NRG

Author: Igor

  • Creating a Safer Hospital Environment

    Creating a Safer Hospital Environment

    “How can we make our operating room safer during the pandemic?”

    When Dr. James Hecker, an anesthesiologist at UW Medical Center, heard this question from a fellow physician, he thought about the problem not just as a doctor but also as an engineer.

    Hecker, who has a PhD in chemical and biomedical engineering, knew about the risks of airborne transmission of the novel coronavirus. It can remain in the air for hours on microdroplets released after someone with the virus coughs, sneezes or talks. These aerosols can also be produced during medical procedures, raising concerns for both patients and health care workers.

    But how such infectious aerosols might spread indoors—particularly in medical centers—is not well understood.

    To learn more, Hecker and Igor Novosselov, research associate professor in Mechanical Engineering and adjunct research associate professor in the Department of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences (DEOHS), launched a study to track the movement of aerosols in operating rooms using state-of-the-art sensors designed by Novosselov.

    The project recently received $25,000 in funding through the new Director’s Award from UW CoMotion, a university hub supporting collaborative research. The team includes Edmund Seto, associate professor in DEOHS, Martin Cohen, DEOHS principal lecturer and assistant chair and many other UW physicians and researchers.

    “I am trying to help to bring the incredible talent and technology at the UW into the sometimes insulated environments of our hospitals,” Hecker said.

    Fishing for aerosols

    Last week, the team began its first on-site experiments in UW Medical Center’s WISH, a simulated operating room used for training. They outfitted the room with dozens of Novosselov’s air monitoring sensors, each about the size of a deck of cards.

    Then the researchers used a medical nebulizer to create harmless saline particles that mimic aerosols and followed them to see where they went.

    They are searching for spots where air currents might trap aerosols and keep them from being flushed out by the hospital’s ventilation system.

    Novosselov likened these areas to a bend in a stream, where eddies form. “That’s where you want to go fishing,” he said.

    The sensors report particle counts in real time, allowing the scientists to model the distribution of aerosols at different heights and locations in the room, and to see how they are affected by people moving through the space.

    “We’re trying to characterize the entire room,” Novosselov said.

    Find out more about how NRG is helping monitor the hospital’s air here

  • NRG Wins CoMotion’s First Director’s Award

    NRG Wins CoMotion’s First Director’s Award

    We are pleased to announce that NRG is the recipient of a new CoMotion award that will support the development of University of Washington (UW) innovations that have potential for transformational impact in areas of pressing societal need.  Led my Professor Igor, we are joined by James Hecker, Associate Professor of Anesthesiology and Pain Medicine and Neuroanesthesia, Edmund Seto, Associate Professor of Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences, and Martin Cohen, Principal Lecturer in Environmental & Occupational Health Sciences to tackle the problem of aerosol fate and persistence in medical environments.  The team intends to deploy low-cost sensor networks in operating rooms to map out the spatial and temporal distribution of long-lived aerosols that may contain SARS-CoV-2 or other infectious agents in real time. “This information will help medical professionals develop effective mitigation and decontamination measures and save lives,” Igor says. The team is already thinking about how their technology might be deployed to facilitate the return to the workplace in post-COVID-19 times.

    For more information, check out the CoMotion’s article here.

  • NRG’s Aquagga Wins 2020 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge

    NRG’s Aquagga Wins 2020 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge

    The 2020 Alaska Airlines Environmental Innovation Challenge (EIC), hosted by the UW Foster School’s Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship, named Aquagga, co-founded by Brian Pinkard of UW Mechanical Engineering (ME) Novosselov Research Group and the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF), as $15,000 Alaska Airlines Grand Prize winners, extending the ME department’s and specially the Novosselov Research Group streak to two years in a row.

    In a competition that was held completely virtually and included a strong showing from ME with four teams named as finalists, Aquagga’s patented technology for destroying toxic and hard-to-treat PFAS chemicals wowed judges and earned them both the grand prize and the $1,000 UW Grand Challenges Impact Lab domestic prize.

    More Information can be found here!

  • Supercritical Water Gasification Offers Promising Waste-to-Energy Technology

    In a recently accepted article in the ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering journal, NRG student Brian Pinkard explores the reaction behavior of complex molecules such as methanol, ethanol and isopropyl alcohol in supercritical water.  Working with Professor Kramlich and Professor Novosselov of UW’s Mechanical Engineering department, Pinkard proposes global reaction pathways in addition to discussing the mechanisms for free radical reaction initiation, propagation and termination.

    More information on this recent article can be found here.

  • The Women of Fluid Mechanics

    Happy International Women’s Day!

    In honor of all the women across the world, we’d like the share a recent article one of our students, Courtney Otani, wrote for the American Physical Society.  Sharing her experience as a woman in engineering, Otani writes about her time attending the 2019 APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (DFD) and her engineering career.  While engineering and STEM currently remains heavily male dominant, we’d like to applause all the women who previously worked or are currently working hard to seek equal recognition.

    Otani’s full article can be read here.

  • AeroSpec Selected for UW’s Jones + Foster Accelerator

    AeroSpec Selected for UW’s Jones + Foster Accelerator

    The winner of past startup competitions, AeroSpec, has now been selected as one of the recipients of the Jones + Foster Accelerator program.  Guided by the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, AeroSpec will receive up to $25,000 after they completing six months of milestones under the mentorship of industry leaders from across the community. The J+F Accelerator has now awarded more than $1.4 million since the program began in 2010.

    AeroSpec provides a complete air quality monitoring system for the industrial segment using off-the-shelf electronics and proprietary software to create a real time air quality heat map of an indoor facility. “AeroSpec started the program with many possible directions,” said CEO Sep Makhsous. “Now we have a focused 3-year plan with clear goals and milestones to achieve.” AeroSpec is scheduled to officially launch in January 2021.

    More information can be found at UW’s Foster Blog.  If you are interested in joining AeroSpec, please reach out to Sep.

  • NRG Explores Electrohydrodynamic Flow in 2019

    NRG Explores Electrohydrodynamic Flow in 2019

    2019 proves to be a strong year for NRG’s research in electrohydrodynamic flow.  Electrohydrodynamics (EHD) involves the study of plasma actuators to generate plasma that can then be controlled with the application of an external flow, and in the past year NRG has produced 10 articles involving analytical, experimental, and numerical investigations of EHD.  From conference appearances to journal publications, NRG hopes to continue push the boundaries of EHD.  Related articles can be found here:

    • Novosselov, I.; Aliseda, A.; Riley, J.; Guan, Y., Study of Laminar Electrohydrodynamic Flows. Novosselov, I.; Aliseda, A.; Riley, J., Eds. ProQuest Dissertations Publishing: 2019.
    • Vaddi, R. S.; Guan, Y.; Novosselov, I., Particle Dynamics in Corona Induced Electro-hydrodynamic Flow. 2019.
    • Vaddi, R. S.; Guan, Y.; Chen, Z. Y.; Mamishev, A.; Novosselov, I., Experimental and Numerical Investigation of Corona Discharge Induced Flow on a Flat Plate. 2019.
    • Prasad, H. K. H.; Vaddi, R. S.; Chukewad, Y. M.; Dedic, E.; Novosselov, I.; Fuller, S. B., A laser-microfabricated electrohydrodynamic thruster for centimeter-scale aerial robots. 2019.
    • Guan, Y.; Vaddi, R. S.; Aliseda, A.; Novosselov, I., Comparison of Analytical and Numerical Models for Point to Ring Electro-Hydrodynamic Flow. 2019
    • Guan, Y.; Riley, J.; Novosselov, I., Three-dimensional Electro-convective Vortices in Cross-flow. 2019.
    • Vaddi, R. S.; Novosselov, I., Analytical Model for Electrohydrodynamic Thrust. Bulletin of the American Physical Society 2019.
    • Fillingham, P.; Guan, Y.; Sankar Vadi, R.; Novosselov, I., Numerical, Experimental and Analytical Investigation of the Planar Electrohydrodynamic Wall Jet. Bulletin of the American Physical Society 2019, 64.
    • Guan, Y.; Novosselov, I., Two relaxation time lattice Boltzmann method coupled to fast Fourier transform Poisson solver: Application to electroconvective flow. Journal of Computational Physics 2019, 397.
    • Guan, Y.; Riley, J.; Novosselov, I., Numerical analysis of 2D and 3D electrohydrodynamic convection instability with crossflow. Bulletin of the American Physical Society 2019.

  • NRG Students Present at 2019 American Physical Society

    Numerous NRG students, including Justin Davis, Yifei Guan, Patrick Fillingham, Ravi Vaddi, James Riley, Courtney Otani, and Elizabeth Rasmussen presented at this year’s 72nd Annual Meeting of the American Physical Society’s Division of Fluid Dynamics held in Seattle, WA.  Our research presentations range from electrohydrodynamic, particle science, combustion, and much more.  Click on each student’s name to see more about their research.

  • AN ITTY-BITTY ROBOT THAT LIFTS OFF LIKE A SCI-FI SPACESHIP

    AN ITTY-BITTY ROBOT THAT LIFTS OFF LIKE A SCI-FI SPACESHIP

    Our recently published work (collaboration with Autonomous Insect Robotics Lab) featured in wired magazine. 

    From the article:

    You may have heard of ion propulsion in the context of spacecraft, but this application is a bit different. Most solar-powered ion spacecraft bombard xenon atoms with electrons, producing positively charged xenon ions that then rush toward a negatively charged grid, which accelerates the ions into space. The resulting thrust is piddling compared to traditional engines, and that’s OK—the spacecraft is floating through the vacuum of space, so the shower of ions accelerate the aircraft bit by bit.

    A robot here on Earth, though, has air molecules at its disposal, so it doesn’t have to bother with xenon. In this case (known as electrohydrodynamic thrust), electricity flows into what is essentially a tiny comb made of a conductive metal. Each super-sharp tine throws off ions, which are attracted to a carbon fiber “collector” grid situated below.

    “On the way from Point A to Point B, they have multiple collisions with neutral molecules, which is air—nitrogen, oxygen, a little bit of CO2 and water,” says University of Washington mechanical engineer Igor Novosselov, coauthor of a recent preprint paper detailing his team’s system. “So what happens is that these ions accelerate the air toward the ground, providing the thrust.”

    Easy, right? No xenon to futz with or wings to flap or rotors to spin. But the reality is, ion propulsion comes with a host of problems that roboticists are just beginning to wrestle with.

    flying robot prototype and a penny

    One is power. It takes a lot of juice to produce enough ions to generate thrust, so much so that Novosselov and his colleagues have to tether their robot to a power source. Think of their machine like four separate ion thrusters stuck together, in total measuring an inch long. The idea with having four is that you could modulate the power for each, allowing the flier to steer like a quadcopter does.

    But that’s a ways off, because for now the machine can produce only a bit more thrust than it needs to get off the ground. That’s not enough to carry the battery and sensors and other electronics that would make steering and sustained flight possible. (As you can see below, a single tethered thruster subscribes to the chaos method of powered flight.) It’s not even as powerful as the previous UC Berkeley ion thruster it was modeled on.

  • NRG Team Wins Grand Prize at Innovation Challenge

    NRG Team Wins Grand Prize at Innovation Challenge

    A team from the research group (Motif Materials) idea to make battery technology more sustainable won the top prize at the Alaska Airline environmental innovation challenge. Check out more at Geekwire and Official Blog posts.