Washington D.C. has decided to go green, and at Camp Energy, 36 middle-school students from the Bryan Independent School District (BISD) prepared for the challenge.

Middle-school students tested the energy efficiency of different building materials at Camp Energy.

Camp Energy, which was held between June 22 and 26 at Arthur L. Davila Middle School in Bryan, was organized by BISD and the Energy Systems Laboratory (ESL), a center within the Texas Engineering Experiment Station (TEES).

The children learned about energy transformation, energy efficiency, and alternative fuels through field trips to Bryan Texas Utility’s Dansby Power Plant, Texas A&M University’s College of Architecture, the TEES  Spacecraft Technology Center, the Dwight Look College of Engineering’s Nuclear Science Center and the TEES/MixAlco pilot biomass conversion plant.

“I enjoyed the field trips. Especially the one to the space center, because I want to build spacecrafts when I grow up,” said 13-year-old Hunter Denton.

Don Gilman, an assistant research engineer in ESL, who conceptualized the program, said that the aim of the field trips was twofold: “Besides exposing the children to energy concepts, we wanted to increase their awareness about different high-level jobs involving science, math and engineering.”

At Camp Energy, students constructed waterwheels and tested them to see if the hydropower they generated was sufficient to lift a cup full of gravel.

The children applied the different energy concepts they learned during the field trips in hands-on activities. They constructed energy-efficient house models, built miniature waterwheels and windmills, conducted energy audits of household appliances and a school building and raced solar cars.

“I think the students enjoyed the hands-on activities. We did not give them too many rules, just the basics. The ideas and innovation are all their own,” said Jessica Mahaffey, a biology teacher at Bryan High School, who says Camp Energy has benefitted her too by helping her become better informed about energy-efficient building materials.

Camp Energy activities were designed to mimic real-world situations. For example, to build energy-efficient houses, the children were given budgets ranging from $105,000 to $115,000. They had to buy all building materials, which were realistically priced, using this budget.

“I was worried when we spent $100,000 of our $115,000 to buy the cardboard box for the house,” said 11-year-old Kristin O’Neill who along with team member Denton built the house with the lowest internal temperature. “But we still managed to stay within budget.”

Houses built with both high and low budgets were comparable in terms of energy efficiency noted Sally Keller, a sixth-grade science teacher at Sam Rayburn Middle School. “I think we managed to show the children that going green need not be expensive,” Keller said.

The camp organizers now face the challenge of translating the camp activities into classroom activities that are aligned with TEKS requirements.

Participants building energy-efficient model houses.

“The teachers have been working hard during the camp, noting what works and what doesn’t,” Gilman said. “The participants have also taken pre- and post-tests. Besides cost, time and storage are concerns.  The only way to do these activities in classrooms effectively will be to virtualize them. I keep seeing the Muppet scientist in his lab, but online using Flash technology.”

Camp Energy sponsors included the Brazos Valley Affordable Housing Co-op., City of Bryan-Sustainability Office, Bryan Texas Utilities and the Brazos Valley Association of Home Builders.

TEES is the engineering research agency of the State of Texas and a member of The Texas A&M University System.

Camp Energy is part of a larger plan to extend energy education in schools, called “Integrated School Energy Education and Building Improvement” or ISEEBI. For more information, visit http://iseebi.tamu.edu

Written by Marissa Doshi

Popularity: 35% [?]

Texas A&M University’s student chapter of the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) has been selected as the 2009 Outstanding Student Chapter for the North America Region.

SPE Outstanding Student Chapter Awards recognize student chapters whose programs, activities and levels of participation during a single academic year distinguish those chapters from others.

Winners will be recognized Oct. 4 during the Student General Session at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition in New Orleans. More information is available online at http://www.spe.org/atce/2009/.

Popularity: 54% [?]

Dr. Sara A. McComb, associate professor in the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at Texas A&M University, has been selected to participate in the National Academy of Engineering’s (NAE) 15th Annual Frontiers of Engineering Symposium Sept. 10-12 at the National Academies’ Beckman Center at the University of California, Irvine.

Dr. Sara A. McComb

McComb was one of 88 of the nation’s brightest young engineers selected to participate in the three-day event, which brings together engineers ages 30 through 45 from industry, government and academia who are doing cutting-edge engineering research and technical work in a variety of disciplines. The symposium will examine engineering tools for scientific discovery; engineering the health care delivery system; nano/micro photonics and new applications; and resilient and sustainable infrastructures. A featured speaker will be Bradford W. Parkinson, the Edward C. Wells Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics Emeritus at Stanford University. Parkinson is credited with being the father of the Global Positioning System, and is a recipient of the prestigious Draper Prize and a member of the NAE.

McComb joined the Texas A&M Engineering faculty in September 2008. She previously was with General Motors, Purdue University and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. In 2001, she received the National Science Foundation CAREER Award. She is a member of the Academy of Management (AOM); Alpha Pi Mu, the Industrial Engineering Honor Society; American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE); Institute of Industrial Engineers (IIE); and Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS).

McComb’s research areas of interest are in exploring team-level cognition by capturing individually held mental models, the mental model convergence process among team members, and the impact of mental models on team performance; studying collaboration among healthcare professionals and its impact on patient care, with the intent to fundamentally change the way resident training in conducted; and devising productivity enhancing strategies and tools that reduce the inherent uncertainty experienced by project teams, by examining project team design, team communication, organizational context, project complexity, and human-system interactions.

A licensed professional engineer in Michigan, McComb holds a bachelor’s degree from GMI Engineering & Management Institute and a master’s degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She earned a Ph.D. in from Purdue University.

The National Academy of Engineering is an independent, nonprofit institution that serves as an adviser to government and the public on issues in engineering and technology. Its members consist of the nation’s premier engineers, who are elected by their peers for their distinguished achievements. Established in 1964, NAE operates under the congressional charter granted to the National Academy of Sciences in 1863.

A meeting program and more information about Frontiers of Engineering are available at http://www.nae.edu/frontiers.

Written by Lesley V. Kriewald, lesleyk@tamu.edu

Popularity: 51% [?]

Three professors and a student in petroleum engineering will receive prestigious technical awards from the Society of Petroleum Engineering (SPE) at the SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition.

Dr. Christine Ehlig-Economides

Dr. Christine Ehlig-Economides, professor and A.B. Stevens Endowed Chair, has been selected as the 2010 recipient of the SPE Anthony F. Lucas Gold Medal — SPE’s highest award for technology development — for her work in advancing both reservoir engineering and hydraulic fracturing technologies. Her work in reservoir engineering helps the industry estimate the amount of resources available; her work in fracturing helps extract resources from unconventional, challenging reservoirs.

A member of the National Academy of Engineering, Economides currently leads Texas A&M University’s program in energy engineering that engages students from multiple disciplines in shaping their outlook on sustaining a positive energy balance for the future.

Dr. Akhil Datta-Gupta

Dr. Akhil Datta-Gupta, the LeSeur Chair in Reservoir Management, has won the John Franklin Carll Award, SPE’s second-highest award for technology development. Datta-Gupta manages the largest and most active joint industry project in the Harold Vance Department of Petroleum Engineering. His research into sophisticated systems of dynamic data integration has helped simplify problems of how fluids move in the subsurface so they can be recovered for use.

Dr. Hisham Nasr-El-Din

Dr. Hisham Nasr-El-Din, holder of the S.A. Holditch Faculty Fellowship, will receive the SPE Production and Operations Award. Over his 40-year career, Nasr-El-Din’s work has touched nearly every approach to improved production technology, mostly through the development of products and processes that move hydrocarbons from their locations within a reservoir to the wellbore, where they can be produced to the surface for processing.

Graduate student Abhishek Anchliya will receive the Young member Outstanding Service Award. Anchliya has served as a member of the International Student guidance Committee and the Young Professionals Committee, where he has worked to coordinate programs that help students move into the professional organization. He has also served as editor of The Way Ahead, the SPE magazine for young members.

Written by Darla-Jean Weatherford

Popularity: 63% [?]

Dr. Brian Sauser will present a seminar, “A Review of Frameworks and Models from Maturity to Collaboration in Systems and System of Systems Engineering,” Monday (June 29) at 11 a.m. in Room 233 of the Zachry Engineering Center.

Sauser is with the School of Systems and Enterprises at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, N.J.

Sauser says there is a rising demand and necessity for military defense systems and more recently system of systems (SoS) to address ever‐increasing complex problems in a global theater. In his seminar, he will review some of the research and developments of two laboratories at Stevens Institute of Technology seeking to find solutions to these emerging challenges.

Systems Development and Maturity Laboratory
The Technology Readiness Level (TRL) scale is a measure of maturity of an individual technology, with a view towards operational use in a system context. A comprehensive set of concerns becomes relevant when this metric is abstracted from an individual technology to a system context, which may involve interplay among multiple technologies that are integrated through an acquisition life cycle. This research has been pursuing the development of a system‐focused approach for managing system development and making effective and efficient decisions during the acquisition life cycle. This has included: development of system maturity indices in order to assess developmental and earned systems maturity; and the formulation of optimization models that allow for effective trade‐offs in functionality, capability, cost, schedule and maturity.

Systomics Laboratory
Future military systems will be distributed SoS of heterogeneous systems relying on network‐centric, decentralized control that is flexible in its autonomy and ability toexchange information at the right time to the those that need it. Equivalently, faced with asymmetric threats, uncertain and conceivably unknowable hostilities and continuous improvisation in anti‐counter‐insurgency measures, a SoS in a military context must have an agility in both form and function that exceeds enemy action. Accordingly, the ability to force this dynamism in SoS form and function, whilst maintaining SoS control and resilience, minimizing vulnerability and increasing SoS agility is paramount. This research is embarking on a discovery of the essence of togetherness through the study and modeling of cooperation and collaboration as it relates to SoS. This is being done through a SoS construct of distinguishing characteristics that have been understood to define a fundamental architecture (i.e. behavior) of a SoS. These elements are being used to model and better understand the essence of collaboration in a cooperative SoS, so we may better understand their health, maintenance, replication, and evolution.

Submitted by Katherine Edwards, kedwards@tamu.edu

Popularity: 60% [?]

Dr. Scott Socolofsky, assistant professor in the Coastal and Ocean Engineering Program of the Zachry Department of Civil Engineering, has received the 2009 Karl Emil Hilgard Hydraulic Award from the American Society of Civil Engineers.

Dr. Scott Socolofsky

He received the award for his paper, “Experiments on Mass Exchange between Groin Fields and Main Stream in Rivers,” in the Journal of Hydraulic Engineering. The award was presented by the American Society of Civil Engineers at the Environment and Water Resources Institute Annual Congress May 17-21 in Kansas City, Mo.

According to Socolofsky the paper covered contaminant mixing problems in navigable rivers, where there is potential for accidental spills and the need for a predictive response capability.

“It was an honor to be a part of the experiments and data analysis,” Socolofsky said. “Since this paper, we’ve applied similar methods to several other shallow water flows to learn more about mixing in natural water bodies.”

Socolofsky received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in civil and environmental engineering in 2001. He joined Texas A&M’s Zachry Department of Civil Engineering in 2003.
Written by Cassidy Thomas

Popularity: 79% [?]

Dr. John C. Criscione

Dr. John C. Criscione, associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Texas A&M University and CEO of CorInnova, has received the 2009 Bryan Rotary Club/Research Valley Commercialization Rising Star Award for his work in accelerating the commercialization of Texas A&M heart technologies.

“Technology commercialization is something you do because you want to see your research in the hands of those who will benefit from it,” said Criscione, who holds both an M.D. and a Ph.D.

Criscione develops heart assist technologies in his laboratory at Texas A&M, and CorInnova is engaged in transferring these technologies to the marketplace.

Marissa Doshi, marissadoshi@tees.tamus.edu

Popularity: 68% [?]

Thomas Abia, a graduate student in the Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, has received a grant of up to $5,000 from the Texas Water Resources Institute (TWRI) to support his research.

His project, “In Situ Groundwater Arsenic Removal using Iron Oxide Coated Sand,” is under advisor Dr. Yongheng Huang, assistant professor in the biological and agricultural engineering department.

This year, TWRI presented 10 grants for beginning, expanding or extending water-related research projects to graduate students from Texas A&M University, Rice University, Texas Tech University and The University of Texas at El Paso.

The institute’s funding for the graduate student projects is provided by the U.S. Geological Survey as part of the National Institutes for Water Research annual research program. TWRI will publish articles and reports about the progress of each project.

For more information about the grant program and students’ projects, go to http://twri.tamu.edu/usgs.php.

About TWRI

The Texas Water Resources Institute, part of the Texas AgriLife Extension Service, Texas AgriLife Research, and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Texas A&M University, provides leadership to stimulate priority water resources research and educational programs for AgriLife Research and AgriLife Extension as well as throughout Texas.

Contact Cecilia Wagner, 979.458.1138, cecilia@tamu.edu

Popularity: 67% [?]

Dr. John Valasek

Dr. John Valasek, associate professor in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and director of the Vehicle Systems and Control Laboratory at Texas A&M University, received the Outstanding Alumnus of the Year Award for 2009 from the aerospace engineering department at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

The award, which recognizes outstanding accomplishments in the field of aerospace engineering, was presented in a ceremony at the department’s 15th Annual Alumni & Student Awards Banquet, held June 6. Valasek was also the featured speaker at the banquet and presented results of his current research at Texas A&M.

Valasek has been with the Texas A&M aerospace engineering department for 12 years, where his research and teaching is focused on bridging the gap between traditional computer science topics and aerospace engineering topics. His interests encompass machine learning and multi-agent systems, intelligent autonomous control, vision based navigation systems, fault tolerant adaptive control, and cockpit systems and displays.

Valasek is an Associate Fellow of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA), Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), member of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and member of the American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE). He has received several teaching and education awards, including the university-level Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching in 2008, the college-level Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Teaching in 2004, Scholar Of The Montague Center For Teaching Excellence in 2001, the B.P. Amoco Teaching Excellence Award in 2001 and 2003, and the Thomas U. McElmurry Teaching Excellence Award in the aerospace engineering department in 2001 and 2004. From 2006 to 2009 he served as the national president of Sigma Gamma Tau, the aerospace engineering honor society, and he received the National Faculty Advisor Award from AIAA in 2005.

Valasek earned the B.S. degree in aerospace engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, in 1986, and the M.S. degree with honors and the Ph.D. in aerospace engineering from the University of Kansas, in 1991 and 1995 respectively.

Contact Dr. John Valasek, valasek@tamu.edu

Popularity: 66% [?]

Aerospace engineering senior Justin Wilkerson is the recipient of the 2009 Ammon S. Andes National Award from Sigma Gamma Tau, the Aerospace Engineering Honor Society.

Aerospace engineering senior Justin Wilkerson

This award honors him as the top aerospace engineering senior in the United States for 2009 based on his academic, service and extracurricular accomplishments. A panel of judges selected Wilkerson from a group of 53 of the top aerospace engineering seniors nationally. In addition to the national award, Wilkerson was recognized as the recipient of the Southwestern Region Award.

An honorarium in the form of a check for $1,000 and a plaque documenting the award were presented to Wilkerson at the Department of Aerospace Engineering Awards Banquet in May by Dr. John Valasek, the national president of Sigma Gamma Tau.

“Justin works hard on his studies, undergraduate research, service activities and publications. This is a fitting reward for his efforts that we can all be very proud of,” Valasek said.

Wilkerson was president of Texas A&M’s Sigma Gamma Tau student chapter for 2008-2009 and graduated in May. He will start graduate school in the aerospace engineering department this fall.

The Sigma Gamma Tau Undergraduate Awards serve to select outstanding aerospace engineering students at both the regional and national levels. Each of the ABET-accredited aerospace engineering departments with a Sigma Gamma Tau chapter are eligible to nominate one student per year for the award. A review board consisting of professional members selects eight regional finalists and the national finalist.

The award was created and named for Ammon S. Andes in 1976 to bestow upon Professor Andes a recognition of his 12 years of service to the society as its national executive secretary-treasurer from 1964 to 1976. Texas A&M University is tied with Purdue University for the most Ammon S. Andes National Award recipients all time, at four each. More Aggie seniors have also been regional winners (19) than any other university.

Written by Dr. John Valasek, valasek@tamu.edu

Popularity: 69% [?]