Posts filed under ‘College of Engineering’
New Solar House in the Works
I stopped out to Innovation Park (actually to a big field just behind Innovation Park) this afternoon to see how construction is coming along on Penn State’s entry in this year’s Solar Decathlon.
The decathlon, held every other year, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. It pits student teams from various schools against each other to see who can build the best solar house, with the houses displayed on the national mall in Washington, D.C., in October. Penn State finished fourth in 2007 with an entry called MorningStar—which you can still see; it now sits next to the Centre County Visitors Center across from Beaver Stadium.
This year’s entry is called Natural Fusion. It’s small, as you can see in the photo above—the competition requirements stipulate that its “footprint” be no more than 800 sq. ft.—and it will be entirely powered by solar energy.
Here are a couple of photos from this afternoon’s visit. The first is of Dan Sutton (an architecture major from Evans City, Pa.) and Kyle Macht ’09 Eng (a recent grad who is the team leader) installing a window on the rear of the house:
And here is a stack of solar panels waiting to be installed. They’re made of a kind of solar cell called CIGS (short for copper indium gallium selenide).
Much of the material for the house has either been donated or sold to the students at a discount; the team has worked with Penn State’s fundraising staff to identify corporate entities who can support the effort.
In this next shot, Brian Goodykoontz ’09, ’09g explains the solar-energy system that’s supplying power for the construction process. Brian graduated in May with a bachelor’s and master’s in architectural engineering and is the construction project manager.
And this last shot is of Dan Sutton, whose hardhat sports the logo of this year’s team.
The overall crew—numbering about 150 students—is currently racing to get the house finished by mid- to late-September. A big target date is Sept. 25, when they’ll be offering tours of the house to the public—and when actor and environmental activist Ed Begley Jr. will be in town to see the house and give a public talk.
Tina Hay, editor
“Millennium Science Complex” in the Works
The construction site of the Millennium Science Complex at University Park. Click to see it full-size.
Last evening I took a quick drive up to campus to see if I could get some shots of the construction site for the Millennium Science Complex, which is being built in the space roughly between Eisenhower Auditorium and Pollock Road. Dave Shaffer ’77 of the Center for Performing Arts had posted on his Facebook page last week a panoramic shot he took from the top of the Eisenhower Parking Deck, and I wanted to see if I could get something similar.
Turns out you can’t really get to the top of the parking deck—at least not legally (uhhhhhh … Dave?). Some sort of construction has the access blocked off, so I had to shoot from the next-to-top deck. That, plus the fact that the sun was getting low in the sky, cast a bit of a shadow over the foreground of the photo. I’ll have to go back another time and try again.
What you see here isn’t a panoramic; it’s just an ultra-wide-angle shot. I did also take some photos for use in stitching together a panorama in Photoshop, and maybe we’ll run one of those in the magazine sometime. (If you’re interested in learning how to make panoramas in Photoshop, just Google “Photoshop photomerge”; it’s a fun and fairly easy technique.)
Just to orient you in this photo: Eisenhower Auditorium is behind you; the dorms you see just above the center of the photo are Pollock Halls; and that’s Mount Nittany in the distance, of course.
You can read more about the Millennium Science Complex at the link above, and also here. We really haven’t covered it in the magazine yet, and we probably should. It’s being designed by Rafael Viñoly Architects, so it will probably be amazing. It’s scheduled for completion in 2011.
Tina Hay, editor
From Mont Alto to the Moon (Almost)
The Chambersburg Public Opinion ran this story the other day about engineering students from Penn State Mont Alto working on a two-year project with NASA—a project that peaked (so to speak) last week with a rocket launch from the Wallops Flight Facility on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The students weren’t on the rocket, but their experiment—some sort of disc used to measure the effects of intense gravity and rapid acceleration—was. According to the story, they’ll spend the next couple of weeks analyzing the data from the flight.
And I imagine that, when asked how they enjoyed their summer, they’ll tell friends they had a blast.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Two Articles Worth Reading
I mentioned the other day that we hadn’t won anything in the overall magazine category in this year’s CASE awards, but that we did win two gold medals in the category called “Best Articles of the Year.” I thought you might want to see the two articles that won.
One of the gold awards was for “The Family Tree” (Nov-Dec 2008), a story by Vicki Glembocki ’93, ’02g, about the film No. 4 Street of Our Lady, which chronicles the heroic efforts of a Polish woman to shelter several Jewish families from the Nazis during the Holocaust. The film is the work of three Penn State faculty members—one of whom is the daughter of one of the Jews who was saved.
As for the other gold award, well, a year or so we learned of a Penn State grad, Andrew Bieniawski ’89, who leads a U.S. government effort to track down and remove nuclear materials that are still scattered throughout eastern Europe, remnants of the Cold War. The effort often involves delicate negotiations with other countries, and lots of secretive work under cover of darkness. We sent Jason Fagone ’01 over to Hungary to follow one such cloak-and-dagger mission, and the resulting article, “The Hungary Job” (Jan-Feb 2009) is one of the most engrossing reads we’ve printed in a long time. It won the other gold medal.
You can download a PDF of “The Family Tree” here and a PDF of “The Hungary Job” here.
And, if you don’t already get the print version of The Penn Stater magazine, you can have it sent to your mailbox six times a year simply by joining the Penn State Alumni Association. Click here to sign up.
Tina Hay, editor
A Unique Approach to Renewable Energy, Take 2
Turns out bug gas isn’t the only unlikely renewable energy source being researched at Penn State. An article today on Forbes.com mentions the work of engineering professor Craig Grimes, whose team is trying to find more efficient ways to turn carbon dioxide into fuel; specifically, Grimes hopes to create a solar-powered “carbon dioxide recycling machine.” Like so much of the research that comes out of Penn State’s world-class College of Engineering, I don’t understand it, but is sounds awfully cool.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Renewable Energy: Solar, Wind, and… Gas?
From the always interesting Wired magazine blog comes news of a Penn State researcher’s innovative approach to solving a major problem of renewable energy: storage. Dr. Bruce E. Logan, the Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, is leading research into bioenergy production, specifically into the idea of bacteria producing storable energy that can be converted into electricity. In case I haven’t made clear why this is interesting, I’ll let the folks at Wired explain:
How can tiny bug farts solve our energy problems? It turns out that when a large collection of single celled organisms (known as a culture) containing mainly Methanobacterium palustre live on the positive electrode of a battery, they use the plentiful supply of electrons to convert carbon dioxide into methane. The methane produced can be collected and stored and when further juice is required by the grid, it can be burned to produce electricity… Who would have thought the collective breaking of wind of billions of bugs could be so useful?
Turns out the idea of microbial energy generation isn’t exactly new — Logan’s work with fuel cells was written up in Wired five years ago — but this latest research is all the more reason to be hopeful about a tiny solution to a huge problem.
Ryan Jones, senior editor
Even Better Than 2,000 MPG
One of the students on Penn State’s Shell Eco-Marathon team, Matt Shiskowski, sent me a link to the Shell news release yesterday, and I was surprised to see that the Penn State car—which got nearly 1,913 mpg—was not the top mpg car in the whole competition. The Penn State team won in the fuel-cell division, but over in the internal-combustion-engine division, a team from Laval University in Montreal got 2,757 mpg. And a solar-powered car developed by some students from Purdue got a whopping 4,913 mpg!
Even though Purdue’s entry got way more miles per gallon, the Laval guys get top billing in the Shell news release. Matt explained to me why: “The internal combustion category gets the most publicity because it is uses the type of engine found in everyday vehicles.”
The Shell Web site also has more about Penn State’s eight-member team, and the Penn State team also has a new blog entry celebrating their win.
Tina Hay, editor
Two Thousand Miles Per Gallon?
Well, not quite. But a team of Penn State mechanical-engineering students won the Shell Eco-Marathon this weekend in California with a car they designed that got almost that much: 1,912.9 mpg.
Guys, you HAVE to let me take this for a spin....
The competition was held at the Auto Club Speedway in Fontana, Calif.—the same place where they have NASCAR races like the Pepsi 500. The Penn State entry, called Blood, Sweat, and Gears, didn’t exactly set any NASCAR speed records, but that wasn’t the point. The object of the competition was simply to get the best gas economy possible, using any of several kinds of fuel: gasoline, diesel, liquified petroleum gas, ethanol, hydrogen, solar, or something called “fatty acid methyl ester” (which sounds more like the kind of thing my doctor would lecture me about).
Penn State’s entry was a hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle. It’s the second straight year that Penn State has won the competition, which attracted more than 50 teams from around the country.
Here’s the only news story I can find so far about the results. More news as we get it. In the meantime, you can check out the blog that three members of the Penn State team (Toby Snider, Matt Shiskowski, and Tom Keenan) have kept, starting with the assembly of their car back in February.
Thanks to Penn State grad Dick Williams ’80, who is president of Shell WindEnergy, for calling my attention to all of this.
Tina Hay, editor
Another Solar House in the Works
I was driving by the stadium this afternoon, and Penn State’s student-built solar house caught my eye—it looked picturesque, in its quirky boxy way, against the white snow and the blue sky. So I pulled into the parking lot of the Centre County visitors’ center and took a few shots. The solar house, called the MorningStar and located right next to the visitors’ center (across from the stadium and the Ag Arena), was built for the 2007 Solar Decathlon, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. Students from schools all over the country built solar houses and displayed them on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.; Penn State’s entry placed an impressive fourth.
Now the house is back at Penn State and on more-or-less permanent display. Supposedly it’s “open for drop-in tours from 1 to 4 p.m. most Sundays,” but no one seemed to be around when I was there. (No doubt they were out at Wegman’s, stocking up on snacks for the Super Bowl.)
Visitors to the MorningStar solar house check out the sliding exterior shelves on the south-facing windows, designed to regulate solar gain.
Penn State is planning to enter the Solar Decathlon again this year, and students from three colleges—Engineering, Earth and Mineral Sciences, and Arts and Architecture—are working on this year’s entry, which will be called Natural Fusion. No word yet on where on campus the physical construction will take place.
You can learn more about Penn State’s 2009 Solar Decathlon project here and about Penn State Center for Sustainability here.
Tina Hay, editor
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