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Chevron Corporation Labs Dedicated

CU Engineering has strong associations with the business community, as demonstrated by two undergraduate labs that are made possible with generous support from Chevron Corporation.

The Chevron Chemical Engineering Teaching Lab is located in the Jennie Smoly Caruthers Biotechnology Building on CU-Boulder’s East Campus, while the Chevron Mechanical Engineering Design Studio is in the Idea Forge on the main campus.

“These labs exemplify the highly successful collaboration between engineering and this corporate partner,” says Melinda Seevers, senior director of corporate and foundation relations. “Chevron is very supportive of student success and retention. They are interested in talented engineers and hire many of our students.”

The Chevron Mechanical Engineering Design Studio showcases the creativity, ingenuity and technical competence of mechanical engineering seniors, as well as the entrepreneurial, multidisciplinary teams who use the space during the summer. The lab promotes peer-to-peer collaboration among students from a wide range of industries.

The Chevron Chemical Engineering Teaching Laboratory facilitates chemical and biological engineering students’ lab course work, ongoing laboratory projects and general learning opportunities.

Both labs were dedicated in early 2015 with unique “ribbon cutting” ceremonies. The chemical engineering teaching lab was dedicated by shattering tubing frozen with liquid nitrogen, while the mechanical engineering design studio’s ceremony used a Sawzall to cut a piece of wood painted in Chevron colors of red, white and blue.

An event acknowledging Chevron’s partnership was held January 27 during the men’s basketball game with Stanford University.

Math Teams Shine in International Competition

CU-Boulder once again came out on top, this time in the February 2015 International Mathematical Contest in Modeling. CU-Boulder won two top prizes, two meritorious designations and an honorable mention. Out of the 10 papers designated as “outstanding,” CU-Boulder students authored two of them, earning the meritorious designations.

Seven CU-Boulder teams participated in the four-day event, along with 456 other U.S. teams representing 239 institutions and 7,000 teams worldwide.

Mathematical modeling presents solutions to real-world problems such as finding a lost airplane, eradicating Ebola or creating the perfect brownie pan. The contest, which is administered by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, is essentially a mini-research project done in just 96 hours.

CU-Boulder has a stellar track record in this event, with eight “outstanding” awards and seven named prizes from 2000 to 2015.

Students Matthew Hurst, Nathan J. Yeo and Jordan Deitsch received an outstanding designation and the top awards for the contest—the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics Award and a Two Sigma Scholarship.

Deitsch, a junior from Monument who is majoring in engineering physics, says the contest was unlike anything he had ever done. “The question itself was extremely open-ended; we were allowed to go almost anywhere in our solution, as long as we still focused on the primary question of designing a search effort for a lost aircraft.”

Marc William Thomson, Derek Gorthy and Christine Reilly received the second outstanding designation.

“It was an intense experience,” says Reilly, an aerospace engineering major from Sunnyvale, California. “I wouldn’t describe the MCM as a math contest. I would describe it as a problem-solving contest that requires the ability to understand the implications of a difficult question.”

Outreach

CU-Boulder hosted a full-day professional learning event for Boulder Valley School District (BVSD) science teachers in fall 2015 at the Idea Forge. The focus was on how to teach engineering to middle and high school students. Presentations and breakout sessions were given by faculty and staff from BVSD and CU-Boulder, including representatives from CU Science Discovery as well as the BOLD Center and the Integrated Teaching and Learning (ITL) Program, both from CU-Boulder’s College of Engineering and Applied Science.

Transformation Power Plant Cooling Technology

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded CU-Boulder a three-year, $3 million grant to develop cooling technology that will enable efficient, low-cost supplementary cooling for thermoelectric power generation.

CU-Boulder’s research team, led by Ronggui Yang, associate professor of mechanical engineering, will develop cold storage modules and a system called RadiCold, which cools by infrared thermal emission. If successful, the design could provide power plant operators a low-cost way to supplement cooling without using as much water as they do now.

“I am confident that we will be successful in developing this novel cooling technology that could be useful for both power plants and buildings,” says Yang.

In thermoelectric power generation, only 40 percent of the energy in the fuel is used for power generation. The remaining 60 percent becomes low-grade heat that needs to be carried away by cooling systems.

There are two types of cooling systems: Wet cooling systems use water resources such as a river, lake or ocean and pass it directly over tubes containing condenser water, and then return it, warmer, to the original source. Dry cooling systems use air to cool condenser water.

Most U.S. power plants use wet cooling technologies because water can cool better than air, which allows power plants to operate more efficiently. In fact, thermoelectric power plants are among the biggest consumers of fresh water in the world. About 139 billion gallons per day—or 41 percent of total fresh water withdrawal—is used to cool condenser water. Three percent of the cooling water is evaporated and lost. This has an enormous environmental impact, especially in areas already suffering from fresh water shortages. These systems also release heat waste into the environment, which adversely affects wildlife, says Marta Zgagacz of CU’s Office of Technology Transfer. Zgagacz is on the team that will evaluate the commercialization potential of this innovative technology.

Researchers say dry cooling has the potential to significantly reduce water consumption, but the high cost and low efficiency of current technologies discourage their use.

Improved air-cooled heat exchangers can help overcome these challenges. Since air-cooled heat exchangers can only cool water temperatures as low as the surrounding temperature, supplemental cooling technologies—such as RadiCold—are needed to further decrease water temperatures in certain conditions.

Methods to cool a building roof by sending long-wavelength infrared light into the dark night sky have been known for a long time. However, cooling under direct sunshine and, more critically, manufacturing these cooling systems in a scalable and cost-effective way are areas ripe for research, says co-principal investigator Xiaobo Yin, an assistant professor in both mechanical engineering and in the materials science and engineering program. 

A RadiCold surface reflects sunlight and allows cooling for both daytime and nighttime power plant operation.

“I am excited to work with my colleagues at CU-Boulder to transform innovative materials and component research into engineering systems,” says Gang Tan, assistant professor in the Department of Civil and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wyoming and a co-principal investigator. “I also foresee great potential in building energy savings by developing cooling roof and ceiling systems using RadiCold surfaces.”

In addition to these senior researchers, the team will include three postdoctoral research associates, three doctoral students and a few undergraduate students. Two MBA students from the CU-Boulder Leeds School of Business will work closely with the team on technology to market analysis.

Tony Tong, associate professor of strategy and entrepreneurship at the Leeds School, is also part of the team that will commercialization potential of this innovative technology.

$2.8 Million in Cybersecurity Research

As defensive technologies against cyberattacks mature, adversaries are forced to find new ways to attack computer systems. One of these methods is to create “inputs of coma,” which cause a system to exhaust its processing resources and leave it unavailable for legitimate users. The attackers also can observe network traffic and computational activities in order to deductively infer secret information without having direct access to it.

In order to protect and assure information flows over critical enterprise networks for military and industrial systems, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is making pivotal research investments in breakthrough technologies for national security. CU-Boulder recently received more than $2.8 million from    the agency to develop new program analysis techniques and tools for identifying vulnerabilities that are inherent in software algorithms.

Pavol Cerny, assistant professor in the Department of Electrical, Computer and Energy Engineering, leads the research team. Cerny is joined by four researchers from the Department of Computer Science: associate professor John Black, assistant professor Evan Chang, associate professor Sriram Sankaranarayanan and research scientist Ashutosh Trivedi.

The CU-Boulder team will be joined by colleagues from the University of Texas and Kestrel Technology to develop a breakthrough set of tools, called AUDITR, which statically analyzes Java bytecode and automatically uncovers security vulnerabilities in software algorithms that could be exploited. AUDITR will provide security analysts with quick and reliable capabilities to assess vulnerabilities and take the necessary actions to reduce the vulnerabilities prior to attack.

The research will take place over 48 months and in several phases. The project will include simulated attack demonstrations run by DARPA that will allow the team, including graduate students, to test its developments in a simulated cyberattack environment.

Interdisciplinary Telecom Program Develops Skilled Workforce

A recently renovated lab is giving graduates of the Interdisciplinary Telecom Program (ITP) a competitive edge.

The lab provides students access to state-of-the-art, enterprise-grade networking equipment, allowing them to combine theory with extensive hands-on experience. And the lab is paying dividends for the more than 3,000 students who have completed the program since 1971.

In 2015, with strong demand for well-rounded telecom employees, the employment rate of graduates was 100 percent with an average salary of $80,000. ITP has strengthened its engagement with industry partners to increase student internships and employment.

ITP offers master’s and doctoral degrees and has grown to include five-year BS/MS programs in partnership with the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering and the Department of Computer Science.

This year, the curriculum evolved to include four new focus areas: wireless, network security, network engineering, and telecom policy and strategy. Each specialty incorporates courses in law, policy and business combined with a technology focus to create an interdisciplinary engineering program that is cutting-edge.

The vision of ITP is to build a comprehensive research program, augment graduate level faculty and fund incoming doctoral candidates with teaching assistant fellowships. ITP students are industry’s future employees and they’re unstoppable in the marketplace.

Launching Ideas at AeroSpace Ventures Day

Over the past 25 years, innovations in aerospace science and technology have influenced the way we live our daily lives. These technologies have transformed how we sleep, eat, communicate, get our news, navigate our environment and engage in local, regional and global commerce.

AeroSpace Ventures facilitates collaboration among campus units, industry and government partners in order to transition academic innovation into industry products and services. AeroSpace Ventures focuses on developing instruments, vehicles, systems and methods that observe, measure and better understand Earth and space.

A highlight of this initiative is AeroSpace Ventures Day. “The AeroSpace Ventures program provides an opportunity to collaborate with CU’s extensive resources and experience in research and development to advance our technologies and have access to the next generation of aerospace professionals,” says Frank Backes, CEO of Braxton Technologies.

This year, CU-Boulder welcomed more than 35 aerospace executives including attendees from Ball Aerospace, Braxton Technologies and Lockheed Martin. Gregg Burgess, the vice president of technology and engineering at Sierra Nevada Space Systems, was the industry keynote speaker. Attendees networked with some of the nation’s leading scientists and researchers and spent the day learning about using small satellites for advanced weather forecasting, remote sensing opportunities, climate variability, and their impact on air travel. 

The day also included a technical career fair for students and recruiters. “Currently, our major source of talent is CU-Boulder,” says Steve Jolly, chief engineer for the GOES-R (Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites) at Lockheed Martin. “This pipeline is dependent on the quality of education and its intersection with industry. Thus, it’s in our best interest to support the CU-Boulder community.”