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| COLLEGE BRIEFS Cleaning up. ISU’s Center for Sustainable Environmental Technologies and faculty from ChemE, ME, and MSE will soon begin researching ways to improve hot gas clean up in coal plants thanks to two Department of Energy research grants totaling $400,000. Both projects concern hot gas contaminant and particulate removal techniques, areas where improvement is needed because current methods limit a plant’s efficiency. In the first project, ME and ChemE Professor Robert Brown and ME Professor Gerald Colver will study the formation of dust cakes and improve the performance of moving bed granular filters for hot gas clean up. The second project will focus on methods for producing a regenerable, superior calcium-based sorbent for cleaning up hot gas in integrated combined-cycle systems. ChemE Professors Thomas Wheelock and L. K. Doraiswamy and MSE Associate Professor Kristen Constant will collaborate on the research. Jolls in Science. “Phase,” a 3D software program designed by ChemE Professor Ken Jolls and former graduate students, Kong Tian, MSChE’97, and Richard Campero, PhDChE’98, has caught the attention of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A two-page review appeared in the October 15 issue of the association’s prestigious weekly magazine, Science. Phase uses high-performance computer graphics to illustrate thermodynamic property diagrams. It runs on Silicon Graphics IRIS workstations and contains 108 screen pages, including text screens and fixed and movable drawings. Perla Balbuena, ChemE assistant professor at the University of South Carolina, says the software is an excellent teaching tool for mixture thermodynamics. “The movable images allow many useful insights about phase equilibria, which would be extremely difficult to grasp without these visualization tools.” Interstate transportation. ISU’s Center for Transportation Research and Education (CTRE) was recently awarded the honor of heading the Midwest Transportation Consortium (MTC) program. MTC, a consortium of several Midwest universities, is funded by a five-year, $5 million U.S. Department of Transportation grant that requires matching funds for transportation-related research, education, and outreach. As manager of MTC, CTRE will provide region-wide transportation education and research. Plans include the development of a web-based virtual transportation community and research center along with multidisciplinary transpor-tation education programs at partner univer-sities. The center will also be a source of technology transfer in providing technical assistance and guidance to universities in the region. Speaking of CTRE. Stephen Andrle, manager of the Transit Cooperative Research Program at the Transportation Research Board in Washington, D.C., has been named director of the Center for Transportation Research and Education. He will administer transportation research programs and develop research and outreach proposals for regional, national, and international sponsors. |