the time of the work and encumbered funds that are not needed will be freed much sooner to be utilized on other projects.”

It’s an unprecedented change, but one that will elevate the quality of engineers who practice in Wisconsin: For the first time ever, the

Wisconsin Department of Safety and Professional Services is requiring professional engineers seeking to renew their licenses to complete 30 professional development hours every two years.

And while engineers can meet these requirements in many ways, the Department of Engineering Professional Development offers a wide variety of continuing education courses that enable practicing engineers to update and expand their technical knowledge.

Among those courses is a two-hour seminar that fulfills the professional conduct and ethics training requirement.

Faculty Associates LauraGrossenbacher (who teaches ethics to UW-Madison undergraduate engineers) and HowardRosen (who develops continuing education short courses for practicing engineers) began offering the two-hour continuing-education seminar in October 2012. Since then, they and other instructors have traveled around Wisconsin to deliver tailored versions of the ethics course to engineers working in both the public and private sectors.

Initially, says Grossenbacher, the engineers are skeptical. After all, how difficult is it to make the “right” decision?

As it turns out, the answer to that question is somewhere along the lines of, “More difficult than you’d think,” given that politics, the bottom line, deadlines and job security are among the many factors that can influence decisions. In fact, in each ethics class, Grossenbacher and Rosen present case studies relevant to their students’ line of work, and they ask the engineers to talk through all the options. “People need to think through these things and realize their immediate answer is not always the best answer,” she says.

Engineers leave with tools that help them navigate situations in which they must make a difficult ethical decision. “So many people have said they were dreading the class, and at the end, can’t believe it’s over so soon,” says Grossenbacher. “The new ethics requirements get people in the door for our seminar. But once they’re there, many of them realize it is a great opportunity to discuss the kinds of dilemmas and ambiguities that keep them up at night.”

Engineering Professional Development www.engr.wisc.edu/epd

Under construction: Revamped process speeds DOT project closeouts

Unique expertise and education for the worldof workshops and seminars about engineering and managing water and wastewater systems and facilities. And Professor Emeritus WillisLong(top photo, center) participated in an international workshop in China that explored synchronized phasor measurements, an emerging technology that could mitigate network disturbances in China’s expanding electric power network. “We have a unique mix of products, services and capabilities that is quite

rare,” says Vieth. “As a multidisciplinary department, we’re able to bridge many engi-neering disciplines to meet the unique needs of interna-tional customers.”

25

A new opportunity for P.E.’s to talk about ethics

24

Known as the nature isle of the Caribbean, Dominica features waterfalls, mountainous rainforests and an abundance of rare plant, animal and bird species, many of which are protected in an extensive

natural park system. Because of its location in the eastern Caribbean, this island nation is particularly vulnerable to hurricanes.

This combination of weather, nature and terrain have presented engineers in Dominica unique challenges in their quest to design a robust overhead system for distributing electricity from three generation plants across the island. So when the chief electrical engineer in Dominica heard about Assistant Faculty Associate MitchBradt’s course, Designing Electrical Overhead Distribution Lines, he knew it would fit his training needs.

In summer 2013, Director of Corporate Education Carl Vieth and instructor John Miner traveled to the island and delivered Bradt’s customized course to attendees not only from Dominica, but also St. Kitts, Barbados and the Bahamas (pictured, far right).

It’s one of many examples of the department’s reach beyond university, state and even national borders, says Vieth. “We truly are a global player in engineering continuing education,” he says. “The UW brand is internationally recognized, we have a strong international alumni base, and lots of those people become repeat customers and our advocates in the engineering communities in which they work.”

In fact, in 2012, EPD courses drew participants from 82 countries, while program directors offered training at more than a dozen locations outside the United States. Professor PhilipO’Leary now is exploring opportunities for delivering continuing engineering education in China.

The department’s international roles also include significant research and technical contributions. Faculty AssociateThomasSmith, for example, is a leader on a multi-national team developing ISO 55000, an international standard for asset manage-ment. At the invitation of the National Technical University of Ukraine Kiev Polytechnic Institute, Program Director NedPaschke spent several weeks in the Ukraine and delivered a series

26

Industrial and Systems Engineeringwww.engr.wisc.edu/ie

27

It’s 1 a.m. and heavy fog cover has caused a terrible accident on the Interstate. A highly trained medical team climbs aboard the medevac

chopper and a highly trained pilot flies the team to the scene. The problem, heading into a potentially life-threatening situation, is that these teams train in isolation and often have competing goals.

This is the culture of aeromedical evacuation teams. Pilots and medical personnel train separately but must make split-second, team-based decisions that often put the entire team at risk to save a patient’s life.

It is a culture Chris Johnson aims to improve. A postdoctoral researcher working with Associate ProfessorDoug

Wiegmann, Johnson is hoping to better integrate aeromedical pilot and medic training using a combination of improved flight simulation software and customized hardware.

This integrated training environment will enable both crews to recognize that their decisions are influenced by potentially conflicting goals. “The medical crew’s goal is to provide quality healthcare to the patient,” says Johnson. “The goal of the aviation crew is the safety of everyone. Sometimes those goals are competing, and that’s what needs to be studied.”

The integrated simulation team training also allows researchers to test the hypothesis that pilots may give in to social influences. “Medical needs may influence a pilot to fly into bad weather to save a patient,” says Johnson, “but that might compromise all of their lives.”

This team-based decision making not only could better prepare pilots for the rigors of aeromedical operations, but also—through scenarios in which the safety of the patient is at odds with the safety of the entire crew— ensure the helicopters are better equipped.

It may be surprising, given the benefits of integrated training, that Johnson feels his biggest challenge is political. “Currently, pilots don’t get credit for training with medical staff in a simulated cabin,” he says. “And nobody wants to pay for more training. But I think that, by putting these teams together, we’re going to save a lot of lives and advance an industry that’s very heroic.”

LAYING THE GROUNDWORK FOR SAFER AIR AID

the 5 percent you really need to worry about,” she says. “A lot of times operations research is exactly the right tool to use, because it answers the question, ‘How do we best utilize limited resources and imperfect data?’”

McLay found a robust new research target after the 2010 “Snowmageddon,” a storm that dumped more than 3 feet of snow on parts of the Washington, D.C., region. In the aftermath, there were controversies over poorly managed emergency resources, response times and decisions.

This was a perfect research storm for McLay, who married her longtime work in analysis of emergency response times with data on severe weather. Her analysis of the Snowmaggedon response, compared against more typical weather days, revealed importance differences that could improve decision-making and prioritizing calls during future weather emergencies.

Emergency responders develop notoriously good instincts in reducing their response times, but McLay hopes her work bolsters those instincts with hard data on managing calls during high-volume or high-risk periods.

The Wisconsin Idea was created as a way to keep the benefits of UW-Madison education from being an isolated island of knowledge

and technological advances. In 2013, the Center for Quick Response Manufacturing (QRM) and the UW E-Business Consortium (UWEBC)— two of the biggest bridges connecting university research and Wisconsin industries—are celebrating anniversaries.

For the past 20 years, the QRM center has been helping member companies reduce company-wide lead times to become more efficient and profitable in the increasingly competi-tive global marketplace. And for the past 15 years, the UWEBC has fostered a collaborative learning community for Wisconsin’s leading companies, and has focused on thought leadership, business best practices and emerging technologies.

One of the architects of these two bridges, QRM founding director and now-Professor Emeritus RajanSuri, wanted to show that U.S. manufacturers could compete against manufacturers world-wide regardless of labor costs. Suri and current QRM Center director, Professor AnanthKrishnamurthy, have done just that over the past 20 years, helping more than 200 companies improve their bottom lines by shaving inefficiencies and reducing lead times from assembly to delivery.

Seeing the QRM Center as a partnership between companies, faculty and students at UW-Madison, Suri could not be prouder of the center’s success. “We’ve not only preserved manufacturing jobs,” he says, “but we’ve grown manufacturing jobs in our member companies in the face of stiff global competition.”

While the QRM Center is focused on company-wide strategies, the UWEBC applies a holistic view of e-business to its member companies from diverse industries. In 1998, its founder, Professor RajVeeramani, realized that UW-Madison was uniquely positioned to provide a trusted, non-commercial environment where companies can explore, learn about, and examine different e-business technologies and strategies.

Global competition and accelerating advances in technology will require companies to be increasingly nimble, Veeramani says. “The cross-pollination of best practices and innovative ideas, within and across industry sectors, through UWEBC’s unique collaborative learning community is a powerful mechanism to amplify the Wisconsin Idea and to enhance the competitiveness of U.S. companies.”

Her response: Increase the ‘reward’ in high-risk scenarios

ssociate Professor LauraMcLay’s research canvas is massive data—banks of millions of emergency 911 calls, commercial airline flights and ship cargo deliveries—which she uses to

tease out the risk factors in these high-stakes endeavors.As a data challenge, it might seem like searching for the proverbial

needle in the haystack, but McLay is quick to clarify her goal. “You actually never find the needle,” she says. “You just make a better haystack.”

McLay is an expert in operations research, which she defines as “the discipline of applying advanced analytical methods to help make better decisions.” Operations research received a major awareness boost after the September 11 attacks, as an important tool in improving airline screening and security and combating terrorist threats.

McLay works to develop mathematical models to identify how to design risk-based passenger screening methods given that the “haystack” of data can be used as a type of passenger risk assessment tool. “You’re really trying to weed out all of the low-risk events and be able to focus on maybe

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Materials Science and Engineering www.engr.wisc.edu/mse

29

For members of the Advanced Materials Industrial Consortium, some of the greatest benefits of membership include access to world-class research—and to the students at all educational levels

who conduct that research. “The research we have here is five years or more ahead of the things our members are doing, and they want to know about it,” says Senior Scientist Jon McCarthy, who is development director for the consortium.

The 25 consortium members range in size from very small to large and include such industry leaders as Sigma-Aldrich, Thermo Fisher Scientific and Brady Corp., as well as startups and emerging companies like SolRayo, Bust the Rust and Silatronix. Many member companies recruit UW-Madison students for internships and several conduct sponsored research projects with both students and faculty. Additionally, members can network during an annual meeting that features a student research poster session and faculty, industry researcher and student talks on relevant topics such as polymers, photonics, biomaterials or energy materials, among others.

Through membership in the 8-year-old consortium, companies also can use a variety of specialized tools in the shared-instrument facilities on campus. These facilities offer campus and non-university researchers both on-location and remote access to state-of-the art instruments that include an FEI Titan aberration-corrected scanning transmission electron microscope, an imaging x-ray photoelectron spectrometer, a Zeiss CrossBeam field-emission scanning electron microscope with a focused ion

beam, a Zeiss confocal scanning microscope, and an atomic force microscope for imaging biological samples, among many other instruments for imaging,

characterization and analysis. “We have facilities these companies don’t have,” says McCarthy, who oversees the UW-Madison Materials Science Center, Soft Material Center and clean rooms in the Wisconsin Center for Applied Microelectronics. “We have approximately 130 principal investigators who work with materials in diverse fields, about 600

grad students and postdocs, and 30 companies using these facilities. With all of the materials research and characterization capability that’s going on in these laboratories, we have a broad capability to offer state and national companies—many of which don’t have their own R&D, but should know about us.”

At first glance, they may look lush and green, but many of the nation’s forests also are chock-full of brush—often, invasive species and disease-transmitting biomass—just waiting for a spark. “One of the reasons wildfires are so catastrophic is that many forests are unhealthy and there’s

a lot of excess biomass in the forest,” says Joseph Jakes. “By creating new and expanded markets for the low-value biomass, we aim to provide economic incentives for people to come in and selectively remove the hazardous biomass—which will simultaneously accelerate forest restoration and create jobs in the U.S. forest products industry.”

A materials research engineer at the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Jakes (BSChE ’05, MSMSP ’07, PhDMS&E ’10) is using advanced research tools to extend the value of that “waste” wood—for example, in developing more effective bio-derived adhesives for engineered products such as plywood or particle board.

When “glued” wood gets wet, it swells and causes adhesive bonds to fail. In collaboration with Professor DonStone and PhD student Nayomi Plaza, Jakes is studying, at the cellular level, how those failures occur.

One challenge is that researchers still do not have a clear understanding of the nanostructure of wood. “It’s a very old problem, but there are new techniques for looking at it,” says Stone.

Jakes himself has developed nanoindentation methods that allow researchers to measure the mechanical properties of individual wood cell walls. And working at Argonne National Laboratory, he developed advanced microscopy techniques that allow him to correlate changes in mechanical properties with the amount of adhesive infiltration at the cell-wall level.

He and Plaza have created unique actuators that allow them to study moisture-induced swelling forces where adhesives bond to wood cells. Plaza is conducting research at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where she has developed methods and customized tools that enable her to use neutron scattering to study how unmodified and modified wood swells at different moisture levels.

The big picture, says Jakes, is restoring the nation’s forests and maintaining their health for generations to come. “And in my area, we’re using advanced materials research to try to understand and develop better wood adhesives and to improve the durability of forest products,” he says.

Future looks bright for carbon nanotube solar cells

the power-conversion efficiency of their solar cells in line with that of silicon cells. “What our work shows is that you will be able to get as high efficiency as silicon eventually, and that’s why we’re excited,” says Arnold, who received funding for the research from the Army Research Office.

In an approach that could challenge silicon as the predominant photovoltaic cell material, UW-Madison materials engineers have developed an inexpensive solar cell that exploits carbon nanotubes to

absorb and convert energy from the sun. The advance could lead to solar panels just as efficient, but much less expensive to manufacture, than current panels.

The proof-of-concept carbon nanotube solar cell can convert nearly 75 percent of the light it absorbs into electricity, says Assistant Professor MichaelArnold (right). “We’ve made a really fundamental key step in demonstrating that it will be possible to use these new carbon nanotube materials for solar cells one day,” he says.

Silicon is abundant and an efficient solar energy gatherer, yet is expensive to process and manufacture into solar panels. As a result, researchers are studying alternative materials—among them, carbon nanotubes. The thin spaghetti-like tubes are easy and inexpensive to manufacture, stable and durable, and are both good light absorbers and electrical conductors.

Building on a half-decade of research—including founda-tional studies by PhD student Dominick Bindl—Arnold and PhD student Matthew Shea developed a solar cell that uses carbon nanotubes to collect light and convert it to electricity. Their proof-of-concept solar cell is an ultrathin sheet, or film, of carbon nanotubes layered atop another thin sheet of a material called buckminsterfullerene, or C

60. The nanotubes absorb the bulk of the sunlight

and retain the positive charge, while the C60

draws the negative charge. In contrast with the 15-percent average efficiency of conventional silicon solar cells, the proof of

concept is 1 percent efficient. The next step in boosting that efficiency already is underway. The researchers now are focusing on augmenting the thickness of the carbon nanotube thin film from a mere 5 nanometers to at least 100—which, according to their theoretical models, ultimately could put

How waste wood works for forests

Nayomi Plaza at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

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Advancing industry through materials research and education

Mechanical Engineering www.engr.wisc.edu/me

31

For about a decade, Associate Professor TimothyShedd has been exploring liquid-based cooling systems for data centers to address a

simple but very costly problem. “Technology is developing faster than the air-conditioning systems that cool computers,” he says.

Shedd also is chief technology officer of Ebullient, a company that hopes to install its first commercial liquid-based cooling system in 2013. “We can save about 80 percent of the energy costs for cooling a state-of-the-art system,” Shedd says.

in medicine. However, Turng’s polymer blends unfurl from a temporary spiral shape to a memorized permanent straight shape at 158 degrees Fahrenheit. While the goal will be to get the reaction to occur at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit, the temperatures are significantly lower than the current state of the art. “Right now, we’re looking for the best combination of materials that will bring down the transition temperature,” says Mi.

The research team uses inexpensive polymer materials commonly used in injection molding environments. The key is combining a mix of polymers with both brittle and elastic properties. The mix used here is amorphous polylactic acid, derived from corn starch, and thermoplastic polyurethane, a stretch plastic commonly found in athletic apparel.

In addition to the transition temperature, the researchers are working to improve their materials’ overall strength for medical applications. They also are following a variety of other promising paths, including using stem cells in tissue scaffolding and on drug delivery applications embedded within the shape-memory materials.

Fuel Simulation for the real World

Granted, other researchers know that liquid-based systems can help data centers save significantly on energy costs and various commercial ventures are working to make it commonplace. But Shedd is the first to develop a system that takes advantage of the efficiency of boiling, while being compact, able to cool many devices in series, and available at a cost that is competitive with traditional air-cooling technologies.

Ebullient uses an environmentally safe dielectric fluid that evaporates and then re-condenses as it flows through processing units.

The idea evolved from long-term research project-to-business idea in late 2011, when Shedd and his students began experimenting with 3-D printers in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. The printers allowed Shedd to create components optimized for the system. “Without them, I probably never would have thought of starting a company,” Shedd says.

The project also has advanced with help of the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and an Innovation and Economic Development grant from the UW-Madison Graduate School.

In summer 2013, Shedd and graduate students Brett Lindeman and Robert Buchanan installed a prototype Ebullient system on a bank of about 20 computers in Engineering Hall. Shedd says this alone will save UW-Madison about $2,500 per year in cooling costs.

Ebullient’s ideal first clients will be companies that run small- to mid-size data centers. “These could be medical-records companies, video-delivery companies, large law firms, hospitals, and universities, obviously,” Shedd says.

He’s hoping Wisconsin and northern Illinois will provide Ebullient’s first clients and investors.

“We’re looking at investors who are interested in investing in Wisconsin—in people as much as the technology,” he says.

‘Smart’ medical material aims to unfurl at 98.6 F

ProfessorLih-Sheng(Tom)Turng has a simple office demonstration of how shape-memory polymers work. He takes the material, which is formed into a compact flower bud, drops the bud in a cup of warm

water, and voila: A daisy slowly blooms.A significant materials research advance by Turng and colleagues may help

translate this shape-shifting phenomenon to human medicine. Turng and PhD students Hao-Yang Mi and Xin Jing have discovered a new blend of shape-memory polymer that can regain its predetermined shape when exposed to heat levels close to human body temperature. This could have exciting implications for surgical implants such as stents and artificial arteries, which could be implanted in compact form and regain their desired shape naturally in the body.“This material has some amazing recovery properties,” says Turng, who directs the BIONATES biopolymer research program in the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery. “Our ultimate goal is to create shape-memory materials that will regain their permanent shape at human body temperature.”

Shape-memory polymers have been around since the 1980s but currently require too high a temperature trigger to have widespread use

Custom 3D-printed components are key in Ebullient’s system. (Photo: Scott Gordon)

from emissions to the thermal stresses on the mechanical components of a cylinder.”

But the sorts of incredibly vivid, physics-driven simulations Trujillo has been creating in recent years involve vast expense, time and computing power. It’s impractical for a company to run many such simulations in the course of developing a new diesel engine. “The recurring message from industry is: ‘Look, our computations have to be done quickly,’” Trujillo says.

The Engine Research Center solution is to stake out a middle ground and break the simulation down into two parts: Use the intensive computer-simulation approach in the near field (where the fuel is closer to the nozzle), and a more traditional modeling approach further along in the flow.

Ultimately, access to predictive simulations will spare Caterpillar a great deal of real-world testing when it’s developing diesel engines.

“If we can make our simulations more predictive, they’ll become more useful,” Gehrke says “It will impact on our engine development process across the entire diesel engine product line.”

o

Assistant Professor MarioTrujillo confidently predicts that liquid fuels are not going away, but understanding how they’ll behave in fuel-

injection systems will become increasingly complex.“There is probably going to be a wide range of new fuels with different

physical properties, which means liquid fuel injection is going to change,” he says. “There’s a need to have more predictive science.”

With funding from Caterpillar Inc., Trujillo is developing simulations to predict how different fuels will disperse on their way to an engine’s combustion chamber. His research group’s work complements that of several colleagues in the Engine Research Center, whose interests include emissions, engine performance, and turbulence models. Having better access to predictive simulations potentially could impact every aspect of how Caterpillar develops new diesel engines.

“The diesel spray is one of those areas where the physics are not modeled as well as they need to be,” says Chris Gehrke, a senior engineering team lead at Caterpillar. “It impacts everything in the simulation

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46%Instruction

26%Hands-on

experiences

15%Student Services

13%Instructional Innovation

Differentialtuitionexpenditures

FACTS AND FIGURES

State,nationalandglobalimpact

• College inventors disclosed 153 inventions to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation in 2012-2013 fiscal year.

• College faculty, staff and students have logged 12 consecutive years of 100 or more patent disclosures.

• The college offers 44 research centers in a broad range of areas.

• More than 300 companies, mostly from the Midwest, participate in one or more of 15 industrial consortia, on topics of strategic importance such as power engineering, small engines, e-business and advanced manufacturing.

• In the past 30 years, the college has produced more than 80 spinoff and startup companies based on faculty, staff and student innovations.

• Startup companies and technology transfer from the college strengthen the Wisconsin economy. Examples include SHINE Medical, which is building an $85 million manufacturing facility in Janesville that will employ 120 people; and Virent Energy Systems, which is experiencing strong growth in the U.S. bioplastics and jet fuel markets.

• The college communicates the value of engineering to Wisconsin middle schools—a time when students make key decisions about their academic future. Society’s Grand Challenges for Engineering incorporates engineering modules into Wisconsin middle school science courses, while the summer Camp Badger for Teachers helps instructors integrate core engineering ideas into classes.

• A strong percentage of UW-Madison engineering graduates stay in Wisconsin and help the state economy. In 2010-11, more than 60 percent of engineering graduates obtained jobs in Wisconsin.

Educationalexcellence

U.S. News and World Report rankings:

• 13th—undergraduate program (tied)

• 17th—graduate program

Facultyexcellence

• 2 professors named to the Institute of Medicine

• 120 faculty recipients of National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator, PECASE, or CAREER awards

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

150

120

90

60

30

136

128

150

134137

112

112

137

0

116

The college has posted more than a decade of 100 or more patent disclosures.

2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012

$120M

$90M

$60M

$30M

$136

,000

,000

$122

,000

,000

$116

,700

,000

$113

,000

,000

$108

,000

,000

$106

,030

,000

$104

,000

,000

$102

,500

,000

$126

,000

,000

0

32 33

By the numbers: 2012–2013

Totalexpenditures

ResearchInstruction and EducationEngineering Professional DevelopmentAlumni and Industrial Gift FundsTOTAL

$153,156,00044,487,000

11,790,0009,957,000

$219,390,000

COLLEGE INDUSTRIAL ADVISORY BOARD

These industry leaders draw on valuable engineering, business and academic experiences in their service to the college. Their insight helps College of Engineering administrators set priorities that advance college excellence in research and education and strengthen connections with alumni and industry.

IABCHAIR:CynthiaBachmannVice President, EngineeringKohler Kitchen & Bath

WilliamC.BeckmanCEO, X-nth

VincentS.ChanDirector, Theory & Computational Science Energy Group, General Atomics

KimChristopherVice PresidentVision Strategic Solutions, UnitedHealthCare

DonnaJ.FairbanksChief Technology OfficerGE Sensing and Inspection Technologies

R.Fenton-MayChairman and CEOCarrierWeb / e*freightrac LLC

DavidC.FranchinoPresident and PrincipalDesign Concepts

ThomasF.GunkelCEO, Mortenson Construction

BrianHaasSenior Vice President Global Customer Operations,Japan, Korea, Taiwan, ChinaKLA-Tencor Corp.

MichaelJ.HarschVice President and Chief Technology Officer GE Healthcare

MarkA.HenningGeneral ManagerDow Microbial Control,The Dow Chemical Co.

JayV.IhlenfeldSenior Vice President (retired)Asia Pacific, 3MDirector, Celanese Corp.

ToddKelseySenior Vice PresidentGlobal Customer ServicesPlexus Corp.

JaneMandulaCo-owner and Vice President (retired) Gen/Tran Corp.

JamesR.MeisterVice President Operations Support,Exelon Nuclear

WilliamJ.MoorePresidentPacMoore

SusanB.OrtenstoneChief Administrative Officer (retired)El Paso CorporationCopano Energy LLC

JamesE.RekoskeVice President and GM Renewable Energy and Chemicals,Honeywell’s UOP

TomStillPresidentWisconsin Technology Council

JamesH.ThompsonExecutive Vice PresidentEngineering, Qualcomm Inc.

Differential tuition began in 2008 as a core investment in top undergraduate priorities.

The College of Engineering is among the most innovative and consistently highly ranked U.S. colleges of engineering. We are internationally renowned for our leading-edge research and

widely recognized for our ability to transfer technological advances into real-world applications via myriad partnerships with industry. Through our world-class undergraduate, graduate- and professional-level educational programs, we enable students to develop as thoughtful, ethical leaders and to acquire the technical expertise they need to tackle complex global engineering challenges.

• 29 professors named to the National Academy of Engineering

• 4 professors named to the National Academy of Sciences

• Most academic departments rank in the top 20; some rank in the top 5

54%Federal

Engineering Professional

Development

13%Tuition

8%State Taxes

UW Foundation

Totalfundingbysource

5%5%

Researchexpenditures2003-12

Patentdisclosures2003-12

$153

,200

,000$150M

153

77%Federal

Researchexpendituresbysource

17%Industry

University Budget

Grad School

15%Industry

Annualenrollment

Undergraduate studentsGraduate studentsProfessional engineering education students

Approx. 4,050Approx. 1,550

Approx. 12,600

3%

3%

EX-OFFICIO:IanM.RobertsonDean, College of EngineeringUW-Madison

The 2012 total does not include $25 million in Wisconsin Energy Institute expenditures.

Studentsuccess

• College graduation rates for students who enter a degree program (typically by sophomore year) are 85 percent or higher for all 12 engineering degree-granting programs.

• More than 95 percent of December 2012 graduates are either employed in the engineering field (80 percent) or pursuing graduate education (15 percent).

• 85 percent of all engineering majors participate in either an internship or eight-month co-op experience.

• The college has 58 registered student organizations that provide engineers a wide variety of opportunities for involvement.

• The college fosters student innovation and entrepreneurship through major competitions, including the 20-year-old Innovation Days Prize, the Qualcomm Wireless Prize and the Wisconsin Energy and Sustainability Challenge.

• The college Engineers Without Borders chapter is the largest in the country, with active or recent projects in El Salvador, Haiti, Kenya and Rwanda.

• Competitive teams have a track record of success, including hybrid vehicles (six national titles since 1993), clean snowmobile (four national titles in the last eight years), concrete canoe (six national titles) and steel bridge (five top-10 finishes since 2000).

Internationalopportunities

• 144—Students who studied abroad, for academic credit, in fall 2013 and spring and summer 2013

• 30—Countries they visited

Internships,co-opsandcareeropportunities

• 160 students on co-op—fall 2012• 140 students on co-op—spring 2013• 249 students on co-op—summer 2013• 545 students on internships—summer 2013• In two career fairs, thousands of students talked with recruiters from

more than 350 local, state and national corporations.

STUDENT ACHIEVEMENTS

By the numbers: 2012–2013

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EngineeringProfessionalDevelopmentimpact

• 25–Technical and professional subject areas ranging from the basics to high-level topics

• 75–Faculty and support staff• 800–Course instructors• 351–Short courses per year• 12,600–Annual enrollment

• In 2012, students who participated in EPD continuing-education courses came from 50 U.S. states, Washington D.C., Puerto Rico, and 82 countries around the world.

• 7–Distance-delivered master’s degrees

• 11–Certificate series

Engineering students in Prague, Czech Republic, which is one of the many study-abroad locations offered through the International Engineering Studies and Programs Office.

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EARLY CAREER ADVISORY BOARD

CarolinaCastellanosR&D Group LeaderPackaging Division,Kraft Foods Corporation

TaliaCawrseInventory LeaderMaterials & Demand Planning Team, GE Healthcare

TomGilbertProduct Development Engineer3M

TrevorGhylinWater and Wastewater Process EngineerCH2M Hill

JoshuaHinnendaelFunctional ManagerDigital Group, Plexus Corporation

JonathanKochProject Development ManagerMortenson Construction

MarieLottoSenior Global Market ManagerAdvanced Surgical Devices Division,Smith & Nephew

MarkA.PolsterEnvironmental EngineerFord Motor Co.

AndrewSchaeveProject ManagerAmerican Transmission Co.

ChristopherJ.ThorkelsonVice PresidentConstruction Development,Lloyd Companies

EricN.VanAbelReactor EngineerDominion-Kewaunee Nuclear Power Station

MeganL.VoelkerPlastics Process EngineerPlacon Corporation

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College of Engineering UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN–MADISON

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Snapshots of some unique college materials research tools and facilities

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5

1 The FEI Titan aberration- corrected scanning transmission electron microscope

2 The TF 30 transmission electron microscope

3 An atomic force microscope for biological and soft materials.

4 An imaging x-ray photoelectron spectrometer

5 The wet chemistry bay in the micro-fabrication cleanroom

Phot

os: R

enee

Meil

ler