The BiSSL group is very proud of our own Ph.D. student Abheek Chatterjee, who was one of a select few graduate students chosen to present their doctoral research at the SERC Annual Sponsor Research Review’s Doctoral Student Forum. His presentation is titled “Ecology-Inspired Design of Resilient and Affordable System of Systems.”
Congratulations to Ph.D. candidate Abheek Chatterjee, Ph.D. student Samuel Blair, and MS student Garrett Hairston for being awarded J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Fellowships for Fall 2021 in recognition of the great research they’ve been doing as graduate students!
BiSSL MS students Samuel Blair and Garrett Hairston were awarded a J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Summer Research Grant for Summer 2021 for their proposals titled: “Ecological Systems Approach to Understanding Makerspace Networks” and “Ecological-modularity as inspiration for community-scale net zero achievement,” respectively. Congratulations Samuel and Garrett!
The 2021 Undergraduate Teaching Award for the Mechanical Engineering department was awarded to Dr. Astrid Layton in recognition of her undergraduate teaching excellence. Since joining the department in 2017, she has taught the following courses: MEEN 344 Fluid Mechanics, MEEN 401 Senior Design (studio & lecture), and MEEN 440/696 Bio-Inspired Engineering Design.
Congratulations to BiSSL PhD student Abheek Chatterjee for winning a J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Excellence Fellowship for continuing students for the Fall 2020 semester! The highly competitive graduate scholarship awards graduate students doing excellent research, academic performance, and leadership in the department.
Abheek his paper was written in collaboration with Dr. Richard Malak, in CIE’s SEIKM division titled “Exploring a Bio-Inspired System of Systems Resilience vs. Affordability Tradespace“
Abstract: “The objective of this study is to investigate the value of an ecologically inspired architectural metric called the Degree of System Order in the System of Systems (SoS) architecting process. Two highly desirable SoS attributes are the ability to withstand and recover from disruptions (resilience) and affordability. In practice, more resilient SoS architectures are less affordable and it is essential to balance the trade-offs between the two attributes. Ecological research analyzing long-surviving ecosystems (nature’s resilient SoS) using the Degree of System Order metric has found a unique balance of efficient and redundant interactions in their architecture. This balance implies that highly efficient ecosystems tend to be inflexible and vulnerable to perturbations while highly redundant ecosystems fail to utilize resources effectively for survival. Motivated by this unique architectural property of ecosystems, this study investigates the response to disruptions vs. affordability trade-space of a large number of feasible SoS architectures. Results indicate that the most favorable SoS architectures in this trade-space share a specific range of values of Degree of System Order. This suggests that Degree of System Order can be a key metric is engineered SoS development. Evaluating the Degree of System Order does not require detailed simulations and can, therefore, guide the early stage SoS design process towards more optimal SoS architectures.”
A. Chatterjee, R. Malak, and A. Layton, “Exploring a Bio-Inspired System of Systems Resilience vs. Affordability Tradespace,” presented at the ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conference, virtual, 2020.
BiSSL PhD student Abheek Chatterjee was awarded a J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering Graduate Summer Research Grant for Summer 2020 for his proposal titled: “Ecology-inspired design of resilient and affordable System of Systems.” Congratulations Abheek!
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!
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.
BiSSL MS student Colton Brehm was a finalist for the Leo Award for best paper for his CIRP Life Cycle Engineering conference paper “Designing eco-industrial parks in a nested structure to mimic mutualistic ecological networks.”
Abstract: Industrial Ecology uses ecological systems as a guide for improving the sustainability of complex industrial systems. Eco-Industrial Parks (EIPs) have gained support as a solution that seeks to simultaneously reduce environmental burdens and promote economic interests by exchanging materials and energy between industries to their mutual benefit. Recent studies have focused on drawing relations between food webs (FWs) and EIPs to improve the sustainability of the latter using ecological metrics, such as the level of cycling or average connections between actors. This study incorporates a new ecological metric, nestedness, into the discussion of sustainable design for EIPs. The association of nestedness with mutualistic ecological networks supports its application to EIP design. The work here improves the understanding of holistic network structure with the goal of improving future design decisions for EIPs with purposeful placement of material and energy flows.
The full paper is available here.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 