Catalogue of Sustainable Design Resources Developed

From insulation made from mushrooms to kitchen tops created from recycled glass, Kingston University has catalogued more than 1,000 different sustainable materials for use in the construction industry. The result is a materials library, Rematerialise, which is being launched at EcoBuild, the world's largest event for showcasing sustainable design and construction practices.

Reader in sustainable design, Jakki Dehn has been developing Rematerialise at Kingston University's Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture for 17 years and believes designers will find it invaluable when planning new products."They can come and touch and feel a whole range of materials all in one place -- materials which, otherwise, they might have to spend weeks investigating themselves," she said.

Several firms have already drawn on Dehn's expertise to help with ongoing projects. Product design company Jedco, based in Weybridge in Surrey, has developed a scaffolding board made from recycled polymers and a solar-powered bus-stop."The scaffolding boards have proved useful on oil rigs, because unlike wood, they don't absorb water. So, in this case, the sustainable product is actually better than the material it's replacing," Dehn said.

Dehn began her research into sustainable materials in 1994 and received Arts and Humanities Research Council funding in 2003. Rematerialise now houses more than 1,200 materials from 15 different countries. It contains recycled materials, products made from resources that are very plentiful and easy to re-grow and products made from resources that are not generally used very much. The University hopes eventually to put the entire library online so planners can do initial research before making an appointment to view the materials themselves at Kingston University's Knights Park campus.

As word about the resource has spread, new products have started arriving on an almost daily basis."We recently received a new type of insulation material made from mushrooms. The piece we were sent was only an inch thick but, apparently, you could put your hand on one side of it and take a blow-torch to the other side and you wouldn't be able to feel the heat," said Dehn, who admitted she was yet to put it to the test. Another eye-catching material is resilica, which is used to make kitchen worktops as an alternative to granite or formica. It's made mainly of glass recycled from cars and building sites.

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Plants That Can Move Inspire New Adaptive Structures

Mechanical engineering professor Kon-Well Wang presented the team's latest work Feb. 19 at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2011 Annual Meeting in Washington D.C. Wang is the Stephan P. Timoshenko Collegiate Professor of Mechanical Engineering and chair of the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

"This is quite different from other traditional adaptive materials approaches," Wang said."In general, people use solid-state materials to make adaptive structures. This is really a unique concept inspired by biology."

Researchers at U-M and Penn State University are studying how plants like the Mimosa can change shape, and they're working to replicate the mechanisms in artificial cells. Today, their artificial cells are palm-size and larger. But they're trying to shrink them by building them with microstructures and nanofibers. They're also exploring how to replicate the mechanisms by which plants heal themselves.

"We want to put it all together to create hyper-cellular structures with circulatory networks," Wang said.

The Mimosa is among the plant varieties that exhibit specialized"nastic motions," large movements you can see in real time with the naked eye, said Erik Nielsen, assistant professor in the U-M Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology.

The phenomenon is made possible by osmosis, the flow of water in and out of plants' cells. Triggers such as touch cause water to leave certain plant cells, collapsing them. Water enters other cells, expanding them. These microscopic shifts allow the plants to move and change shape on a larger scale.

It's hydraulics, the researchers say.

"We know that plants can deform with large actuation through this pumping action," Wang said."This and several other characteristics of plant cells and cell walls have inspired us to initiate ideas that could concurrently realize many of the features that we want to achieve for adaptive structures."

Nielsen believes nastic movements might be a good place to start trying to replicate plant motions because they don't require new growth or a reorganization of cells.

"These rapid, nastic motions are based on cells and tissues that are already there," Nielsen said."It's easy for a plant to build new cells and tissues during growth, but it's not as easy to engineer an object or machine to completely change the way it's organized. We hope studying these motions can inform us about how to make efficient adaptive materials that display some of the same types of flexibility that we see in biological systems."

When this technology matures, Wang said it could enable robots that change shape like elephant trunks or snakes to maneuver under a bridge or through a tunnel, but then turn rigid to grab a hold of something. It also could lead to morphing wings that would allow airplanes to behave more like birds, changing their wing shape and stiffness in response to their environment or the task at hand.

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Better Way to Diagnose Pneumonia

Called PneumoniaCheck, the device created at Georgia Tech is a solution to the problem of diagnosing pneumonia, which is a major initiative of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Pneumonia, an inflammation of the lungs, kills about 2.4 million people each year. The problem is particularly devastating in Africa, Southeast Asia and the Eastern Mediterranean, where a child dies of pneumonia every 15 seconds.

Developed by mechanical engineering students, graduate business students and faculty at Georgia Tech, PneumoniaCheck will be commercially launched this month to healthcare professionals through the startup company, MD Innovate Inc.

"Georgia Tech created a simple and new device to detect the lung pathogens causing pneumonia," said David Ku, Georgia Tech Regents' Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Lawrence P. Huang Chair Professor for Engineering Entrepreneurship in the College of Management, and Professor of Surgery at Emory University."It has the potential to save more lives than any other medical device."

Last year, Ku was asked by the head of virology at the CDC to develop a quick and economical way to diagnose pneumonia, particularly in developing nations where it is a leading cause of death among children.

Ku challenged a group of mechanical engineering and bioengineering graduate students to develop an accurate device for diagnosing pneumonia. Current sampling methods using the mouth and nose are only 40 percent effective. The samples are typically contaminated by bacteria in the mouth, which leads to misdiagnosis and an incorrect prescription of antibiotics.

In developing nations, many children with respiratory infections fail to receive adequate care, and the overuse of antibiotics has led to an increase in drug-resistant bacteria. An accurate, easy-to-use and widely available new diagnostic test could improve identification of bacterial respiratory infection in children, reducing the inappropriate use of antibiotics and the long-term negative impacts of drug resistance, according to a recent article inNaturetitled"Reducing the global burden of acute lower respiratory infections in children: The contributions of new diagnostics."

As a Tech graduate student, Tamera Scholz and her peers developed the solution -- PneumoniaCheck.

The device contains a plastic tube with a mouthpiece. A patient coughs into the device to fill up a balloon-like upper airway reservoir before the lung aerosols go into a filter. Using fluid mechanics, PneumoniaCheck separates the upper airway particles of the mouth from the lower airway particles coming from the lungs.

"It's interesting because it's so simple," said Scholz (M.S. '10 Mechanical Engineering), who is now an engineer for Newell Rubbermaid."It's not a fancy contraption. It's a device that patients cough into and through fluid mechanics it separates upper and lower airway aerosols. Through each iteration, it got simpler.… I like that I will be able to see it make a difference in my lifetime."

Once the device was developed, Taylor Bronikowski and a group of Georgia Tech M.B.A. students from the College of Management started developing a business plan for PneumoniaCheck that starts locally and grows globally. They used the device as a test case to develop a Triple Bottom Line company in India that could result in financial profits, environmental sustainability and social benefits, such as jobs and healthcare.

"Our goal is to provide better medicine at a cost savings to patients and hospitals," Bronikowski said."We wanted a worldwide solution, so patients in developing nations can afford it."

Bronikowksi, Ku and Sarah Ku formed the startup company, MD Innovate Inc., in 2010 to manufacture the device in large quantities and organize distribution and commercialization. The device is now being used in pneumonia studies at Grady Memorial Hospital in downtown Atlanta and the Atlanta Veterans Administration Medical Center, Ku said.

The FDA has cleared PneumoniaCheck for sale in the U.S. The device is licensed but its patent is pending. The company will start selling PneumoniaCheck in the U.S. in January and it could hit other countries in two years, Ku said.

"It's a great feeling, working on something that has the potential to save thousands of lives," Bronikowski said.

On the horizon, Ku and future Georgia Tech graduate students will be developing a simple and effective method for diagnosing pneumonia in regions without healthcare facilities or basic infrastructure.

For more information, visit:http://www.mdinnov8.com/

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Welders Can Breathe Easier With Chromium-Free Alloy, Research Suggests

The new nickel alloy consumable is more expensive compared to those already on the market, but worth the cost in situations where adequate ventilation is a problem.

That's why two Ohio State University engineers invented the alloy -- specifically to aid military and commercial welding personnel who work in tight spaces.

In tests, welds made with the new consumable proved just as strong and corrosion-resistant as welds made with commercial stainless steel consumables. When melted, however, the new alloy does not produce fumes of hexavalent chromium, a toxic form of the element chromium which has been linked to cancer.

All stainless steels contain chromium, but Gerald Frankel and John Lippold, both professors of materials science and engineering at Ohio State, determined that the consumable alloy that joins stainless steel parts together doesn't have to contain the metal.

Use of the new alloy essentially eliminates hexavalent chromium in the welding fumes.

The university has three issued US patents and a pending European patent application covering a series of alloys -- based on nickel and copper but with no chromium -- all of which can be used with standard welding equipment.

The new alloy is expensive, however. The engineers estimated that it would cost five to 10 times more than standard welding consumables, depending on metal prices.

The Occupational Safety and Health Administration sets limits on workers' exposure to hexavalent chromium in welding fumes, which affect welders themselves and their surrounding coworkers. Reduced exposure to such toxic fumes requires either extreme ventilation or use of a chromium-free consumable.

Frankel said that the high cost of the alloy would be justified in situations where ample ventilation may be impossible.

"I always think of someone welding a steel pipe, deep inside a ship at sea," he said."Ventilation might not be possible, and a breathing appartus for the welder would make working in a confined space even more difficult. In that case, using our alloy would lower the amount of ventilation needed, and help reduce costs overall."

Frankel is a corrosion expert; Lippold is a welding expert. Lippold was already looking for ways to limit the amount of another metal -- manganese, which can cause neurological damage -- in welding consumables, when Frankel approached him about chromium.

"We came up with an alloy that is compatible with stainless steel from a corrosion perspective, and a welding process that results in high quality welds," Lippold said."It is a drop-in replacement for stainless steel comsumables welders use now."

Sometimes welders use a consumable as a bare metal wire, and other times they need to use an electrode made from a metal core coated with flux -- a chemical agent that removes impurities from the weld. The Ohio State alloy works for either application.

In the laboratory, the researchers performed electrochemical tests to optimize the composition for corrosion resistance. They also performed mechanical tests of the weld joint to test the alloy's strength. The new alloy's performance was comparable to standard commercial welding consumables for stainless steel.

Frankel and Lippold have begun further testing of their alloy with Euroweld, Ltd., a manufacturer of specialty welding materials headquartered in Mooresville, North Carolina.

The engineers are now working on ways to lower the cost of the consumable.

The university will license the alloy and its applications for commercial development.

The Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program -- a partnership of the Department of Defense, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Department of Energy -- funded this research.

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Gas Stations Pollute Their Immediate Surroundings, Spanish Study Finds

"Some airborne organic compounds -- such as benzene, which increases the risk of cancer -- have been recorded at petrol stations at levels above the average levels for urban areas where traffic is the primary source of emission," Marta Doval, co-author of the study and a researcher at the UM, said.

The study, which has been published in theJournal of Environmental Management, shows that the air at petrol stations and in their immediate surroundings is affected by emissions stemming from evaporated vehicle fuels (unburnt fuels from fuel loading and unloading operations, refuelling and liquid spillages).

The research team measured the levels of"typical traffic" pollutants in different parts of the urban area of Murcia, and calculated the quotients for the levels of an aromatic compound (benzene) and a hydrocarbon (n-hexane) at three Murcia petrol stations (near the petrol pumps and surrounding areas) to find the distance at which the service stations stop having an impact.

"In the three cases studied we obtained maximum distances of influence of close to 100 metres, although the average distance over which this contamination has an effect is around 50 metres," Enrique González, the UM researcher who led the research team, said.

However, the distances depend on the number of petrol pumps, the amount of fuel drawn from them, traffic intensity, the structure of the surroundings, and weather conditions.

According to the researcher,"the more contaminated the zone surrounding the petrol station as a result of other causes (traffic), the lower the impact of the two pollutants at the service station." If traffic in the area surrounding the petrol station is very intense, and exceeds the emissions from the station itself, pollution at the service station is"overlapped and goes unnoticed" over short distances.

Advice for new constructions

The research study shows that a"minimum" distance of 50 metres should be maintained between petrol stations and housing, and 100 metres for"especially vulnerable" facilities such as hospitals, health centres, schools and old people's homes."Ideally, the 100 metre distance should be respected in plans for building new houses," says Doval.

The researchers propose carrying out this study at new construction areas in which it is planned to build these kinds of facilities. However, petrol stations are not the only source of emission of these pollutants.

"There is not much use in protecting people from petrol stations if the other sources of emission (above all traffic and industries near population hubs) are not controlled or reduced," stresses González.

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Engineers Predict How Fire Spreads in Warehouses

Results of this research were recently published in the journalCombustion and Flame.

Despite many years of research, including the development of analytical and numerical models and extensive experimentation, the complexity of the process of upward flame spread continues to confound the fire-research community.

"Warehouse fires are definitely a big problem," said Michael Gollner, co-author of the paper and a UC San Diego mechanical and aerospace engineering Ph.D. student."It has been recently found that fully protected warehouses have burned down and that the sprinkler systems can't always control the fires. We still don't understand all the intricacies of this problem."

In their research, Gollner and his team are focusing on the most commonly used packaging material in warehouses -- corrugated cardboard -- which has been found to affect predictions of upward flame spread by current descriptions. As part of the study of the combustion of boxes of commodities, rates of upward flame spread during early-stage burning were observed during experiments on wide samples of corrugated cardboard. The research stems from previous experiments Gollner performed focused on the burning of cardboard in collaboration with Ali Rangwala, a professor in the Department of Fire Protection Engineering at the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and a UC San Diego graduate.

"The flame didn't spread exactly as was assumed so we did some further analysis on how the flame spread on a small scale," Gollner said."What we found is that the cardboard, while in the past was assumed to be a solid material, is actually not. There are different layers, and when it burns some of the cardboard actually peels up, so it slows the rate at which fire spreads. This is very important when you are determining how long it takes a fire to reach a sprinkler and trigger a water spray. At the initial phase, that's when you can actually extinguish a fire most easily. Calculating the sprinkler activation times is really important in designing a warehouse protection system."

Forman Williams, a UC San Diego mechanical and aerospace engineering professor and co-author of the paper, said the ultimate objective of this research is to help create better classifications of fire hazards in storing commodities and materials in warehouses.

"The density and the number of sprinklers they use in a warehouse and the flow rates of sprinklers are determined by the classifications and categories of the packaging material. So we are trying to help determine what the criteria should be," Williams said.

The engineers' warehouse fire research, Gollner said, is appealing to the insurance industry and the national regulatory industry, including the National Fire Protection Association, all of which have a big priority in making sure warehouses are safe.

"One of the biggest concerns is that these systems are designed for firefighter response; they are not made to put themselves out," Gollner explained."They are made to contain themselves until firefighters can enter.…Hopefully this will help become a part of new commodity classification standards in the future and in the way warehouses are designed. We hope to allow them to design warehouses safer not only to protect the goods in these warehouses but also the people who work in them and the firefighters who have to respond."

Next on the researchers' agenda is to conduct follow-on experiments looking at how fire spreads on surfaces at different angles, a project currently sponsored by the Society of Fire Protection Engineers, Educational and Scientific Foundation.

"We would like to understand better what controls the fire spread in different situations," Williams said."There are lots of things we really don't understand, although fire has been around for a very long time."

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An Ice-Bar Made from Pure Ice

Building structures from ice and snow is probably something everyone has tried in their youth. Today, using ice as a building material is also something which is being discussed by scientists. The research group supervised by Prof. Kollegger of the Institute of Structural Engineering is looking into ways of building large-scale, stable domes made of ice. Following a thorough preparatory and research phase, a new ice dome construction method is now being put to the test in Obergurgl -- a world first. This structure, showing more than 10 metres free span, is now home to a bar -- for as long as the temperatures are low enough.

Using ice as a building material has actually been done before: entire ice hotels have been built in e.g. Scandinavia."In most cases though the spans of the structures are small or the ice is not a load-bearing component and merely acts as cladding for the actual construction," explains Prof. Kollegger. The team of Vienna University of Technology has developed an ice dome which presents a stable and free-standing safe structure, and does not require additional support using other building materials. Theoretical calculations and several experiments have been carried out in this area over the past few years and, thanks to the latest technology, ice structures which are large and stable enough to actually be used as serviceable buildings can now be built.

Slow deformation process - like a glacier

First, a 20 cm-thick plate of ice is cut into 16 segments. These two-dimensional segments have then to be transformed into a three-dimensional structure. The University research team takes advantage of one property of ice, known as"creep behaviour." If pressure is applied to the ice, it can slowly change its shape without breaking. Glacial creep functions similarly."The segments of ice are placed on stacks of wood. Then, under the load of its own weight, the ice begins to change shape all by itself, resulting in a curved dome segment," explains Sonja Dallinger, research assistant at the Institute of Structural Engineering and on-site manager of the Obergurgl construction experiment.

The greatest challenge that had to be faced was the prevention of any breakage of the individually curved segments when assembling the dome. To solve this issue, a wooden tower was erected and the dome segments were held together by means of steel chains. The wooden tower could only be removed once all the segments had been positioned correctly and the ice dome stood on its own.

Austria's coolest bar

The ice dome was constructed in front of the spa area of the Hotel Alpina in Obergurgl and is presently being used as an ice bar. The drinks are definitely pretty cool -- and of course it's up to you whether or not to wear a cocktail dress!

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