Author: alayton6

Two Successful BiSSL MS Defenses!

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Samuel Blair and Luis Rodriguez both successfully defended their MS theses! Luis will be staying in the BiSSL group for his Ph.D. and Samuel is starting a role in industry this summer. We’re all so proud of them!

Samuel’s thesis is titled: “A Bio-Inspired Network Approach to Improve Understanding of Engineering Makerspaces” and Luis his thesis is titled: “Ecosystem Decentralization as a Design Guidelines for Resilient Water Networks.” Both have multiple conference papers published on their thesis research and have journal papers currently under review.

Most of the BiSSL group. (L-R) Luis Rodriguez, Samuel Blair, Abheek Chatterjee, Amira Bushagour, Hadear Hassan, Emily Payne, and Alexander Duffy.

Two BiSSL Papers Presented at the Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER2023)

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Abheek Chatterjee and Luis Rodriguez are presenting their first-authored papers at the annual CSER conference hosted by Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. The conference is centered around “Systems Engineering Toward a Smart and Sustainable World.”

Urban water distribution networks have provided potable water to communities and households worldwide over the last century. Within the last two decades, there has been a rise in complications with water distribution systems meeting demands. Urban water distributions fail to meet demands due to increases in natural and man-made disturbances, population growth, and aging water distribution network structures. These issues have caused urban water distribution system designers and decision-makers to shift their interests from focusing solely on efficiency to designs capable of meeting customer potable water demands under normal operations and during disturbances. Ecology, specifically biological ecosystems, provides system resilience inspiration, taken from their structure and functioning that has survived disturbances over millions of years. The work here investigates mimicking the decentralization of food webs to improve network resilience by incorporating decentralized water storage tanks, using the established Two Loop Network (TLN) as a case study. TLN is an introductory water network provided by the University of Exeter for system engineers and designers to test optimization and exploratory techniques. The case study was selected due to its simplistic design which allowed the authors to understand the effects of decentralizing the network toward improving its ability to handle disruptions. The findings suggest decentralization can improve the water network resilience a minimum of three times as much as the original network’s design. Furthermore, introducing decentralization was also found to increase the system’s ability to meet the demand for all nodes during disruptions, something the original case was unable to accomplish while simultaneously reducing the amount of freshwater consumed during disruptions.

(2023) Rodriguez, L.; A. Chatterjee; A. Layton. “Ecological Decentralization for Improving the Resilient Design of Urban Water Distribution Networks.” 21st Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER). Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

A microgrid is a localized energy grid that can disengage from the traditional grid and operate independently. Microgrids can be conceptualized as System of Systems: networked integration of constituent systems that together achieve novel capabilities. Improving resilience (the ability to survive and recover from disruptions) and reducing the cost of energy are critical considerations in microgrid design. However, microgrid resilience evaluation techniques require explicit disruption models – information that is not readily available in the early design stages. Therefore, these models cannot inform early-stage design decisions when changes can be made affordably. Recent research has indicated that Ecological Network Analysis is a promising tool for the design of resilient and affordable System of Systems. However, this approach has not yet been tested as a tool for microgrid design. This work provides an adapted Ecological Network Analysis framework that accounts for two unique architectural features of microgrids: (a) energy storage, and (b) integration of different types of energy generation technology. The Ecological Network Analysis based assessment of microgrid architectures is compared against their resilience and cost of energy evaluations using a state-of-the-art tool. The results of the comparison provide support for the use of Ecological Network Analysis as a reliable early-stage decision-support tool for resilient microgrid design.

(2023) Chatterjee, A.; A. Bushagour; A. Layton. “Resilient Microgrid Design Using Ecological Network Analysis.” 21st Annual Conference on Systems Engineering Research (CSER). Hoboken, New Jersey, USA.

BiSSL group hosting a STEM Saturday event with A&M’s Access & Inclusion office

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Dr. Layton, along with Ph.D. students Hadear Hassan and Luis Rodriguez, will be hosting a bio-inspired engineering design event through Access & Inclusion’s STEM Saturday series, which targets A&M’s first-year general engineering students with fun ways to gain technical experience while learning more about various engineering disciplines to inform students’ entry to a major (ETAM) process.

INCOSE Natural Systems Working Group (NSWG) rolls out their “Natural Systems and Systems Engineering Process: A Primer”

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INCOSE Natural Systems Working Group (NSWG) rolls out their “Natural Systems and Systems Engineering Process: A Primer”

Nature provides a wealth of solutions that can inspire engineers to create better designs. The Primer on Natural Systems is developed as a tool for Systems Engineering professionals and Project Managers to introduce and integrate Natural Systems thinking and approaches into their processes and products. By asking “How can Nature help me solve this problem?” engineers can leverage living and non-living systems to provide inspiration for solutions to system engineering challenges.  Download a free copy.

Invited Speaker at the Workshop Convergent Sea Level Rise Adaptation for Urban and Rural Systems in the Gulf of Mexico, University of Miami

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Dr. Layton will be giving a lightning talk at the NSF-funded Workshop Convergent Sea Level Rise Adaptation for Urban and Rural Systems in the Gulf of Mexico. Her talk “Nature’s Lessons for Resilient Systems” joins others seeking to collaborate to address the urban and rural system impacts of sea level rise.

Invited Research Seminar at UT Austin with the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation

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Dr. Astrid Layton was invited by the Center for Additive Manufacturing and Design Innovation (CAMDI) in the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin to share BiSSL group work on bio-inspired system resilience. Information about her talk, titled “Learning from Nature to Design Resilient Systems,” can be found in the flying below.

The BiSSL group joins 1 of 16 teams that have been selected for NSF’s Convergence Accelerator Grant

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NSF’s Convergence Accelerator is developing use-inspired solutions to address challenges aligned to the manufacturing, reuse and recycling of critical materials and products. The BiSSL group joins one of sixteen teams that have been selected for the program’s Track I: Sustainable Materials for Global Challenges.

The project is titled: Toward Water Circularity: Mining Green Hydrogen and Value-Added Materials from Hypersaline Brines, and is led by Oregon State University. The team is made up of: Dr. Zhenxing Feng (PI), Dr. Alex Chang (Co-PI), Dr. Astrid Layton (Co-PI), and Dr. Kelsey Stoerzinger (Co-PI). Feng, Chang, and Stoerzinger are all at Oregon State University in the Department of Chemical, Biological, and Environmental Engineering.

ABSTRACT. This track I NSF’s Convergence Accelerator aims to converge advances in fundamental materials science with innovative design and manufacturing methods to couple their end-use and full life-cycle considerations for environmentally- and economically sustainable materials and products. Guided by this principle and motivated by the global goal of Net-Zero Emissions by 2050, this project focuses on demonstration of a sustainable production and manufacturing process for large-scale hydrogen deployment and critical materials mining from earth’s abundant hypersaline brines (e.g., seawater). Hydrogen is a green fuel that can help accelerate decarbonization processes, and materials such as Lithium and Rare Earth elements that are critical to U.S. supply chain independence. This project emphasizes transformation from a linear to a circular economy; it enables a convergent, innovative team of universities, industry partners, government agencies, and students/trainees to ensure that the knowledge developed transitions effectively into many aspects of practice. The proposed circular use of water for fuel by renewable energy and extraction of critical materials for renewable energy production has broad societal impacts for a sustainable future. This project integrates multidisciplinary thinking into the undergraduate and K-12 curriculum, producing future engineers and scientists with skills and interests to work on multidisciplinary problems. This research supports and benefits the local community, such as the Oregon Coast’s Blue Sector Partnership Network consisting of partners from workforce development, school districts (CTE), industry, government, research, maritime, municipalities, and blue technology.

This proposal aims to demonstrate the sustainable mining of green hydrogen in parallel with value-added critical elements from hypersaline brines (e.g., seawater) for clean energy applications. Motivated by the global goal of Net-Zero Emissions by 2050, circular economy principles guide our development of sustainable processes for materials/fuels production, utilization, and recycling. Seawater represents the most abundant resource on the earth, with immense surface accessibility and large amounts of solubilized elements imperative for clean energy technologies. Seawater can also be split using renewable energy (e.g., solar) to obtain hydrogen fuel, with benign oxygen gas as a byproduct. Hydrogen presents a zero-emission fuel (producing water in a fuel cell), part of a circular sustainable process. Developing an integrated solution for extracting hydrogen and critical elements from seawater requires a multidisciplinary team from universities, industry partners, government agencies, and students/trainees. With our patented technologies and research results in critical areas, we aim to integrate multidisciplinary knowledge, tools, and modes of thinking under the guidance of circular economy principles to accelerate and converge our research to two integrated prototypes: a mineral-water separation reactor and downstream electrolyzer (producing hydrogen from the reduced-saline effluent). In addition to this prototyping, we will also identify in Phase 1 additional areas of expertise through team activities to prepare our Phase 2 project. In parallel, we will engage local stakeholders (focused on the Oregon Coast with our local expertise) and create training programs to educate next-generation workforces with innovative circular concepts in both Phases.https://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2236036&HistoricalAwards=false

Invited Research Seminar at the University of Miami, Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering

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Dr. Astrid Layton was invited by the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Miami to share BiSSL group work on bio-inspired system resilience. Her talk, titled “Using Biological Inspiration to Guide the Design of Human Networks for Resilience” is also now featured in the University’s Climate Resilience Academy UM YouTube series.

Abstract: Biological ecosystems have been through millions of years of R&D, producing complex systems of systems made up of interacting species that are able to support individual needs while maintaining system-level functions. In this talk Dr. Layton will show that ecosystems offer a relatively untapped source of design inspiration for improving the resilience of our human engineered networks in conjunction with goals like sustainability and cost. Quantitative descriptors and analysis techniques are adapted from ecology, enabling desirable ecosystem characteristics to be used as optimization and design guides for industrial resource networks (or eco-industrial parks, EIPs), water networks, supply chains, cyber-physical systems, and power grids. Ecological characteristics such as high levels of materials/energy cycling and a unique balance between redundant and efficient pathways offer novel routes to achieving traditional engineering goals.

Prof. Astrid Layton (Texas A&M) discusses biological inspiration for resilient human networks. It is shown that ecosystems offer a relatively untapped source of design inspiration for improving the resilience of our human-engineered networks in conjunction with goals like sustainability and cost. #design#bioinspired#resilience#sustainability

BiSSL MS Energy Student Alexander Duffy defends his thesis!

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Masters of Energy student Alexander Duffy successfully defended his master’s thesis on Friday. The committee consisted of BiSSL head Dr. Astrid Layton, Dr. Katherine Davis from Electrical & Computer Engineering, and Dr. Helen Reed from Aerospace Engineering. His thesis was titled “Design and analysis of satellite networks for ecological resilience.”

Alexander Duffy defends his MS thesis research