Dr. Layton and BiSSL Master’s student Jewel Williams will help Austin Technology Incubator celebrate its launch as the new Circular Economy Incubator! Discussions with industry experts and entrepreneurs about real-world solutions, including leading Circular Economy companies: Wisetek, Remade, re:3D, and Leaf and Flour. Keynote to be given by BiSSL collaborator Dr. Ahmed Ali on Circular Design for the Built Environment.
TheAustin Technology Incubator(ATI) is the deep technology incubator of The University of Texas at Austin working with university and community entrepreneurs to commercialize their breakthrough innovations. For over 29 years, ATI has used a customized approach to support entrepreneurs addressing the world’s most pressing problems by connecting startups with the expertise, relationships, and funding sources they need to succeed in the marketplace.
Read more about the event and the companies presenting here…
“We stand at a key moment in history. As sustainability challenges intensify and the window for action grows smaller every day, the need for leadership by higher education is greater than ever. With a theme of “Global Goals: Rising to the Challenge,” the 2018 AASHE Conference & Expo will examine the critical role of higher education in achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Adopted by the world’s governments in September 2015, the 17 SDGs establish ambitious global targets to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure prosperity for all by 2030.”
Tuesday August 28th from 2-3pm the ASME CIE Systems Engineering and Information Knowledge Management (SEIKM) technical committee will host a panel on “Networks and Systems.” The panel will consist of Mr. Babak Heydari (Assistant Professor, Stevens Institute of Technology) speaking on Complex Socio-Technical Systems, Dr. Astrid Layton (Assistant Professor, Texas A&M University) speaking on Bio-Inspired Network Analysis Techniques, and Dr. Sara Behdad (Assistant Professor, University at Buffalo, SUNY) speaking on Network Approaches for Sustainable Design and Manufacturing.
The Texas A&M Energy Research Society (ERS), in partnership with the Texas A&M Energy Institute, is pleased to present the Third Annual Texas A&M Conference on Energy. Varun’s poster is to be presented during Poster Session 2 (3-4:30pm) on Tuesday, September 25th, 2018. The poster covers preliminary work done by MS students Varuneswara Panyam and Bogdan Pinte and their advisors Dr. Kate Davis (Electrical Engineering) and Dr. Astrid Layton (Mechanical Engineering).
Congratulations to our students Varuneswara Panyam and Tirth Dave for their paper titled “Understanding Ecological Efficiency and Robustness for Network Design Using Thermodynamic Power Cycles” getting accepted into the International Design Engineering Technology Conferences, Design Theory and Methodology. The conference will be held in Quebec City, Canada from August 26-29, 2018.
Ecology has acted as a source for sound design principles and studies of ecosystems have examined how ecological principles can enhance sustainable human network design. Engineered systems are often designed for maximum performance, but in many cases, robustness is lost due to unwanted variations in inputs or efficiency. Taguchi’s signal to noise ratio and other quality engineering principles are well known fundamentals in the field of robust design. In this paper, we will introduce flow-based metrics from ecological network analysis (ENA) for robustness, efficiency, and redundancy. Ecosystem robustness is related to the balance between flow path diversity and system delivery efficiency. Systems with diverse flows are more resilient to a disturbance since there are redundant pathways, but are inefficient because they contain many flow paths with the same endpoints. Efficient systems are better able to transfer material and energy, but this is at the cost of fewer pathways so the system is brittle. Thus to survive a disturbance, an ecosystem system balances redundancy with efficiency. Thermodynamic power cycles are used to understand the relationship between energy efficiency, measured using first law efficiency, and ecological robustness and an ecological balance of efficiency to redundancy (as measured by ascendency vs development capacity). The result highlights the importance of understanding differences in the meaning of efficiency between two fields, and that from an engineering standpoint robustness does not have to be sacrificed to obtain energy efficiency.
“Understanding Ecological Efficiency and Robustness for Network Design Using Thermodynamic Power Cycles”
I will be presenting my work titled “Designing Sustainable Manufacturing Networks: The Role of Exclusive Species in Achieving Ecosystem-Type Performance” at the IDETC-CIE 2017 conference, under the 22nd Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference (DFMLC) division, on Monday, August 7th.
Ecology is proving to be an innovative source for design principles. Studies have examined how ecological principles can enhance sustainability in industrial networks. Ecologically inspired manufacturing networks tend to focus on supporting symbiotic relationship formation, creating a cyclical flow structure that has been shown to result in efficiency and resource consumption improvements. Despite successes, bio-inspired manufacturing networks still fail to accurately mimic ecosystem cycling. The roles of exclusive actors and specialized predators in achieving the high cycling characteristic of ecosystems is investigated here. Exclusive actors participate in the network as either only a consumer (predator) or only a producer (prey). Specialized predators consume only one producer inside the system boundary. The populations of these special actors in manufacturing networks versus ecological food webs speaks to the potential influence these roles have on the cycling the network achieves. The trends shown here suggest less exclusivity is necessary for achieving ecologically-strong network cycling.
Layton, A.; B. Bras; M. Weissburg. Designing Sustainable Manufacturing Networks: The role of exclusive species in achieving ecosystem-type performance. Cleveland, OH, 2017. ASME 2017 International Design Engineering Technical Conference.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 