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Antibiotics In Water

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Potential Hazards

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Wooden Semiconductors 15 May Reduce Electronic Waste

Professional Directory 22

Swelling Magnets 18 New Class of Magnets Discovered

Engineers On The Move 12

Bits and Pieces 21

Index to Advertisers 25

The Outer Edge 26

Antibiotics In Water Supply 4 Scientists Investigate Potential Hazards

Strategic Use Of Microgrids 10 Integrating Energy Flow From Renewables

Improving Air Quality 6 Meeting Global Guidelines Offers Benefits

New Air Quality Studies Performed 16 Impact of Natural Gas Extraction Is Focus

Sustainable Phosphorus Recovery 8 Economic and Environmental Rewards

THE TOP OF THE NEWSVolume LXIV Number 7 July 2015

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Page 4 – July 2015 The Virginia Engineer

THE VIRGINIA ENGINEER

For years scientists have been aware of the potential problems of antibiotics being present in water supplies from various sources. Antibiotics find their way into wastewater in several ways. Those not broken down by the human body are passed to wastewater, expired antibiot-ics from homes and hospitals are dumped into wastewater, and there is discharge of antibiotic materials from pharmaceutical companies. Research has been focused on identifying the envi-ronmental impact as well as po-tential solutions to the problem.

A recently published study in the journal Chemo-sphere by Rebecca Klaper, a professor in the School of Freshwater Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM), deter-mined exposure to the dia-betes medicine metformin causes physical changes in male fish exposed to doses similar to the amount in wastewater effluent.

Metformin, a medication commonly taken for Type II diabetes, found in freshwa-ter systems worldwide, has been shown to cause inter-sex in fish –male fish that produce eggs.

In addition to intersex condi-tions, fish exposed to metformin were smaller in size than those not exposed, said Prof. Klaper.

Because intersex fish are par-ticularly prevalent downstream

from wastewater treatment plants, many studies have inves-tigated the effect of hormones from birth control pills, noted study co-author Nicholas Nie-muth, a researcher in Prof. Kla-per’s lab.

Initially, the results of her study seemed surprising since metformin is not a hormone and it targets blood sugar regulation.

But Prof. Klaper said it is also prescribed to women with a common hormonal disease called polycystic ovary syn-drome. The research in her lab indicates metformin could be a

potential endocrine disruptor – a chemical that confuses the body’s complicated hormonal messaging system, interrupting a range of normal activities, in-cluding reproduction.

Of the chemicals she has de-

tected in water samples collected from Lake Michigan, metformin stands out, Prof. Klaper said.

“It is the chemical we found in almost every sample and in the highest concentrations com-pared to other emerging con-taminants – even higher than caffeine,” she said.

The prevalence of the chemi-cal in samples led Prof. Klaper to investigate what effects the medication may have in the en-vironment. In a previous study, she exposed mature fish to met-formin, and although there were no physical changes, she found the genes related to hormones for egg production were being expressed in males as well as females – an indication of endo-crine disruption.

For the current study, the researchers monitored fish that had continuous ex-posure to metformin from birth to adulthood. The next step is to determine the cor-responding changes in the genome, which Prof. Klaper is doing at UWM’s Great Lakes Genomic Center.

In addition to the dra-matic impact on aquatic life, research lead by Olya Keen, an assistant professor of civ-il and environmental engi-neering at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (UNC Charlotte), is show-ing that treatments to clean

wastewater may actually be cre-ating new antibiotics and further contributing to the development of antibiotic resistance in the en-vironment.

Prof. Keen began her current research into the behavior of an-

Potential Hazards of Antibiotics In Water Supplies

Rebecca Klaper studies emerging contami-nants in freshwater systems, including the residuals of pharmaceuticals in wastewater. Photo courtesy of UWM Photo Services.

The Virginia Engineer www.vaeng.com – Page 5

tibiotics in wastewater in sum-mer 2014, presenting her initial findings recently at a conference of the American Chemical Soci-ety held in Denver, Colo.

“This research is a small piece of a larger question,” Prof. Keen said. “There are varieties of antibiotics found in waste-water, and, at this point, we are just testing one. It is in a class of antibiotics that all have similar compositions, so we anticipate that other antibiotics in this class may respond the same way.”

The antibiotic Prof. Keen and her doctoral student, Nicole Kennedy-Neth, are studying is doxycycline, which falls into one of the more widely used classes of antibiotics. Their research to date is showing that chlorine used to treat wastewater is actu-ally changing the makeup of the doxycycline and forming new antibiotics.

“Wastewater treatment is de-signed to break down biological substances but not antibiotics,” stated Prof. Keen. “Surprisingly enough, though, we are finding in the lab that not only is chlo-rine not breaking down antibi-otics, but it is actually creating even stronger antibiotics than the original doxycycline.”

“Wastewater tests have found every type of antibiotic known,” Prof. Keen said. “The problems antibiotics cause when they are not broken down by treatment is they get into streams, where bacteria are becoming immune to them, and more danger-ous, super bug, bacteria can be formed.”

Prof. Keen’s lab is working with controlled samples, treat-

ing doxycycline with chlorine. Using a mass spectrometer, they separate samples by the mass of the molecules to identify their make-up. The next step in their research will be to treat and test real-world wastewater samples.

And growing evi-dence suggests that agricultural practices, especially widespread antibiotic use, could be contributing to the in-creasing antibiotic re-sistance problem in hu-mans.

In order to learn how to ef-fectively control this spread of antibiotic resistance from live-stock manure, the U.S. Depart-ment of Agriculture (USDA) has awarded a $2.25 million grant to a Virginia Tech team of engi-neers and scientists to examine the food chain from farm to fork.

One of the team’s immediate concerns is to determine if the proposed Food and Drug Ad-ministration’s (FDA) Food Safe-ty Modernization Act rules for composting manure, intended for the control of pathogens, will effectively limit the spread of antibiotic resistant bacteria. The team’s plan includes tracking the fate of antibiotics, antibiotic resistant bacteria, and antibiotic resistance genes, as they are po-tentially carried over from ma-nure to fresh produce.

Leading the interdisciplinary group is Amy Pruden, profes-sor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech, a pioneer in examining environ-mental sources and pathways

of antibiotic resistance genes as emerging contaminants. A 2007

Presidential Early Career Award in Science and Engineering and a 2006 National Science Founda-tion CAREER Award recipient, she is also the 2014 Paul L. Busch Award recipient from the Water Environment Research Founda-tion for innovation in applied water quality research.

A report on ways to fight an-tibiotic resistance in the U.S., re-leased in 2014 by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, noted as a “very serious concern” the use of anti-biotics in animal agriculture.

“Antibiotic resistance is a serious human health threat,” Prof. Pruden emphasized. “Our goal is to identify all possible means by which we can control the spread of antibiotic resis-tance so that these drugs contin-ue to work when we need them. In this case, we hope to work with existing practices intended to control the spread of patho-gens from livestock manure and to determine how we can ensure

Continued on page 19.

Widespread use of antibotics in livestock op-erations could be a contributor to increased antibiotic resistance. Photo courtesy: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.



Improving air quality — in clean and dirty places — could potentially avoid millions of pollution-related deaths each year. That finding comes from a team of environmental engineer-ing and public health researchers who developed a global model of how changes in outdoor air pollution could lead to changes in the rates of health problems such as heart attack, stroke and lung cancer.

Outdoor particulate air pol-lution results in 3.2 million pre-mature deaths annually, more than the combined impact of HIV-AIDS and malaria. The re-searchers found that meeting the World Health Organization’s (WHO) particulate air qual-ity guidelines could prevent 2.1 million deaths per year related to outdoor air pollution.

Joshua S. Apte of the Cock-rell School of Engineering at The University of Texas Austin was lead author of the research paper published recently in En-vironmental Science & Technology. The paper was co-authored by Julian D. Marshall of the Uni-versity of Minnesota, Aaron J. Cohen of the Health Effects In-stitute in Boston, and Michael Brauer of the University of Brit-ish Columbia.

Prior research has empha-sized the health implications of breathing polluted air. This new study is the first detailed analy-sis of how improvements in particulate air pollution world-

wide would yield improvement in health, and where those im-provements would occur.

The researchers looked at outdoor air pollution from par-ticulate matter (PM) smaller than 2.5 microns. Those particles can enter deep into the lungs. Breathing PM is associated with increased risk of heart attack, stroke and other cardiovascu-lar disease; respiratory illnesses such as emphysema; and can-cer. PM pollution comes from fires, coal power plants, cars and trucks, and agricultural and in-dustrial emissions. In low-in-come countries, PM also comes from burning coal, wood, crop waste and animal dung for cook-ing and heating, and from open burning of trash.

“We wanted to determine how much cleaner different parts of the world would need to be in order to substantially reduce death from particulate matter,” said Prof. Apte. “We believe our model could help in designing strategies to protect public health.”

The study used the Institute of Health Metrics and Evalua-tion’s Global Burden of Disease 2010 database; estimates of PM concentrations derived from ground-based measurements, satellite observations and air pollution models; and WHO’s air quality guidelines. World-wide, most people live in ar-eas with PM concentrations far above WHO’s air quality guide-

line of 10 micrograms per cubic meter, with some parts of India and China experiencing levels that exceed 100.

One of the study’s unexpect-ed findings is that cleaning air in less polluted parts of the world, including in North America and Western Europe, can have as much health benefit as similar measures taken in the most pol-luted areas.

“We were surprised to find the importance of cleaning air not just in the dirtiest parts of the world — which we expected to find — but also in cleaner en-vironments like the U.S., Cana-da and Europe,” said co-author Prof. Marshall.

The study determined that meeting WHO’s air quality guidelines could prevent up to 1.4 million premature deaths per year in polluted areas such as China and India. Meeting WHO guidelines in clean regions could reduce premature deaths from outdoor pollution by more than half a million deaths per year.

“If we only meet U.S. Envi-ronmental Protection Agency standards, we aren’t fully ad-dressing the problem,” said Prof. Marshall. “This study demon-strates the benefits of stringent air quality controls in the U.S. as well as overseas.”

Another important finding is that because of aging popu-lations, health risks in many countries will increase even if pollution levels are constant. Older people are more suscep-tible to air pollution and more at risk than are younger people for health problems such as heart at-tack and stroke. The study found

Benefits Abound In Meeting Global Air Quality Guidelines


that with no changes in air pol-lution, deaths per capita from air pollution would increase 20 to 30 percent during the next 15 years in India and China. If also accounting for population growth, the increase in deaths would be even greater if those countries experience no change in air pollution.

The study helps to meet a

gap in knowledge about how stricter outdoor air pollution controls could benefit global health. In May, WHO called for more research into air pollu-tion and passed a resolution to address the health effects of air pollution, which they call “the world’s largest single environ-mental risk.”

“Our study demonstrates

that continued progress on air quality can deliver major public health benefits to nearly all re-gions of the world,” co-author Dr. Brauer said.

Funding for the study came from the participating organiza-tion and universities.

Article reprinted from materi-als provided by the University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). ##

Construction crews may someday use a plant molecule called lignin in their asphalt and sealant mixtures to help roads and roofs hold up better under various weather conditions. It also could make them more en-vironmentally friendly, accord-ing to research findings, “Sus-tainable bitumen”, presented at the 249th National Meeting & Exposition of the American Chemical Society (ACS).

Currently a by-product of crude oil production, bitumen is the main sticky ingredient in asphalt and roof sealants. But oil is a nonrenewable resource. And price fluctuations in the oil mar-ket have made it more difficult to get high-quality bitumen, forc-ing manufacturers to look for alternatives, noted Ted Slaghek, Ph.D., a senior scientist at TNO, a non-profit organization in the Netherlands that develops real-world applications for scientific and technological advances.

“In the long term, we have to move to renewable products that we can harvest every year,” says

Dr. Slaghek. “It should be logical to use natural organic raw mate-rials instead of crude oil.”

Dr. Slaghek explains that lig-nin, unlike oil, is a renewable resource that makes up as much as a third of the dry material in trees, where it keeps out water and binds together other com-ponents of plant biomatter, like cellulose. Lignin is also plentiful — and therefore, inexpensive — because it is removed as a waste product during the paper-mak-ing process. More than 50 mil-lion tons are produced globally as waste each year. Most of this is burned to generate electricity to run the paper mills. Burning lignin is not only wasteful, it re-leases soot and other pollutants, he said.

Because lignin shares many characteristics with bitumen, it has the potential to become an environmentally friendly addi-tive to help reduce the amount of bitumen needed for construc-tion activities.

As is generally the case with other additives, lignin makes sealants perform even better — but those polymer additives come from petroleum sources, making them just as problematic as bitumen. Dr. Slaghek’s team has developed a number of lig-

nin-bitumen mixtures that make the asphalt harder in warm weather, preventing rutting and adding a few years to a road’s lifespan. “On the other hand, if you have roads where the tem-peratures tend to be lower, bitu-men can become too hard and brittle, increasing the chance that rocks and pebbles will come loose and damage your car,” noted Dr. Slaghek. “We have also developed lignin-bitumen mixtures that keep the bitumen more tacky, so at lower tem-peratures it’s still a good road.” The mixtures contain differing amounts of unmodified lignin, as well as lignin with various chemical modifications.

The advantages of lignin go far beyond these quality, cost and performance benefits, Dr. Slaghek notes. It’s also safe to handle — and consume. “You might be surprised to learn this, but you’re eating lignin every day if you’re eating vegetables,” he pointed out.

The researchers acknowl-edge funding provided by ICO-PAL B.V., Van Gelder B.V. and the Ministry of Economic Affairs of The Netherlands.

Article reprinted from mate-rials provided by the American Chemical Society (ACS). ##

Green Component Could Improve

Asphalt and Sealant Mixtures



A new approach to waste-water treatment may be

key as part of efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle. Moreover, it can be profitable.

Phosphorus is an essential element for human nutrition. It plays multiple roles in the hu-man body, including the de-velopment of bones and teeth. Fertilizer with phosphorus, ap-plied to crops or lawns, enables healthy growth. Without it, the basic cells of plants and animals, and life itself, would not exist.

Typically, phosphorus is found in phosphate-containing minerals, a limited and non-renewable resource, that are mined. The annual demand is rising quickly, but unfortunately, once used, phosphorus is diffi-cult to reclaim.

In animals (including hu-mans), urinary waste contains phosphorus. Surface water carry large amounts of phosphorus from fields and lawns down-stream. The result is phospho-

rus in water discharged by wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs).

“Whatever phosphorus we use and discharge into rivers and oceans is lost to the environment,” ex-plained Rolf Halden, pro-fessor at the School of Sus-tainable Engineering and the Built Environment, and director of the Center for Environmental Security, Ar-izona State University.

Additionally, accumu-lation of phosphorus can

result in problems like algae blooms in lakes and other sur-face water bodies. In turn, algae blooms deplete oxygen from the water, affecting the delicate bal-ance of aquatic life. “This prob-lem is observed in the seasonally recurring ‘dead zone’ of the Gulf of Mexico,” said Prof. Halden.

Prof. Halden’s group recently published a study in the Journal of Environmental Quality that ex-amined methods for recovering phosphorus from wastewater using mathematical modeling. “WWTPs represent ground zero for addressing the problem of global phosphorus depletion,” Prof. Halden noted.

WWTPs in many cities are currently implementing meth-ods to extract phosphorus prior to discharging wastewater into the environment. Currently there are two main types of phosphorus recovery methods: chemical and biological.

In the chemical method,

WWTP treat phosphorus dis-solved in wastewater. The phos-phorus then falls out of solution for easier removal. In the biolog-ical method, bacteria introduced into the water collect the phos-phorus into removable sludge. A variation includes enhanced biological phosphorus removal (EBPR). This method selectively encourages bacteria that can ac-cumulate phosphorus.

Choosing a method is com-plicated. “The region’s water quality, size of the treatment plant, and economic consider-ations play a role in the selec-tion,” explained the study’s lead author, Dr. Arjun Venkatesan.

Prof. Halden and Dr. Ven-katesan’s study focused on a combination approach. First, EBPR concentrated phosphorus in sludge. Next, chemical treat-ment helped phosphorus fall out to form struvite, a usable phosphate mineral. The study showed that a typical WWTP could reclaim approximately 490 tons of phosphorus in the form of struvite each year.

Conventional methods re-move only 40%-50% of the phosphorus, according to Dr. Venkatesan. The secondary treatment of sludge employed by EBPR “achieves an additional 35% mass reduction, for a total of about 90% removal,” he said. EBPR helpfully avoids addition-al chemicals and reduces sludge production. Both these factors lower the cost of operation—a key consideration for WWTPs with limited budgets.

Reclaimed phosphorus pays off for the environment with less mining for phosphorus

Sustainable Phosphorus Recovery From Wastewater

Wastewater treatment infrastructure, such as this anaerobic digester, can be leveraged to capture and recycle phos-phorus, a limited essential nutrient. Im-age courtesy of Michael Northrop.


and improved surface water health. phosphorus recovered as struvite can also generate in-come. The team estimates that the WWTP used in their case study could generate $150,000 in annual revenue from this two-pronged approach. A plant with existing EBFR facilities can

recoup the initial expenses in as little as 3 years.

“Nearly 367,500 tons per year of phosphorus could be gener-ated with combined EBPR and struvite production,” noted Prof. Halden, in plants with treatment capacity similar to the one used in the case study.

When it comes to the three-horned dinosaur called the Tric-eratops, science is showing the ancient creatures might have been a little more complex than previously thought.

In fact, their teeth were far more intricate than any reptile or mammal living today.

Biological Science Professor Gregory Erickson and a multi-university team composed of engineers and paleontologists contend that the Triceratops actually developed teeth that could finely slice through dense material giving them a richer and more varied diet than mod-ern-day reptiles.

Prof. Erickson and the re-search team outlined the find-ings of their study in the journal Science Advances.

Today, reptilian teeth are con-structed in such a way that they are used mostly for seizing food — whether plant or animal — and then crushing it. The teeth do not occlude — or come to-gether — like those of mammals. In essence, they can’t chew. The teeth of most herbivorous mam-mals self wear with use to create complex file surfaces for minc-ing plants.

“It’s just been assumed that dinosaurs didn’t do things like

mammals, but in some ways, they’re actually more complex,” he said.

Prof. Erickson, who has been studying the evolution of dino-saurs for years, became interest-ed in looking at dinosaurs’ teeth several years ago and suspected that they had some unique prop-erties. But, the technology to re-ally discover what they were ca-pable of did not exist.

Brandon Krick, an assistant professor of mechanical engi-neering at Lehigh University, and Prof. Erickson, accompa-nied by scientists at University of Florida, University of Penn-sylvania and the American Mu-seum of Natural History, set out to find out what exactly these teeth were made of and how they worked.

Prof. Erickson had access to the teeth of Triceratops from museum specimens collected around North America. So to study their composition, he be-gan by cutting up a bunch of teeth to get a look at the interior.

He discovered that Tricer-atopsteeth were made of five layers of tissue. In contrast, her-bivorous horse and bison teeth, once considered the most com-plex ever to evolve, have four layers of tissue. Crocodiles and

other reptiles have just two.“Each of those tissues does

something,” Prof. Erickson ex-plained. “They’re not just there for looks.”

What Prof. Krick and his team of engineers, including Lehigh graduate student Mike Sidebottom, found was that the material properties of the teeth were remarkably preserved in 66 million year old teeth.

“If you took these dinosaurs’ teeth and put them in a cow for example, they would work,” Prof. Erickson said.

A sophisticated three-dimen-sional model was developed to show how each tissue wore with use in a strategic manner to cre-ate a complex surface with a full-er (a recessed area in the middle, much like those seen in fight-ing knives and swords) on each tooth. This served to reduce fric-tion during biting and promote efficient feeding.

The 3D wear model devel-oped for this project is inspiring new engineering techniques that can be used for industrial and commercial applications.

This work was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Article reprinted from mate-rials provided by Florida State University. ##

New Study Reveals Complexity of Triceratops' Teeth

Such a payload can be a wel-comed economic payoff for con-scientious communities.

Article reprinted from mate-rials provided by the American Society of Agronomy (ASA), Crop Science Society of America (CSSA), Soil Science Society of America (SSSA). ##



Strategic use of locally produced, renewable energy through smart microgrids can reduce power costs and help prevent outages, according to assistant professors Wei Sun and Reinaldo Tonkoski of the electri-cal engineering and computer science department at South Dakota State Univer-sity (SDSU).

They are de-veloping the smart power management technologies that will make it possi-ble for communities and businesses to use locally produced wind and solar en-ergy yet maintain a consistent, reliable power system. The automated system needed to integrate renewables will also facilitate develop-ment of an intelli-gent power restora-tion system called a self-healing smart grid that can help prevent power outages.

Profs. Tonkoski and Sun be-gan developing a microgrid that will allow data centers to utilize locally available energy sources that can be operated as power plants through support from Mi-crosoft Corp. They are the first SDSU engineering researchers to receive a Software Engineering Innovation Foundation grant.

An additional $87,000 pro-vided by the South Dakota Board of Regents will support development of these power management tools, which could also benefit farms and communi-ties. Currently two doctoral stu-

dents and 12 master’s students are working on power manage-ment and renewable energy sys-tems integration in the SDSU microgrid laboratory.

“Data centers are high con-sumers of power, but that supply has to be really reliable,” Prof. Tonkoski pointed out. Though most data centers rely on the main power grid, they require locally available standby power

in case of grid failure.Furthermore, integration of

alternative energy sources will help reduce the demands that a data center puts on the power grid. Use of batteries and stand-by generators will help reduce the intermittency of solar and wind power so that it can sup-port the grid.

“Renewables have uncertain-ty,” Prof. Sun said, pointing out

weather conditions affect the generation of solar and wind energy. In addition, power production varies based on time, cloud conditions and the wind speed, so integrating them into the distribution system means solv-ing problems such as a maintaining power system balance, add-ed Prof. Tonkoski. Specially designed controllers with new battery technologies can deal with these issues to get consis-tent power quality.

Today, remote power systems gen-erally use diesel or

gas generators, he pointed out. Adding solar or wind energy can save fuel and reduce the load on the generator. “Integrating bat-teries into the system may boost the efficiency of the generator,” Prof. Tonkoski added.

The researchers plan to de-velop an algorithm that will determine when and how each power source can be efficiently used in a sustainable energy

Using Microgrids To Integrate Energy From Renewable Sources

Through the use of microgrids, assistant professors Reinaldo Tonkoski and Wei Sun of South Dakota State University hope to be able to integrate renewable energy into the power grid. The smart automated system will facilitate development of an intelligent power restoration system that can minimize power outages. Photo by Emily Weber.


Power plant operators fol-low guidelines based on offline scenarios, simulations and ex-perimental data to respond to a blackout, Prof. Sun explained. “There are basically no com-putational tools to guide them through these emergencies.”

Consequently, the first step will be to develop tools to give operators what engineers call “real-time data,” meaning what is happening at the moment rather than even 30 seconds ago. Three graduate students are working on the project.

Prof. Sun collaborates with Clemson University Electrical Engineering and Computer Sci-ence Department Distinguished Professor Kumar Venayaga-moorthy, who is developing ad-vanced computational methods for the smart grid through a sep-arate NSF grant.

Once the algorithm, software code and hardware simulation as well as education and training materials have been completed, Prof. Sun hopes to demonstrate the system’s effectiveness to ma-jor utility companies.

Article reprinted from mate-rials provided by South Dakota State University. ##

system. That includes instances when operating the generator or using batteries can increase the system’s efficiency.

With data centers being built worldwide, Prof. Sun noted, “some regions do not have a robust power grid.” Therefore, construction of a new data center and the infrastructure to handle a power load in the range of 100 megawatts can take as long as three years. Using multiple ener-gy sources through a microgrid system may reduce the timeline to establish new facilities.

The automated system need-ed to integrate renewables will facilitate development of an in-telligent power restoration sys-

tem called a self-healing smart grid that can help prevent pow-er outages, according to Prof. Sun. He received a three-year, $210,000 National Science Foun-dation (NSF) Grant to support his research.

A microgrid power management system can integrate solar and wind pow-er, generators and battery storage to provide consistent, reliable power to consumers in remote areas. Image courtesy of South Dakota State Uni-versity.

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Additional coverage of Engineers and Their Colleagues On The Move including photographs is available at www.vaeng.com

ENGINEERS

and THEIR COLLEAGUES

On The Move ...

Austin Brockenbrough & As-sociates, LLP is pleased to wel-come:

Keith D. Stanley, P.E. to their Civil Engineering Team. Mr. Stanley brings over 11 years in land development engineering including major commercial de-velopment and sports facilities projects. At Brockenbrough, he will be focusing his efforts on managing site design projects; and

Corey S. Beyke, E.I.T. to their Mechanical Engineering Team. Mr. Beyke is a Virginia Com-monwealth University graduate with three years of experience in high-end HVAC design.

Dewberry welcomes James Bennett, P.E. as an associate vice president and the manager of the firm’s Gainesville office. With over thirty years of experience in consulting, design services, and development in Virginia, his primary responsibilities will include managing and oversight of the full-service engineering, planning, and surveying opera-tions based in Gainesville. Earn-ing his bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech, he most recently served as the vice president of land planning, design, development, and con-struction at Jamestown Manage-ment Company.

National architecture and en-gineering firm, Clark Nexsen, is pleased to announce 14 profes-sionals have been named firm shareholders. Six new share-holders are Professional Engi-neers based in Virginia:

Chris Aebel, P.E., CDT has more than 20 years of experience as a civil engineer in the South-east. Mr. Aebel is the Civil De-partment Head in the Virginia Beach office, and holds a B.S. de-gree in Civil Engineering from Old Dominion University;

Steve Bennett, P.E. is a senior project manager in the Virginia Beach office with four decades of design, construction, and finan-cial management experience for both private and public sector projects. He holds a B.S. degree in Structural Engineering from Old Dominion University, and a Master’s in Management and Finance from Boston University;

Erik Dupilka, P.E., PMP, CEM, LEED AP BD+C is a project manager in the Virginia Beach office with more than 8 years of experience with the de-sign and management of both domestic and international proj-ects. He holds a B.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Virginia Military Institute and is currently working to-wards a Master’s of Engineering

Management at Old Dominion University;

Dwayne Mitchem, P.E., LEED AP, with 8 years of struc-tural design experience, is a bridge engineer in the Roanoke office. Mr. Mitchem holds a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech;

Brian Snyder, P.E., also with 8 years of experience, is a struc-tural engineer in the Virginia Beach office. Mr. Snyder holds a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech; and

Brian Wilson, P.E., LEED AP is a project manager in the Vir-ginia Beach office with 12 years of experience in the design and construction of public and pri-vate projects. Mr. Wilson holds a B.S. degree in Civil Engineering from Virginia Tech.

Progressive Design, Inc. is pleased to announce that Todd Burdge, P.E. has received his P.E. license in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Mr. Burdge is a Proj-ect Engineer in the firm’s Civil/Structural Department.

Kevin P. Heaslip, associate professor of civil and environ-mental engineering in College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, has been named research leader for resilience for the National Capital Region Research Devel-opment Team. He is assuming this role following the retire-ment of resilience expert Jack Harrald. Dr. Heaslip earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from Vir-ginia Tech and a Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts. Dr. Heaslip joined Virginia Tech in 2014 from Utah State Universi-ty, a faculty member there since 2008. He also served as associate director of the Utah Transporta-


tion Center of Logan, Utah, from July 2011 to August 2014.

Peter Rim, professor of chem-ical engineering in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech, was reappointed the Joseph H. Collie Endowed Chaired Profes-sor of Chemical Engineering by Virginia Tech President Timo-thy D. Sands and Senior Vice President and Provost Mark G. McNamee. He has more than

25 years’ experience in the de-velopment, commercialization, and marketing of performance polymer products. Prior to join-ing Virginia Tech, Dr, Rim was in charge of the new product strat-egy, development, and commer-cialization of Honeywell Perfor-mance Fiber’s nearly $1 billion dollar fiber business. Dr. Rim received his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and Ph.D. from

Pennsylvania State University and an MBA degree from the University of Richmond.

Pennoni, an award-winning multidiscipline engineering, sci-ence, and design consulting firm, has announced the relocation of its Chantilly office to Herndon. The office will be referred to as Pennoni’s Dulles office, located at: 13880 Dulles Corner Lane, Suite 100, Herndon, VA 20171.##

Study Shows Longer Battery Lifecycle Than Predicted

In the first study of its kind, scientists at the De-partment of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), funded through the Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) program at Berkeley Lab, quantitatively show that electric vehicles (EVs) will meet the dai-ly travel needs of drivers longer than commonly assumed. Until now, many had assumed that EV batteries would be retired after the battery has lost 20 percent of its energy storage or power delivery capability. This study demonstrates that the daily travel needs of drivers continue to be met well be-yond these levels.

Samveg Saxena, who leads a vehicle pow-ertrain research program at Berkeley Lab, ana-lyzed real-world driving patterns and found that batteries that have lost 20 percent of their original-ly rated energy storage capacity can still meet the daily travel needs of more than 85 percent of U.S. drivers. He and his research team also analyzed battery power fade and found that even after sub-stantial loss in battery power capabilities perfor-mance requirements are still met.

“There are two main reasons people are hesi-tant to buy an EV: first, they’re unsure it will satis-fy their mobility needs, and second, they’re afraid the battery won’t last the whole life of the car and they’ll have to replace it for a lot of money,” said Saxena, who has a PhD in mechanical engineer-ing. “We show that, even after substantial battery

degradation, the daily travel needs of most people are still going to be met.”

The analysis of battery life was published on-line recently with open access in the “Journal of Power Sources,” “Quantifying EV battery end-of-life through analysis of travel needs with ve-hicle powertrain models,” which Dr. Saxena co-authored with Jason MacDonald of Berkeley Lab and Caroline Le Floch and Scott Moura of the Uni-

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versity of California-Berkeley.With today’s EV batteries,

“end of life” is commonly de-fined as when the battery’s stor-age capacity drops down to 70 to 80 percent of the original ca-pacity. As capacity fades, the vehicle’s range decreases. The researchers decided to investi-gate the extent to which vehicles still meet the needs of drivers beyond this common battery re-tirement threshold.

To conduct the study, they took nearly 160,000 actual driv-ing itineraries from the National Household Travel Survey con-ducted by the Department of Transportation. These are 24-hour travel itineraries showing when a car was parked or driv-ing, including both weekend and weekday usage by drivers across the United States.

The researchers then as-sumed all itineraries were driv-en using a vehicle with specifi-cations similar to a Nissan Leaf, which has about 24 kilowatt-hours of energy storage capacity and 400 kW of discharge power capability, which was based on battery cell-level measurement data for the chosen vehicle.

This data was fed into the team’s unique simulation tool, V2G-Sim, or Vehicle-to-Grid Simulator. Developed by Dr. Saxena and other Berkeley Lab researchers, V2G-Sim quantifies second-by-second energy use while driving or charging for any number of different vehicle or charger types under varying driving conditions.

Then for each of the itinerar-ies, they changed different vari-ables, including not only the

battery’s energy storage capac-ity, but also when the car was charged (for example, level 1 charger [standard 120V outlet] at home only, level 1 charger at home and work, level 2 charger [240V outlet] at home and level 1 charger at work, and so on), whether it was city or highway driving, whether the air condi-tioner was on, and whether the car was being driven uphill. More than 13 million individu-al daily state-of-charge profiles were computed.

“People have commonly thought, ‘if I buy an EV, I’ll have to replace the battery in a few years because I’ll lose the ability to satisfy my driving needs, and it’s not worth it,’” Dr. Saxena said. “We have found that only a small fraction of drivers will no longer be able to meet their daily driving needs after having lost 20 percent of their battery’s energy storage capabilities. It is important to remember that the vast majority of people don’t drive more than 40 miles per day on most days, and so they have plenty of reserve available to ac-commodate their normal daily trips even if they lose substantial amounts of battery capacity due to degradation.”

As the battery degrades down to 50 percent of its original energy storage capacity, the re-search found that the daily travel needs of more than 80 percent of U.S. drivers can still be met, and at 30 percent capacity, 55 percent of drivers still have their daily needs met. “Even if a driver has a long, unexpected trip beyond the normal daily travel, an EV battery with substantial capac-

ity fade can often still make the trip,” Dr. Saxena said.

The Berkeley Lab scientists also analyzed power capac-ity fade, or the declining ability of the battery to deliver power, such as when accelerating on a freeway onramp, as it ages. They modeled the impact of power fade on a vehicle’s ability to ac-celerate as well as to climb steep hills and complete other drive cycles. They found that power fade for the chosen vehicle does not have a significant impact on an EV’s performance, and that a battery’s retirement will be driven by energy capacity fade rather than by power fade.

Based on the findings, the researchers reached the conclu-sion that “range anxiety may be an over-stated concern” par-ticularly since EVs can meet the daily travel needs of more than 85 percent of U.S. drivers even after losing 20 percent of their originally rated battery capac-ity. They also conclude that bat-teries can “satisfy daily mobility requirements for the full lifetime of an electric vehicle.”

Given these results, the au-thors propose that an EV bat-tery’s actual retirement may be delayed to when it can no longer meet the daily travel needs of a driver, leading many EV batter-ies to have a longer lifetime than is commonly assumed. Future work will involve providing personalized EV battery lifecycle information for drivers, which would take into account an indi-vidual’s driving behavior.

Article reprinted from materi-als provided by Lawrence Berke-ley National Laboratory. ##


Researchers Unveil New Wood

SemiconductorPortable electronics, typically made of non-re-

newable, non-biodegradable and potentially toxic materials, are discarded at an alarming rate in con-sumers' pursuit of the next best electronic gadget.

In an effort to alleviate the environmental bur-den of electronic devices, a team of University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) researchers has collaborated with researchers in the Madi-son-based U.S. Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL) to develop a surpris-ing solution: a semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood.

The research team, led by UW-Madison elec-trical and computer engineering professor Zhenq-iang "Jack" Ma, described the new device in a paper recently published by the journal Nature Commu-nications. The paper demonstrates the feasibility of replacing the substrate, or support layer, of a computer chip, with cellulose nanofibril (CNF), a flexible, biodegradable material made from wood.

"The majority of material in a chip is support. We only use less than a couple of micrometers for everything else," Prof. Ma said. "Now the chips are so safe you can put them in the forest and fungus will degrade it. They become as safe as fertilizer."

Zhiyong Cai, project leader for an engineering composite science research group at FPL, has been developing sustainable nanomaterials since 2009.

"If you take a big tree and cut it down to the in-dividual fiber, the most common product is paper. The dimension of the fiber is in the micron stage," Dr. Cai explained. "But what if we could break it down further to the nano scale? At that scale you can make this material, very strong and transpar-ent CNF paper."

Working with Shaoqin "Sarah" Gong, a UW-Madison professor of biomedical engineering, Dr. Cai's group addressed two key barriers to using wood-derived materials in an electronics setting: surface smoothness and thermal expansion.

"You don't want it to expand or shrink too much. Wood is a natural hydroscopic material

and could attract moisture from the air and ex-pand," Dr. Cai noted. "With an epoxy coating on the surface of the CNF, we solved both the surface smoothness and the moisture barrier."

"The advantage of CNF over other polymers is that it's a bio-based material and most other poly-mers are petroleum-based polymers. Bio-based materials are sustainable, bio-compatible and bio-degradable," Prof. Gong said. "And, compared to other polymers, CNF actually has a relatively low thermal expansion coefficient."

The group's work also demonstrates a more environmentally friendly process that showed performance similar to existing chips. The major-ity of today's wireless devices use gallium arse-nide-based microwave chips due to their superior high-frequency operation and power handling capabilities. However, gallium arsenide can be environmentally toxic, particularly in the massive quantities of discarded wireless electronics.

While the biodegradability of these materials will have a positive impact on the environment, Prof. Ma speculated that the flexibility of the technology could potentially lead to widespread adoption of these electronic chips.

"Mass-producing current semiconductor chips is so cheap, and it may take time for the industry to adapt to our design," he said. "But flexible elec-tronics are the future, and we think we're going to be well ahead of the curve."

Article reprinted from materials provided by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. ##

A cellulose nanofibril (CNF) computer chip rests on a leaf. Photo courtesy of Yei Hwan Jung, Wisconsin Nano Engineering Device Laboratory.



A team led by environmen-tal engineers from Drexel Uni-versity are the first independent researchers to take a closer look at the air quality effects of natu-ral gas extraction in the Marcel-lus Shale region of Pennsylva-nia. The group used a mobile air quality monitoring vehicle to survey regional air quality and pollutant emissions at 13 sites in-cluding wells, drilling rigs, com-pressor stations and processing areas. Their work establishes baseline measurements for this relatively new area of extraction.

While there have been a number of studies focusing on water quality impacts related to natural gas extraction in shale regions across the country, few have looked at the effect on air quality. In a paper recently pub-lished in the journal Environ-mental Science & Technology Pe-ter DeCarlo, PhD, an assistant professor in the College of Engi-neering and College of Arts and Sciences, and J. Douglas Goetz, a doctoral researcher in the Drexel Air Resources Research Labora-tory, present the findings of a two-month mobile air monitor-ing campaign in several counties in the northeastern and south-western Pennsylvania.

The team looked specifically at gaseous chemicals and par-ticulate matter released into the air from natural gas extraction. They compared levels of carbon monoxide, methane, ethane, ni-trogen oxides and other volatile

organic compounds to those found in other shale formations across the country where natural gas was being extracted.

According to Dr. DeCarlo, air emission studies of shale gas extraction facilities in this region have thus far focused solely on the release of methane due to its impact on the climate sys-tem. Dr. DeCarlo’s research has a broader scope and is the first to also test for air pollutants that could pose a more immediate and local health hazard.

The most significant findings of the research include:

• Relatively small increases in chemicals that affect air quality, such as nitrogen oxides and vola-tile organic chemicals compared to other monitored regions. Thisindicates that these types of emissions cannot be generalized for all oil and natural gas extrac-tion regions.

• The number of ultrafine parti-cles originating from compressor stations was elevated, although the total particulate mass was not significantly increased. Ul-trafine particles, though not reg-ulated in the U.S., are thought to have health impacts.

• Methane emissions observed were generally higher than those reported in previous studies.

Dr. DeCarlo’s team collected

the data in collaboration with Aerodyne Research, Inc., using its Mobile Laboratory vehicle that in some aspects resembles a moving van with several sam-pling inlets affixed to the roof and instruments and computers for data processing contained on the inside. The Electric Power Research Institute funded the study and its air quality scien-tists helped guide the research concept and design plan.

The research focused on two distinct regions of the Marcellus Shale formation where hydrau-lic fracturing is being used to ex-tract natural gas. Bradford and Susquehanna are two counties in Northeast Pennsylvania that are part of the region known for producing “dry gas”—gas that is predominantly methane. The team spent two weeks in the summer of 2012 in the region before performing similar sam-pling in the southwestern part of the state, which is known to produce “wet gas.” Wet gas con-tains higher levels of hydrocar-bons including ethane, propane and butane, which can be sepa-rated and sold or used in other chemical processes.

Despite not having direct ac-cess to the sites, the group was able to use a fence line tracer-re-lease sampling protocol. This al-lowed them to make downwind measurements with the mobile laboratory and provide an accu-rate assessment of site emissions and potential air quality impact.

The team collected air qual-ity data from four types of sites associated with the extraction and processing of natural gas: drilling sites—where the wells

Air Quality Effects From Natural Gas Extraction Studied


are being created; completion sites—the end of the drilling and hydraulic fracturing pro-cess when wells are prepared for continuous natural gas extrac-tion; production sites—where natural gas is actively being extracted; and compressor sta-tions—where the natural gas is pressurized for transport.

“In looking at a cross section of sites, we identified compres-sor stations as one of the larger long-term emission sources,” Dr. DeCarlo said. Completion sites were another large source of pollutants, although these emis-sions are transient. “In terms of persistent impacts to local air quality, compressor stations and other post-extraction processing are major sources of pollutants that have the potential to affect downwind air quality.”

Dr. DeCarlo sees these find-ings as the first step toward a better understanding of the im-pact of natural gas extraction on the environment, which will al-low leaders and citizens to make more informed choices and poli-cies regarding the practice and energy policy as a whole.

“It’s important not only to understand the impact of natu-ral gas extraction on local and regional environments,” Dr. De-Carlo said. “But this informa-tion also fills in part of a bigger picture of the overall air quality and climate-relevant emissions from the entire life cycle of shale gas compared to other sources of electrical power including nu-clear, renewables and other fos-sil fuels like coal.”

Article reprinted from materials provided by Drexel University. ##

Engineers at The Univer-sity of Texas at Dallas (UT Dal-las) have created semiconduc-tor technology that potentially could make night vision and thermal imaging affordable for everyday use.

Researchers in the Texas Analog Center of Excellence (TxACE) in the University’s Erik Jonsson School of Engi-neering and Computer Science have created an electronic de-vice using affordable technol-ogy that detects electromag-netic waves to create images at nearly 10 terahertz, the highest frequency for electronic de-vices. The device could make night vision and heat-based imaging affordable.

Presently, night vision and thermal imagers are costly, in part because they are made with specialty semiconductor devices or need isolation from the environment.

The new UT Dallas device was created using Schottky diodes in Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) technology. CMOS is used to make affordable con-sumer electronic devices such as personal computers, game consoles and high-definition TVs. In addition to being af-fordable, these devices could be more easily incorporated

into smartphones.“There are no existing elec-

tronic detection systems oper-ating in CMOS that can reach above 5 terahertz,” said Ze-shan Ahmad, lead author of the work, electrical engineer-ing doctoral candidate and a research assistant in TxACE. “We designed our chip in such a way that it can be mass pro-duced inexpensively, has a smaller pixel and operates at higher frequencies.”

The device could eventu-ally be used for imaging ani-mals near a road while driving at night; imaging intruders in darkness; providing light for night hiking; and estimating how many people are in a room to better control heating, air conditioning and light. It also could be used for other tasks such as finding pipes covered by concrete or walls.

The next step in the research is to realize CMOS devices that can reach even higher frequen-cies, up to 40 terahertz.

The work was conducted in collaboration with research teams from Goethe University Frankfurt and Vilnius Univer-sity in Lithuania.

Supported by TxACE, with funding provided by the Semi-conductor Research Corpora-tion, the state through its Texas Emerging Technology Fund, Texas Instruments Inc., the UT System and UT Dallas, the re-search findings were presented at the International Electron Device Meeting.

Article reprinted from mate-rials provided by the University of Texas, Dallas. ##

Affordable Night Vision

and Thermal Imaging

A Possibility



A new class of magnets that expand their volume when placed in a magnetic field and generate negligible amounts of wasteful heat during energy har-vesting, has been discovered by researchers at Temple University and the University of Maryland.

The researchers, Harsh Deep Chopra, professor and chair of mechanical engineering at Tem-ple, and Manfred Wuttig, pro-fessor of materials science and engineering at Maryland, pub-lished their findings, “Non-Jou-lian Magnetostriction,” in a re-cent issue of the journal, Nature.

“Our findings fundamen-tally change the way we think about a certain type of magne-tism that has been in place since 1841,” explained Prof. Chopra, who also runs the Materials Ge-nomics and Quantum Devices Laboratories at Temple’s College of Engineering.

In the 1840s, physicist James

Prescott Joule discovered that iron-based magnetic materi-als changed their shape but not their volume when placed in a magnetic field. This phenome-non is referred to as “Joule Mag-netostriction,” and since its dis-

covery 175 years ago, all magnets have been char-acterized on this basis.

“We have discovered a new class of magnets, which we call ‘Non-Jou-lian Magnets,’ that show a large volume change in magnetic fields,” said Prof. Chopra. “More-over, these non-Joulian magnets also possess the remarkable ability to harvest or convert ener-

gy with minimal heat loss.”“The response of these mag-

nets differs fundamentally from that likely envisioned by Joule,” said Prof. Wuttig. “He must have thought that magnets respond in a uniform fashion.”

Profs. Chopra and Wuttig found that when they thermally treated certain iron-based alloys by heating them in a furnace at approximately 760 degrees Cel-sius/1400 degrees Farenheit for 30 minutes, then rapidly cooled them to room temperature, the materials exhibited the non-Jou-lian behavior.

The researchers found the thermally treated materials con-tained never before seen micro-scopic cellular-like structures whose response to a magnetic field is at the heart of non-Jou-lian magnetostriction. “Know-ing about this unique structure will enable researchers to de-velop new materials with simi-

larly attractive properties,” Prof. Wuttig added.

The researchers noted that conventional magnets can only be used as actuators for exert-ing forces in a single direction since they are limited by Joule magnetostriction. Actuation, even in two directions, requires bulky stacks of magnets, which increase size and reduce effi-ciency. Since non-Joulian mag-nets spontaneously expand in all directions, compact omnidi-rectional actuators can now be easily realized, they said.

Because these new magnets also have energy efficient char-acteristics, they can be used to create a new generation of sen-sors and actuators with vanish-ingly small heat signatures, said the researchers. These magnets could also find applications in efficient energy harvesting de-vices; compact micro-actuators for aerospace, automobile, bio-medical, space and robotics ap-plications; and ultra-low thermal signature actuators for sonars and defense applications.

Since these new magnets are composed of alloys that are free of rare-earth elements, they could replace existing rare-earth based magnetostriction alloys, which are expensive and feature inferior mechanical properties, said researchers.

Profs. Chopra and Wuttig’s research was supported by the Condensed Matter Physics and the Metals programs of the Na-tional Science Foundation’s Di-vision of Materials Research.

Article reprinted from materi-als provided by Temple Univer-sity. ##

New Class of Swelling Magnets

Discovered

Never before seen highly pe-riodic magnetic ‘cells’ or ‘do-mains’ in iron-gallium alloys responsible for n o n - J o u l i a n magnetism. Im-age courtesy of Harsh Deep Chopra/Temple University.


Continued from page 5.

that antibiotic resistance also is not spread.”

In fact, the FDA recently es-timated that 80 percent of anti-biotics used in the U.S. are ad-ministered to livestock, to which Prof. Pruden noted “the fact that the majority of antibiotic use in the U.S. is for livestock cannot be ignored.” Kang Xia, associate professor of crop and soil envi-ronmental sciences at Virginia Tech and a co-principal inves-tigator, noted that between “40 and 90 percent of the antibiotic is excreted in the feces and urine where they can remain active and potentially stimulate antibi-otic resistance,” reinforcing “our call for new strategies.”

In the U.S., antimicrobials are widely used for therapy, disease prevention, and growth promo-tion in animals raised as a source of food. “They generally act by targeting specific aspects of the bacterial cells and inhibiting their growth,” Prof. Pruden ex-plained. “However the bacteria can become resistant to antibi-otics when they carry antibiotic resistance genes.”

So the Virginia Tech team is focusing on these genes “since they can be shared among bacte-ria, even dead to living bacteria, and could therefore persist dur-ing pre-harvest and post-har-vest stages,” said Prof. Pruden. “Antibiotic resistance genes are arguably of greater concern than antibiotic resistant bacte-ria because they are typically associated with mobile genetic elements that enable them to be passed between microorgan-

isms via horizontal gene trans-fer, a phenomenon possible even from dead to living cells,” Prof. Pruden explained, noting that “horizontal gene transfer is con-sidered to be the most important mechanism driving the spread of antibiotic resistance.”

Monica Ponder, a team mem-ber and an associate professor of food science and technology at Virginia Tech, noted concerns about produce eaten raw, as vegetable surfaces are naturally colonized by a variety of bac-teria, yeasts, and fungi. Gener-ally harmless, they do occasion-ally carry pathogens that can be deadly, as was the case in the 2006 outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7 linked to spinach.

This contamination can come from lapses in manure manage-ment, such as contamination of irrigation water, poor compost-ing, or application too near the harvest time. “In the U.S., it is not permissible to apply raw manure to fields intended for food production, but there may be simple ways we could im-prove the composting process, selection of soil type, crop type, or post-harvest washing practic-es to ensure that antibiotic resis-tance is not spread,” Prof. Pon-der emphasized.

“While limiting antibiotic use in livestock makes sense from a practical standpoint, the science of the effect of antibiotic with-drawal on antibiotic resistance is complex,” cautioned team member Katharine Knowlton, the Virginia Tech Colonel Hor-ace E. Alphin Professor of Dairy Science, and other undesirable effects may occur.

The new USDA project will integrate research, education, and extension in order to train future leaders equipped to ad-dress complex problems like the spread of antibiotic resistance in the environment and to en-gage with farmers and livestock producers in translating the re-search to practice. “Virginia Tech is the ideal locale for this project given its land-grant mission and highly supportive atmosphere for agricultural extension, Prof. Pruden said.

Despite the negatives associ-ated with antibiotic resistance, there does appear to be poten-tial positives as related research is identifying and developing what could be new solutions.

Much like milk producers that tend to herds of cows, re-searchers are tending to colonies of the bacteria Escherichia coli (E. coli) to produce new forms of antibiotics — including three that show promise in fighting drug-resistant bacteria.

Published recently in the journal Science Advances, Blaine A. Pfeifer, Ph.D., an associate professor of chemical and bio-logical engineering in the Uni-versity at Buffalo (UB) School of Engineering and Applied Sci-ences, led the research with team members Guojian Zhang, first author, Yi Li and Lei Fang, all in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at UB.

For over a decade, Dr. Pfeifer has been studying how to engi-neer E. coli to generate new va-rieties of erythromycin, a popu-lar antibiotic. In the new study, he and colleagues report that they have done this successfully,



harnessing E. coli to synthesize new forms of the drug that have a slightly different structure from existing versions.

Three of these new va-rieties of erythromycin suc-cessfully killed bacteria of the species Bacillus subti-lis that were resistant to the original form of erythromy-cin used clinically.

“We’re focused on trying to come up with new anti-biotics that can overcome antibiotic resistance, and we see this as an important step forward,” said Dr. Pfeifer.

“We have not only cre-ated new analogs of eryth-romycin, but also developed a platform for using E. coli to produce the drug,” he said. “This opens the door for additional engineering possibili-ties in the future; it could lead to even more new forms of the drug.”

The study is especially im-portant considering that eryth-romycin is used to treat a vari-ety of illnesses, from pneumonia and whooping cough to skin and urinary tract infections.

Getting E. coli to produce new antibiotics has been some-thing of a holy grail for research-ers in the field.

That’s because E. coli grows rapidly, which speeds experi-mental steps and aids efforts to develop and scale up produc-tion of drugs. The species also accepts new genes relatively eas-ily, making it a prime candidate for engineering.

While the dangers of E. coli are often the primary focus, most types of this bacteria are actually

harmless, including those used by Dr. Pfeifer’s team in the lab.

Over the past 11 years, Dr. Pfeifer’s research has focused on manipulating E. coli so that the organism produces all of the materials necessary for creating erythromycin.

With that phase of the re-search complete, Dr. Pfeifer has turned to the next goal: Tweak-ing the way his engineered E. coli produce erythromycin so that the drug they create is slightly different than versions used in clinics and hospitals throughout the U.S. today.

Achieving that goal is the fo-cus of Dr. Pfeifer’s research as presented in the recently pub-lished paper.

The process of creating eryth-romycin begins with three basic building blocks called metabolic precursors — chemical com-pounds that are combined and manipulated through an assem-bly line-like process to form the

final product, erythromycin.To build new varieties of erythromycin with a slightly different shape, scientists can theoretically target any part of this assembly line, using various techniques to affix parts with structures that deviate slightly from the originals. (On an assem-bly line for cars, this would be akin to screwing on a door handle with a slightly different shape.)

In the new study, Dr. Pfeifer’s team focused on a step in the building process that had previously received little attention, a step near the end.

The researchers focused on using enzymes to attach

16 different shapes of sugar mol-ecules to a molecule called 6-de-oxyerythronolide B. Every one of these sugar molecules was successfully adhered, leading, at the end of the assembly line, to more than 40 new analogs of erythromycin — three of which showed an ability to fight eryth-romycin-resistant bacteria in lab experiments.

“The system we’ve created is surprisingly flexible, and that’s one of the great things about it,” Dr. Pfeifer said. “We have estab-lished a platform for using E. coli to produce erythromycin, and now that we’ve got it, we can start altering it in new ways.”

Article adapted from materi-als provided by the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, the University of Wisconsin-Mil-waukee, the American Chemical Society, the University at Buf-falo, and Virginia Tech. ##

White filter disks holding antibiotics sit on petri dishes housing erythromycin-resistant Bacillus subtilis. The circled filter disks hold new forms of erythromycin created by Uni-versity at Buffalo researchers, and the dark halo around them indicates that the drug has seeped out of the disk to kill the surrounding bacteria. Image courtesy of Guojian Zhang.


Bits & PiecesNumerous other, continuously updated, news items are available at www.vaeng.com and m.vaeng.com

Drought Conditions Not Mti-gated By Tropical Storms

Popular opinion says that tropical storms and hurricanes that make landfall mitigate droughts in the southeastern United States.

But that simply isn’t true, ac-cording to a Florida State Uni-versity researcher.

Vasu Misra, associate pro-fessor of meteorology, disputed the commonly held belief in an article published in the journal Climate Dynamics.

“The perception that land-falling tropical cyclones serve to replenish the terrestrial water

sources in many of the small wa-tersheds in the southeastern U.S. seems to be a myth,” Prof. Misra said. “This perception is wide-spread because the southeast-ern United States has the largest share of land-falling tropical cy-clones in the country.”

Prof. Misra and Satish Bas-tola from Georgia Institute of Technology examined historical rainfall records and from that, created a soil moisture-based drought index for 28 watersheds across the southeastern United States for a 58-year period. They then reconstructed the database by eliminating the rainfall on

days when a tropical storm or hurricane had made landfall.

The end result? Soil moisture levels in these watersheds re-mained about the same.

That’s because the atmo-spheric circulation during sum-mer droughts often create fa-vorable conditions for steering a tropical storm or hurricane away from land.

Additionally, when tropical cyclones do make landfall, it is usually during a season when the soil is already wet. The ad-ditional saturation does nothing for the overall soil moisture con-ditions, Prof. Misra said.

THE MOON IS ENGULFED in a permanent but lopsided dust cloud that increases in density when annual events like the Geminids spew shooting stars, according to a new study led by the Univer-sity of Colorado Boulder. The cloud is made up pri-marily of tiny dust grains kicked up from the moon’s surface by the impact of high-speed, interplanetary dust particles, said CU-Boulder physics professor Mihaly Horanyi. A single dust particle from a com-et striking the moon’s surface lofts thousands of smaller dust specks into the airless environment, and the lunar cloud is maintained by regular im-pacts from such particles, said Prof. Horanyi, also a research associate at CU-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics. The cloud was discovered using data from NASA’s Lunar Atmo-sphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, which launched in September 2013 and orbited the moon for about six months. A detector on board, the Lunar Dust Experiment (LDEX) designed and built by CU-Boulder, charted more than 140,000 impacts during the mission. A paper on the subject appears in a recent issue of Nature. Knowledge of the dusty environments in space has practical applications, said Prof. Horanyi. Knowing where the dust is and where it is headed in the solar system, for example, could help mitigate hazards for future human exploration, including dust particles damaging spacecraft or harming astronauts. Prof. Horanyi also is the principal investigator on a CU-Boulder student dust-counting instrument on board NASA’s New Horizons space-craft that will fly by Pluto on July 14 after a journey of more than nine years. In this image is an artist’s conception of the thin dust cloud surrounding the Moon and the LADEE mission orbit. The colors represent the amount of material ejected from the lunar surface, with red representing the highest density of dust and blue representing the lowest density. Image Credit: Daniel Morgan and Jamey Szalay, University of Colorado.


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According to a National Oce-anic and Atmospheric Adminis-tration (NOAA) report, 37.4 per-cent of the contiguous United States was experiencing moder-ate drought at the end of April.

This study was funded by the NOAA and the U.S. Geologi-cal Survey.

New Coating May Reduce Intensity of Laser Attacks

A recently published Journal of Aviation Technology and En-gineering (JATE) article shows Lewis University researchers have created a coating for air-craft that reduces pilot distrac-tion from laser attacks.

In a 2013 study, Lewis Uni-versity proved these laser at-tacks, which average around 3,750 incidents a year, can be a distraction to pilots and a poten-tial safety hazard during critical phases of flight. As part of con-tinued research on the matter, Lewis University recently devel-oped a practical and economi-cal solution through the use of photoresponsive nanocomposite coatings on aircraft windscreens.

A recent study published in JATE, “Measuring the Effective-ness of Photoresponsive Nano-composite Coatings on Aircraft Windshields to Mitigate Laser Intensity,” determined the ap-plication of the engineered films resulted in a reduction in laser intensity from 36-88 percent.

The study was completed through collaboration of the Aviation, Physics and Chemistry departments at Lewis Universi-ty. The Chemistry Department developed the photoselective coatings, and the Physics De-partment developed the appara-tus to efficiently test the coatings






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while allowing safe viewings of laser illumination. The coatings were subject to bench-testing in a laboratory prior to conducting field tests at the 200- and 500-foot distances.

The team’s research was sponsored, in part, by a grant from the Colonel Stephan S. and Lyla Doherty Center for Avia-tion and Health Research.

Brain’s Response Could Replace Passwords

You might not need to re-member those complicated e-mail and bank account pass-words for very much longer. According to a new study, the way your brain responds to cer-tain words could be used to re-place passwords.

In “Brainprint,” a newly pub-lished study in academic jour-nal Neurocomputing, researchers from Binghamton University observed the brain signals of 45 volunteers as they read a list of 75 acronyms, such as FBI and DVD. They recorded the brain’s reaction to each group of letters, focusing on the part of the brain associated with reading and rec-ognizing words, and found that participants’ brains reacted dif-ferently to each acronym, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer with 94 percent accuracy. The results suggest that brainwaves could be used by security systems to verify a person’s identity.

According to Sarah Laszlo, assistant professor of psychol-ogy and linguistics at Bingham-ton University and co-author of “Brainprint,” brain biometrics are appealing because they are cancelable and cannot be stolen by malicious means the way a






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finger or retina can.“If someone’s fingerprint

is stolen, that person can’t just grow a new finger to replace the compromised fingerprint—the fingerprint for that person is compromised forever. Fin-gerprints are ‘non-cancellable.’ Brainprints, on the other hand, are potentially cancelable. So, in the unlikely event that attack-ers were actually able to steal a brainprint from an authorized user, the authorized user could then ‘reset’ their brainprint,” Prof. Laszlo said.

The project is funded by the National Science Foundation and Binghamton University’s Interdisciplinary Collaboration Grants (ICG) Program.

Climate Change Effecting Fre-quency, Intensity of Hurricanes

Climate change may be the driving force behind fewer, yet more powerful hurricanes and tropical storms, says a Florida State geography professor.

In a paper recently published in Nature Climate Change, Profes-sor Jim Elsner and his former graduate student Namyoung Kang, supported by the Geo-physical Fluid Dynamics Insti-tute at Florida State, found that rising ocean temperatures are having an effect on how many tropical storms and hurricanes develop each year.

“We’re seeing fewer hurri-canes, but the ones we do see are more intense,” Prof. Elsner said. “When one comes, all hell can break loose.”

Prior to this research, there had been some discussions among scientists about how warmer ocean temperatures affected the intensity of a hur-


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ricane. Prof. Elsner and Kang wanted to further explore that concept as well as the number of storms that occurred each year.

Hurricanes can form when ocean waters are 79 degrees Fahrenheit or more. As the warm water evaporates, it provides the energy a storm needs to be-come a hurricane. Higher tem-peratures mean higher levels of energy, which would ultimately affect wind speed.

Specifically, Prof. Elsner and Kang projected that over the past 30 years, storm speeds have increased on average by 1.3 me-ters per second — or 3 miles per hour — and there were 6.1 fewer storms than there would have been if land and water tempera-tures had remained constant.

“It’s basically a tradeoff be-tween frequency and intensity,” Prof. Elsner said.

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Ad-ministration, the Earth is roughly 1.53 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was last century.

Prof. Elsner and Kang said the yearly temperatures can also be a good indicator of what’s yet to come in a given storm season.

“In a warmer year, stronger but fewer tropical cyclones are likely to occur,” noted Kang, now deputy director of the Na-tional Typhoon Center in South Korea. “In a colder year, on the other hand, weaker but more tropical cyclones.”

For the 2015 Atlantic storm season, which began June 1, the Weather Channel has projected a total of nine named storms, five hurricanes and one major hurri-cane. The 30-year average is 12 named storms, six hurricanes and three major hurricanes. ##


The power of evaporating water has the po-tential to propel self-sufficient devices or produce electricity according to reseachers at Columbia University (Columbia).

In a recent online issue of “Nature Communi-cations”, scientists report the development of two devices that derive power directly from evaporation - a floating, pis-ton-driven engine that generates electricity causing a light to flash, and a rotary engine that drives a miniature car.

When evaporation energy is scaled up, it could one day produce electricity from giant floating pow-er generators that sit on bays or res-ervoirs, or from huge rotating ma-chines akin to wind turbines that sit above water, predicted Ozgur Sahin, Ph.D., lead author and as-sociate professor of biological sci-ences and physics at Columbia.

“Evaporation is a fundamental force of nature,” Dr. Sahin noted. “It’s everywhere, and it’s more powerful than other forces like wind and waves.”

In a paper published earlier in Nature Nano-technology, Dr. Sahin reported that when bacterial spores shrink and swell with changing humidity, they can push and pull other objects forcefully.

Building on this discovery with funding pro-vided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, and the David and Lucile Packard Fellows Program, Dr. Sahin’s team sought to build actual devices that could be powered by such energy.

To build a floating, piston-driven engine, the researchers first glued spores to both sides of a thin, double-sided plastic tape creating a dashed line of spores. They did the same on the opposite side of the tape, but offset the line so dashes on one side overlapped with gaps on the other.

When dry air shrinks the spores, the spore-covered dashes curve, shortening the tape as it changes shape from straight to wavy. If one or both ends of the tape are anchored, the tape tugs on the anchor points. Conversely, when the air is

moist, the tape extends, releasing the force. The result is a new type of artificial muscle that is con-trolled by changing humidity.

The researchers then placed dozens of these tapes side by side, creating a stronger artificial muscle that they then placed inside a floating

plastic case topped with shutters. Inside the case, evaporating wa-ter made the air humid causing the muscle to elongate, opening the shutters and allowing the air to dry out. When the humidity es-caped, the spores shrunk and the tapes contracted, pulling the shut-ters closed and allowing humidity to build again. The result is a self-sustaining cycle of motion.

The spore-covered artificial muscles act as an evaporation-driv-en piston that attached to a genera-tor produces electricity.

“We turned evaporation from a pool of water into light,” Dr. Sahin

said, speculating that an improved version could potentially generate even more power per unit area than a wind farm.

The other new evaporation-driven engine, the Moisture Mill, contains a plastic wheel with protruding tabs of tape covered on one side with spores. Half of the wheel sits in dry air, causing the tabs to curve, and the other half sits in a hu-mid environment, where the tabs straighten. As a result, the wheel rotates continuously, effectively acting as a rotary engine.

The researchers next built a small car, power-ing it with the Moisture Mill and were successful in getting the car to roll, powered only by evapo-ration. In the future, Dr. Sahin said, it may be pos-sible to design engines that use the mechanical en-ergy stored in spores to propel a full-sized vehicle. Such an engine, if achieved, would require neither fuel nor an electrical battery. He also suggested that a larger Moisture Mill could steadily produce as much electricity as a wind turbine.

Article adapted from materials provided by Columbia University. ##

The Outer Edge of Engineering Research

The first evaporation-pow-ered car moves as water evaporates. Credit: Xi Chen, Columbia University.

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VOLUME LXIV • NUMBER 7 • July 2015 • $3