Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar Series

Calendar of events for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar Series – Summer 2020

Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellows collaborate with Princeton faculty and/or senior researchers within an energy or environment-related field to articulate an interdisciplinary research plan that is aligned with the mission of the Andlinger Center. Every week, starting on June 24, a Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow will hold a public seminar to talk about his/her research and to answer questions from the academic community and prospective postdocs.

Kian Wee Chen

Algorithm-assisted design: supporting integrative design in the built environment

June 24 at 2pm

Chen’s research focuses on the development and use of digital tools to support the integrative design process for the built environment. Recently, he has extended his research to include using low-cost sensors and IoT devices in prototyping building design with innovative cooling and heating systems. Chen plans to further his research through developing collaborative tools that enable timely access to data and models to support multidisciplinary research/design of the built environment.
Website | Watch the video

Read Kian Wee's abstract

Algorithm-Assisted Design: Supporting Integrative Design in the Built Environment

Abstract
It has been estimated that by the year 2050, 64-69% of the world population will reside in urban areas. Urbanisation has been associated with an increase in energy usage. It is widely accepted that a well-designed built environment can mitigate this increase in energy usage. This requires designers (architects, landscape, and urban designers) to focus on assessing the environmental impacts of their designs when historically, they have been primarily focused on addressing social and political issues. To address the environmental issues associated with rapid urbanisation, designers will have to collaborate with engineers and scientists. However, designers, engineers and scientists lack a common ground for the exchange of knowledge because of the difference in their education and training. I propose the adoption of an algorithm-assisted design process to bridge the knowledge gap, where routine tasks are identified and performed automatically by algorithms, so that designers have more time to perform creative tasks. For example, by automatically visualising domain-specific data on a common platform, designers, engineers and scientists can spend more time interpreting the results for design than on data processing.

Tapomoy Bhattacharjee

Bacterial motility in porous media: implications for environmental bioremediation strategies

July 1 at 2pm

Bhattacharjee’s current research focuses on understanding and controlling the behavior of bacterial communities for water remediation. Bhattacharjee also collaborates with researchers in the Departments of Physics, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Molecular Biology, and at the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment. He also collaborates with researchers in bioremediation at the University of Virginia. Bhattacharjee published his most recent work from Princeton University in Nature Communications and Soft Matter. He is mentored by Prof. Sujit Datta in Chemical and Biological Engineering.
Twitter | Website | Watch the video

Read Tapomoy's abstract

Bacterial motility in porous media: implications for environmental bioremediation strategies

Abstract
While bacterial motility is well-studied on flat surfaces or in unconfined liquid media, in environment and energy applications, most bacteria are found in disordered porous media, such as soils, sediments, and subsurface formations. Understanding how porous confinement alters bacterial motility is therefore critical to processes ranging from fouling of oil reservoirs, sustaining plant growth, and remediating contaminants in soil. To address these problems, we have designed transparent porous media that enable direct visualization of bacteria in situ. Using this platform, first, we interrogate the migration of E. coli bacteria through the 3D pore space. Direct visualization enables us to reveal a new mode of hopping and trapping motility exhibited by individual cells, in stark contrast to the paradigm of run-and-tumble motility, in which cells are intermittently and transiently trapped as they navigate the pore space. Further, analysis of these hopping and trapping dynamics enables prediction of single-cell transport over large length and time scales. Second, we use 3D bioprinting to embed dense colonies of E. coli inside porous medium and investigate how bacterial hopping and trapping motility manifests in multicellular communities. We find that cellular chemotaxis drives collective migration and that this process depends sensitively on pore-scale confinement, colony density, and differential metabolism of nutrients. Finally, we focus on design strategies of synthetic porous media which enable us to bioprint and grow precisely structured bacterial biofilms—a powerful tool to create artificial biofilms for water remediation. Together, these studies highlight how this transparent porous medium provides a powerful platform to design and interrogate bacterial communities at their natural habitat—with implications for bioremediation and purifying contaminated water.

Luis Ceferino

Disaster resilience of distributed energy resources to earthquakes and hurricanes

July 8 at 4pm

Ceferino earned his doctoral degree in civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University where he studied the effects of large earthquakes on multiple urban systems including the power system. His thesis also focused on the policy implications for earthquake emergency planning and how to optimize the flow of patients, caregiving resources, and traffic during disaster responses.

At Princeton University, Ceferino works with Ning Lin, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering. Ceferino’s work leverages Lin’s expertise in hurricane and climate change modeling to model power systems during hurricanes, and provide solutions for more resilient infrastructure. Ceferino also works with researchers focusing on zero-carbon resources in the Andlinger Center.
Twitter | Website | Watch the video

Read Luis' abstract

Disaster Resilience of Distributed Energy Resources to Earthquakes and Hurricanes

Abstract
Distributed energy resources (DERs) are expected to increase the resilience of power systems to natural disasters by introducing multiple power-generation and-storage units close to the users. This presentation will show the findings of evaluating the increase in post-disaster power accessibility spurred by the rapid adoption of DERs after earthquakes and hurricanes. First, I will present a methodology that quantifies the power-generation performance of microgrid clusters and households with rooftop solar panels after earthquakes. Our assessment leveraged a novel high-resolution dataset on the current household adoption of solar panels, estimated using computer vision and satellite imagery. The methodology is applied to San Carlos, California, to demonstrate how the deployment of microgrids can increase its earthquake resilience. Second, I will present a methodology to quantify the power generation of solar panels during and after hurricanes. Exposed to high wind conditions and lower solar irradiance levels, solar panels can drastically reduce their capacity to generate energy. Our methodology combines hurricane hazard and vulnerability assessments with a proposed model to track irradiance decay during hurricanes. Our methodology is applied to the entire EastCoast of the United States to highlight hotspots where solar generation is at the highest risk.

Rebecca Ciez

Designing energy storage for climate goals

July 15 at 12pm

Rebecca Ciez is a former Andlinger Center Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow and, starting in the fall of 2020, a Postdoctoral Researcher at Columbia University and incoming Assistant Professor in Mechanical Engineering and Earth and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University. Ciez looks at the crucial transition of the electrification of transportation, specifically electric vehicle technology, and electricity generation technologies. On the former, she focuses on the interactions between electric vehicle technology and consumer adoption by developing a model of the state of used electric vehicles at their time of sale, and comparing this model with consumer willingness to pay for different vehicle attributes that would justify battery replacement between owners. For the latter, Ciez looks at design choices, operating methods, and how use requirements work together in solar energy generation and storage systems. Her talk is via the New Energy: Conversations with Early-Career Energy Researchers series at the Arthur L. Irving Institute for Energy & Society at Dartmouth.
Twitter | Website | Watch the video

Bastien Wild

Dissolving silicates to build solid carbon budgets: insights from nanoscale investigations of minerals, glass, and cements interfaces

July 22 at 2pm

Wild focuses on the mechanisms underlying the alteration of silicate materials, including minerals, glasses, and cements. In particular, silicate alteration rates have important implications for the long-term carbon cycle, the durability of urban infrastructure, and the feasibility of several low-carbon energy technologies, including green cements, carbon capture and storage, and radioactive waste storage.
Website

Read Bastien's abstract

Dissolving silicates to build solid carbon budgets: insights from nanoscale investigations of mineral, glass, and cement interfaces

Abstract
Silicate materials are widespread across natural settings and constitute key elements of sustainable materials and energy technologies. For instance, the dissolution of rock-forming silicate minerals, known as a control on the carbon cycle over geological timescales, has been identified as a key process for atmospheric carbon dioxide removal through the development of enhanced rock weathering approaches. In addition, understanding the dissolution of nuclear waste storage glass matrices or industrial byproducts such as blast furnace slags or fly ashes is crucial to evaluate the feasibility of several low-carbon emission technologies involving the development of durable nuclear waste depositories and the design of novel cements with a reduced carbon footprint.

However, state of the art knowledge on silicate material dissolution processes does not allow for reliable assessment of the weathering rates of minerals, cement and glass, thereby limiting the accuracy of the associated carbon budgets. In particular, the effect of passivation layers formed at fluid-silicate interfaces and the extrapolation of laboratory-based rates to field conditions constitute two important knowledge gaps tackled in this study.

We combined advanced experimental techniques with high-performance atomistic simulations to evaluate the impact of the formation of interfacial amorphous silica layers on silicate dissolution kinetics. Such nanoporous media were investigated in-situ using synchrotron-based grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS), atomic force microscopy (AFM), and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Furthermore, the mobility of water and alkali ions was evaluated via molecular dynamics (MD) modeling of nanoporous systems. We evaluated the ability of individual cylindrical silica nanopores to sustain concentration gradients by estimating their permeability and salt rejection capabilities.

An additional outcome of this project was the development of a new dissolution rate measurement technique, based on a coupled X-ray reflectivity (XRR) and vertical scanning interferometry (VSI) approach, delivering a relevant picture of the temporal evolution of fluid-silicate interfaces over a wider range of conditions than previously allowed.

Overall, our results open promising avenues for improved estimates of silicate dissolution rates in the field, which will serve as a basis to refined carbon budgets and associated energy strategies.

Princeton University

Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar Series

Calendar of events for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar Series – Summer 2020

Kian Wee Chen

Algorithm-assisted design: supporting integrative design in the built environment

June 24 at 2pm

Algorithm-Assisted Design: Supporting Integrative Design in the Built Environment

Tapomoy Bhattacharjee

Bacterial motility in porous media: implications for environmental bioremediation strategies

July 1 at 2pm

Bacterial motility in porous media: implications for environmental bioremediation strategies

Luis Ceferino

Disaster resilience of distributed energy resources to earthquakes and hurricanes

July 8 at 4pm

Disaster Resilience of Distributed Energy Resources to Earthquakes and Hurricanes

Rebecca Ciez

Designing energy storage for climate goals

July 15 at 12pm

Bastien Wild

Dissolving silicates to build solid carbon budgets: insights from nanoscale investigations of minerals, glass, and cements interfaces

July 22 at 2pm

Dissolving silicates to build solid carbon budgets: insights from nanoscale investigations of mineral, glass, and cement interfaces

Calendar of events for the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment
Distinguished Postdoctoral Fellow Seminar Series – Summer 2020