NSF-supported Projects
Developing a resilient soil-binder mixture for 3D printing infrastructure
- Faculty Mentor: Pavan Akula
- Project Description: The goal is to develop a resilient soil-binder mixture for 3D printing infrastructure components such as walls. The results from this study will play a key role in developing sustainable materials for constructing our future infrastructure. We will employ a carefully designed factorial experiment and will develop a series of formualtion comprised of in-situ soil and binder (e.g., geopolymeric cement). We wtill study the effect of binders on the short-term and long-term properties of the soil-binder mixtures. This allows us to discern the individual contributions of physical and mineralogical properties and how their combination affects material properties.
Enabling One Water security for climate-ready communities
- Faculty Mentor: Meghna Babbar-Sebens
- Project Description: This project is focused on building and deploying a digital decision support system to assist communities in Lincoln County, Oregon to develop strategies for a 50-year plan for water security resilience. In this summer project, the student will learn about watershed models and improve an existing model to identify feasible, long-term actions for security in water availability. The student will also identify indicators for assessing inequities in water availability for the region. Student should be comfortable with coding in python and interested in learning more about computational models that are used to aid decision making in the water sector.
Modular dual-function water treatment device for point-of-use applications
- Faculty Mentor: Matthew Coblyn
- Co-Advisors: Goran Jovanovic and Tala Navab-Daneshmand
- Project Description: The drinking water supply for the Willamette Valley in Oregon and many other regions in the US is increasingly compromised by challenging biological contaminants such as cryptosporidium which resists chlorination. This places an extra burden on centralized treatment facilities to invest in costly process improvements and puts the public at a higher health safety risk. The methodology will involve designing, fabricating, and testing prototypes using microbial models such as E. coli to quantify log removal while also quantifying light flux in the system and peroxide concentration. A mathematical model is developed and implemented within a numerical simulation. The model is validated using experimental data to transform the model into a tool for further technology development.
Engineering with nature to increase coastal community resilience to hurri-canes and adaption to climate change
- Faculty Mentor: Daniel Cox
- Project Description: The vulnerability of coastal areas to flooding is rising, necessitating resilient solutions. Traditional gray approaches like bulkheads have been used, but green and hybrid methods are gaining popularity. Green methods offer ecological and economic benefits but lack widespread understanding of their performance and uncertainties, limiting their adoption. The students will leverage data from previous field investigations to inform the construction of a large-scale physical model and targeted numerical model simulations. The validated numerical models will be used to investigate the expected performance of hybrid systems over a range of incident hydrodynamic conditions, vegetation configurations, and structural geometries. Fundamental processes affecting wave transformation through these systems will be identified and synthesized to inform the design of these systems for enhanced coastal resilience.
Chemical Recycling of Plastics using Heterogeneous Catalysts
- Faculty Mentor: Lucas Ellis
- Project Description: The rapid accumulation of plastics in communities around the globe is resulting in a poorly understood environmental and health crisis. By developing catalysts to breakdown plastics into their chemical constiuents, we are able to chemically recycle plastics back to their building blocks, and provide an incentive to reclaim this recalcitrant waste to prevent further polution. Resilience societies will require relialbe strategies to recycle their waste plastics. Students should be willing to learn new skills to perform experiments to develop next generation catalysts for plastics recycling.
The Concrete is Cracking - Can you Smell Why?
- Faculty Mentor: Jason Ideker
- Project Description: Can you smell concrete and determine why it is deteriorating? It seems like we can! This project will use volatilomics to distinguish between sound concrete and concrete undergoing premature deterioration. You will confirm the degradation process using non-destructive evaluation techniques, linear measurements, and scanning electron microscopy on small sampled sections. One or two-dimensional gas chromatography with time of flight mass spectrometry will be used to distinguish volatiles that can give signatures specific to sound or unsound concrete. You will be participate in concrete mixing, measurements and field observations in Corvallis, and at the Newport, Oregon marine exposure site.
Cracking the chemical code: A data-science approach to deciphering the chemical information stored in environmental samples
- Faculty Mentor: Gerrad Jones
- Project Description: When people think of water quality, they often focus on individual contaminants like pesticides or metals. However, environmental samples contain tens of thousands of chemicals that reflect complex processes and sources. By leveraging computational tools such as machine learning, multivariate statistics, and information theory, we can translate chemical data into insights about these processes. Students in this project will help develop novel workflows for chemical forensics, applying advanced mathematical concepts. Applicants should have a strong foundation in mathematics and be comfortable coding in Python or R.
Antibiotic resistance in wastewater systems
- Faculty Mentor: Tala Navab-Daneshmand
- Project Description: Antibiotic-resistant pathogens are an emerging human health concern worldwide. Wastewater treatment systems are the main recipients, reservoirs, and sources of antimicrobial resistance. The student will work with the research team to quantify antibiotic-resistant bacteria in wastewater samples in a national-scale study. The student will also measure physical chemical parameters of the wastewater samples. The student will learn to do preliminary analysis on the obtained data and to compare the findings with the relevant literature. Students should have a strong interest in learning microbial methods and working with a large team.
Futile to Utile: Waste Plastics to Farm Diesel Fuel in rural and farming communities
- Faculty Mentor: Skip Rochefort, Lucas Ellis (CBEE), and Stuart Reitz, Marina Denny and Leanne Giordono (Ag Extension)
- Project Description: Waste plastics are everywhere, polluting both land and oceans. We have developed a small-scate, very simple, pyrolyis reactor to convert the major commodity plastics (not PETE) in a high quality farm diesel fuel suitale for tractors, boats, generators. The specific project will be to work with onion farmers in Malheur County to convert their waste drip tape irrigation (which they have hundrds of milee\s of each Fall) and other farm plastic waste such as buckets, film covering, etc. into farm diesel which can directly used on their farms. The project involveds re-design and scale-up of a reactor, techno-economic analysis of the process in Malheur County, and socioeconomic surveys of local farmers.
Hydrogel beads for the cometabolic treatment of emerging contami-nants in drinking water
- Faculty Mentor: Lewis Semprini
- Project Description: The presence of emerging contaminants in drinking water supplies is a major concern, especially in small communities. We will investigate the use of hydrogel beads that co-encapsulate bacteria that can transform emerging contaminants to low concentrations, along with slow-release substrates for the long-term growth and maintenance of the bacteria, and supply the energy needed for cometabolic transformations. Students will fabricate co-encapsulated hydrogels using methods previously developed by the faculty member, evaluate the performance of the hydrogels in batch reactors and continuous treatment systems containing the co-encapsulated beads by quantifying the emerging contaminants using GC-MS and LC-MS techniques, and identify the products formed by the transformation process using LC-MS methods.