Posts tagged grants
City of Boulder Office of Arts + Culture
Oct 23rd
Jann talks with the people who run the City of Boulder Office of Arts and Culture and what they do for the local community to educate and promote arts in the society.
To Find out more and take a quick survey visit: http://boulderarts.org
CU develops solar toilet for third world use
Mar 13th
by CU-Boulder ready for India unveiling
A revolutionary University of Colorado Boulder toilet fueled by the sun that is being developed to help some of the 2.5 billion people around the world lacking safe and sustainable sanitation will be unveiled in India this month.
The self-contained, waterless toilet, designed and built using a $777,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has the capability of heating human waste to a high enough temperature to sterilize human waste and create biochar, a highly porous charcoal, said project principal investigator Karl Linden, professor of environmental engineering. The biochar has a one-two punch in that it can be used to both increase crop yields and sequester carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
The project is part of the Gates Foundation’s “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge,” an effort to develop a next-generation toilet that can be used to disinfect liquid and solid waste while generating useful end products, both in developing and developed nations, said Linden. Since the 2012 grant, Linden and his CU-Boulder team have received an additional $1 million from the Gates Foundation for the project, which includes a team of more than a dozen faculty, research professionals and students, many working full time on the effort.
According to the Gates Foundation, the awards recognize researchers who are developing ways to manage human waste that will help improve the health and lives of people around the world. Unsafe methods to capture and treat human waste result in serious health problems and death – food and water tainted with pathogens from fecal matter results in the deaths of roughly 700,000 children each year.
Linden’s team is one of 16 around the world funded by the Gates “Reinvent the Toilet Challenge” since 2011. All have shipped their inventions to Delhi, where they will be on display March 20-22 for scientists, engineers and dignitaries. Other institutional winners of the grants range from Caltech to Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and the National University of Singapore.
The CU-Boulder invention consists of eight parabolic mirrors that focus concentrated sunlight to a spot no larger than a postage stamp on a quartz-glass rod connected to eight bundles of fiber-optic cables, each consisting of thousands of intertwined, fused fibers, said Linden. The energy generated by the sun and transferred to the fiber-optic cable system — similar in some ways to a data transmission line — can heat up the reaction chamber to over 600 degrees Fahrenheit to treat the waste material, disinfect pathogens in both feces and urine, and produce char.
“Biochar is a valuable material,” said Linden. “It has good water holding capacity and it can be used in agricultural areas to hold in nutrients and bring more stability to the soils.” A soil mixture containing 10 percent biochar can hold up to 50 percent more water and increase the availability of plant nutrients, he said. Additionally, the biochar can be burned as charcoal and provides energy comparable to that of commercial charcoal.
Linden is working closely with project co-investigators Professor R. Scott Summers of environmental engineering and Professor Alan Weimer chemical and biological engineering and a team of postdoctoral fellows, professionals, graduate students, undergraduates and a high school student.
“We are doing something that has never been done before,” said Linden. “While the idea of concentrating solar energy is not new, transmitting it flexibly to a customizable location via fiber-optic cables is the really unique aspect of this project.” The interdisciplinary project requires chemical engineers for heat transfer and solar energy work, environmental engineers for waste treatment and stabilization, mechanical engineers to build actuators and moving parts and electrical engineers to design control systems, Linden said.
Tests have shown that each of the eight fiber-optic cables can produce between 80 and 90 watts of energy, meaning the whole system can deliver up to 700 watts of energy into the reaction chamber, said Linden. In late December, tests at CU-Boulder showed the solar energy directed into the reaction chamber could easily boil water and effectively carbonize solid waste.
While the current toilet has been created to serve four to six people a day, a larger facility that could serve several households simultaneously is under design with the target of meeting a cost level of five cents a day per user set by the Gates Foundation. “We are continuously looking for ways to improve efficiency and lower costs,” he said.
“The great thing about the Gates Foundation is that they provide all of the teams with the resources they need,” Linden said. “The foundation is not looking for one toilet and one solution from one team. They are nurturing unique ideas and looking at what the individual teams bring overall to the knowledge base.”
Linden, who called the 16 teams a “family of researchers,” said the foundation has funded trips for CU-Boulder team members to collaborate with the other institutions in places like Switzerland, South Africa and North Carolina. “Instead of sink or swim funding, they want every team to succeed. In some ways we are like a small startup company, and it’s unlike any other project I have worked on during my career,” he said.
CU-Boulder team member Elizabeth Travis from Parker, Colo., who is working toward a master’s degree in the engineering college’s Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities, said her interest in water and hygiene made the Reinvent the Toilet project a good fit. “It is a really cool research project and a great team,” she said. “Everyone is very creative, patient and supportive, and there is a lot of innovation. It is exciting to learn from all of the team members.”
“We have a lot of excitement and energy on our team, and the Gates Foundation values that,” Linden said. “It is one thing to do research, another to screw on nuts and bolts and make something that can make a difference. To me, that’s the fun part, and the project is a nice fit for CU-Boulder because we have a high interest in developing countries and expertise in all of the renewable energy technologies as well as sanitation.”
The CU-Boulder team is now applying for phase two of the Gates Foundation Reinvent the Toilet grant to develop a field-worthy system to deploy in a developing country based on their current design, and assess other technologies that may enhance the toilet system, including the use of high-temperature fluids that can collect, retain and deliver heat.
-CU-
CU-Boulder study: Spiral galaxies like Milky Way bigger than thought
Jun 27th
CU-Boulder Professor John Stocke, study leader, said new observations with Hubble’s $70 million Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, or COS, designed by CU-Boulder show that normal spiral galaxies are surrounded by halos of gas that can extend to over 1 million light-years in diameter. The current estimated diameter of the Milky Way, for example, is about 100,000 light-years. One light-year is roughly 6 trillion miles.
The material for galaxy halos detected by the CU-Boulder team originally was ejected from galaxies by exploding stars known as supernovae, a product of the star formation process, said Stocke of CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department. “This gas is stored and then recycled through an extended galaxy halo, falling back onto the galaxies to reinvigorate a new generation of star formation,” he said. “In many ways this is the ‘missing link’ in galaxy evolution that we need to understand in detail in order to have a complete picture of the process.”
Stocke gave a presentation on the research June 27 at the University of Edinburgh’s Higgs Centre for Theoretical Physics in Scotland at a conference titled “Intergalactic Interactions.” The CU-Boulder research team also included professors Michael Shull and James Green and research associates Brian Keeney, Charles Danforth, David Syphers and Cynthia Froning, as well as University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor Blair Savage.
Building on earlier studies identifying oxygen-rich gas clouds around spiral galaxies by scientists at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the University of Massachusetts, Amherst College and the University of California, Santa Cruz, Stocke and his colleagues determined that such clouds contain almost as much mass as all the stars in their respective galaxies. “This was a big surprise,” said Stocke. “The new findings have significant consequences for how spiral galaxies change over time.”
In addition, the CU-Boulder team discovered giant reservoirs of gas estimated to be millions of degrees Fahrenheit that were enshrouding the spiral galaxies and halos under study. The halos of the spiral galaxies were relatively cool by comparison — just tens of thousands of degrees — said Stocke, also a member of CU-Boulder’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy, or CASA.
Shull, a professor in CU-Boulder’s astrophysical and planetary sciences department and a member of CASA, emphasized that the study of such “circumgalactic” gas is in its infancy. “But given the expected lifetime of COS on Hubble, perhaps another five years, it should be possible to confirm these early detections, elaborate on the results and scan other spiral galaxies in the universe,” he said.
Prior to the installation of COS on Hubble during NASA’s final servicing mission in May 2009, theoretical studies showed that spiral galaxies should possess about five times more gas than was being detected by astronomers. The new observations with the extremely sensitive COS are now much more in line with the theories, said Stocke.
The CU-Boulder team used distant quasars — the swirling centers of supermassive black holes — as “flashlights” to track ultraviolet light as it passed through the extended gas haloes of foreground galaxies, said Stocke. The light absorbed by the gas was broken down by the spectrograph, much like a prism does, into characteristic color “fingerprints” that revealed temperatures, densities, velocities, distances and chemical compositions of the gas clouds.
“This gas is way too diffuse to allow its detection by direct imaging, so spectroscopy is the way to go,” said Stocke. CU-Boulder’s Green led the design team for COS, which was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder for NASA.
While astronomers hope the Hubble Space Telescope keeps on chugging for years to come, there will be no more servicing missions. And the James Webb Space Telescope, touted to be Hubble’s successor beginning in late 2018, has no UV light-gathering capabilities, which will prevent astronomers from undertaking studies like those done with COS, said Green.
“Once Hubble ceases to function, we will lose the capability to study galaxy halos for perhaps a full generation of astronomers,” said Stocke. “But for now, we are fortunate to have both Hubble and its Cosmic Origins Spectrograph to help us answer some of the most pressing issues in cosmology.”
The study was supported by a NASA/Hubble Space Telescope contract to the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph science team, general NASA/Hubble Space Telescope observing grants to Stocke and a National Science Foundation grant to Keeney.
-CU-
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