A new kind of polymer membrane created by researchers at Georgia Tech could reshape how refineries process crude oil, dramatically reducing the energy and water required while extracting even more useful materials.

The so-called DUCKY polymers — more on the unusual name in a minute — are reported Oct. 16 in Nature Materials. And they’re just the beginning for the team of Georgia Tech chemists, chemical engineers, and materials scientists. They also have created artificial intelligence tools to predict the performance of these kinds of polymer membranes, which could accelerate development of new ones.

The implications are stark: the initial separation of crude oil components is responsible for roughly 1% of energy used across the globe. What’s more, the membrane separation technology the researchers are developing could have several uses, from biofuels and biodegradable plastics to pulp and paper products.

“We're establishing concepts here that we can then use with different molecules or polymers, but we apply them to crude oil because that's the most challenging target right now,” said M.G. Finn, professor and James A. Carlos Family Chair in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Sean Castillo is in the win-win business. As an industrial hygienist in the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute (EI2), his job is to ensure that employees are safe in their workspaces, and when he does that, he simultaneously improves a company’s performance.

That’s been a theme for Castillo and his colleagues in the Safety, Health, Environmental Services (SHES) program and their partners in the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Partnership (GaMEP), part of EI2’s suite of programs aimed at helping Georgia businesses thrive.

“A healthier workforce is healthy for business,” said Castillo, part of the SHES team of consultants who often work closely with their GaMEP counterparts to improve safety while also maximizing productivity.

This team of experts from EI2 assist companies trying to reach that critical intersection of both, combining smart ergonomics and safety enhancements with lean manufacturing practices. This can solve human performance gaps due to fatigue, heat, or some other environmental stressor, while helping businesses continue to improve their production processes and, ultimately, their bottom line.

These stressors cost U.S. industry billions of dollars each year — fatigue, for example, is responsible for about $136 billion in lost productivity.

“Protecting your employee — investing in safety now — saves a lot of money later,” Castillo said. “It equates to less money spent on workers compensation and less employee turnover, which means less time training new employees, and that ideally leads to a more efficient process in the workplace.”

It takes careful and intentional collaboration to bring those moving pieces together, and inextricably linked programs like SHES and GaMEP can help orchestrate all of that.

Ensuring Safe Workspaces

SHES is staffed by safety consultants, like Castillo, who provide a free and essential service to Georgia businesses. They help companies ensure that they meet or exceed the standards set by the federal Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA), mainly through SHES’ flagship OSHA 21(d) Consultation Program.

“Our job is to ensure that workspaces and processes are designed so that anybody can perform the work safely,” said Trey Sawyers, a safety, health, and ergonomics consultant on the SHES team, aiding small and mid-sized businesses in Georgia. When a company reaches out to SHES to apply for the free, confidential OSHA consultation program, a consultant like Sawyers gets assigned to the task, “based on our area of expertise,” said Sawyers, an expert in ergonomics, which is the science of designing and adapting a workspace to efficiently suit the physical and mental needs and limitations of workers.

“If a company is having ergonomic issues — maybe they’re experiencing a lot of strains and sprains — then I might get the call because of my knowledge and understanding of anthropometry, and then I’ll go take a close look at the facility,” Sawyers said. Anthropometry is the scientific study of a human’s size, form, and functional capacity.

SHES consultants can identify potential workplace hazards, provide guidance on how to comply with OSHA standards, and establish or improve safety and health programs in the company.

“The caveat is the company has to correct any serious hazards that we find,” said Castillo, who visits a wide range of workspaces in his role. For instance, his job will take him to construction and manufacturing sites, gun ranges, even office settings. “We do noise and air monitoring at all different types of workplaces. I was at a primary care clinic the other day. And over the past few years, we’ve had a significant emphasis on stone fabricators, looking for overexposures to respirable crystalline silica.”

Silica, which is dust residue from the process of creating marble and quartz slabs, can lead to a lung disease called silicosis. OSHA established new limits that cut the permissible exposure limits in half, and that has kept the SHES consultants busy as Georgia manufacturers try to achieve and maintain compliance.

Keeping Companies Cool

Another area of growing emphasis for Georgia Tech’s consultants is heat-related stress in the workplace.

“Currently, there are no standards to address this,” Castillo said. “For example, there are no rules that say a construction site worker should drink this much water. There are suggested guidelines and emphasis programs for inspections for targeted industries where heat stress may be prevalent — but no standards, though that is coming.”

The SHES team is trying to stay ahead of what will likely be new federal rules for heat mitigation. To help develop safe standards and better understand the effects of heat on workers, consultants like Castillo are going to construction sites, plant nurseries, and warehouses, and enlisting volunteers in field studies. Using heat stress monitor armbands, they’re monitoring data on workers’ core body temperatures and heart rates.

“These tools are great because we’re not only gathering some good data, but we can use them proactively to prevent heat events such as heat exhaustion and heatstroke, which can be fatal if left untreated,” Castillo said.

To further help educate Georgia companies about the risks of heat-related problems, SHES applied for and recently won a Susan Harwood Training Grant from the U.S. Department of Labor. The $160,000 award will support SHES consultants’ efforts to further their work in heat stress education so that “companies and workers will understand the warning signs and the potential effects of heat stress, and how they can stay safe,” Castillo said. “We’re sure this will all become part of OSHA standards eventually, and we’d like to help our clients stay ahead of the curve to protect their employees.”

OSHA standards are the law, and while larger corporations routinely hire consulting firms to keep them on the straight and narrow, SHES is providing the same level of expertise for its smaller business clients for free. Most of those clients apply for help through SHES’ online request form. And others find the help they need through the guidance of process improvement specialist Katie Hines and her colleagues in GaMEP.

Lean and Safe

Hines came to her appreciation of ergonomics naturally. After graduating from Auburn University, she entered the workforce as a manufacturing engineer for a building materials company, where “it was just part of our day-to-day work life in that manufacturing environment, on the production floor,” she said.

It took grad school and a deeper focus on lean and continuous improvement processes to formalize that appreciation.

While working toward her master’s degree in chemical engineering at Auburn, Hines earned a certificate in occupational safety and ergonomics (like Sawyers, her SHES colleague). At the same time, Hines was helping to guide her company’s lean and continuous improvement program. And when she joined Proctor and Gamble after completing her degree, “The lean concept and safety best practices were fully ingrained, part of the daily discussion there,” she said.

All those hands-on manufacturing production floor experiences managing people and systems prepared Hines well for her current role as a project manager on GaMEP’s Operational Excellence team, where her focus is entirely on lean and continuous improvement work — that is, helping companies reduce waste and improve production while also enhancing safety and ergonomics.

Hines uses her expertise in knowing how manufacturing processes and people should look when everyone is safe and also productive. She can walk into a GaMEP client’s facility and drive the process improvements and solutions that will help them achieve a leaner, more efficient form of production. And then, when she sees the need, Hines will recommend the client contact SHES, “the people who have their fingers on the data and the expertise to improve safety.”

These were concepts that, for a long time, seemed to be working against each other — the very idea of maximizing production and improving profits while also emphasizing worker safety and comfort.

“But you can have both,” Castillo said. “You should have both.”

This is part four of the student experiences series. William Berkey, a Ph.D. candidate in chemistry shares his experience from the 2023 RBI Spring Workshop on "Innovations in Packaging and Circular Economy."

Tell us about yourself.

My name is William Berkey. I got my undergraduate degree in chemistry from Davidson College in North Carolina. I am getting my Ph.D. in chemistry at Georgia Tech. I am co-advised by Stefan France and Christopher Jones. I work on the upcycling of carbohydrates to yield furan-containing building blocks as platforms chemicals and precursors to value-added fuels, materials, and products. Specifically, I work with the Garcia Gonzalez reaction and the Achmatowicz reaction. 

The paper I just published as the second author with my mentor Caria Evans (first author) is about converting amino acids — a renewable feedstock — to functionalities pyrroles that can be used for drug molecule development or other bio-active compounds.

How was your experience at the RBI workshop?

I really enjoyed the RBI workshop. It was interesting to see other people’s research and talk with fellow researchers on solving problems and potentially collaborating. The diverse set of talks from industrial, government, and research collaborators shows the wide set of problems still to be solved and different viewpoints on how to solve them. My main takeaway is that through collaboration, solutions to a wide range of problems affecting the industry can be achieved. 

What was your main takeaway from the poster session? 

What stood out during the poster session was the wide variety of topics that my peers were researching and the interesting findings they discovered. I interacted with several industrial representatives and a fellow Davidson alumnus who works in forest management. I received great advice on how to advance my research as well as how to pursue potential next steps in application. 

What more would you like to see in future events at the Renewable Bioproducts Institute?

I would like to see more talks on biorefining. I am interested in interacting with potential collaborators. I would like to see new seminars on research problem-solving or project idea creation.

Kartik Ramachandruni knew he would need to find a unique approach to a populated research field.

With a handful of students and researchers at Georgia Tech looking to make breakthroughs in home robotics and object rearrangement, Ramachandruni searched for what others had overlooked.

“To an extent it was challenging, but it was also an opportunity to look at what people are already doing and to get more familiar with the literature,” said Ramachandruni, a Ph.D. student in Robotics. “(Associate) Professor (Sonia) Chernova helped me in deciding how to zone in on the problem and choose a unique perspective.”

Ramachandruni started exploring how a home robot might organize objects according to user preferences in a pantry or refrigerator without prior instructions required by existing frameworks.

His persistence paid off. The 2023 IEEE International Confrence on Robots and Systems (IROS) accepted Ramachandruni’s paper on a novel framework for a context-aware object rearrangement robot.

“Our goal is to build assistive robots that can perform these organizational tasks,” Ramachandruni said. “We want these assistive robots to model the user preferences for a better user experience. We don’t want the robot to come into someone’s home and be unaware of these preferences, rearrange their home in a different way, and cause the users to be distressed. At the same time, we don’t want to burden the user with explaining to the robot exactly how they want the robot to organize their home.”

Ramachandruni’s object rearrangement framework, Context-Aware Semantic Object Rearrangement (ConSOR), uses contextual clues from a pre-arranged environment within its environment to mimic how a person might arrange objects in their kitchen.

“If our ConSOR robot rearranged your fridge, it would first observe where objects are already placed to understand how you prefer to organize your fridge,” he said. “The robot then places new objects in a way that does not disrupt your organizational style.”

The only prior knowledge the robot needs is how to recognize certain objects such as a milk carton or a box of cereal. Ramachandruni said he pretrained the model on language datasets that map out objects hierarchically.

“The semantic knowledge database we use for training is a hierarchy of words similar to what you would see on a website such as Walmart, where objects are organized by shopping category,” he said. “We incorporate this commonsense knowledge about object categories to improve organizational performance.

“Embedding commonsense knowledge also means our robot can rearrange objects it hasn’t been trained on. Maybe it’s never seen a soft drink, but it generally knows what beverages are because it’s trained on another object that belongs to the beverage category.”

Ramachandruni tested ConSOR against two model training baselines. One used a score-based approach that learns how specific users group objects in an environment. It then uses the scores to organize objects for users. The other baseline used the GPT-3 large language model prompted with minimal demonstrations and without fine-tuning to determine the placement of new objects. ConSOR outperformed both baselines.

“GPT-3 was a baseline we were comparing against to see whether this huge body of common-sense knowledge can be used directly without any sort of frame,” Ramachandruni said. “The appeal of LLMs is you don’t need too much data; you just need a small data set to prompt it and give it an idea. We found the LLM did not have the correct inductive bias to correctly reason between different objects to perform this task.”

Ramachandruni said he anticipates there will be scenarios where user input is required. His future work on the project will include minimizing the effort required by the user in those scenarios to tell the robot its preferences.

“There are probably scenarios where it’s just easier to ask the user,” he said. “Let’s say the robot has multiple ideas of how to organize the home, and it’s having trouble deciding between them. Sometimes it’s just easier to ask the user to choose between the options. That would be a human-robot interaction addition to this framework.”

IROS is taking place this week in Detroit.

Using ultraviolet light instead of extremely high temperatures, a team of Georgia Tech researchers has developed a new approach for 3D printing small glass lenses and other structures that would be useful for medical devices and research applications.

Their process reduces the heat required to convert printed polymer resin to silica glass from 1,100 degrees Celsius to around 220 degrees C and shortens the curing time from half a day or more to just five hours. They’ve used it to produce all kinds of glass microstructures, including tiny lenses approximately the width of a human hair that could be used for medical imaging inside the body.

Led by George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering Professor H. Jerry Qi, the team described their approach Oct. 4 in the journal Science Advances.

“This is one of the exploratory examples showing that it is possible to fabricate ceramics at mild conditions, because silica is a kind of ceramic,” Qi said. “It is a very challenging problem. We have a team that includes people from chemistry and materials science engaged in a data-driven approach to push the boundary and see if we can produce more ceramics with this approach.”

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.

Along coastal shorelines, tiny drops of sea spray are flung everywhere – sometimes reaching the atmosphere, where they’re transported around the world. And within these sea spray aerosols are particles, chemicals, and even microbes.

“Sea spray aerosols are very important here on Earth,” explains Amanda Stockton, an associate professor in the School of Chemistry and Biochemistry. “Earth has a complex biology contributing to and living in the oceans.”

Now, with support from a $50,0000 Scialog grant, Stockton is studying what other roles these aerosols might play, digging into how they may have impacted the evolution of life on Earth, and how they may help us search for life beyond Earth.

Scialog: Signatures of Life in the Universe is an initiative launched in 2021 by the Research Corporation for Science Advancement (RCSA) foundation to catalyze fundamental science in the search for life beyond Earth. Scialog, which stands for “Science + Dialogue,” funds innovative, cutting-edge research, while supporting dialogue and community-building across fields.

For this project, Stockton will partner with Tyler Robinson, a professor at the University of Arizona who specializes in exoplanet observation and modeling. “Tyler and I met at the Scialog Conference, which aims to generate new ideas between cross cutting disciplines that are very unrelated,” Stockton says. “So what we were thinking here is Tyler's really good at exoplanet observation and modeling. My group's really good at microfluidic generation. At first, it seems like we don’t have anything to work on together. But it turns out we do.”

Additionally, Augustine Atta Debrah, a second-year Chemistry Ph.D. student in Stockton’s Lab, is playing a key role — Debrah’s research interests are rooted in analytical chemistry, and encompass analytical method development, mass spectrometry-based applications, microfluidics, chromatography-based applications, biosensors, and lab-on-chip devices..

“We are excited to explore the fascinating world of sea sprays through our research,” Debrah says. “By recreating and analyzing the behavior of these aerosols under controlled laboratory conditions, we aim to learn more about how they might have played a role in the early Earth's chemistry and what they could tell us about other planets.”

The team has no shortage of questions to answer together. “How might these aerosols impact what we would observe here from Earth with a telescope?” Stockton asks. “How might aerosols on other planetary bodies impact our search for life? And how did sea spray aerosols contribute to the emergence of life here on Earth?”

Tiny droplets, big impact

While sea spray aerosols have been previously studied, “We don't necessarily have a good handle on how sea spray aerosols might impact other planetary bodies, like a water world,” Stockton says, adding that “an exoplanet water world that doesn’t have continents and doesn't have the same sort of chemistry that Earth has” might have a different spectrographic ‘signature’ through a telescope.

To better understand this, Stockton’s group will generate microfluidic droplets with different chemistries, which they will cycle through different conditions, including different UV irradiation conditions and different temperatures, to model the various ways that aerosols could be transported through atmospheres. 

“Then we could look at how the chemistry changes based on that transport phenomenon and also how the UV spectra or visible spectra changes,” Stockton adds. Scientists observe spectra – the light coming from each planetary object – as a way of better understanding what is present. Different properties can emit different spectra. “Eventually, we’d like to be able to see these from a distance and start to figure out what type of spectra you’d see for different conditions. For example, if the ocean has very simple organics, what you might find from just meteorites accreting to make the planet, versus the sort of spectra you might see if complex organic chemistry is taking place.”

The team also aims to uncover chemistries pertaining to early Earth by mimicking spectra from ocean chemistries that might have been present on early Earth, which could help researchers better understand how life emerged on our planet.

“There's a lot of things that also result from sea sprays on Earth that aren't necessarily being studied to the fullest extent,” Stockton adds. “For example, what are the stressors on these microorganisms and how does being confined in a droplet contribute to what pathways get turned on or off in the microbe, especially when that droplet may be evaporating, sublimating, or freezing?”

Early life on Earth — and life beyond

While Stockton notes that this research is still just beginning, there’s excitement in its focus – this year’s research will start to determine what is possible, and potential applications for the new model. “This is a proof of concept year where we want to see what we can build, what we can learn from what we can build, what the applications are of the system,” Stockton adds. “We hope that this will feed into bigger types of projects where we want to catalog what happens in multiple different types of conditions.”

The research has the potential to touch on some of the most fundamental questions humanity faces: who we are, how we got here — and many researchers, including Georgia Tech astrobiologists, are seeking to better understand water worlds like Encledeus, Titan, and early Europa.

“This project shows our dedication to uncovering the mysteries of the origins of life and expanding our knowledge about planets far beyond our own,” Debrah says.

“There are entire fields that we can branch into at varying levels of complexity,” Stockton adds. “We're very interested in what we can apply this to once we can build the hardware and show that we can do some of this controllably.”

Research faculty at the Georgia Institute of Technology now have their own advocacy group. Since 2022, the Research Faculty Advisory Council (RFAC) has increased research faculty engagement and addressed concerns from researchers in the Interdisciplinary Research Institutes (IRIs), joining similar organizations that address such needs in other colleges.

The group addresses issues such as retention, professional development, recognition, and compensation. Julia Kubanek, vice president for Interdisciplinary Research (VPIR), formed the group after hearing feedback from research faculty and modeled it after a similar council in the College of Sciences.

“This advisory council has helped clarify how we can improve both the status and experience of research faculty on campus,” Kubanek said. “The recommendations they’ve provided and the initiatives they’ve launched are already making a difference.”

The 12 members are nominated from across the IRIs, plus two other interdisciplinary research units supported by the VPIR. These members include:

• Vishwadeep Ahluwalia (Center for Advanced Brain Imaging)
• Michael Chang (Brook Byers Institute for Sustainable Systems)
• Sriram Chockalingam (Institite for Data Engineering and Science)
• Christine Conwell (Strategic Energy Institute)
• Andrew Dugenske (Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute)
• Ulrika Egertsdotter (Renewable Bioproducts Institute)
• Evan Goldberg (Global Center for Medical Innovation )
• Walter Henderson (Institute for Materials)
• Johannes Leisen (Parker H. Petit Institute for Bioengineering and Bioscience)
• Paul Joseph (Institute for Electronics and Nanotechnology)
• Leanne West (Pediatric Technology Center)
• Clint Zeagler (Institute for People and Technology)

In its first year, RFAC had two co-leads: Andrew Dugenske, the director of the Factory Information Systems Center and a principal research engineer at the Georgia Tech Manufacturing Institute, and Paul Joseph, a principal research scientist and director of External User Programs for Southeastern Nanotechnology Infrastructure Corridor.

“Although the research faculty contribute significantly to the overall growth of Georgia Tech, we remain largely underrepresented, unrecognized, and underemployed because of the lack of suitable platforms to talk about the challenges faced by research faculty colleagues,” Joseph said. “It was not a surprise that the same concerns surfaced and were discovered by the council when we collected input from the research faculty throughout the IRIs on issues that concern and are important to research faculty.”

Although Joseph and Dugenske have completed their terms in their leadership roles, they are satisfied with RFAC’s initial success in creating awareness of research faculty challenges on campus, and initiatives that include a mentorship program with the Research Next team, a Research Faculty Mentoring Network, and efforts in RFAC bylaws creation. Leanne West and Walter Henderson now serve as co-leads.

“It was great for the administration to recognize the many contributions that research faculty make to the Institute and establish a way to improve research faculty job satisfaction and engagement,” Dugenske said. “During the first year of the RFAC, the committee did a great job of gathering issues of importance to research faculty and presenting clear and actionable recommendations to decision-makers.”

The Georgia Institute of Technology will lead development of a new generation of cancer tests capable of detecting multiple types of tumors earlier than ever with up to $50 million from President Joe Biden’s Cancer Moonshot initiative.

Led by biomedical engineer Gabe Kwong, the project will map the unique cellular profiles of cancer cells and leverage that knowledge to build new bioengineered sensors to detect those profiles. The goal is to create a new kind of multi-cancer early detection test that would allow oncologists to start treating the tumors sooner, when they’re still small and most responsive.

The funding announced Sept. 26 is from the new Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) and part of the Biden administration’s efforts to cut the cancer death rate in half in 25 years.

Read the full story on the College of Engineering website.