Colorado Fuel Cell Center director and mechanical engineering professor Dr. Neal Sullivan and his team are testing Geothermic Fuel Cells (GFC) for a new application of solid-oxide fuel cell technology: heat generation. When placed underground within oil-shale formations, the heat naturally generated from the 750 ºC fuel cells is harnessed to liberate oil from the shale, known as “in situ oil shale processing.” The electricity generated by the fuel cells comes as a useful and valuable byproduct of the oil-recovery process.

Designed and built for IEP Technologies by Delphi Powertrain Systems, the world’s first geothermic fuel cell (GFC) operated continuously for five days at the CFCC in October 2013. During that time, the 6 feet by 1 foot in diameter GFC generated 3 kilowatts of electricity and 6 kW of heat. Follow-on testing in November reached power levels of 4.3 kWe. Both startup and operation of the GFC was thermally self-sustained.

Sullivan’s research team hopes to build on this laboratory-scale success through outdoor GFC operation scheduled for summer 2014. The outdoor tests will be on the Mines campus, and will utilize a significantly larger GFC measuring approximately 28 feet by one foot. It is expected to generate around 15 kW of electricity and up to 25 kW of heat.

Sullivan explained that the GFC recently tested in the CFCC could currently power one or two American homes. However, even a small oil production facility would require thousands of much larger GFCs. The target GFC size during deployment could reach nearly 500 feet in length. Industrial partner IEP Technologies estimates an 80,000 barrel-per-day oil field would require nearly 3,400 GFCs distributed in a network throughout the oil shale formation.

A field of GFCs of this magnitude would generate approximately 700 megawatts of electricity that could be sold back to the utility and put on the grid or provide power for operation of the oil field.

Research engineer Buddy Haun designed and built the extensive data-acquisition systems for the project, building test stands and taking advanced measurements to quantify GFC performance and behavior. Haun graduated from Mines in 1986 with a degree in petroleum engineering.

"I think this has potential to be a technology that alters the economics and political landscape in oil producing nations," Haun said. "We are using green technology to produce a product that is a lot more refine-able."

Graduate student Gladys Anyenya and Associate Professor Robert Braun apply computational models to explore relationships between the GFC operating conditions and the heating of the oil shale. Anyenya uses a chemical engineering program called Aspen Plus to predict electrical performance from the fuel cell. The current GFC in the lab has three stacks of fuel cells; the one underground will have nine.

"These models allow us to do things that we can't do with a physical experiment without the risk of damaging it," Anyenya said.

Research engineer Mark Daubenspeck is also part of the team and has played a central role in the construction of the GFC test stands. Daubenspeck graduated from Mines in 2011 with a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics and got his master’s degree in mechanical engineering in 2012.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Environmental science and engineering graduate student Erin Neil is working on an independent study with civil and environmental engineering professors Dr. Tzahi Cath and Dr. Pei Xu on developing cost-effective and environmentally sound technologies to increase the quality of water from water waste.

“We are trying to use waste streams from one water treatment process to treat another stream that might be used beneficially,” Cath said.

Neil is comparing the removal efficiencies of different types of sludge and evaluating the potential for microbiological contaminants to leach from the sludge to the treated water. The group has collected samples from Golden Drinking Water Treatment Plant, El Paso Water Utilities and other drinking water treatment plants. Neil uses the EPA Membrane Filtration Method to test fluid samples for microbiological contamination.

“We have seen promising adsorption results and expect to better understand the feasibility of re-using this water,” Neil said.

The project is part of a large effort with The National Science Foundation Engineering Research Center Program, ReNUWit Engineering Research Center. It is part of a collaborative study among Mines, New Mexico State University and the industrial partner, El Paso Water Utilities.

The researchers use sludge from drinking water treatment plants to treat reverse osmosis (RO) waste. RO waste is made of concentrated brine, which contains minerals, organics and metals that are rejected by the RO membranes. Treating this concentrate could provide additional water supplies to the public, and reduce the environmental impacts from discharging concentrate laden with salt and toxic heavy metals.

“Treatment of reverse osmosis concentrate can convert the waste stream to additional water for beneficial use, such as irrigation, that is otherwise scarce in arid climates,” Xu said. “Removal of toxic contaminants from RO concentrate will allow beneficial use of the water and protection of environment.”

Although several disposal methods are available, they can be associated with high processing costs, constrained by permitting, environmental impacts and other limitations.

“It can be a challenge with respect to regulations that surround deep well injection,” Neil said. “It can be expensive to dispose of that concentrate.”

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Students in the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences Senior Design Program are building a lunar mining rover with technology that could support driverless vehicles.

Electrical engineering senior Megan Salinas is one of a 16-member multidisciplinary student team called Blasterbotica. She said their project “supports robotic mining technology in deep mines and Australian deserts, to self-driving cars in California.”

“The sensing and driving technology we are researching could develop into your personal driving chauffeur,” said Salinas.

Students have to apply to be a part of the team and are selected by administrators in the Senior Design Program. Two senior design teams working on locomotion and autonomy subsystems are reusing a rover built last year to make improvements for this year’s project.

“I was interested in the coding and autonomy aspects of this project,” mechanical engineering senior Ryan Stauffer said. “They wanted computer science students so it was a perfect fit for me.” 

The class is designing and building a mining rover for NASA as part of a Regolith Mining Competition. In its fifth year in the competition, Mines must develop a winning robot that will excavate and deposit a lunar regolith simulant (rock powder), traverse an obstacle area and deliver the materials to a collection container.  The winner of the competition will receive a $3,000 team scholarship and an invitation to watch a rocket launch at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in the spring.

Chris Dreyer is the faculty advisor for the team and an assistant research professor in the mechanical engineering department.

“NASA created the competition to develop technologies for and promote the concept of space resource utilization—and STEM education,” Dreyer said.

The team often does testing on the Golden volleyball sand pits, as it is a convenient substitute until a regolith test bed is ready. Dreyer said that regolith is a difficult material to drive on and can confound sensors.  

“It is an interesting robotics problem because the environment is difficult to predict,” Dreyer said. “No team has completed the competition with an autonomous rover.”

In addition to support from the program, the team raises funds through donations for most of their expenses. Angel Abbud-Madrid, director of the Center for Space Resources, also helps sponsor the team by providing funds and an assembly and testing workspace in the center’s lab on the Mines campus.

“This project directly relates to the research we are conducting at the center,” Abbud-Madrid said. “We are learning how to design autonomous systems for remote space applications. This particular project is beneficial because it brings all expertise of Mines together for this purpose.”

The Senior Design class has a website at inside.mines.edu/25763-php. The team has a website at blasterbotica.mines.edu. 

Blasterbotica is looking to expand student participation beyond the senior design groups. Students interested in helping out can contact Dreyer at cdreyer@mines.edu.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Imagine a smaller version of the Blaster the Burro statue on campus with the same precision of detail. Professor Jered Dean and Dr. Douglas L. Van Bossuyt, along with three mechanical engineering graduate students from the Design Innovation and Computational Engineering Laboratory under the direction of Dr. Cameron Turner, created a one-twentieth-scale model of the mascot just last week. The new Blaster stands 2.5 inches tall.

As part of a tech fee proposal that was funded last spring, a 3D scanner was purchased for students to use for research and design. One 3D printer was loaned to group to use for experiments and test its capabilities. The group is submitting a tech fee proposal next week in hopes to fund additional 3D printers for students to use at a low cost (i.e. $3-5 a printed part). They are also working on collaborating with some of the 3D print houses in Denver.

Before 3D scanners, when an engineer would want to reproduce a part without a drawing, they would need to go through a time-consuming and often inaccurate set of measurements to document the part features and reproduce the part in a CAD model.

“A 3D scanner allows engineering designers to build upon or modify existing parts with relative ease, even if they do not have the drawings to the original part,” Turner said.

The activity of scanning Blaster was done to show off how powerful the combination of 3D Scanning and 3D Printing is. The process required 4.5 hours in total and the model produced consisted of 2.5 million points of data. The group used several algorithms to correct any errors they found. A program called a “slicer” converted the data into a series of machine codes, which drive a 3D printer. Once the printing was finished, the model was wrapped in scaffolding to protect the plastic from drooping during extrusion.

“I was actually blown away by the level of detail that it achieved, and the ease with which it was used, especially with no training or prior experience,” Graduate student Daniel Anderson said.

Graduate student John Steuben is currently working on the development of a low-cost attachment for smartphones, which would convert the phone's camera into a microscope 40 times the power of the standard instrument.

“I am hoping to develop this device with STEM education in mind, and produce it for a cost of less than $5 using 3D scanning and printing technology,” Steuben said.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

A new program at Colorado School of Mines gives students an opportunity to address design challenges faced by local community partners. The Engineering by Doing (EbD) concept was inspired by the College of Engineering and Computational Sciences (CECS) as a way to include project-based learning, research as undergraduates, community and service learning and other active learning experiences.

“We believe students can develop into better engineers if they can get exposure to actual engineering and research practice during their program of study,” CECS Dean Kevin Moore said.

The goal of the program is “to provide Mines students with professional practice experiences as part of their education through ‘Projects that Matter.’” This semester, students in the EbD class are working with International Development Enterprises (iDE), a Denver-based organization that sells irrigation and water storage and sanitation to farmers in poor countries. The project aims to find a solution to help farmers in Burkina Faso and Northern Ghana maintain crops for a longer duration and sell them for a larger profit.

“This can allow their kids to go to school longer, or for them to afford more things,” said Doug Nettles, one of the students taking the class as part of the humanitarian minor. “It could really open up more opportunities for them.”

Professor Jered Dean started the semester by giving groups of students $20 to build a rough prototype of a solution. Senior Nicole Davis and her group created a drying device that used mirrors and the sun.

“I am analyzing the insulating and cooling potential of soil in Ghana,” Davis, also a humanitarian engineer minor, said. “It has been an amazing way to implement the skills I am learning in heat transfer to solve a real-world problem.”

Students regularly visit iDE’s main office at the Posner Center for International Development in Denver. Currently, Mines is the only higher education tenant at the center. Just this past week, iDE won the Global Humanitarian Engineering Award at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Global Humanitarian Technology Conference.

iDE Technology and Innovation Group Project Manager Leslie Light said the project idea has been proposed for years at the organization, but no one has fully explored it.

“The students have looked both broadly at different elements associated with crop storage and deeply in terms of the specific challenges for each,” Light said, who will be teaching EbD I "Human Centered Problem Definition" in the spring.

Nettles said working with iDE has given him the freedom to talk with experts who have knowledge or have worked in the food industry.

“We aren't looking things up in books—we are asking real people about real things, because odds are the culture and the crop details about Ghana and Burkina Faso aren't in a book.” Nettles said. “The real data is going to be in the people.”

Last semester, Mines students in the program collaborated with Colorado Aquaponics and Red Rocks Community College (RRCC) pre-engineering students to design and build an aquaponics system for the RRCC greenhouse.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Researchers at Colorado School of Mines are discovering ways to make longer lasting lithium batteries and new ceramics for armors, windows and fuel cells.

“The possibility for opening up new applications in energy are huge,” Metallurgical and Materials Engineering Associate Professor Brian Gorman said.

Gorman and his team have recently proven that, for the first time, the full periodic table can be examined in ceramics by counting atoms one at a time. They are using new equipment to look at an atom’s arrangement and predict the properties of the material.

“We can start to determine electrical resistivity, ionic conductivity, how well it conducts oxygen or hydrogen and start to determine how strong it is,” Gorman said.

Their research isn’t done on a computer, but rather on real materials using a combined electron microscope and atom probe instrument. The team is able to study why the strongest ceramics break and why certain solar cells produce more electrical current.

Last fall, Gorman received a grant from the National Science Foundation to build the instrument. While there are eight atom probe instruments being used at U.S. universities, Mines is developing the world’s first atom probe instrument with an electron microscope attached. This equipment allows his team to heat and cool specimens at a rate of 10 trillion degrees per second, fast enough to “freeze” individual atoms as they move in a solid.

Gorman’s collaborators at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) develop high efficiency, low cost solar cells. In a new program funded by the Department of Energy, Gorman and his NREL collaborators are working to understand why current cannot escape the solar cell efficiently. Understanding these materials at the atomic scale will allow companies to produce solar cells with much higher efficiencies.

The materials in this device are Cadmium Telluride. 



“The highest efficiency devices that have been made so far are around 18 percent, meaning only 18 percent of the sunlight that hits the solar panel generates electrical current,” Gorman said. “Our new program allows us to understand why out of place atoms reduce this efficiency. Ultimately, we are aiming to improve efficiency to 24 percent in three years.”

Graduate student Adam Stokes works on the research team with Gorman. He analyzes grain boundaries in a different solar absorber material, also in relation to how efficient solar cells can be made. The equipment allows Stokes to narrow down at an atomic level what exists in the material.

“The atom probe is very unique in that the resolution spatially is amazing, as well as the chemical sensitivity,” Stokes said. “You can analyze materials at a really fundamental level that you can’t do anywhere else.”

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

Physics Professor Lincoln Carr and Liberal Arts and International Studies Professor Toni Lefton are connecting science and poetry in a new course this semester.

“Honors courses and programs exist in many schools, but we are not aware of a specific physics/poetry combination elsewhere,” Lefton said. “We don't think courses in most other programs would treat pseudoscience, metaphysics, lucid dreaming both in Tibetan culture and as demonstrated in the Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine, and alternate concepts of time all in one class.”

As part of the McBride Honors curriculum, students have the option of taking Carr and Lefton’s class, “Explorations in Science, Technology and Society.” The class focuses on projects such as writing poetry, papers on physics theories, stream of consciousness and interviewing panels of modern revolution survivors.

“We have intense round table dialogues, combining actual physics equations and poetry readings, political theory and philosophy, speculative fiction and future technologies,” Carr said.

Senior Katie Williams, who is majoring in chemical engineering, said the three-hour class goes by quickly.

“I think that my classmates would agree with me in saying that our discussions have not led to any definitive answers, but they have been eye-opening,” Williams said. “The class has pushed me beyond my usual thought processes and forced me to consider new ideas.”

The final project in the course will focus on a creating a “Revolution Zine,” building on the tradition of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. The zines will include essay-style articles, poetry and short stories, mathematical proofs and computer code, to name a few.

Carr and Lefton began exploring the idea when they noticed the creative talents of students while serving on the Mines Student Board of Publications.

“Both of us have lived all over the world and have seen a lot of revolutions of one kind or another, whether political, scientific, or cultural. At the same time there is this awful and unnecessary divide between the sciences and the humanities,” Carr said. “We thought that revolution seemed a natural context in which to bridge this gap.”

Check out the course blog at labtothepage.blogspot.com.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

The Mines Society of Physics Students (SPS) will be hosting the Haunted Physics Lab Oct. 26 in Friedhoff Hall in the Green Center, 924 16^th St. Doors will open at 11:30 a.m. and the event will start at noon.

This family-friendly event will display the spirit of Halloween while SPS members demonstrate several experiments including a Frankenstein electricity bolt contraption called a Jacob's Ladder, a bed of nails and a Ping-Pong ball cannon. Younger children can enjoy hands-on experiments that will focus on physical principals such as total internal reflection, diamagnetism and laminar flow.

The Society of Physics Students is a national organization under the umbrella of the American Institute of Physics.

Contact:

Kathleen Morton, Communications Coordinator / 303-273-3088 / KMorton@mines.edu

Karen Gilbert, Director of Public Relations / 303-273-3541 / KGilbert@mines.edu

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