Engineering FYI, September 2009, Part II

At Florida State an Off-Grid, Zero Emissions Building (OGZEB) is being used to analyze and test solutions to the world’s energy and climate changes.

Graduate students and others take turns living in OGZEB to improve data collection. Currently OGZEB includes a “unique solar-hydrogen experiment” because hydrogen is a low-cost alternative to batteries.

Co-director of the Clean Energy Research Center as the University of South Florida, Yogi Goswami (AL A ’75), details the hydrogen experiment,

“It’s a viable concept they are demonstrating. For hydrogen the problem is the cost of production. It’s usually high. If they are going to reduce the cost, that’s moving in the right direction.”

The house will continue to be used as a tool to research new technologies and test ideas of today and tomorrow.
Read full story from The New York Times

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A team of scientists studying Monterey Bay since 2000 will publish research on “the moving skeletons embedded in complex flows, known as Lagrangian coherent structures.”

The patterns of flow have been observed since the 1500s and Leonardo da Vinci. Today’s research uses “instruments that can track in fine detail how parcels of fluid move” and low-cost computers to crunch large amounts of data.

Read article about the progression of Lagrangian coherent structures.

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The National Science Foundation has announced a new grant awarded to the Texas Advanced Computing Center, at the University of Texas.

The center is known as the “home of supercomputing” and will use the grant to fund new projects related to “providing new computing resource and visualization and data analysis services to the open science community.”

Read the article for more information

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