Author: alayton6

2 BiSSL Papers Accepted to the 27th CIRP-Life Cycle Engineering Conference

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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.

  • Abheek Chatterjee, Colton Brehm, and Astrid Layton (2020) “Mimicking the nested structures of ecosystems in the design of industrial water networks.”
  • Abheek Chatterjee and Astrid Layton (2020) “Bio-inspired Design for Sustainable and Resilient Supply Chains.”

Invited J. Mike Walker Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Seminar

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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

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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!

  • Tirth Dave was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship
  • Abheek Chatterjee was awarded an Emil Buehler Aerodynamic Analog Fellowship
  • Colton Brehm was awarded a Graduate Excellence Fellowship
  • Varun Panyam was awarded a Graduate Excellence Fellowship
  • Shelby Warrington won the James J. Cain ’51 Award
  • Kristina Viro won the J. Mike Walker ’66 Impact Award

Two BiSSL Students Defend Their Theses!

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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.

TEXAS A&M CONFERENCE ON ENERGY

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PhD student Hao Huang from the Power Systems group in Electrical Engineering will be presenting our Bio-Inspired Power Grid design work at the Fourth Annual TEXAS A&M CONFERENCE ON ENERGY on September 23-25, 2019. The event is sponsored by the Texas A&M Energy Research Society in partnership with the Texas A&M Energy Institute. The presentations will include a poster presentation in the “Seed Grant Poster Session” on Monday 23td 3:30-4:30pm as well as an oral presentation in the “Energy-Efficiency, Economics, Sustainability, and Policies” session on Wednesday 25th from 11:05-11:20am.

Layton and Ali Present at A&M College of Architecture’s 21st Annual Research Symposium

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Natural, Built, Virtual — the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s 21st Annual Research Symposium

(L to R) Dr. Ahmed Ali and Dr. Astrid Layton

Our collaborative and multidisciplinary research on by-product reuse and supporting a circular economy will be presented by Mechanical Engineering’s Dr. Astrid Layton and Architecture’s Dr. Ahmed Ali today at the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s 21st Annual Research Symposium “Natural, Built, Virtual” http://symposium.arch.tamu.edu/symposium/2019/

The presentation will cover the past year of our project ” Matrix Trays: Waste to Opportunities,” a seed grant project supported by Texas A&M’s President’s Excellence Fund. Read more about the outcome of the Mechanical Engineering Senior Design component of the project here: https://engineering.tamu.edu/news/2019/07/student-designed-smart-shades-reflect-a-more-sustainable-future.html

BiSSL Student Presents at A&M’s Resilience Rising Symposium

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Resilience Rising: Research and Practice on Hurricane Harvey and Hazards of the Future Symposium

BiSSL PhD student Abheek Chatterjee will be presenting his resilient system design related research “Investigating Ecosystems’ Mimicry towards Design of Resilient Resource and Infrastructure Networks” this Friday, September 6th at the “Resilience Rising” symposium being hosted by TAMU College of Architecture.

The symposium will be held in Rudder Tower on the College Station campus. Come learn and network with fellow TAMU researchers and practitioners as they discuss recent projects on Hurricane Harvey and disaster resilience! The event is free but registration is limited.

The schedule will include:

  • Presentations
  • Panel Discussions
  • Student Poster Presentation and Competition
  • Pecha Kucha Style Quick Presentations

For questions contact us at hrrc@arch.tamu.edu

Fall 2019 J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Excellence Fellowships

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meen logo

Congratulations to two of our BiSSL graduate research students, Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee and Masters student Tirth Dave, for winning the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Excellence Fellowship for continuing students for the Fall 2019 semester! The highly competitive graduate scholarship awards graduate students doing excellent research, academic performance, and leadership in the department.

Presentations of BiSSL Work at IDETC-CIE 2019

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BiSSL graduate students Varuneswara Panyam and Abheek Chatterjee presented their first-authored papers this week in Anaheim, CA. The papers for their talks “Bio-Inspired Human Network Design: Multi-Currency Robustness Metric Formulation Inspired By Ecological Network Analysis” and “Bio-inspired modeling approaches for human networks with link dissipation” can be found only through ASME IDETC2019.