Rising temperatures in the tundra of the Earth’s northern latitudes could affect microbial communities in ways likely to increase their production of greenhouse gases methane and carbon dioxide, a new study of experimentally warmed Alaskan soil suggests. 

About half of the world’s total underground carbon is stored in the soils of these frigid, northern latitudes. That is more than twice the amount of carbon currently found in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, but until now most of it has been locked up in the very cold soil. The new study, which relied on metagenomics to analyze changes in the microbial communities being experimentally warmed, could heighten concerns about how the release of this carbon may exacerbate climate change.

“We saw that microbial communities respond quite rapidly – within four or five years – to even modest levels of warming,” said Kostas T. Konstantinidis, the paper’s corresponding author and a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, where he also is a researcher in the Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience. “Microbial species and their genes involved in carbon dioxide and methane release increased their abundance in response to the warming treatment. We were surprised to see such a response to even mild warming.”

The new study was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, and reported July 8 in the early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Researchers from the University of Oklahoma, Michigan State University and Northern Arizona University collaborated with Georgia Tech on the study.

The study provides quantitative information about how rapidly microbial communities responded to the warming at critical depths, and highlights the dominant microbial metabolisms and groups of organisms that are responding to warming in the tundra. The work underscores the importance of accurately representing the role of soil microbes in climate models.

The research began in September 2008 at a moist, acidic tundra area in the interior of Alaska near Denali National Park. Six experimental blocks were created, and in each block, two snow fences were constructed about five meters apart in the winter to control snow cover. Thicker snow cover in the winter served as an insulator, creating slightly elevated temperatures – about 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) in the experimental plots.

Other than the temperature difference, the soil conditions were similar in the experimental and control plots. Soil cores were taken from the experimental and control plots at two different depths at two different times: 1.5 years after the experiment began, and 4.5 years after the start. Microbial DNA was extracted from the cores and sequenced using the Genomics Core at Georgia Tech. 

“Our analysis of the resulting data showed which species were there, in what abundances, which species responded to warming and by how much – and what functions they possessed related to carbon use and release,” said Eric R. Johnston, now a postdoctoral researcher at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, who conducted the study’s analysis as a Georgia Tech Ph.D. student. 

Cores from the experimental and control plots were compared to assess the effects of the warming. Cumulative ecosystem respiration was also sampled during the month following removal of the cores.

“The response we observed differed markedly between the two soil depths (15 to 25 centimeters and 45 to 55 centimeters) that were sampled for this study,” said Johnston. “Specifically, at the upper boundary of the initial permafrost boundary layer – 45 to 55 centimeters below the surface – the relative abundance of genes involved in methane production (methanogenesis) increased with warming, while genes involved in organic carbon respiration — the release of carbon dioxide — became more abundant at shallower depths.”

Measurement of the community respiration showed increases in the rate of carbon dioxide and methane release in the plots that were warmed. “Similar measurements have also shown that these gases are being released at a greater rate throughout the entire region in recent years as a result of climate warming,” Johnston added.

The two soil depths correspond to an active layer near the surface that freezes during the winter but thaws during warmer months, exposing the carbon. The deeper measurements examined soil just above the permafrost that thaws for only a brief time each year. These variations create fundamental differences in the biology and chemistry at the two depths.

“We expected to observe warming responses that differed between the two sampling depths,” Johnston said. “Ongoing thaw of permafrost soil is being observed on the global scale, so we were particularly interested in evaluating microbiological responses to thawing permafrost.”

The research highlights the importance of microbial communities in contributing atmospheric methane and carbon dioxide to climate change, Konstantinidis said.

“Because of the very large amount of carbon in these systems, as well as the rapid and clear response to warming found in this experiment and other studies, it is becoming increasingly clear that soil microbes – particularly those in the northern latitudes – and their activities need to be represented in climate models,” he said. “Our work provides markers – species and genes – that can be used in this direction.”

In addition to those already mentioned, the paper’s authors included Janet K. Hatt from Georgia Tech, Zhili He and Liyou Wu from the University of Oklahoma, Xue Guo from Tsinghua University, Yiqi Luo and Edward A. G. Schuur from Northern Arizona University, James M. Tiedje from Michigan State University, and Jizhong Zhou from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

This research was supported by U.S. Department of Energy award DE-SC0004601 and by the National Science Foundation awards 1356288 and 1759831. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring organizations.

CITATION: Eric R. Johnston, et al., “Responses of tundra soil microbial communities to half a decade of experimental warming at two critical depths" (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2019)

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Solid-state batteries – a new battery design that uses all solid components – have gained attention in recent years because of their potential to hold much more energy while simultaneously avoiding the safety challenges of their liquid-based counterparts.

But building a long-lasting solid-state battery is easier said than done. Now, researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology have used X-ray computed tomography (CT) to visualize in real time how cracks form near the edges of the interfaces between materials in the batteries. The findings could help researchers find ways to improve the energy storage devices.

“Solid-state batteries could be safer than lithium-ion batteries and potentially hold more energy, which would be ideal for electric vehicles and even electric aircraft,” said Matthew McDowell, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Materials Science and Engineering. “Technologically, it’s a very fast moving field, and there are a lot of companies interested in this.”

In a typical lithium-ion battery, energy is released during the transfer of lithium ions between two electrodes – a cathode and an anode – through a liquid electrolyte.

For the study, which was published June 4 in the journal ACS Energy Letters and was sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the research team built a solid-state battery in which a solid ceramic disc was sandwiched between two pieces of solid lithium. The ceramic disc replaced the typical liquid electrolyte.

“Figuring out how to make these solid pieces fit together and behave well over long periods of time is the challenge,” McDowell said. “We’re working on how to engineer these interfaces between these solid pieces to make them last as long as possible.”

In collaboration with Christopher Saldana, an assistant professor in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at Georgia Tech and an expert in X-ray imaging, the researchers placed the battery under an X-ray microscope and charged and discharged it, looking for physical changes indicative of degradation. Slowly over the course of several days, a web-like pattern of cracks formed throughout the disc. 

Those cracks are the problem and occur alongside the growth of an interphase layer between the lithium metal and solid electrolyte. The researchers found that this fracture during cycling causes resistance to the flow of ions.

“These are unwanted chemical reactions that occur at the interfaces,” McDowell said. “People have generally assumed that these chemical reactions are the cause the degradation of the cell. But what we learned by doing this imaging is that in this particular material, it’s not the chemical reactions themselves that are bad – they don’t affect the performance of the battery. What’s bad is that the cell fractures, and that destroys the performance of the cell.”

Solving the fracturing problem could be one of the first steps to unlocking the potential of solid state batteries, including their high energy density. The deterioration observed is likely to affect other types of solid-state batteries, the researchers noted, so the findings could lead to the design of more durable interfaces.

“In normal lithium-ion batteries, the materials we use define how much energy we can store,” McDowell said. “Pure lithium can hold the most, but it doesn’t work well with liquid electrolyte. But if you could use solid lithium with a solid electrolyte, that would be the holy grail of energy density.”

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Nos. DMR-1652471, CMMI-1825640/1254818, ECCS-1542174, and CMMI-1825132. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsors.

CITATION: Jared Tippens, John C. Miers, Arman Afshar, John A. Lewis, Francisco Javier Quintero Cortes, Haipeng Qiao, Thomas S. Marchese, Claudio V. Di Leo, Christopher Saldana, and Matthew T. McDowell, “Visualizing Chemomechanical Degradation of a Solid-State Battery Electrolyte,” (ACS Energy Letters, June 2019). https://doi.org/10.1021/acsenergylett.9b00816

For the second year in a row, HyTech Racing has brought the first-place trophy from Formula Hybrid back to Georgia Tech. The team outperformed its previous record, running in the Acceleration and Autocross events for the first time at this competition and placing first in the Autocross event with a 44.092 second run. With their 368 lb vehicle, the lightest at the competition, HyTech was the only team to finish the 44 km Endurance course this year, beating the University of Vermont’s previous 01:25:15 record with a 01:15:56 track time and becoming the second electric team to ever complete the 44 km Endurance course in Formula Hybrid history.

HyTech Racing is Georgia Tech’s Formula Student electric vehicle engineering team. On this team, students from a wide array of disciplines, from Mechanical Engineering to Aerospace Engineering, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science, work together year-round to design fully electric race cars. “The work that is happening on teams like HyTech is an important part of the experiential learning here at Georgia Tech,” said Dr. Samuel Graham, Eugene C. Gwaltney, Jr. Professor and Chair of Georgia Tech’s Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering. Working on this multidisciplinary team, students learn to work effectively with deadlines and budgets, solving real-world engineering and business problems before graduating into the workforce with valuable experience applicable to their industry.

Closing out its 13th competition year, Formula Hybrid brings together students from around the world each May at the New Hampshire Motor Speedway to identify the best-engineered and best-performing electric and hybrid open-wheel Formula racing-style vehicles conforming to the competition rules. Before testing the dynamic performance of the vehicle, each team must pass through a rigorous scrutineering process. Engineers, many from the automotive industry, inspect each vehicle to ensure that it meets competition rules and can be safely operated.

The competition also measures the engineering behind each team’s vehicle. Georgia Tech’s team defended the design methodologies behind its new vehicle, where significant engineering effort was put into reducing the weight of components compared to the team’s vehicles from previous years. “There's an old adage in racing that goes 'more power makes you faster in the straights, losing weight makes you faster everywhere',” said Sam Gilmer, Chief Engineer of HyTech Racing. “Being light means your tires are more efficient and you have less momentum and accelerate more quickly.” After building a 413 lb vehicle last year, the team worked towards a goal of building a 380 lb vehicle in 2019, exceeding this goal with an official vehicle weight of 368 lb.

While the team won the design portion of the competition, it also defended its project management strategy, placing second in the category. “Working with over 60 students to engineer such a complex vehicle takes a significant amount of planning and oversight,” said Nathan Cheek, Team President. “We focused this year on making a very lightweight and tightly packaged vehicle, so facilitating communication between subteams was critical for ensuring that everything would fit together and work together.”

Vehicle performance is measured through a number of dynamic events. First, each vehicle’s acceleration capabilities are measured at the 75 meter Acceleration track. Second, vehicle handling is put to the test on the Autocross course. Finally, the ability of each vehicle to run reliably is tested through the 44 km Endurance event. HyTech placed second in the Acceleration event with a 5.28 second time and won the Autocross event with a 44.092 second run. On the Endurance course, the team beat out Princeton University, The University of Vermont, and Tufts University, completing more than twice the number of laps than the second-place team. As the only team to finish all 44 km of the Endurance event this year, Georgia Tech’s team set a new track time record of 01:15:56, beating the previous record of 01:25:15 held by The University of Vermont and cementing themselves as the second fully electric team to ever finish the 44 km course.

HyTech Racing finished the Formula Hybrid competition with a 262 point lead, taking home 899 points out of 1,000. “Next year we are going to focus on making the car even lighter and better-performing using data we gathered from this year's success,” said Yvonne Yeh, incoming Team President for the 2020 school year. The team plans to work iteratively, building a new vehicle with updates only to the systems that will most improve the car’s performance. “It’s important to update these vehicles methodically year-to-year,” said Nathan Cheek. “Making calculated engineering updates to specific vehicle subsystems is the best way to ensure we have plenty of testing time on our new vehicle before taking it to a competition.”

Precision medicine and understanding health disparities, innovation to power competitive manufacturing, technology for smarter communities, and addressing coastal hazards such as hurricanes are among the challenges facing the Southern United States. A $4 million award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will help apply data science and engineering to address those challenges.

The funding will continue support for the South Big Data Innovation Hub, an organization that helps 16 Southern States and the District of Columbia identify and utilize data science and engineering to address critical societal needs. One of four NSF-supported regional data hubs in the U.S., the South Big Data Hub is managed by the Georgia Institute of Technology and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.

"The Big Data Hubs provide a connective tissue for the data science ecosystem across sectors and domains,” said Renata Rawlings-Goss, the Hub’s executive director. “I am deeply pleased by NSF's recommitment to the growth of the South Hub and our community. Over the last three years, we have made great strides within our priority areas and are looking to broaden that reach in the next four years.”

The NSF-supported data hubs play four key roles: (1) Accelerating public-private partnerships that break down barriers between industry, academia and government, (2) Growing R&D communities that connect data scientists with domain scientists and practitioners, (3) Facilitating data sharing and shared cyber infrastructure and services, and (4) Building data science capacity for education and workforce development.

“There is a global shortage of data science and analytics talent that is threatening the future of innovation,” added Rawlings-Goss “By working across sectors, the South Hub joins in creating solutions to increase the capacity of universities and industry to work on pressing problems for our region and for the world.”

Priorities for the hubs are determined regionally to bring together collaborators that include academics, community leaders, local and state government executives, regional businesses, national laboratories and others, explained Srinivas Aluru, principal investigator for the Hub, which was launched in 2015 and won the 2019 Georgia Tech Outstanding Achievement in Research Development Award.

“We want to collaborate to help solve regional problems using the resources of the Hub,” explained Aluru, who is also co-executive director of the Institute for Data Engineering and Science at Georgia Tech. “We are addressing truly regional issues that affect more than one state and more than one set of collaborators. These are challenges that can only be addressed by bringing these groups together.”

The south region is pursuing five major big data priorities:

• Health and Disparities: High impact applications of data science in precision medicine, health analytics, and health disparities. “If you look at the health outcomes, they differ by ethnic groups. Trying to understand and address these health disparities is one of our big data challenges,” Aluru said.
• Smart Cities and Communities: Collection and integration of data on infrastructure, sensors, and behavior to design efficient use of resources and services, and to achieve a higher quality, affordable lifestyle, as well as concrete applications of analytics and machine learning to improve the nation’s energy production and smart grid.
• Advanced Materials and Manufacturing: Access to data infrastructure for creating new materials for advanced manufacturing in every state. “Manufacturing is very important to the Southeast, and we plan to workwith the state manufacturing extension partnerships in different states, trying to inject big data techniques into materials science and manufacturing to shorten the deployment cycle,” Aluru added.
• Environment and Coastal Hazards: Prevention and enhanced response to natural and human-induced environmental hazards. Southern states are disproportionately affected by hurricanes on the both the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Understanding these threats and how best to protect people and property is critical.
• Social Cybersecurity: Best practices across sectors to forecast cyber-mediated changes in human behavior to ensure private, secure and ethical data sharing, reporting and use. “In modern times the virtual world is a force in and of itself; we want to support transparency in how it can change interactions and social outcomes,” said Rawlings-Goss.

The new NSF award includes seed funding designed to evaluate the feasibility of new big data projects. Part of a hub-and-spoke system, the seed money should help create new spokes to address specific data issues identified by collaborators.

“Developing innovative, effective solutions to grand challenges requires linking scientists and engineers with local communities,” said Jim Kurose, Assistant Director for Computer and Information Science and Engineering at the NSF. “The Big Data Hubs provide the glue to achieve those links, bringing together teams of data science researchers with cities, municipalities and anchor institutions.”

Ultimately, the goal is to harness the synergy of the collaborators to address issues that require the use of data science and engineering techniques.

“By catalyzing partnerships that integrate academic researchers into the fabric of communities across the U.S., we can accelerate and deepen the impact of basic research on a range of societal issues, from water management to efficient transportation systems,” said Beth Plale, one of the NSF program directors managing the Big Data Hubs awards.

The South Big Data Hub was funded through the National Science Foundation’s Big Data Science & Engineering Program, Awards 1550305 and 1550291. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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For environmental monitoring, precision agriculture, infrastructure maintenance and certain security applications, slow and energy efficient can be better than fast and always needing a recharge. That’s where “SlothBot” comes in.

Powered by a pair of photovoltaic panels and designed to linger in the forest canopy continuously for months, SlothBot moves only when it must to measure environmental changes – such as weather and chemical factors in the environment – that can be observed only with a long-term presence. The proof-of-concept hyper-efficient robot, described May 21 at the International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in Montreal, may soon be hanging out among treetop cables in the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

“In robotics, it seems we are always pushing for faster, more agile and more extreme robots,” said Magnus Egerstedt, the Steve W. Chaddick School Chair of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology and principal investigator for Slothbot. “But there are many applications where there is no need to be fast. You just have to be out there persistently over long periods of time, observing what’s going on.”

Based on what Egerstedt called the “theory of slowness,” Graduate Research Assistant Gennaro Notomista designed SlothBot together with his colleague, Yousef Emam, using 3D-printed parts for the gearing and wire-switching mechanisms needed to crawl through a network of wires in the trees. The greatest challenge for a wire-crawling robot is switching from one cable to another without falling, Notomista said.

“The challenge is smoothly holding onto one wire while grabbing another,” he said. “It’s a tricky maneuver and you have to do it right to provide a fail-safe transition. Making sure the switches work well over long periods of time is really the biggest challenge.”

Mechanically, SlothBot consists of two bodies connected by an actuated hinge. Each body houses a driving motor connected to a rim on which a tire is mounted. The use of wheels for locomotion is simple, energy efficient and safer than other types of wire-based locomotion, the researchers say.

SlothBot has so far operated in a network of cables on the Georgia Tech campus. Next, a new 3D-printed shell – that makes the robot look more like a sloth – will protect the motors, gears, actuators, cameras, computer and other components from the rain and wind. That will set the stage for longer-term studies in the tree canopy at the Atlanta Botanical Garden, where Egerstedt hopes visitors will see a SlothBot monitoring conditions as early as this fall.

The name SlothBot is not a coincidence. Real-life sloths are small mammals that live in jungle canopies of South and Central America. Making their living by eating tree leaves, the animals can survive on the daily caloric equivalent of a small potato. With their slow metabolism, sloths rest as much 22 hours a day and seldom descend from the trees where they can spend their entire lives.

“The life of a sloth is pretty slow-moving and there’s not a lot of excitement on a day-to-day level,” said Jonathan Pauli, an associate professor in the Department of Forest & Wildlife Ecology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who has consulted with the Georgia Tech team on the project. “The nice thing about a very slow life history is that you don’t really need a lot of energy input. You can have a long duration and persistence in a limited area with very little energy inputs over a long period of time.”

That’s exactly what the researchers expect from SlothBot, whose development has been funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.

“There is a lot we don’t know about what actually happens under dense tree-covered areas,” Egerstedt said. “Most of the time SlothBot will be just hanging out there, and every now and then it will move into a sunny spot to recharge the battery.”

The researchers also hope to test SlothBot in a cacao plantation in Costa Rica that is already home to real sloths. “The cables used to move cacao have become a sloth superhighway because the animals find them useful to move around,” Egerstedt said. “If all goes well, we will deploy SlothBots along the cables to monitor the sloths.”

Egerstedt is known for algorithms that drive swarms of small wheeled or flying robots. But during a visit to Costa Rica, he became interested in sloths and began developing what he calls “a theory of slowness” together with Professor Ron Arkin in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing. The theory leverages the benefits of energy efficiency.

“If you are doing things like environmental monitoring, you want to be out in the forest for months,” Egerstedt said. “That changes the way you think about control systems at a high level.”

Flying robots are already used for environmental monitoring, but their high energy needs mean they cannot linger for long. Wheeled robots can get by with less energy, but they can get stuck in mud or be hampered by tree roots, and cannot get a big picture view from the ground.

“The thing that costs energy more than anything else is movement,” Egerstedt said. “Moving is much more expensive than sensing or thinking. For environmental robots, you should only move when you absolutely have to. We had to think about what that would be like.”

For Pauli, who studies a variety of wildlife, working with Egerstedt to help SlothBot come to life has been gratifying.

“It is great to see a robot inspired by the biology of sloths,” he said. “It has been fun to share how sloths and other organisms that live in these ecosystems for long periods of time live their lives. It will be interesting to see robots mirroring what we see in natural ecological communities.”

This research was sponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research through Grant N00014-15-2115. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the ONR.

CITATION: "The SlothBot: A Novel Design for a Wire-Traversing Robot," IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, (Volume 4, Issue 2, April 2019) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8642808

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A team from Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, School of Building Construction, and School of Civil and Environmental Engineering won first place in the category for net-zero energy, urban single-family home at the 2019 Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Weekend, April 12-14 2019, held at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado.

The U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon is a collegiate competition that tasks student teams with designing and building highly efficient and innovative buildings powered by renewable energy. This year, the Department of Energy combined two student building design competitions to create the new Solar Decathlon competition.

The Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Weekend took place April 12-14, 2019. Throughout the weekend, student design teams presented their work to a jury of industry experts, attended presentations by collegiate peers and leaders in the energy profession, and engaged with a variety of energy-focused organizations.

The Georgia Tech team was led by Tyler Pilet, Ph.D. in Architecture student with a focus area in high performance building (HPB).

“Our team designed a community-driven, low cost, net-zero home in Grove Park,” said Pilet. “We partnered with the Grove Park Foundation and Atlanta Habitat for Humanity to make the design’s construction a reality in the future. The competition was a great experience that taught us how to design every part and system of a building, from conceptual massing to HVAC and community solar power design.”

In addition to Pilet, the interdisciplinary team consisted of Warren Alexius Campbell (Master of Science (M.S.) in Architecture, HPB), Wen Yi (Vincent) Chang (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Yuran Kong (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Yuhang Li (Master of Architecture), Dan Lu (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Jingxin Xu (Master of Science in Urban Design), Raj Sanjaybhai Shah (M.S. in Building Construction), Raunak Tibrewala (M.S. in Architecture, HPB), Xinyi Zhang (M.S. in Civil Engineering).

Jason Brown, full-time lecturer for high performance buildings in the School of Architecture, served as the team’s advisor. Fried Augenbroe, professor and director of the High Performance Building Lab, and Tarek Rakha, assistant professor for high performance buildings, also helped by reviewing the students’ work. Acme Panel and YKK served as industry partners. Additional outside partners that contributed to the final project included Grove Park Foundation, Grove Park Neighborhood Association, Atlanta Habitat for Humanity, Perkins+Will, Southface, Pursuit Engineering, the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Mayor’s Office of Resilience.

Read more about the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon.

The falling cost of solar power has led to a boom in recent years, with more and more photovoltaic panels popping up on rooftops and backyard solar farms around the world.

But what happens to all of those solar panels in a couple of decades when they reach the end of their useful life? And what about electronic devices with even shorter life spans?

Those questions are at the heart of new research released by a team at Georgia Institute of Technology, where researchers looked into the impact of government policies put in place to reduce the amount of electronics waste filling up landfills.

“There is a lot of concern in sustainability circles that manufacturers are making things with shorter and shorter life spans, and products are perhaps even intentionally made to become obsolete to induce replacement purchases,” said Beril Toktay, a professor at Georgia Tech’s Scheller College of Business.

The study, which was published April 4 in the journal Management Science, focused on government policies used to encourage electronics makers to put more thought into what happens at the end of the product life cycle. Those programs, which are called extended producer responsibility (EPR) laws and are already in use in some states, have two common objectives: to have producers design their products to be easier to recycle or to boost their durability for increased device life span.

However, the researchers reported that those goals are often at odds.

“What we have found is that sometimes when you design for recyclability, you give up on durability, and when durability is the goal, recyclability is sacrificed,” Toktay said.

In theory, a product that is both easy to recycle and more durable would be the pinnacle of environmentally responsible product design. The researchers pointed to automobiles with thicker metal frames that last longer and also have more recyclable materials. In such a scenario, EPR policies emphasizing durability and recyclability work hand in hand.

“Sometimes simple choices that product designers make, such as using glue or fasteners to put together a device, really impact recyclability at the end of life,” said Natalie Huang, a former graduate student at Georgia Tech and now an assistant professor at the University of Minnesota.

More often than not, however, there is no such synergy. In the case of photovoltaic panels, the researchers highlighted how thin-film panels are much more cost effective to recycle than other panels because they contain precious metals. Meanwhile, crystalline silicon panels, which aren’t as cost effective to recycle, have much longer life spans because their components degrade much more slowly.

“These kinds of trade-offs are common, and so from a policy-making perspective, there’s not a one-size-fits-all approach that will work,” said Atalay Atasu, a professor at the Scheller College of Business. “You really have to distinguish between different product categories to consider the recyclability and the durability implications and make sure that your policy isn’t conflicting with the objective.”

The researchers said that in some cases, EPR policies could actually lead to increased waste generation if product designers make products more recyclable but less durable, or lead to increased greenhouse gas emissions if products are made more durable but less recyclable.

To help determine how government policies could impact individual products, the researchers built a mathematical model to help predict the impact those policies would have on products based on their materials and design characteristics. Among the factors the model takes into account are the base production cost of the product, the degree of difficulty in increasing recyclability and durability, the degree of interaction between recyclability and durability in the product design, and the recycling properties of the product.

“Ultimately what we’re after is to find a way to do scenario analyses to determine what would be the best policy for different product categories,” Toktay said. “Fifteen to 20 years from now, a lot of panels are going to be coming off of roofs. Are they being designed with the end of life in mind and with consideration of what’s the best way to reduce the impact of producing those panels?”

CITATION: Ximin (Natalie) Huang, Atalay Atasu and L. Beril Toktay, “Design Implications of Extended Producer Responsibility for Durable Products,” (Management Science, April 2019). http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2018.3072

The Faculty Honors Committee has awarded the Class of 1934 Outstanding Interdisciplinary Activities Award to Regent’s Professor Richard Fujimoto. This award was established to recognize Georgia Tech faculty who have made significant interdisciplinary contributions to teaching and research. The award will be presented at the annual Georgia Tech Faculty and Staff Honors Luncheon to be held on Friday, April 19, 2019.

Fujimoto’s research is concerned with discrete-event simulation programs on parallel and distributed computing platforms. Because his work spans several application areas, Fujimoto’s work is highly interdisciplinary.  Some of the topics he has worked on include transportation systems, telecommunication networks, multi-processor, and defense systems. He is a frequent collaborator in the work of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems, serving as a co-principle investigator on several research grants as well as co-authoring several papers and presentations for conference proceedings with other BBISS affiliated faculty.   

Fujimoto was the founding chair of the School of Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) and served in that role from 2005 to 2014. During this period, he grew the school to 13 tenure track faculty and established the school’s administrative staff. He led the creation of interdisciplinary M.S. and Ph.D. degree programs in Computational Science and Engineering as well as the College of Computing’s first on-line distance learning degree program, the MS program in CSE. At the undergraduate level, he led the Computational-X initiative that resulted in the creation of two new undergraduate minors – Scientific and Engineering Computing and Computational Data Analysis. He also played a leadership role in creating the CRUISE (Computing Research Undergraduate Intern Summer Experience) program which emphasizes outreach to women and minority students. He co-led the initial development of Georgia Tech’s professional Masters Program in Analytics with faculty in the College of Business and School of Industrial and Systems Engineering. Under his leadership, the School of Computational Science and Engineering was formally established as an academic unit within Georgia Tech in 2010.

Fujimoto’s publications include seven award winning papers. He is author or co-author of three books. He led the definition of the time management services for the High Level Architecture for modeling and simulation that is now part of IEEE standard 1516. Fujimoto has served as Co-Editor-in-chief of the journal Simulation: Transactions of the Society for Modeling and Simulation International. He was a founding area editor for ACM Transactions on Modeling and Computer Simulation and has served on the organizing committees for several leading conferences in the parallel and distributed simulation field. He received the ACM Distinguished Contributions in Modeling and Simulation Award in 2013.

The Georgia Institute of Technology is launching a new Master of Science in Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management (MSEEM) — the only graduate degree in Georgia fully dedicated to sustainability issues.

The highly technical, science-based, and interdisciplinary program — approved by the Board of Regents on Feb. 12, 2019 — will prepare students to deliver fact-based policy expertise through robust analytical techniques and a deep understanding of energy and environmental issues and sustainability practices.

“This professionally focused degree will allow Georgia Tech to educate the next generation of sustainability leaders in corporate, government, and non-governmental organizations,” said Rafael L. Bras, provost and executive vice president for Academic Affairs and K. Harrison Brown Family Chair. “Georgia Tech is proud to deliver innovative, affordable, and top-quality education in high-demand areas such as sustainability to meet the needs of our evolving workforce."

When the program begins in the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts' School of Public Policy in August 2019, MSEEM students will study topics such as sustainable energy and voluntary environmental commitments, cost-benefit analysis, utility regulation and policy, Earth systems, economics of environmental policy, big data and policy analytics, climate policy, and environmental management.

They also will learn analytical techniques used to estimate and evaluate sustainability metrics, be able to expertly assess the context of energy and environmental problems, and understand environmental ethics and its implications for sustainability practice.

The program will combine professional instruction from the nationally-ranked School of Public Policy with Georgia Tech’s top-notch engineering, business, and planning faculties to educate professionals who can lead organizations toward policies consistent with a sustainable future.

“This unique interdisciplinary program takes an innovative and integrative approach to sustainability that epitomizes the commitment of the School of Public Policy to collaborate across disciplines to educate future policy analysts and leaders and turn ideas into solutions to public problems,” said Kaye Husbands Fealing, professor and chair of the school.

Faculty will be drawn from across the Georgia Tech campus, including from the School of Public Policy, the Scheller College of Business, the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial and Systems Engineering, the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and the School of City and Regional Planning.

Guest lecturers from Atlanta’s corporate community, government agencies, NGOs and research organizations also will participate — helping connect MSEEM students to the state of the practice and to job opportunities.

MSEEM students also will have access to Georgia Tech’s summer Program on Sustainable Development and Climate Change in Venice, Italy. The 5-week, 6-credit program features courses in climate policy and sustainable development and provides a multi-disciplinary learning experience that combines classroom lectures, guest speakers and instructional field trips.

 “The world’s energy economy is undergoing transformational change, and as the public and private sectors strengthen their commitment to green practices, the need will increase for well-trained policy experts able to design, implement, and manage responses to sustainability issues. This program will provide such leaders,” said Marilyn A. Brown, Regents’ Professor and Brook Byers Professor of Sustainable Systems in the School of Public Policy.

The MSEEM program is designed to serve a broad range of students interested in sustainability issues. Students can complete the degree on campus or online as a full-time student. Students also have the option to enroll part-time and complete their degree online. The program is designed to serve working professionals and others who want to participate part-time and earn their degree over several years.

In addition to the master’s degree, Georgia Tech is also offering a Certificate in Sustainable Energy and Environmental Management. This 12-credit hour SEEM Certificate can be completed in one or two semesters and can be earned on its own or in combination with the master’s degree.

Applications are being accepted through June 15 for the inaugural class of MSEEM students, who will begin study in August 2019.

A generous philanthropic gift has enabled Georgia Tech to offer five fully funded MSEEM fellowships to the program each year for the first three years of the program.

For more information on these programs, visit https://cepl.gatech.edu/mseem, or https://cepl.gatech.edu/cseem.

Twenty three Georgia Tech students have been selected for the second class of Sustainable Undergraduate Research Fellows (SURF). Twenty are new to the position, and three are returning from the previous year of the program. The Fellows represent all six colleges at Georgia Tech and were selected from a highly qualified and competitive field of students. They are:

• Leo Chen (returning), Computer Science
• Kian Halim (returning), Computational Media
• Gigi Pavur (returning), Earth and Atmospheric Sciences
• William Abdallah, Industrial Engineering
• Joseph Buehler, Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering
• Anielle Duritza, Environmental Engineering
• Kyte Harvey, Mechanical Engineering
• Connor Hawley, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
• Chloe Kiernicki, Architecture
• Elizabeth Krakovski, Public Policy
• Matthew Lim, Computer Engineering
• Micah Landwermeyer, Materials Science and Engineering
• Farouk Marhaba, Computer Science
• Kat Matthews, Business
• Kathryn McCarthy, Biology
• Shivan Mittal, Physics
• Christi Nakajima, Public Policy
• Leah Claire Nofsinger, Materials Science and Engineering
• Ashlyn Sasser, Industrial Design
• Alexandra Schultz, Chemical Engineering
• Ranal Apeksha Tudawe, Mechanical Engineering
• Jeniveve Vaia, Material Science and Engineering
• Eliya Olivia Wagner, Environmental Engineering

The paid research fellows are developing prototypes of interactive building monitoring systems that convey the unique elements, qualities, and performance of the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design (under construction) and the behaviors that it engenders among its occupants and visitors. Through SURF, the students will learn about sustainability, systems thinking, and how to apply these principles to the Georgia Tech Living Building. Their work is facilitated by Dr. Michael Chang, Deputy Director of the Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems.