Yue Cao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the Energy Systems research group, has received a Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a grant of nearly $500,000 over five years.
Traditional energy storage systems encompass what Cao calls “real” storage, such as batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells. Cao’s research aims to also incorporate currently overlooked “virtual” resources, such as HVAC systems or water heaters.
“I call those systems ‘virtual,’ because storing energy is not their primary purpose, but they consume electricity and are tied to the grid or other energy resources,” Cao said.
The purpose of Cao’s research will be to create a universal equivalent circuit for multiple energy storage systems that are controlled by connected power electronics. Cao will then develop a design approach to optimally size the hybrid energy storage systems and increase their life and reliability. By dynamically regulating virtual energy mass, this new approach aims to modulate energy usage from the grid.
“For example, if I have rooftop solar panels on my house, and it’s a sunny day and the air conditioner is on, and in the next minute a cloud blocks the sun, solar power will be reduced,” Cao said. “Current systems would use power from the grid to keep the air conditioner running. With an integrated energy system, however, the power used by the air conditioner, or the virtual resource, could be adjusted temporarily to match the reduced power of the solar panels, without my noticing a difference in temperature.”
Cao is already working on research projects that involve energy storage problems including fast charging stations for heavy-duty trucks on rural highways, electrification of locomotives, and wave energy.
Ken Williamson joined the College of Engineering as an undergrad, stayed for his master’s degree, returned as a professor, and eventually became a school head. Now, a decade into his ‘retirement,’ he’s a key industry partner.
Ken Williamson, B.S. civil engineering ’68, M.S. environmental engineering ’70, has spent more than 40 years researching wastewater and hazardous waste treatment and sustainable environmental management. His research has led to genetic and molecular methods to monitor pathogens in wastewater, to achieve greater pollutant removals from biological treatment processes, and to lower wastewater treatment costs.
Along the way, the professor emeritus of environmental engineering headed two schools in the College of Engineering and helped grow the college’s environmental engineering research program to national prominence.
Yet at the heart of his success is his love of teaching.
“I used to tell students the engineering field is so broad that no matter who you are or what you want to do, you can find your niche somewhere,” Williamson said. “It took me a while to discover what my niche was. But I decided I wanted to be a teacher, and I almost left engineering.”
Luckily, when Williamson was an undergraduate, one of his professors pointed out that he could do both — all he needed was a doctorate, and he could be a professor.
“And from that day on, my objective was to get a Ph.D. and come back and teach at a major engineering school,” Williamson said. “And that’s what I did for most of my life.”
Williamson received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Oregon State University. After completing his doctoral work at Stanford University, he realized that “the quality of the education at OSU far exceeded what students at Stanford were receiving at that time.” So, he was excited when Oregon State offered him a position as an assistant professor of civil and construction and environmental engineering.
When Williamson joined the College of Engineering in 1973, there was only one other professor focused on environmental engineering. “That other faculty member passed away six months after I was here, and so, I was the only environmental engineering faculty at OSU, and I was straight out of graduate school.”
At the time, Williamson says, it was still a very “traditional” engineering program.
“The attitude then was clearly that it was the student’s responsibility to be successful, and if they can’t pull it off, then they don’t deserve to be engineers,” he said. “Now, we’re into really trying to help students overcome everything limiting their opportunities in engineering.”
Williamson played a role in that attitude shift — first as a professor; then as head of the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering; and later as head of the School of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering.
When he retired from Oregon State in 2012, he joined Clean Water Services, the water resources management utility for more than 600,000 Oregon residents. He served as director of regulatory affairs for six years and became director of research and innovation in 2018. Today, he leads efforts to promote advancement in wastewater treatment, regulatory innovation, business operations, and environmental restoration.
But his collaboration with Oregon State hasn’t stopped.
Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the Oregon Health Authority awarded Oregon State $5.6 million to develop and lead a statewide monitoring program to examine levels of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in wastewater and detect the presence of variants of concern.
The effort is led by Tyler Radniecki, associate professor of environmental engineering, in collaboration with Christine Kelly, professor of bioengineering, and a number of other researchers across the university. They reached out to Williamson and CWS to help.
“The three of us started from ground zero and built that thing in a matter of months,” Williamson said. “We had to figure out how to do the sampling, how to do the testing, how to get funding. We had to build the lab to actually do the testing. All of that, we did with just incredible speed, and it’s been an amazing success that will carry on far into the future.”
Oregon State was a great place to pull off such a huge effort, Williamson says.
“Part of it was that I knew the people, had good collaborations, and I trusted them,” he said. “There’s a certain flexibility at OSU, and the ability for faculty here to work in teams.”
With additional funding through the university’s TRACE project and data from multiple Oregon communities, the team has correlated coronavirus wastewater concentrations with the prevalence of the virus at neighborhood scales to estimate the number of COVID-19 infections in a community.
“That, I think, was probably my greatest achievement professionally, building this big program from scratch,” Williamson said.
In November, Williamson was named to the College of Engineering’s Academy of Distinguished Engineers during the 2021 Oregon Stater Awards.
Barbara Simpson, assistant professor of structural engineering, has received a Faculty Early Career Development, or CAREER, award from the National Science Foundation. The award includes a grant of nearly $600,000 over five years.
Simpson proposes to lay the algorithmic foundations for high-fidelity simulations of complex structural systems using graphics processing units, or GPUs. Her research could significantly advance the fundamental understanding of the risks posed by natural hazards to the built environment. For example, soil-structure interaction is critically important for how tall buildings respond to earthquakes, but the variable is often neglected in building design because of high computational costs and physical testing constraints.
“We intend to harness the massive parallelism of GPUs to overcome computational bottlenecks in structural simulations, specifically real-time hybrid simulations,” Simpson said.
In hybrid simulations — a powerful tool for analyzing structural systems — physical tests are combined with numerical models. They’re typically applied to systems that are too large or complex to undergo conventional physical testing alone.
“We can already do some hybrid simulations in real time,” Simpson said, “but for very complicated problems, like soil-structure interaction, it’s just not feasible from a computational standpoint. If your numerical model is slow, it’s difficult to couple experimental and numerical components in real time.”
That’s where GPUs come in. As their name suggests, GPUs were originally designed for graphics rendering. But their ability to simultaneously execute numerous discrete calculations has proven valuable for a growing number of applications, including high-speed simulations.
“By leveraging the computational power of GPUs,” Simpson said, “I want to reduce computational times from hours down to minutes and seconds and use this technology to support real-time hybrid models of very complex structural problems.”
Since she began studying materials science as a graduate student at Oregon State University in 2015, Kenya Hazell, a GEM Fellow and recent environmental technology researcher and development intern at Corning, has sought to discover ways to sustainably create and apply polymer composites — unique materials with synergistic properties, formed by combining reinforcement materials with polymer matrices.
“Everything’s a polymer, even DNA,” Hazell said. “It’s hard to narrow down the field, because there are so many uses for composites. They’re in a ton of products you need for your everyday life, like your fridge, your desk, your car.”
Hazell was first turned on to the seemingly endless possibilities of polymer composites during a trio of internships — Garlock Sealing Technologies, UTC Aerospace Systems, and Clausthal University of Technology, in Germany — near the end of her time at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering.
“After those internships, I decided I wanted to delve more into that realm and go to grad school,” Hazell said. “I chose Oregon State, because there are so many possibilities, in terms of research geared toward sustainable engineering.”
As a master’s student at Oregon State, Hazell worked on projects involving wood composites and plant fibers, including an exploration of how hemp fibers can be modified to yield greater thermal sustainability during the manufacturing process.
“Can I make a more sustainable product? Can the manufacturing process be more sustainable? And an end goal is: How can we recycle this?” Hazell wondered.
Kenya Hazell
Now, Hazell’s doctoral research, which she conducts in the lab of Vincent Remcho, professor of chemistry, focuses on electrospinning as a way to produce nanoscale fibers for thermal applications. She primarily works with structural composites similar to those used in exteriors of products such as cars and aircraft.
Complementing Hazell’s research are her recent internships with Georgia-Pacific Chemicals in 2020 and with Corning in the summer of 2021. For her research and development role at Georgia-Pacific, which she began shortly before the pandemic, she helped design experiments to study the properties of resin as a composite material and assisted in studies of wood composites. Beyond her own research, Hazell liked that chemists and chemical engineers working in different labs were eager to tell her about their projects.
“If I didn’t have anything to do, I just walked over to another lab, and if they weren’t too busy, they would tell me everything. I learned a lot about how an R&D lab works,” she said.
A year later, at Corning’s headquarters in New York, Hazell performed research and development work in the company’s environmental technology unit, where she examined methods to characterize the real-life properties of a gel material.
“That gave me a view of what a company invested more heavily in their research sector looks like,” Hazell said.
Hazell’s internship at Corning was connected to her GEM Fellowship, through which Oregon State and Corning provide funding for her Ph.D. studies. In addition to financial support, GEM offers professional networking, conferences, and career development, and many Fellows go on to secure jobs with their internship organizations.
As for her postdoctoral future, Hazell looks forward to making an impact on the materials science industry’s sustainability practices.
“Not everyone wants to be forced to choose a material that’s not environmentally friendly,” Hazell said. “So, how can we make a product that’s competitive to this nonrenewable product? How can we provide more ways for people to make environmentally conscious decisions? I’m creating new options for people.”
Debbie Chou, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering at Oregon State University, is a researcher at heart. This is how she knew that Oregon State’s College of Engineering, where she also earned her master’s degree, was her ideal graduate milieu.
“I was studying at National Taiwan University for my undergrad and thinking of the U.S. for graduate school,” Chou said. “I was doing IC (integrated circuit) design, and Oregon State has a great electrical engineering program, especially in IC design. My undergrad professors shared scientific papers from some of the groups at OSU with us, so I knew there was important work being done at the university.”
Coming into her master’s program in 2019, Chou was interested solely in integrated circuits. However, she had the opportunity to make important advances in a recent graduate’s project, working on an optical sensor called a single-photon avalanche diode in the Sensors and Integrated Microelectronics Lab supervised by Matt Johnston, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering. Having learned a lot from this experience, she began to expand her areas of research interest.
“At first, I just focused on the IC design part, but because I had to get to know every facet of the project, I started to take courses about semiconductors and process integration. The core semiconductors course in our program, ECE 614, has been especially helpful,” Chou said.
Less than two years later, Chou placed third in the 2021 MWSCAS Best Student Paper contest for her work on the SPAD optical sensor. That same summer, she also completed a virtual internship with TDK-affiliated InvenSense, where she helped design analog circuits for motion sensors, such as gyroscope sensors found in smartphones. Just as she intended, Chou has learned to comfortably navigate the complex relationship between IC and semiconductors.
“I’m now trying to explore the applications of my work,” she explained. “For example, think of HDR imaging. When your cellphone switches to HDR mode, it sees the bright and dark parts of images. I’m working on creating a wide dynamic range optical sensor similar to the HDR mode in cellphones, but this sensor is for biomedical experimental applications, where the targeted illuminance is lower and fluorescence detection needs to be better.”
In terms of eventual career goals, Chou, who has just begun her doctorate, will remain flexible and open to any research-related opportunities. Being flexible and proactively participating in class is also her advice for future College of Engineering graduates with similar goals.
“My courses at OSU have given me a lot of experience in designing, improving my skills, and working in the lab. The professors are very helpful; we all cooperate together,” Chou said.
At Intel Labs in Hillsboro, research scientist Soumya Bose, Ph.D. electrical and computer engineering ’19, develops circuits to speed up optical data communications while reducing the amount of power they need.
Optical links are already capable of quickly moving enormous quantities of data within and between computer networks. But still faster links will be needed to handle the world’s incessant demand to move and process data. Higher speeds, though, come at the cost of greater energy consumption, which quickly adds up in the hundreds of giant data centers around the world.
“The high-speed, power-efficient optical links of the future will enable higher data transfer and computing capacities per unit of energy,” Bose said. “Among other things, this will enable advanced data training and analysis capabilities in applications such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.”
For example, new machine learning methods designed to process large datasets of neural recordings could revolutionize neuroscience by providing new insights into the workings of the human brain.
High-speed optical data links are widely used for transmitting data between servers. But within servers themselves, data transmission is predominantly done electrically. At higher data rates, electrical links are less energy-efficient and more prone to errors.
“My work, and our research at Intel Labs, focuses on bringing optical communication closer to the processor itself,” Bose said. He added that converting to optical communications at the level of computer circuit boards and chips will result in faster, more accurate data transfers between core processors and peripheral storage devices.
Bose’s doctoral work included building energy-efficient circuits that enable portable biomedical sensing devices to operate on minuscule amounts of power generated by converting body heat into electricity.
“The voltage from the transducers ranges from tens of millivolts to a few hundred millivolts, which is not enough to power an integrated circuit,” Bose said. “The fundamental challenge was to run semiconductors at a very low input voltage.” Bose’s solution was a new circuit architecture that started operating with only 50 millivolts. It then amplified the voltage enough to sustain long-term operation.
Bose is the lead inventor on a patent for technology related to ultra-low-voltage circuits, as well as on a patent application for a wearable, batteryless heartbeat monitor designed to continuously gather data about a patient’s heart health. These patents also include College of Engineering faculty Matthew Johnston, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Tejasvi Anand, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
According to Bose, Oregon State University was an excellent training ground.
“Doing my doctoral work at the College of Engineering really helped me get to where I am now,” Bose said. “It’s a vibrant program where I had an opportunity to meet leaders in the field of circuit design, and I was able to work alongside great researchers on high-impact work.”
After obtaining his Ph.D. from Oregon State University’s College of Engineering in 2021, Kingsley Chukwu has transitioned to a successful career as an electronic design automation tools software engineer at Intel. However, Chukwu is not your typical software engineer; while he has a minor in computer science, his degree is in chemical engineering with a focus on computational chemistry.
“I use computer quantum software to understand how atoms and molecules will behave on catalyst surfaces,” Chukwu said.
Chukwu’s doctoral research, a National Science Foundation-funded project, was conducted in the lab of Líney Árnadóttir, associate professor of chemical engineering. He implemented computational methods to better grasp how water and other solvents affect the selectivity and rate of acetic acid-based chemical reactions on palladium and platinum surfaces.
Notably, Intel is famous for manufacturing semiconductors, not catalysts. Even though Chukwu’s research was not directly related, the company understood that his training and perspective as a chemical engineer would be invaluable.
“It is challenging for experimentalists to understand the mechanisms underlying chemical reactions on catalyst surfaces, because most of the time they can only observe the products or some intermediates,” Chukwu said. “As a computational chemist, I fundamentally understand the mechanisms behind these chemical reactions on catalyst surfaces, so we can design a catalyst system to get a certain product.”
Chukwu conceptualizes his team at Intel as “gatekeepers.” They are responsible for verifying the design of products in the final stages before they are manufactured.
“I write software for physical design verification of chips or microprocessors before they go to the foundry, mostly making sure that spaces between wires or the geometry in the design matches the design specifications before manufacturing,” Chukwu said.
Chukwu says a combination of transferable and technical skills he honed at Oregon State — problem-solving, critical thinking, project management, and good old Beaver grit — prepared him to excel at Intel. His proficiency with the Linux operating system and the programming skills he developed as a doctoral student writing scripts in Python and C++ have benefited him. He specifically recalls a VLSI system design course with Houssam Abbas, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering.
“That class gave me the confidence that I can work in a place where I can design chips or verify chips using computer-aided designs,” he said.
As future College of Engineering graduates prepare to join Chukwu at Intel, he recommends they continuously strive to improve their programming skills and take courses to boost proficiency in the use of CAD tools for chip design. This will increase their employability, he says, reflecting on his own experiences in the college:
“They offered me all the opportunities that allow me to do what I’m supposed to do here.”
Although Bridger Cook is just beginning his graduate studies in mechanical engineering after taking courses through Oregon State University’s Accelerated Master’s Platform, he started to prepare years ago as an energy systems engineering undergraduate at OSU-Cascades in Bend. Among his most formative early experiences was an internship with Energy Trust of Oregon during the summer of his second year.
“There’s a program with Energy Trust called Strategic Energy Management,” Cook said. “It’s the State of Oregon trying to encourage people to be smarter about the way that they use power. So, Linn County hired me to do that for them.”
Cook’s first taste of monitoring energy systems during the internship was tracking usage of heating and cooling equipment in county offices. Analyzing data from Pacific Power accounts, he was able to identify and rectify excessive energy leaks — air conditioning units running on weekends, boilers left on all summer, and faulty equipment that wouldn’t turn off. Cook now uses the same method to track his own energy consumption.
The following term, he took a course in fluid mechanics. His interactions with the instructor, Rebecca Webb, encouraged him to further his education.
“The way that Dr. Webb was describing her experience with graduate work, it just sounded super fun. So, I talked to her about graduate degrees, and the more I talked to her, the more I realized that I wanted to do one,” Cook said.
Feeling energized, he took the initiative to approach Chris Hagen, who manages the Oregon State-Cascades Energy Systems Laboratory, to express his interest in conducting research. Hagen had a project on deck just waiting for the right student to work on it: improving the flight range of drones. The project would go on to last two years.
“Dr. Chris Hagen took me under his wing, and I started doing work on two-stroke engines. His idea was to attach those to a drone and extend their flight range rather than focus on extending the battery’s range,” Cook explained.
Then, still hungry for more research experience during the first summer of the pandemic, Cook connected with Christophe Lanaud. The energy systems engineering instructor involved him on a project using machine learning to help regulate wind power grids, which could lead to lower-cost energy efficiency.
“The idea with machine learning is we just take a whole bunch of data and shove it into a computer,” Cook explained. “The computer could get pretty good at guessing. So, we can look and say, hey, tomorrow we’re not going to have enough wind, so we can pump a little bit more coal through, or tomorrow we’re going to have way too much wind, maybe cut back.”
Wrapping up an enriching undergraduate experience, Cook began searching for graduate school options during his fourth year. While he applied to programs in both Montana and Washington, one institution was clearly the frontrunner for the Dallas, Oregon, native.
“Oregon State stood out because the school is super close to my family, and I know the professors here. I really liked working with Dr. Hagen; he offered me the opportunity to keep working with him. Near the end of my senior year, we had kind of nailed down that that was the route I was going to go, and he brought up the accelerated master’s,” Cook said.
Wasting no time, Cook enrolled in some graduate courses during his final term at Cascades and worked with Hagen on a hydrogen storage project in the summer of 2021. Specifically, Cook studied control schemes for both half-hydrogen and half-battery storage systems to determine contexts in which each system would be most efficient.
His master’s thesis, being conducted at the Corvallis campus, will focus on wood energy and its potential applications. To this end, Cook received $40,000 in funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture Sun Grant Program, which promotes initiatives in bio-based energy and environmental sustainability.
“The state’s been thinning forests, trying to keep fires from getting so out of control, and then what they do with all that residue is they just burn it. But it also has a whole bunch of emissions, and it’s bad for the soil and just a waste,” Cook explained. “People don’t really use that in boilers or anything, because it’s so expensive to get it from the forest. My project is going to look at different things you can do to that wood to make it more economically attractive.”
Cook relishes his graduate courses so far and looks forward to those in the coming terms. He has already started thinking about future opportunities, too; besides wood, he’s captivated by new, cutting-edge technology in alternative energy usage and storage.
“I think the next big thing is what they call thin-film solar. Imagine Saran wrap solar panels, and they’re saying if you can make solar panels that thin, you can put them on windows as tinting. You can make them in paint on cars, and cars recharge themselves. You can literally have energy wherever you are. I think that’s where we're going next,” he said.
No matter where Cook goes next, his potential to better our environment is limitless.
By changing the consistency of silicone rubber, John Morrow, a graduate student in robotics, enabled a 3D printer to assemble silicone into complex shapes. The breakthrough could hold the key to 3D printing of silicone soft-bodied robots.
Morrow and his colleague, Osman Dogan Yirmibesoglu, a Ph.D. student in robotics, presented their findings at the 2017 Graduate Research Showcase.
“The robotics field is looking closely at 3D printing as another way to build soft robots,” said Morrow, who is a joint M.S./Ph.D. student in robotics. He added that current techniques for building soft-bodied robots out of silicone, such as molding, are messy, fraught with human error, and limit design options. Silicone is well-suited for making soft robots because the material is so pliable (able to stretch to 900% of its initial dimensions). But before it’s cured, silicone is a runny liquid that doesn’t hold its shape when extruded through a 3D printer head. “It just forms puddles, so we needed a way to make the silicone firmer,” Morrow explained.
Morrow and his team mixed an additive into the silicone supply that causes it to thicken. They also custom built a 3D printer head that mixes and extrudes the two component parts of silicone liquid. Once the silicone is deposited in the desired shape, heaters speed along the curing process to solidify it. The result is a solid but pliable silicone rubber. The technique has allowed the group to create complex geometries with seamless internal voids, which are crucial for soft-robot mobility.
Soft robots are made to move by pumping air or liquid into their internal chambers. Exact movements, such as bending or twisting, can be controlled by how those hollow areas are shaped and constricted, so the ability to assemble robots with great precision is vital to assuring they move as intended.
“Our focus is to make hollow objects without any internal support or seam, because seams can break easily when under pressure,” said Morrow. “Forming silicone soft robots using a 3D printer could release us from all limitations to future soft-robot design. We believe our technique imposes the fewest limits on whatever type of soft robots you want to make.”
Morrow’s faculty advisor, Assistant Professor Yiğit Mengüç, added that the potential impact of 3D silicone printing reaches far beyond robotics and could lead to breakthroughs in other fields, such as medicine. “What’s really exciting is that this technique is not just for building soft robots,” he said. “Medical device manufacturers, for example, could use it to make highly flexible endoscopes, custom prosthetics, or devices we can’t even imagine yet. It opens up endless possibilities.”
Oregon State researchers, led by Yelda Turkan, assistant professor of civil and construction engineering, are using deep learning algorithms to discover better, faster way for architects and engineers to design, construct and manage buildings.
Turkan and her colleagues in construction, geomatics, and computer science have been developing building information models, or BIMs, from lidar data. Lidar, short for light detection and ranging, is a remote sensing method that collects detailed 3D measurements of the built environment. But it is prohibitively expensive to manually convert that data into useful, digital information models.
“Our team is turning lidar data into BIMs by automating the tedious and time-consuming manual work required to develop and maintain a BIM,” said Yelda Turkan, the project’s lead principal investigator. “We are doing this with deep learning algorithms to process the lidar data. Modelers – the people who convert lidar data into BIMs – will be able to model buildings within hours instead of weeks and thus transform how the built environment is managed and maintained.”
BIMs are used to create and document building and infrastructure designs. Each detail of a building comprises a model used to explore design options and to create visualizations that help people understand what a building will look like before it’s constructed. The model is also used to generate the design documentation needed for the construction process.
BIMs are also used for managing existing buildings, facilities, and infrastructure. This can be more challenging than using BIM for design because what exists in the real world, including imperfections, must be captured and modeled.
The team’s AI-based algorithms automatically segment, classify, and extract real-world features to create intelligent models for building design, energy management, renovation, and emergency planning.
The end product of the OSU team’s work will be a combination of a database and a deep learning framework that accelerates the creation of BIMs from lidar data, Turkan said.
The project is part of a National Science Foundation effort called the Convergence Accelerator program that seeks to drive transformative research in artificial intelligence and quantum technology. Following a successful phase one development period, NSF has awarded Turkan and her collaborators a two-year phase two grant worth $5 million to continue the work. College of Engineering collaborators include Rakesh Bobba, associate professor of electrical engineering, Fuxin Li, associate professor of computer science, and Mike Olsen, professor of geomatics.
