NRG

Category: Research

  • Destroying “Forever Chemicals” Using Supercritical Water

    Destroying “Forever Chemicals” Using Supercritical Water

    “Forever chemicals,” named for their ability to persist in water and soil, are a class of molecules that are ever-present in our daily lives, including food packaging and household cleaning products. Because these chemicals don’t break down, they end up in our water and food, and they can lead to health effects, such as cancer or decreased fertility.

    Last month, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency proposed to give two of the most common forever chemicals, known as PFOA and PFOS, a “superfund” designation, which would make it easier for the EPA to track them and plan cleanup measures.

    Cleanups would obviously be more effective if the forever chemicals could be destroyed in the process, and many researchers have been studying how to break them down. Now a team of researchers at the University of Washington has a new way to destroy both PFOA and PFOS. The researchers created a reactor that can completely break down hard-to-destroy chemicals using “supercritical water,” which is formed at high temperature and pressure. This technology could help treat industrial waste, destroy concentrated forever chemicals that already exist in the environment and deal with old stocks, such as the forever chemicals in fire-fighting foam.

    The team published these findings on Sept. 7 in Chemical Engineering Journal.

    Read more here!

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.
  • 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.