Newswise — Six faculty in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering from the School of Engineering & Applied Science have received nearly $1.8 million in three-year grants from the National Science Foundation to create a cleaner, safer environment.
Young-Shin Jun, PhD, associate professor, received $340,576 to study how arsenic can be mobilized in aquifers during a water reuse technique;
Brent Williams, PhD, the Raymond R. Tucker Distinguished I-CARES Career Development Assistant Professor, and Pratim Biswas, PhD, the Lucy and Stanley Lopata Professor and chair of the department, received $331,438 to study emissions and aerosol formation from coal combustion and co-firing of coal and biomass;
John Fortner, PhD, the I-CARES Career Development Assistant Professor, and Daniel Giammar, PhD, the Harold D. Jolley Career Development Professor, received $329,835 to study nanoscale sorbents to recover contaminants in water;
Yinjie Tang, PhD, the Francis Ahmann Career Development Assistant Professor, received a $486,510 grant to use a new type of analysis to decipher microbial mechanisms, and is co-investigator on a $299,997 grant to use corn stover, or switchgrass, as a feedstock for producing biofuel.
Young-Shin Jun, PhDJun, also director of graduate studies in Energy, Environmental & Chemical Engineering, will study how water and arsenic-containing iron pyrite interactions affect the fate and transport of arsenic during managed aquifer recharge (MAR), a process in which excess water is returned to underground storage then recovered in times of high demand.
Jun will use a novel multidisciplinary approach in her lab, including in situ atomic force microscopy and small angle X-ray scattering, as well as batch reactor experimental measurements, to take new high-resolution measurements and descriptions of nanoparticles linked with a reactive modeling to predict arsenic mobilization at a larger scale. Then, the data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and from MAR sites will be used to improve the modeling predictions.
Results from her work will help to determine how to pretreat reclaimed water from wastewater treatment plants and will provide an underpinning to develop more sustainable MAR operations. In addition, they can be applied to other environmental systems, including areas with arsenic-contaminated groundwater.
Jun plans an educational outreach program for middle and high school students, as well as a new website and workshops and public lectures focused on water quality.
Brent Williams, PhD, and Pratim Biswas, PhDWilliams and Biswas, members of the newly formed Center for Aerosol Science and Engineering (CASE), will expand on previous work with primary particle production from coal and coal biomass combustion to better understand the formation of those particles, which are tiny pieces of solid or liquid emitted to the atmosphere. They will develop fundamental models that can predict how much particulate matter will be produced using coal mixtures or different coal and biomass mixtures.
“Our hypothesis is that there are a fair amount of volatile gases that can undergo sunlight-driven chemistry in the atmosphere and produce secondary particles — those that enter the atmosphere as a gas and are converted to particles,” Williams says. “These emissions are not regulated as extensively or monitored as much as primary particles. All of this will have greater relevance in developing nations where they don’t apply emission control technologies to the same extent that we do in the US.”
Biswas’ lab has a drop tube furnace that produces gases and particles similar to those released from a power plant or home cooking appliances, for example, and Williams’ lab has a chemical reaction chamber that contains ultraviolent lamps to mimic the atmospheric aging process. Together, they have a full suite of state-of-the-art aerosol instrumentation and other equipment to chemically and physically characterize the particles.
In addition to the lab research, Williams and Biswas plan to reach out to area middle and high school students traditionally underrepresented in the STEM fields to participate in a peer-mentoring program. They plan to hire several high school student interns who will work with middle school students to take air quality samples from various locations (in the presence and absence of air purifiers) and work with Washington University undergraduate and graduate students to analyze the air quality and assess the impact of simple control technologies.
John Fortner, PhD and Dan Giammar, PhDFortner and Giammar will use a novel technology using nanoparticles to remove metal and metalloid contaminants, including arsenic, uranium and chromium from drinking water.Fortner’s lab specializes in creating particles filled with magnetite, a magnetic natural mineral. These particles, which are about 8-20 nanometers in size, can be coated with different materials or surrounded by a shell to serve a variety of purposes, including adsorbing metals and metalloids from water. These metals stick to the outside of the particles, and once a magnet is applied, the metals are removed from the particle and cleaned from the water.
With the new grant funding, Fortner and Giammar will engineer similar nanoparticles that will adhere to the grains of sand in traditional sand-based water filter. As contaminated water flows through the filter, the engineered particles can adsorb dissolved pollutants, thus treating the water. Once the nanosorbents are used to capacity, they can be selectively removed from the sand grains and collected with a magnet for waste disposal. Fresh nanoparticles can then be added to the sand to regenerate the filter.
“We can take a particle with a different coating, then make seven or eight different particles with different coatings and use them all at the same time to target different types of pollutants,” Fortner says. In addition to the lab research, Fortner and Giammar have planned an educational program emphasizing environmental issues for area middle and high school students from groups traditionally underrepresented in the STEM fields.
Yinjie Tang, PhDTang will develop and apply advanced fluxomics tools to characterize microbial species to advance energy and environmental technologies. Microorganisms have complex intracellular enzyme reactions. Analysis of metabolic fluxes can identify bottleneck pathways in the biosynthesis of desirable products, decipher the function of unknown genes, discover new enzymes and reveal the metabolic responses to environmental conditions.
The first project, with co-principal investigator Yixin Chen, PhD, associate professor of computer science & engineering, will build user-friendly metabolic flux analysis platform and data mining approaches to characterize novel microbial species. In the second project, Tang’s lab will help Zhiyou Wen, PhD, associate professor at Iowa State University, investigate clostridium metabolism for syngas fermentations. In this NSF Collaborative Research, his lab will use 13C labeled syngas and metabolic modeling to decipher an industrial clostridium species for carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide utilizations for alcohol production.
The School of Engineering & Applied Science at Washington University in St. Louis focuses intellectual efforts through a new convergence paradigm and builds on strengths, particularly as applied to medicine and health, energy and environment, entrepreneurship and security. With 91 tenured/tenure-track and 40 additional full-time faculty, 1,300 undergraduate students, 750 graduate students and more than 23,000 alumni, we are working to leverage our partnerships with academic and industry partners — across disciplines and across the world — to contribute to solving the greatest global challenges of the 21st century.
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