This week Colman Engineering would like to highlight the Virginia Mennonite Retirement Community (VMRC) and Foundation. Providing independent, assisted, complete, and individualized residential options, VMRC operates on the foundation of compassion, hope, meaning, and growth.

Colman Engineering has been fortunate to work with VMRC and feel we share their passion for serving the community. Colman Engineering, working with Blueline, have strived to provide VMRC with new townhouse and duplex style accommodations, parking lot and entrance designs, additional residential conceptual planning, and more, in order to make a positive impact on the capacity of VMRC to care for individuals in our community.

Through their mission to provide compassionate care and the generosity of others, VMRC is able to provide quality health services by dedicated staff, nutritious meals, a social and pleasant atmosphere, wellness activities, outreach and engagement programs, and spiritual care on their campus.
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Find out more about VMRC and how to give at https://www.vmrc.org/index. 

Conjuring an image of “nature” typically entails lush forests, deep canyons, sunsets over the horizon, or whatever your favorite landscape may be. The commonplace reason for “returning to nature’ has been a reset button for the overstimulated brains of the modern person. Viewed as separate, purer, and even foreign, some of the most fascinating elements of nature often go overlooked by the everyday passerby.

However, the concrete jungle that envelops most of the developed world seems to be creeping closer to its natural roots. Our deep admiration and awe of the non-human world combined with our obsessive drive to innovate is blurring the lines between the landscapes. Some of what we see as the simplest elements of nature are turning into impressive feats of engineering.

As the world refocuses on the Sustainable Development Goals, responsible engineering is at the forefront of what could be considered a metamorphosis. Organizations such as the Biomimicry Institute, Biomimicry 3.8, and a growing cadre of universities are creating nature-inspired solutions to help grow a healthier planet.

Our built environment is held together by a glue of concrete creating a bifurcating web between humanity and the more organic, non-human elements. The scale of concrete use across the planet is immense, with the industry accounting for roughly 7% of global greenhouse gas emissions. New research in materials science is harnessing the power of nature to reinvent concrete at its core. The profound technologies explained below, designed to mimic basic biology, could positively impact industrial sustainability for generations.

One example of such engineering is self-healing concrete. The smallest of cracks can grow the mightiest of oaks, but they can also create an unseen world of destruction, corrosion, and instability. Dilapidated infrastructure remains a pervasive issue, and researchers at Binghamton University and the State University of New York are working to nip this problem in the bud. Inspired by the ability of the human body to heal itself after injury, self-healing concrete uses a fungus called Trichoderma reesei to seal the fractures as they crop up. Fungal spores and nutrients are added to the concrete matrix during mixing and then lies dormant until the cracking first appears. When enough water and oxygen penetrate the split, the fungal spores germinate and grow. Precipitating calcium carbonate as a byproduct of the fungal growth, the cracks fill, cutting off the supply of oxygen and water and mending the break. The fungi again form spores and wait patiently for the next crack to appear. 

Another engineering adaptation adopts lobster inspired patterns in 3D printed concrete. This method of manufacturing has the potential to improve time, effort, and material efficiencies in civil engineering design projects. By biomimicking the spiral patterns in lobster shells, 3D printed concrete enables strength to be directed precisely to areas needing increased structural support. Exoskeletons like the ones fabricated by crustaceans have evolved to harness key advantages in design for stability and performance. Emerging 3D printing technologies greatly enhance engineering productivity and will transform the way our built environment is created from the ground up. This layer-by-layer approach slashes costs, time, and enhances finished engineering projects by utilizing bio-mimicked combinations of printing patterns, material choices, models, and reinforcement options.
 
Our reliance on concrete to stabilize our environment is not without costs, however. Like we mentioned, the carbon emissions from producing 4 billion tons of cement per year will proliferate detriment to the atmosphere. Although extending its life through the self-healing and 3D printed innovations, researchers at Aalto University are trying to move away from concrete use altogether. Developing a bio-based coating for wood may be the answer. Prone to degradation from moisture and sunlight, wood is not always the first choice of building materials. However, researchers have harnessed the innate resiliency of trees in the form of lignin. This abundant wood polymer is often regarded as a waste product in biorefinery and pulp processing. It is estimated that between 60 and 120 million tons of lignin is isolated annually world-wide, and of that, 98% is incinerated. Therefore, the potential applicability of lignin as a coating material is huge. Currently, protective coatings are primarily petroleum-based and included environmentally harmful substances. Outperforming traditional synthetic options, a lignin-based sealant coating is a safe, low-cost, high-performing construction option. Again, nature has provided us with an anti-corrosive, anti-bacterial, anti-icing, UV-shielding, bio-mimicked alternative.
The global urge to meet rising sustainability standards continues to drive material transformations and bio-mimicked alternatives even further. The longevity, persistence, adaptability, common in both nature and humanity, enables us to see, and emulate, the gifts that reside just outside our industrial frame of reference. While basic biology-based innovations provide us with sustainable growth opportunity, they are also the sincerest form of flattery for the vastly beautiful and complex world we are a part of.
 
Citations:
Aalto University. (2021, July 23). Bio-based coating for wood outperforms traditional synthetic options: Researchers turn a non-toxic residue into wood coating that resists abrasion, stain, and sunlight.ScienceDaily.RetrievedSeptember20,2021,from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/07/210723105310.htm
Binghamton University. (2018, January 17). Self-healing fungi concrete could provide sustainable solution to crumbling infrastructure: New concept offers low-cost, pollution-free and sustainable approach to fixing concrete. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/01/180117152511.htm
RMIT University. (2021, January 19). Bio-inspired: How lobsters can help make stronger 3D printed concrete. ScienceDaily. Retrieved September 17, 2021, from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210119102846.htm

​Reeling from yet another natural disaster of catastrophic proportions, the US looks to the challenges in the South with exhaustion, relief, sadness, hope, and perseverance. The human condition, however adverse to change we think we are, has an uncanny ability to recover, adapt, and thrive time and time again. Even so, this dynamically precarious state of perceived reliability and safety provided by our infrastructure is an ever-thinning veil of comfort.
Perhaps, the sheer magnitude of what we face with respect to climate change is simply not able to be fully realized. Maybe the trust of the American people in antiquated infrastructure systems is too great. Although, positively, it may be something else entirely…  

Throughout the previous decade, the world has watched history unfold as disasters such as Superstorm Sandy (2012), a once-every-500-year pluvial event in Michigan (2014), hurricanes Harvey (2017) and Michael (2018), a record-breaking 5 major storms in the Gulf (2020), and now the wrath of Ida (2021), ravage the terrain. The detrimental intensity of these natural upheavals consistently pushes the boundaries of what our society can withstand.

Currently, we are in the midst of a paradigm shift as epically proportionate as 21st century superstorms. Modifications in behaviors, mindset, and industrial progress are barreling through the engineering sector in the form of resilience engineering. Resilience, defined as “the ability to spring back into shape”, is an American ideal permeating to our culture’s core. New to the scene, resilience engineering is taking that nucleic ethos and applying it to design, maintenance, and restoration objectives for buildings, infrastructure, and our communities. The image of a single flower growing out of a sidewalk crack should no longer be the poster image conjured in our minds. Instead, picture a punching bag that always rights and centers itself no matter the blow.

As Ida’s destruction is fresh in our forethought it’s only natural to envision coastal resilience as the primary pinch point of infrastructure durability. However, the modern pressures on engineering cannot  pigeonhole the sect into narrowly focusing on a single element of the changing climate and landscape. Resilience engineering works to address evolving threats to infrastructure, changing environmental thresholds resulting in extreme weather events, and disrupted timelines for necessary improvements regardless of size.  

Crossing traditional disciplinary boundaries has become a foundational tool for civil and environmental engineers, and reliance on cooperative approaches will only increase. Tandem planning efforts for land use, environmental considerations, social and equity factors together inform infrastructure design and systems within resilience engineering.

Therefore, the not-so-streamline path of progress has been diverted, requiring a fresh focus on the first principles of the new paradigm. The foundation of today’s engineering has been trained to balance loads versus capacities and evaluate cost-benefit optimization. Through resilient design, engineers will begin to fill the cracks by; integrating physical and social design considerations, quantifying, and incorporating uncertainty, use system-level approach to plan for infrastructure diversity and redundancy, and explicitly defining adaptive options within design decisions.
There to meet the needs of the community, civil and environmental engineers can adapt to replace traditional standards-based approaches with risk informed project plans, providing tangible technical solutions for sustainable, resilient progress.

It may seem, at times, that we have strayed too far, and the wobble has turned in to a topple, and the complexity of system inter-dependencies, regulatory constraints, the evolving nature of hazards, the limitations of conventional engineering solutions, and the humbling effort required to work across disciplines is just too heavy a burden to embrace. However, we cannot stagnate. It is clear the data of the 20th century can no longer inform the resilience planning of the future.
The inadvertently short-sighted planning, development and disaster policy of the U.S. is now barely operating as a broken crutch bowing under the atmospheric pressure of climate change, population growth, and technological acceleration. This is an advantage for engineers though. The ability to leverage risk informed approaches in order to mitigate flooding and reduce hurricane or other natural disaster impacts further fuels the resilience paradigm shift, emphasizing recovery instead of loss reduction.

But how is resilience measured?

The first study defining the components of resilience was the Resilience Measurement Index. However, it largely missed the mark by failing to address ability of engineered systems to adapt. But, like humans, adaptability needs to be built into the code, the structural DNA so to speak, of the policies, ordinances, regulations, and expectations of foundational infrastructure resilience planning across community scales. Statistical assessments for measuring the level of resilience such as the Critical Infrastructure Elements Resilience Assessment (CIERA) and the HAZUS Resiliency Evaluation are only two great places to start incorporating into planning methodologies.
Resilience engineering is a cyclic process with a need for assessment and reassessment of the systems throughout their life. Quantification of resilience has to divert focus from the sticker shock of the damage and look to future cost saving. Mutating building codes, a much less taboo practice than the typical sense of the work, could ubiquitously create a new “hazard landscape”. Increased adoption and enforcement of the new expressions of civil and environmental engineering DNA will be the rebuilding blocks of natural disaster recovery.

Achieving dynamic stability through resilience planning is not without significant challenges. The geographic size and scope of modern infrastructure, interdependencies between communities, bureaucratic corruption, conflicting regulations, and cascading failures resulting from natural disasters all hinder the resilience engineering movement. However, responsible engineering can’t be accomplished in isolation, nor should it be attempted. Accepting failures within systems, the inability of infrastructure to offer complete protection from disaster, and the inevitability that change is going to happen, will foster the advancement in recognition of our need for resiliency and cognition of the path forward. As engineers, we must ask ourselves from the beginning how we can ameliorate the infrastructure and communities we are a part of by taking a leadership role within the paradigm shift. With this resilient mindset, civil and environmental engineers are perfectly poised to become the “true protagonists” of the rejuvenation of United States urban infrastructure, and stewards of the cities as we all head into the eye of the storm. 

Citations:
Baecher, Gregory, et al. “Resiliently Engineered Flood and Hurricane Infrastructure: Principles to Guide the next Generation of Engineers.” National Academy of Engineering, The Bridge, 1 July 2019, https://www.nae.edu/212181/Resiliently-Engineered-Flood-and-Hurricane-Infrastructure-Principles-to-Guide-the-Next-Generation-of-Engineers 

Lu, Xinzheng, et al. "Quantification of disaster resilience in civil engineering: A review." Journal of Safety Science and Resilience 1.1 (2020): 19-30.

Rehak, David, et al. "Complex approach to assessing resilience of critical infrastructure elements." International journal of critical infrastructure protection 25 (2019): 125-138.

“Resilience | Definition of Resilience by Lexico.” Lexico Dictionaries | English, 2019, www.lexico.com/en/definition/resilience.

Water scarcity in the American West has historically been a contentious issue. In order to address growing water demands throughout a region with unpredictable precipitation, pressure was put on the federal government to take responsibility for storage and irrigation projects. The first half of the 1900’s saw major changes in water resource availability as the Reclamation Act of 1902 was passed by Congress.  Within the Department of Interior, the United States Bureau of Reclamation, initially was created to study projects in water development within western states containing federal lands.

The concept of these water development projects was to “reclaim” the drought ridden lands to explicitly alleviate the burden of water shortages and amplify accessibility for human and agricultural use. The Colorado River, a focal point in the American West, has held a mystical and wild air for centuries. Subject to both erratic behavior and seasonal, predictable, cyclical periods of drought and flooding, the river is made up of a vast network of tributaries. Throughout the complex web of water are a number of control mechanisms primarily in the form of dams (i.e. The Hoover Dam). These massive feats of engineering efforts to provide water security were successful, instigating a shift from construction to operation and maintenance.

Fast forward to 2021, and we are facing climate crisis and unprecedented resource challenges. Although the current and revised mission of Reclamation is to "manage, develop, and protect water and related resources in an environmentally and economically sound manner in the interest of the American public", it was originally stated by Reclamation that “the arid West essentially has been reclaimed. The major rivers have been harnessed and facilities are in place or are being completed to meet the most pressing current water demands and those of the immediate future."

Spanning 7 states almost 250,000 square miles, the Colorado River and surrounding watershed supports the livelihoods of nearly 40 million Americans. Facing incredible insistence, Reclamation solved the immediate water issues in the beginning of the 20th century, however it’s shortsighted and anthropocentric goals were unsustainable for the water resources.

Now these reservoirs that at one time saved the West are now fast deteriorating to such low levels the massive hydroelectric power generators in dams are unable to spin. Massive water restrictions on the horizon, it is the latest undertaking of modern engineering to again provide savior to the desperate state of the American West’s water resources.

Stakeholders are tasked with fulfilling the social planning goals that were inadvertently overlooked from Reclamation’s initial mission. Retrofitting the awe-inspiring architecture along the Colorado River is not entirely feasible, however, the structured creativity of engineering opens new solution avenues.
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Contingency plans are now common documents for municipalities, their governing bodies, and stakeholders. Offering an opportunity to explore and expand demand management techniques, drought contingency plans suggest collaborative efforts to enhance mechanisms controlling water resource growth planning, and address water needs across multiple regions. Among these suggestions are updating municipal development codes with water-smart parameters, expanding water market transactions to facilitate increased engagement between municipalities, and establishing an atlas of collaborative frameworks for environmental organizations, engineers, and other shareholders.
 
The Water SMART Program is also one of the latest mitigation efforts put forth by Reclamation. The Program combines funding for subprograms aimed at tackling improvement projects related to water resources. Water recycling and reuse projects are at the top of the funding list through the Program. Participants are also able to apply for grants to make efficiency improvements to water and energy infrastructure. Additional consideration is given to those applying with projects addressing improvements to water delivery systems. For example, engineering projects include improving canal lining and piping to reduce seepage loss, installing advanced metering systems, updating and automating water gates where necessary, implementing supervisory control and data acquisition systems to improve water management, and introducing new residential water meters. Through collaborative, sustainable planning, and responsible engineering , water reliability can be recaptured in the American West. 

Citations:
Booth, M. (2021, July 13). The Colorado river is drying up faster than federal officials can keep track. Mandatory water cuts are looming. The Colorado Sun.
https://coloradosun.com/2021/07/13/drought-drains-colorado-river-reservoirs-faster/.
Soeth, P. (2021, March 17). Projects throughout the Western United States receive $42.4 million in grants from Reclamation to conserve and use water more efficiently. News & Multimedia.                  https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/#/news-release/3794.
Soeth, P. (2021, August 5). Reclamation invests in grants to increase water sustainability in the West. News & Media. https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/#/news-release/3794.
Summitt, A. (2013). Conquering the Wild Colorado: The River before 1945. In Contested Waters: An  Environmental History of the Colorado River (pp. 3-30). Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado. Retrieved August 19, 2021, from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt4cgjp3.5
Tuser, C. (2021, August 18). Bureau of Reclamation Announces FIRST-EVER water shortage in Lake MEAD, Colorado River. Water & Wastes Digest. https://www.wwdmag.com/one-water/bureau-reclamation-announces-first-ever-water-shortage-lake-mead-colorado-river.
U.S. Congressional Research Service. Bureau of Reclamation: FY2021 Appropriations (F11465; Jan. 8, 2021) ,by Unknown. Text pdf: https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IF/IF11465.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) is a scientific government agency spanning the disciplines of geography, geology, biology, and hydrology. Engineers at the University of Missouri (UM) recently partnered with USGS to assess an environmental threat at the intersection of the organization’s biological and hydrological interests: the spread of invasive carp throughout American river basins.

Four species of invasive carp—grass, bighead, silver, and black—constitute researchers’ target population. In the early 1960s, institutions like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imported grass carp to fish farming stations as an experimental control for unwanted aquatic weed growth in wastewater, aquiculture, and retention ponds. By the next decade, intentional and accidental releases had enabled grass carp to enter open water systems and spread to more than 16 states. In subsequent years, bighead, silver, and black carp experienced similar patterns of importation and expansion into open waters.

Since the early 2000s, institutions and organizations across the country have recognized and sought to slow the spread of invasive carp. The tolerance, fecundity, size, and appetite of these species enable their rapid spread throughout American waterways. As carp spread, they jeopardize the survival of competing native plant and animal species. Commercial and local fishing operations face economic risks when habitats are overtaken by invasive fish.

The carp not only threaten water and economic ecosystems but also create safety hazards in recreational environments. Bighead and silver carp possess a powerful startle reflex that enables them to jump up to 10 feet above water when frightened. Boaters in bighead and silver carp habitats have reported injuries as a result of collisions with fish.

The partnership between USGS and UM engineers seeks to provide scientists with knowledge of invasive carp spawning practices and egg drift patterns. “We want to be able to control these fish,” says Duane Chapman, the team’s supervisory research fish biologist from USGS’s Columbia Environmental Research Center. Chapman is confident that the expertise of Binbin Wang, UM Assistant Professor of civil and environmental engineering and the university’s project representative, will enable improved forecasts of where carp live.

Wang specializes in the physics of environmental flows. He and his fellow researchers will further develop his innovative 3-dimensional turbulence modeling tools in order to locate possible invasive carp spawning areas in river habitats. Wang’s modeling generates environmental flows like river currents as three-dimensional structures, rather than traditional, oversimplified two-dimensional models that often fall short of supplying useful information for large and turbulent rivers.

The team hopes that they can use information derived from Wang’s new model to anticipate spawning locations and possibly create structures that will prevent the hatching of invasive carp, thereby providing balance to an overtaxed ecosystem.

Click here to learn more about the partnership between the United States Geological Survey and the University of Missouri. To learn more about invasive carp in American waterways, click here.

As summer enters full swing throughout the United States—bringing with it record-setting heat waves, threats of power outage, and cases of heat-related illness—scientists, engineers, and urban planners are considering urban surface alternatives that might reduce the effects of heat pollution in cities.

Many cities around the world record average temperatures between 2 and 4°C warmer than neighboring rural areas. This phenomenon, known as the Urban Heat Island effect, occurs because typical urban surfaces (like pavement) absorb more heat than natural surfaces (like grass) which often characterize rural regions.

For the individuals who live in urban centers, stakes are high (and climbing higher). From 2004 to 2018, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recorded an annual average of 702 heat-related deaths in the United States. As global warming increases the likelihood of extreme weather events like heat waves, the need for effective remediation against heat pollution grows. Otherwise, we could see cities throughout the world become unlivable for part or all of the year.

In a paper recently published by the journal Nature Communications, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh’s Swanson School of Engineering model the effects of reflective surface applications on conventional urban surfaces in a neighborhood. Coauthors Sushobhan Sen and Lev Khazanovich used Computational Fluid Dynamics to model air currents in a prototypical neighborhood as it was subjected to alternate spatial distributions of reflective surfaces. Their research yields promising insights that can be used to address urban heat pollution.

The team found that widespread application of reflective surfaces reduced air temperatures throughout the simulated neighborhood by up to 1.9°C, but this came with a significant investment. Alternate models revealed that temperature reductions as great as 1.1°C could be generated by adding reflective materials to 50% of existing surfaces, rather than 100%.

In cases where researchers located reflective surfaces upstream from conventional surfaces, cooler air currents penetrated the downstream homes in addition to upstream homes. Because reflective surfaces are cooler than conventional surfaces, dominant wind cools as it passes through high reflectance areas and continues to travel downstream, cooling the rest of the city at a reduced cost.
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Sen notes that strategic placement of reflective surfaces is key. The effectiveness of high reflectance surfaces declines when they are placed downstream of or parallel to the dominant wind direction—less mixing of air restricts cooling to the part of the neighborhood with reflective surfaces. In order to maximize the effectiveness of minimal resources, engineers and urban developers must evaluate both spatial distribution of reflective surfaces and dominant wind streams throughout neighborhoods. In doing so, they enable a substantial decline in city temperatures with half the material investment required of total surface application.
 
Click here to read Sen and Khazanovich’s work in the journal, Nature Communications. To learn more about heat-related deaths in the United States, click here.

Concrete has dominated the modern construction industry since the start of its commercial manufacturing in the nineteenth century. Asphalt concrete, a specific variety of concrete used for paving and typically referred to as “asphalt,” gained popularity during this same period. As the foremost option for road construction, asphalt’s popularity rose in conjunction with the commercial automobile industry. Today, concrete is the most commonly used building material in the world, and second only to water as the world’s most widely used substance.

Despite worldwide popularity, concrete and asphalt structures can fall short of their expected lifespans. Modern concrete and asphalt structures are known to deteriorate far faster than their historical counterparts. Deterioration takes many forms: cracks, breakdown into fine particles, interior hollowing, and separation into layers. All forms of deterioration threaten the integrity and safety of structures, translating into decreased lifespans and increased maintenance or replacement costs.

When compared to the endurance of historical concrete, widely studied processes like aggregate expansion, chemical damage, and rebar corrosion (in reinforced structures) present only a partial picture of deterioration root causes for modern concrete structures and asphalt pavements. A paper recently published by the journal PLOS ONE sheds light on one significant additional cause of deterioration.

The paper authors—a team of researchers drawn from six diverse institutional environments (medicine, manufacturing, higher education, and consulting)—began their inquiries with the unexplained odor that emanates from commercial cement when mixed with water. The researchers hypothesized that the odor derived from organic matter. From there, they examined the presence of organic matter in relation to concrete deterioration.

Currently, scientists and inspectors determine deterioration rates through surface crack measurements and a chemical test. This team of researchers used a micro focus CT scanner, like those used in medical settings, to develop cross-sectional images of asphalt and concrete samples. The samples originated from a variety of geographical locations and time periods where unexplained asphalt and concrete damage had occurred. After procurement, researchers exposed the samples to test conditions reproduced from moisture permeation levels calculated in the field. This permeation process enabled the team to accurately represent the real-world relative humidity of summer.

Researchers determined that asphalt and concrete samples contained organic molecules from a variety of sources: phthalates, surfactants, windshield washer fluids, and diesel exhaust particulates. Comparisons between CT scans showed that phthalates, chemicals used to increase the durability of plastics, had the most significant effect on concrete and asphalt deterioration. For the first time, researchers demonstrated that organic matter levels, whether introduced during the production process or real-world exposure, were indicators for the deterioration present in modern concrete and asphalt.

The researchers believe that their findings will contribute to the development of enduring concrete and asphalt materials and structures. To read more about the study and findings, click here. 

Engineers use time-tested, evidence-based physical laws to determine how materials will behave in a particular situation. With knowledge of a material’s structural makeup, engineers can calculate the integrity of a design—built or theoretical—to ensure that structures fulfill the functions required of them.

The design innovations of previous decades have led to a rise in the use of composite materials throughout the engineering field. Composite products like concrete, plywood, and fiberglass confront consumers everyday as mainstays of modern design. Composite materials can offer expanded functionalities like increased strength or lightness as compared to their constituent materials. But as the complexity of material resources increases, so too does the complexity of equations required to calculate stresses and strains. Even with the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), up until now, engineers have been forced to code stress and strain equations into networks before AI can generate simulations and solutions.

New research published by Zhenze Yang, Chi-Hua Yu, and Markus Buehler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) reveals a process that can calculate the properties of a material through the use of machine learning and computer vision, rather than the input of differential equations (as is presently required).

Researchers selected a machine learning framework known as a Generative Adversarial Neural Network as the foundation of their AI model. In order to train the network, the team paired images depicting the internal microstructures of various materials under stress with color-coded images of the materials’ stress and strain values. After exposure to thousands of paired images, the network learned to calculate stresses based on the geometry of a material’s structural makeup.

Through extensive testing and AI exposure to additional scenarios, researchers also determined that their network could capture “singularities,” such as developing cracks in concrete, and accurately simulate the force and field changes resulting from such events. Overall, the research reveals a system capable of generating stress and strain calculations with less time, resources, and manpower than any other method known to the field of engineering.

Yang, Yu, and Buehler predict that their approach will lead to faster progressions through the engineering design process. Professionals like architects and materials inspectors will benefit from a tool capable of calculating material integrity with nothing more than a snapshot. In addition, nonexperts will be able to gather materials calculations for small scale and pet projects alike, because a fully trained version of the researchers’ network runs on computers with consumer-grade CPUs (central processing units).
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To view Yang, Yu, and Buehler’s recent publication in the journal Science Advances, click here.

Wind accounts for the highest percentage of renewable energy generation in the United States. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 8.4% of all electricity produced in the U.S. is derived from wind energy. In 2020, wind accounted for 43% of renewables-based electricity generation—5% more than hydropower and more than ten times the combined electricity yields of biomass, solar, and geothermal energy.

Electricity-generating wind turbines have occupied scattered spaces in the U.S. electricity landscape since their initial conception in the late nineteenth century. When oil shortages in the 1970s forced a reevaluation of the nation’s energy environment, federally funded research and development brought wind turbines into the mainstream.

Despite more than a century of use, the design of electricity-generating wind turbines has remained relatively unchanged. Now, Spain-based tech startup Vortex Bladeless is refreshing the traditional means of wind energy generation with a wind machine that forgoes the defining characteristics of a turbine.

Vortex’s wind machine is a modular, on-site wind energy generator without blades or rotating parts. The machine is comprised of a cylindrical body surrounding a central support that is anchored to the ground. Its ability to generate energy relies on a principle of fluid dynamics called called vortex shedding.

Vortex shedding occurs when fluids (like water or air) flow past a blunt body, creating alternating vortices at the back of the body that detach to form a “vortex street.” When wind passes through the blunt body, the cylinder oscillates toward the alternating low-pressure vortices and subsequently triggers a coil-and-magnet alternator system attached to the central support. Through this process, wind energy becomes mechanical energy becomes electrical energy. In action, the vortex machine resembles one prong of a struck tuning fork rather than the pinwheel shape of a turbine.

Vortex Bladeless launched initial manufacturing with a first series of Vortex Nano devices measuring in at 85 centimeters tall. The company has plans to manufacture generators in a variety of sizes in order to meet site-specific needs. Next on the list is the Vortex Tacoma: a 2.75-meter-tall generator weighing less than 15 kilograms with the capacity to generate 100w. Product features like variable sizing, a light weight, and a low center of gravity hold promise for the wind machine’s ability to occupy a variety of settings, whether rural hilltops or skyscraper railings.  

Click here to read more about electricity generation in the United States. For more on the Vortex Bladeless wind machine, click here.