PSTAT: Promoting Sustainable Transportation Among Teens

With a $15,000 grant from the EPA (won by Paul Frymier, associate professor in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering; Chris Cherry, assistant professor in Civil and Environmental Engineering; David Irick, research assistant professor in Mechanical, Aerospace, and Biomedical Engineering; and Leon Tolbert, head of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) teams of high school students from three area high schools, along with their undergraduate and faculty advisers designed and constructed electric bicycles with the objective of encouraging teenaged drivers to consider the impacts of their personal transportation choices.

The high school teams prepared and orally defended project reports, which discussed the design process and sustainability impacts of various transportation scenarios, including an e-bike as a commuting option for school and for general personal transportation. The teams also participated in an obstacle course to determine which e-bicycle was the best at climbing hills, energy efficiency, and speed.

"H2 v. BE": A Case Study of the Reliability, Cost, and Environmental Sustainability of Hydrogen Fuel Cell Hybrids vs. Battery Electrics for Near Urban Personal Transportation

An interdisciplinary team of undergraduate and graduate UT College of Engineering students conducted a design study of personal transportation options for lowering the environmental footprint of commuting to work, funded by a small grant from the US EPA. Starting with a commercially available chassis and body kit, the students built a small, one-person electric vehicle for commuting up to thirty miles round trip. The vehicle was road-tested on a closed circuit for two weeks and a sustainability analysis of the vehicle, comparing them to a fuel cell version of the vehicle and two other commuting options: a Toyota Camry and a two-person Smart Car for their environmental, social, and economic impacts and benefits.

The team earned an honorable mention award at the competition at the National Mall in Washington, DC.

http://cfpub2.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/9183

http://www.epa.gov/ncer/events/news/2011/04_18_11_feature.html

http://tntoday.utk.edu/2011/05/09/ut-students-compete-national-mall-epa-p3-award/

http://planetforward.org/idea/tennessee-students-engineer-eco-vehicle-that-drives-for-pennies/(video)

Microrefining of Waste Glycerol for the Production of a Value-Added Product (EPA Grant Number :SU833930)

A team of five chemical engineers set out to develop a benchscale process to refine crude glycerol, a by-product of biodiesel, to a purity sufficient for sale as a commodity chemical while minimizing the energy and materials inputs to the system and quantify the net material and energy balance of the process to assure sustainability. They teamed up with UT Biodiesel program, the supplier of contaminated glycerol.

The goals of the project were: 1) identification of an economically viable market for the product of at least one process that reclaims glycerol from the production of biodiesel in small batch sizes, 2) a detailed economic analysis of the process, including annualized operating and capital costs, the return on investment, and the estimated payback period, 3) a design for the construction of equipment to carry out the process validated by experimental results on a bench scale, and 4) a proposal for how to implement the full scale facility to produce a valuable product from waste glycerol.

http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/8811

Photosynthetic Biohydrogen, An All-Worlds Solution to Global Energy Production (EPA Grant Number: SU833168)

This project proposed two major tasks: first, perform a design study to size and determine the operating and capital costs for a bioreactor system for the large scale production of photosynthetic biohydrogen, and second, design and build a laboratory scale bioreactor system. The large scale system is sized to produce sufficient hydrogen for transportation for a small city of 100,000 people, which was determined to be approximately 46 million kilograms of hydrogen annually. This figure uses the rule of thumb that one kg of hydrogen contains roughly the same amount of energy as a gallon of gasoline and assumes the existence of automobiles with gas mileage ratings on hydrogen (in mile/kg) similar to current gasoline mileage (in miles/gallon).

http://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/8102/report/F

Courses Taught

ChE 200/CBE 201 – Chemical Engineering Fundamentals (current)

ChE 240 – Fluid Flow and Heat Transfer

ChE/CBE 340 – Mass Transfer and Separation Processes

CBE 401 – Review of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering Fundamentals (current)

ChE 410 – Chemical Engineering Laboratory II (team taught, have covered two experiments, current)

ChE/CBE 445 – Separations Process Technology

ChE 488 – Honors: Design Internship in Industrial Pollution Prevention (team advisor for small groups)

ChE 501 – Graduate Seminar (served as seminar coordinator)

CBE 503 – STAIRWISE: STAIR Weekly Integrative Strategic Exercises

CBE 542 – Diffusive and Stagewise Mass Transfer Operations

CBE 572 – STAIRCase I: Sustainability Case Studies in Technology

CBE 611 – Sustainable Energy Journal Club (current)

CBE 652 – STAIRCase II: Case Study for Sustainable Energy Production

ChE/Micro/Ag.E/EnvE 575 – Applied Microbiology and Bioengineering

ChE 675 – Microbial Systems Analysis