BiSSL MS student Colton Brehm successfully defended his MS thesis!
His thesis is titled: “Improving the Environmental and Economic Outcomes of Industrial Networks using Nestedness to Design Resource Distribution Infrastructure” and focused on using the nested structure of biological food webs to advise engineering system design.
On this episode (Season 1 Episode 28) of “Ask an Engineer,” the SoundBytes team asks Dr. Astrid Layton about the challenges facing recycling. You can find a full transcript of the episode here.
The final presentations of the 2020 Texas A&M Regional Engineering Conference (TREC) were a huge success! The student teams presented innovative bio-inspired designs that could have a real impact on hurricane prone areas. A lot of the students had first hand experience with the problems they were looking to solve.
First prize went to the INSPIDERED team from SWE! They created a spider silk glass cover to protect from and prevent shattered glass from falling into homes and the environment – protecting clean up crews from glass shards. Congratulations!
I’m excited to help kick-off the Texas A&M Regional Engineering Conference (TREC) this Saturday with a keynote speech! TREC co-chairs Laura Orellana and Keeton Bailey have done an excellent job creating an impactful problem statement for the interdisciplinary freshmen teams to work on for the next three weeks.
TREC is an event hosted annually by the Student Engineers’ Council (SEC) at Texas A&M Engineering to foster professionalism and interdisciplinary collaboration among freshmen by developing a solution to a sustainability-related problem and presenting their product 3 weeks later.
It’s not too late to register! http://trec.tamu.edu
BiSSL is looking forward to representing our bio-inspired systems of systems (SoS) design work at this year’s 18th Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research in Redondo Beach, CA. The conference this year is focused on “Recent Trends and Advances in Model-based Systems” and will be going on from March 19-21, 2020. PhD student Abheek Chatterjee is first author on a paper with our collaborator Dr. Richard Malak titled: “A Bio-inspired Framework for Analyzing and Predicting the Trade-off between System of Systems Attributes.” We hope to see you all there!
Congratulations to BiSSL alumni Tirth Dave (MS graduate December 2019) on the publication of his paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production! “Designing ecologically-inspired robustness into a water distribution network” covers Tirth’s work on bio-inspired network design coupled with modeling of a water distribution network, showing that we can draw inspiration from nature to improve the resilience and reduce freshwater use in industrial resource networks.
ABSTRACT: Eco-Industrial Parks (EIPs), network of industries that collaborate by utilizing each other’s byproducts and wastes, are highly desirable for both the industries themselves, their environment, and governments due to their economic, environmental, and social advantages. Previous work has shown that EIPs are not as successful as they could be in terms of mimicking the behavior of biological ecosystems, highlighting that more work needs to be done for EIPs to truly mimic their biological-counterparts. The Kalundborg EIP, located in Kalundborg, Denmark, is a well documented example of an EIP with long-term success. Using the water network within the Kalundborg EIP as a case study, two bio-inspired networks are selected from an optimization based on the ecosystem metric robustness. The bio-inspired solutions are compared with a traditionally cost-minimized solution to understand what bio-inspired design can offer when a network is disturbed. Disturbances such as connection breakages and industry shutdowns are tested, showing that the bio-inspired designs require minimal recovery costs – in stark contrast to the traditional network solution. The results show that the bio-inspired designs reduce the network’s dependence on a scarce import (freshwater) and have higher overall network resilience in the event of disturbances. The three network solutions are discussed from a ecological perspective, explaining differences from the standpoint of ecosystem characteristics. The analysis highlights the benefits of using ecology to understand the nature of and improve the design of industrial networks.
JCP (2020) “Designing ecologically-inspired robustness into a water distribution network” Dave, T. and Layton, A.
We can finally share this open access PLOS ONE publication “A quantitative engineering study of ecosystem robustness using thermodynamic power cycles as case studies” written with MS BiSSL alumni Varuneswara Panyam (TAMU graduate December 2019). Understanding the characteristics of biological systems from an engineering perspective is an important part of bio-inspired engineering design!
ABSTRACT: Human networks and engineered systems are traditionally designed to maximize efficiency. Ecosystems on the other hand, achieve long-term robustness and sustainability by maintaining a unique balance between pathway efficiency and redundancy, measured in terms of the number of flow pathways available for a given unit of flow at any node in the network. Translating this flow-based ecosystem robustness into an engineering context supports the creation of new robust and sustainable design guidelines for engineered systems. Thermodynamic cycles provide good examples of human systems where simple and clearly defined modifications can be made to increase efficiency. Twenty-three variations on the Brayton and Rankine cycles are used to understand the relationship between design decisions that maximize a system’s efficient use of energy (measured by thermodynamic first law efficiency) and ecological measures of robustness and structural efficiency. The results reveal that thermodynamic efficiency and ecological pathway efficiency do not always correlate and that while on average modifications to increase energy efficiency reduce the robustness of the system, the engineering understanding of ecological network design presented here can enable decisions that are able to increase both energy efficiency and robustness.
PLOS ONE (2019) “A quantitative engineering study of ecosystem robustness using thermodynamic power cycles as case studies” Panyam, V. and Layton, A.
Two BiSSL students, MS student Colton Brehm and PhD student Abheek Chatterjee, have had full papers accepted to 2020’s CIRP LCE conference! The 2020 conference focuses on “the role that engineering must play in the achievement of the sustainable future that people wish.” The conference this year is hosted by Grenoble INP – Institut d’Ingénierie Univ. Grenoble Alpes and will be held in Grenoble, France May 13-15, 2020.
Honored to have been invited to give our department’s graduate seminar later today, I’m looking forward to it! Feel free to stop by if you’re around, I’ll be talking about my research regarding “Using biological inspiration to improve the design of complex human-engineered networks.”
Brief description: Biological ecosystems have been through millions of years of R&D, producing complex networks of interacting species that are able to support individual needs while maintaining system-level functions. In this talk, Dr. Layton will show that these networks offer a relatively untapped source of design inspiration for improving the sustainability and resilience of our human-engineered networks. Quantitative descriptors and analysis techniques are adapted from ecology through close collaboration with ecologists, enabling desirable ecosystem characteristics to be used as optimization guides for industrial resource networks (or eco-industrial parks, EIPs), water networks, supply chains, and power grids. Characteristics such as a high level of cycling of materials/energy within the system and a unique balance between redundant and efficient pathways are connected back to the achievement of traditional engineering goals such as cost and robustness.
J. Mike Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering Fellowships and Scholarships. So incredibly proud of all of our BiSSL research students! Last week’s fellowships and scholarships awards dinner for the J. Mike Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering was an honor to attend, to celebrate all of our department’s diverse and accomplished students!
MS students Tirth Dave and Varuneswara Panyam both successfully defended their theses!
Dave, T., (2019) “Designing Robust Water Distribution Systems using Ecology as an Inspiration” Mechanical Engineering M.S. Thesis, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.
Panyam, V., (2019) “Bio-inspired design for robust power systems” Mechanical Engineering M.S. Thesis, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 