Drs. Astrid Layton, Jessica Menold, Kosa Goucher-Lambert, Mohsen Moghaddam, and Zhenghui Sha were invited by Drs. Carolyn Seepersad and Julie Linsey at Georgia Tech for an insightful series of talks on The Future of Design for the annual “Rigi” meeting of the Design Society. The talks will be compiled in an editorial journal paper in the Journal of Mechanical Design later this year.
BiSSL Ph.D. student Hadear Hassan has been awarded the 2024 James J. Cain ’51 Award by the department, an award that recognizes the demonstrated academic and innovative excellence of the recipients and is awarded to only 2 graduate students each year. She received the award at the 2024 Mechanical Engineering Student Award Recognition on October 10th.
James J. Cain ’51 was a long-time supporter and graduate of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Texas A&M University. Cain was the youngest of five children and was born and raised in Sherman, Texas. After completing high school, Cain attended Texas A&M and received a degree in mechanical engineering. During his long and distinguished career of more than 35 years at Mobil Oil, Cain was renowned for his desire to mentor students and faculty at Texas A&M. He took great pride in being a part of Mobil’s college recruiting team, often filling positions with Aggie graduates.
Dr. Astrid Layton, assistant professor in the J. Mike Walker ’66 Department of Mechanical Engineering and Donna Walker Faculty Fellow, received an esteemed Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award from the National Science Foundation. The CAREER Award stands as one of the NSF’s highest honors, supporting early-career faculty in becoming exemplary academic leaders.
The accolade recognizes Layton’s scholarly contributions and underscores her research’s pivotal role in achieving resilience and sustainability in engineering. Layton is poised to transform engineering system design by drawing inspiration from the resilience and sustainability inherent in nature.
Resilience, the ability to withstand and recover from disruptions, is paramount for engineering systems, yet there are few methods for integrating resilience into the early phases of design. Layton’s research leverages insights from biological ecosystems so that engineers have quantitative tools for enhancing resilience when confronted with limited information.
“I envision a future where engineers don’t have to choose between settling for something that’s sustainable or resilient. This grant supports my career goal to learn, evaluate and adapt the complexity and interconnectedness of biological systems to engineering design for both sustainability and resilience,” said Layton.
“This grant supports my career goal to learn, evaluate and adapt the complexity and interconnectedness of biological systems to engineering design for both sustainability and resilience.”
Dr. Astrid Layton
Drawing from principles of engineering design, biological ecosystems, and ecological network analysis, Layton’s interdisciplinary approach promises to revolutionize system design by infusing it with findings from nature. The project will examine biological ecosystem traits to clarify when and how their effectiveness helps system designers improve a system’s ability to survive, respond, and recover, highlighting both targeted and random disturbance situations.
The future impact on critical infrastructure systems that underpin society’s essential services, such as water supply, power distribution, and pharmaceutical-type supply chains, is of particular significance. By drawing insights from resilient biological ecosystems, the project seeks to furnish designers with practical tools to effectively use resources, mitigate vulnerabilities, and fortify system robustness.
Layton’s project also includes a visionary “Walk Like an Engineer” program that engages participants in engineering design within natural settings. The program equips a future workforce with the intuition to tackle complex challenges by fostering interdisciplinary communication skills and an early interest in engineering design.
“Engineering from the perspective of nature — something that all human beings are inherently familiar with — draws interest from a diverse group of people,” said Layton. “This grant takes advantage of that to support a long-term career goal of mine to foster excitement and feelings of inclusion in engineering via bio-inspired design through the “Walk Like an Engineer” program that partners with our local nature center. These engineering and nature scavenger hunts will encourage participants to see themselves as design engineers learning from nature.”
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.
ABSTRACT: Climate change, NetZero energy, and the Fourth Industrial Revolution are all game changers for infrastructure providers. Inadequate and ill-prepared infrastructure will increase the consequences of rapid urbanization, extreme weather events, and digital disruption, driving up the costs to individuals, businesses, and society, reducing economic productivity, and undermining the quality of life for people and plants. To build smarter, more sustainable, and resilient infrastructure, cities will need to reimage the infrastructure services they provide and arrange deeply interconnected technological, social and environmental systems to do so. Infrastructure 4.0 is comprised, not just of physical assets and digital twins, but an interconnected web of social, institutional, and ecological systems. New, complex forms of socio-technological systems are emerging that require a synthesis across traditional disciplines of engineering, information technology, environmental science, and policy. Leaders in smart, sustainable cities are embracing information and communication technologies and other means to meet the needs of populations without compromising future generations, envisioning new possibilities, and developing transformational roadmaps for a smarter, more sustainable, and resilient future.
BiSSL PhD student Abheek Chatterjee and alumn Colton Brehm (MS) just had their full-length research paper accepted and published in the journal Resources, Conservation & Recycling! The paper, titled “A Quantitative Benefits Evaluation of Ecologically-Inspired Nested Architectures for Industrial Networks,” investigates the use of ecological nestedness – a structural characteristic of ecological food webs, to guide the design of eco-industrial parks and other resource networks to improve it’s ability to survive network disturbances AND to guide inter-actor connections based on resource cost and distance between actors.
You can find a high level summary of the paper written by Texas A&M Engineering’s Vanada Suresh here: “Following nature’s cue, researchers build successful, sustainable industrial networks”
Abstract: “Industrial Symbiosis (IS), inspired by the highly effective resource utilization found in nature, advocates byproduct-exchange partnerships between industries to reduce raw material use, emissions, and waste generation while promoting economic growth. Ecological research on mutualistic ecosystems (such as plant-pollinator networks) has found a connection between high values of nestedness, a unique linkage distribution strategy, and effective resource utilization. The present work is the first to test the benefits of nested architectures for IS goals, a characteristic thus far overlooked in bio-inspired IS efforts. A generated large dataset of hypothetical-realistic Industrial Water Networks spanning the entire nestedness domain shows that highly nested designs significantly reduce resource consumption. Circumstances where these savings outweigh any additional infrastructure and operation costs are also shown, highlighting that low to moderate resource abundance and manageable geographical dispersion between participating industries (conditions that commonly generate interest in IS) are particularly favorable for nested architectures. Ecologically-similarly nested IS networks, especially those with highly connected high-throughput industries, are also found to have a reduction in negative impacts during pipeline disruptions. The results provide promising evidence that the principle of nestedness can be a powerful quantitative bio-inspired design guideline for IS, capable of simultaneously addressing environmental, economic, and resiliency concerns.”
Chatterjee, A., Brehm, C., & Layton, A. (2021). A Quantitative Benefits Evaluation of Ecologically-Inspired Nested Architectures for Industrial Networks. Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 167. doi:10.1016/j.resconrec.2021.105423
“Whether intended or not, engineered, industrial systems often mirror those found in the natural world. Case in point: the relationship between today’s electrical power grid and the way food chains function.
Drawing on principles from bio-designed systems—in this case, the food web—will help scientists build more resilience into the electrical power grid, said Astrid Layton, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University. She collaborates with Katherine Davis, an A&M assistant professor of electrical engineering, on the project.
A more resilient power grid means reducing the damage from outages and shorten their duration, Layton said.”https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/how-the-food-web-can-keep-the-electricity-flowing
Whether intended or not, engineered, industrial systems often mirror those found in the natural world. Case in point: the relationship between today’s electrical power grid and the way food chains function.
Drawing on principles from biodesigned systems—in this case the food web—will help scientists build more resilience into the electrical power grid, said Astrid Layton, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Texas A&M University. She collaborates with Katherine Davis, an A&M assistant professor of electrical engineering, on the project.
A more resilient power grid means reducing the damage from outages and shorten their duration, Layton said.
A food web is a system of interlocking and interdependent food chains. It goes beyond predators that depend on their prey for survival but—at the other end of the system—actors like earthworms or fungi that take dead organic material and break it down and cause it to decompose so the ecosystem can use it again, Layton said.
Designing the power grid to continually circulate energy in this interlocking manner can aid with stability. “Food webs have a lot of these cyclical patterns that happen.” Layton noted.
“Essentially you start at one species, and you follow the arrows and you wind back up at that same species if you just follow the arrows around,” she said. “This represents the energy sort of remaining in the system or the materials remaining in the system for as long as possible. It’s really being able to maximize the use of what you already have inside the system.”
But power grids right now are extremely linear, like a lot of engineered networks,” she added. “You look at the start of your material or energy that’s flowing through the system, and you follow it through and you’re essentially following a straight line, even as you pass a series of nodes or actors along the way.”
By studying how different types of interactions, structures and patterns within food webs mingle, and incorporating those movements into a power grid, the grid has less opportunity for failure, the researchers believe.
For instance, one important way food webs are resilient, Layton realized, is that after a food system suffers a disruption, it doesn’t necessarily have to recover to its initial state.
“They can recover to alternate, also stable states,” she said. The predator may be able to sustain life for a time by eating another type of prey animal, for example.
She and Davis are applying the analogy to power grids to find ways they also may be able to quickly reset themselves to an alternative, yet stable, state. Using that method, areas that are more critical during times of disruption than others—such as hospitals or first responder centers—should see the least disruption to their power supply.
“The implications we could have power grids that are able to deliver power even when we have large-scale disturbances,” Layton said. “With the increase in weather-related disturbances this is particularly important. Especially if you start thinking about critical power consumers such as first responders and vulnerable populations—the impact to these consumers when the power goes out is significantly worse.”
The Houston area, for example, experienced a drop in power-system performance during Hurricane Harvey, a Category 4 storm that inundated the region for several days in August and September of 2017. It was critical that first responders and hospitals to maintain power.
Investigations on grid resiliency and the pollution-cutting potential investigation are still in the early stages, though it looks promising, Layton said.
“A recent publication of ours shows that the bio-inspired grid designs perform significantly better than the traditionally designed grids when we put them through contingency analyses,” Layton said.
A contingency analysis is a “what if” scenario that evaluates, provides and prioritizes the impacts on an electric power system whenever typically unplanned problems or outages occur.
“Biological ecosystems have been around for a long time and that’s lots of rounds of design iteration to produce something that we as engineers can really learn from to make things better,” Layton said.
The pair also hope to use their findings to better incorporate renewable electricity into the grid to cut atmospheric pollution levels.
Dr. Debalina Sengupta is the Associate Director of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station’s Gas & Fuels Research Center, as well as the Water, Energy, and Food Nexus Coordinator in the Texas A&M Energy Institute at Texas A&M University.
Abstract: We are witnessing history, and living through it. Never before in recent times has a pandemic spread around the world and paralyzed nations, economies, resources, and most importantly, people, all at the same time. It has exposed vulnerabilities to systems in ways that we are yet to fathom. As we wade through solving the immediate human health concerns and crisis, there is a deeper question that we need to address. The role of different entities and players in the society need to be taken into consideration for determining the resilience to disasters of great magnitude.
Over the past two decades, statistics suggest that the intensity of natural disasters have been increasing, and the damages caused by them have been impacting the lives of millions. Hurricanes and flooding events have increasingly influenced coastal communities and given rise to terms as climate refugees. Disaster management has primarily been a top-down approach from governance perspectives. The Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act of 2006 saw a comprehensive push towards disaster management strategies, and the need for emergency planning and implementation. However, the multiple failures during disasters and the resulting increase in losses to human lives, property, and progress of regions have yet again shown us that a convergent, interdisciplinary research approach is required to address the four stages of disaster management: Response, Recovery, Mitigation, and Preparedness. From analyzing vulnerabilities and risks to identifying root causes and critical elements in the full cycle of disaster management, interventions can be designed for timely recovery and minimizing loss of life. Deriving from concepts of sustainable development, this webinar will provide a framework for resilience studies, and seek to develop partnerships that can bring translational research components for innovative approaches towards disaster resilience.
The Mechanical Engineering Female Graduate Students (MEFEGs) is honored to invite Dr. Cynthia Hipwell to share her experience in our monthly faculty lunch this Friday noon. Dr. Hipwell spent 21 years in industry – most of that as a data storage leader at Seagate Technology, and is known as a technology and business process innovator. She is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and National Academy of Inventors and is very passionate about promoting innovative thought and curriculum at Texas A&M. The faculty lunch will be discussion based and it is a good opportunity to interact with female faculties within MEEN department.
BiSSL: Bio-inspired Systems Lab 