Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has approved Stevens as a founding partner for a new Industry-University Cooperative Research Center (IUCRC). The Growing Ocean Energy Technologies and the Blue Economy (GO Blue) Center will be a collaborative effort among Stevens, the University of Michigan and Texas A&M-Corpus Christi.

This cooperative effort aims to find innovative ways to harness the untapped power potential from ocean tides, waves and currents, to help the energy transition in coastal and island communities.

Muhammad Hajj, chair of the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering, is the lead investigator for Stevens, which has received $597,136 in funding from the NSF’s $2.2 million project. Professor Hajj, the director of the Davidson Laboratory, is joined by co-PIs Raju Datla from the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering, as well as Lei Wu from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Gizem Acar from the Department of Mechanical Engineering.

“GO Blue is committed to accelerating marine energy technological innovations in support of traditional and emerging blue economy industries,” said Hajj. “By working beside esteemed academic institutions, as well as with corporate partners who will bring their industry expertise, we will be able to engage in synergetic high-impact technology development and experiential workforce training, leading to successful technology transfer and commercialization.”

Read more: https://www.stevens.edu/news/stevens-co-founds-renewable-energy-center-with-michigan-texas-a-and-m-corpus.

Professor Dibyendu ‘Dibs’ Sarkar is the principal investigator alongside co-principal investigator Christos Christodoulatos on a project to develop technology that will make it easier to extract nickel from the marginal ultramafic Serpentine Barrens soils in the Western and Eastern U.S. Sarkar and Christodoulatos, both professors in Stevens’ Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering, have received an $832,269 grant from the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy (ARPA-E) – a U.S. government agency in the U.S. Department of Energy. The Stevens professors will work with Michigan Technological University, the primary institution for the $1.9 million project.

Given that nickel mining is practically non-existent in the U.S. at this time, phytomining of nickel from secondary nickel-rich sources is crucial for meeting the metal demand needed for clean-energy technologies. However, the phytomining process is difficult largely due to the lack of plant-available nickel to extract from nickel-enriched soils by hyperaccumulator (HA) plants.

The goal of this project, titled “Chemically and Biologically Catalyzed Phytomining of Nickel from Serpentine Barren Soils,” is to develop a chemically and microbiologically catalyzed phytomining (CMPM) technology that will make it easier for HA plants to extract nickel from the nickel-rich soils in Serpentine Barrens.

Specifically, the project investigators will use environment-friendly, biodegradable chemicals and microbial agents to try to make it easier for HA plants to extract and uptake nickel then find efficient and scalable methods to harvest the nickel from the resulting biomass. Finally, they will attempt to find nickel-tolerant accumulation mechanisms in HA plants, develop a real-time nickel sensor and perform life cycle and techno-economic analyses.

Cheng Chen — an associate professor and Nariman Farvardin professor in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering — is exploring the next frontier of renewable energy with a recent Department of Energy grant of $1,521,587 for his project, “High-Temperature Testing of Proppants for EGS and Simulation of Electromagnetic Fracture Mapping Using Electrically-Conductive Proppants.” Utah Frontier Observatory for Research in Geothermal Energy serves as prime.

With this award, Chen and his collaborators from Colorado School of Mines and University of Texas at Austin will investigate enhanced geothermal systems (EGS), or human-made geothermal energy reservoirs — a promising form of renewable energy with the potential to power 65 million American homes and businesses.

Chen’s project has two primary aims. First, the team will experimentally test the high-temperature performance of electrically-conductive (EC) proppants under EGS conditions. They will also use numerical simulation to explore how EC proppants and fluids can be used in fracture detection and mapping, as the current technologies for imaging and mapping of man-made fractures in EGS reservoirs are still in early stages.

Principal Investigator (PI) Dibyendu “Dibs” Sarkar and Co-PI Christos Christodoulatos, both professors in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Ocean Engineering at Stevens Institute of Technology, and Co-PI Zhiming Zhang, professor at Rowan University, received an award of $687,432 (plus optional funds of $208,000) from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for their project, “Making SCWO Treatment of PFAS-Contaminated Water More Sustainable.”

Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a group of emerging and persistent organic contaminants, which have come to be known as “forever chemicals” because they do not break down, but rather persist in the environment indefinitely. This problem is especially pronounced in military sites; more than 700 military bases have reported PFAS contamination. There is now an urgent demand for more effective PFAS treatment methods.

One such method is supercritical water oxidation (SCWO). However, while SCWO has been effective in destroying certain PFAS species, the pressurization and preheating involved in this process is highly energy-intensive — and, hence, cost-prohibitive.

Sarkar and Christodoulatos propose concentrating the PFAS from contaminated water before treating it with SCWO. This practice will reduce the quantities of media that require treatment, which will reduce energy consumption and, in turn, cost. By implementing this PFAS preconcentration step, Sarkar’s team will improve the energy efficiency, cost effectiveness — and overall sustainability — of the use of SCWO to treat aqueous PFAS contamination.