RTI energy lab (Photo courtesy of RTI)

One of the founding members of the Research Triangle Energy Consortium three years ago, RTI has scientists working on projects that include the capture and reuse of carbon dioxide – the most prominent greenhouse gas in the Earth’s atmosphere – production of bio-crude from organic waste and a nanotechnology light bulb that promises to be more energy efficient than a fluorescent light and doesn’t contain harmful mercury.

Stimulus funds the U.S. Department of Energy has awarded in the past year to help the economy recover fueled RTI’s stepped-up energy research. Of the institute’s $750 million in estimated revenue this year, energy research will contribute about $12.5 million, said RTI spokesman Patrick Gibbons.

That’s still a small amount, but as Gibbons pointed out during a tour of the Johnson Building last month, “Energy is growing tremendously.” The Johnson Building, which opened four years ago, is home to most of the environmental and energy research on the sprawling, 50-year-old RTI campus. The tour was organized by SCONC, a Triangle-based group of science writers.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is funneling more than $35 billion into research projects nationwide. North Carolina universities, companies and institutes have been awarded nearly $2 billion – about $1 billion from the National Institutes of Health for medical research and more than $800 million from the DoE for energy research, energy efficiency and renewable energy projects.

Federal research funding has long been a lifeblood of North Carolina’s universities, particularly in medical research. Duke University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Wake Forest University garnered nearly 80 percent of North Carolina’s share of the $10 billion in stimulus funds the NIH awarded last year. RTI received about $35 million.

The state and the RTP area are not as well known for research into alternative energy and green technologies. About half of North Carolina’s share of the DoE’s more than $25 billion in stimulus funding so far has gone to the state’s two big utilities, Duke Energy and Progress Energy. RTI is involved in about a dozen energy research projects. Half of them were awarded in the past year with DoE commitments of  about $7 million.

RTI had applied for more DoE funding, including a $120 million solar fuels center and a $20 million pilot plant to convert wood waste into liquid hydrocarbon with the help of high temperatures, high pressure and catalysts. The pilot plant was to be located at the N.C. Biofuels Center. But neither project was approved.

A bottle of bio-crude (Photo courtesy of RTI)

Much of RTI’s approved stimulus projects are also related to next-generation biofuels made by exposing cellulose-rich biomass, such as corn stover, wood chips and switchgrass, and other waste, such as hog manure, to high temperatures. Also known as pyrolysis, the technique is heavily used in the chemical industry and turns the waste into a gas or an oily liquid.

“Everything we do is high pressure, high temperature,” said David Dayton, director of the chemistry and biomass program at RTI’s Center for Energy Technology.

The gasified waste, also known as syngas, and the bio-crude must then be cleaned of impurities before they can be processed into liquid fuel. At RTI, researchers are testing a multitude of chemicals, or catalysts, that scrub contaminants.

In the next decade or so, Congress want to see domestically produced biofuels reduce U.S. oil imports by about 30 million barrels per year and eliminate more than 15 million tons of CO2 per year.

RTI researchers are also working on technologies to reduce CO2 emissions. Lora Toy, for example, oversees a project aimed at developing polymer membranes that capture up to 90 percent of the CO2 emissions from coal-fired power plants with the goal of increasing electricity costs by less than 20 percent.

On most of these projects, RTI is working with a corporate partner to develop the technology for commercial use.

I first saw Phaedra Boinodiris speak as the opening speaker at TEDxRTP (my review) back in March, but this was a different kind of talk, geared more towards scientists and science communicators.

I remember playing Pong when it first came out. I remember spending many hours back in 1980 or so playing The Hobbit on Sinclair ZX Spectrum. And I played many games at arcades (still not knowing which games started out as arcade games adapted to computers and which the other way round). Then I quit playing games for a couple of decades until my kids were ready for them. I loved Zoombinis – an amazing game of logic and a brilliant preparation for taking IQ tests! I loved Richard Scarry’s Busytown – the one and only game I know about infrastructure, where players build stuff and deliver it to others for the good of the town – from baking bread to paving roads – learning along the way how those things are done.

And sure, Phaedra Boinodiris started with a slide depicting Pong (to the chuckle of the audience) but soon got into the real stuff – the serious gaming and the story of how she got involved in developing such games, as well as about studies of gaming and how different kinds of games help develop different real-work skills, from eye-hand coordination to leadership to cooperation. Her first game – INNOV8 – was developed as a prototype, a proof of concept, in only three months and instantly became a huge hit. It is used by businesses and business schools around the world to teach Business Process Management. It is essentially a first person shooter game (without guns) in which the player is brought as an outside consultant into a company where s/he has to figure out the flow, the bottlenecks, etc. (including by interviewing employees, as well as data-sheets) and experiment in making it more efficient. The 2.0 version came soon after, adding such problems as traffic, customer service and supply chains.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The next game, recently announced and coming out in October 2010, will be a Sim-City-like serious game CityOne, designed to help city planners, town councils, citizens, and engineers plan better, more efficient infrastructure for their cities. Put in your city’s specs and start building new infrastructure, see how much it will cost, see what problems will arise, see what solutions are available – probably something you could not have thought of yourself and may be surprised.

As I am currently reading ‘On The Grid’ it occured to me that the developers of CityOne should read that book, and that Scott Huler should be given a test-run of the game, perhaps for him to review for Charlotte Observer and Raleigh News&Observer and the local NPR station. And for Science In The Triangle, of course.

The store was packed. The store sold out all the books before Scott was even done talking. The C-Span Book TV crew was there filming so the event will be on TV some day soon. Scott was also, earlier yesterday, on WUNC’s The State Of Things (the podcast will soon be online here) and the day before that he was on KERA’s Think with Krys Boyd (download MP3 podcast by clicking here).

Scott’s energy and enthusiasm are infectuos. He held the audience captive and often laughing. The questions at the end were smart and his answers perfectly on target. But most importantly, we all learned a lot last night. I think of myself as a reasonably curious and informed person, and I have visited at least a couple of infrastructure plants, but almost every anecdote and every little tidbit of information were new to me. Scott’s point – that we don’t know almost anything about infrastructure – was thus proven to me.

What Scott realized during the two years of research for the book is that people in charge of infrastructure know what they are doing. When something doesn’t work well, or the system is not as up-to-date as it could be, it is not due to incompetence or ignorance, but because there is a lack of two essential ingredients: money and political will. These two factors, in turn, become available to the engineers to build and upgrade the systems, only if people are persuaded to act. And people are persuaded to act in two ways: if it becomes too costly, or if it becomes too painful to continue with the old way of doing things. It is also easier to build brand new systems for new services than it is to replace old systems that work ‘well enough’ with more more modern ways of providing the same service.

There are people who advocate for moving “off the grid” and living a self-sufficient existence. But, as Scott discovered, they are fooling themselves. Both the process of moving off the grid and the subsequent life off the grid are still heavily dependent on the grid, on various infrastructure systems that make such a move and such a life possible, at least in the developed world.

What is really astonishing is how well the systems work, even in USA which has fallen way behind the rest of the developed world. We are taking it for granted that the systems always work, that water and electricity and phone and sewers and garbage collection and public transportation always work. We get angry on those rare occasions when a system temporarily fails. We are, for the most part, unprepared and untrained to provide some of the services ourselves in times of outages, or to continue with normal life and work when a service fails. And we are certainly not teaching our kids the necessary skills – I can chop up wood and start a wood stove, I can use an oil heater, I know how to slaughter and render a pig, how to get water out of a well, dig a ditch, and many other skills I learned as a child (and working around horses) – yet I am not teaching any of that to my own kids. They see it as irrelevant to the modern world and they have a point – chance they will ever need to employ such skills is negligible.

I got the book last night and am about to start reading it – very eagerly so. Scott started with his house in Raleigh and traced all the wires and cables and pipes going in and out of the house to see where they led. He compared what he learned in Raleigh and its various infrastructure experts and officials, to the equivalent services in other geographical places, and traced them back in history. I can’t wait to read the synthesis of all that research. I hope you will read it, too.

NCSU's EcoCAR

To reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel consumption, the NCSU team installed a large lithium-ion battery pack behind the front seats of the crossover SUV. Up front is a diesel engine from an Opel Corsa, a European fuel-sipper, to power the wheels on longer-distance drives.

The NCSU team had less than six months to take the vehicle apart to where only a blue shell remained and rebuild it to specifications they had determined the previous school year.

On May 8, a carrier will pick up the car and take it to the General Motors Desert Proving Ground in Yuma, Ariz., where less than two weeks later it will be judged in more than a dozen technical events against entries of 15 other teams from Canadian and U.S. universities.

Ali Seyam, student team leader

“We lost so many nights together,” said Ali Seyam, one of three graduate student leaders on the NCSU team. To get the car ready, team members sacrificed spring break, he said, and worked until 6 a.m. Saturday.

The EcoCAR Challenge is a three-year competition that was established by the U.S. Department of Energy and General Motors. Argonne National Laboratory, a federally funded research and development center for science and engineering near Chicago, manages the competition.

Teams spent the first year designing the technology to build their EcoCAR. The second year was dedicated to rebuilding a GM-donated Saturn View. Following a week of tests in the Arizona desert and three days of presentations in San Diego, Calif., students then optimize and promote their entries during the third year.

The lithium-ion battery pack

At the end of the competition, which is broken down into multiple milestones and deadlines, teams with the best scores in the different categories can win hundreds and even thousands of dollars.

But not just the winners benefit. Participating students interact with mentors in the industry and learn cutting-edge skills. Sponsorships and donations to complete an entry, including the car, parts and software, are worth more than $1 million per team, Terry Gilbert, the faculty advisor for the NCSU EcoCAR team, estimated.

Once the competition is over, the NCSU EcoCAR will become part of the university’s pool of vehicles.

More information about the NCSU EcoCAR team is here and here.

Enzymes get cheaper and better

After 10 years of work, Novozymes announced it can make enzymes that brings down the production costs of  cellulosic ethanol to below $2 per gallon. The enzymes, called Cellic CTech2, have shown to work in corn cobs and stalks, wheat straw and woodchips.

All commercially available fuel ethanol is made by turning the starches in corn kernels into sugar. The goal has long been to switch from corn, which is also a food source, to biomass waste such as corn stalks and woodchips. But the cost of the enzymes that break down the cellulose in biomass to sugar has always been too high for cellulosic ethanol to compete with gasoline and corn ethanol at the pump.

Novozymes is a Danish enzyme producer with a large production plant at its U.S. headquarters in Franklinton, north of Research Triangle Park. Part of the research to bring down the cost for Cellic CTech2 was done in Franklinton, but marketing director Poul Anderson told Transport & Logistic News that the enzymes will be produced at Novozymes’ proposed Nebraska facility.

Horizant raises safety concerns

An experimental restless leg treatment that GlaxoSmithKline, a British drugmaker that has its U.S. headquarters in RTP, developed with a California partner fell short of regulatory approval because of safety concerns.

The Food and Drug Administration raised questions about pancreatic tumor cells in rats that were found in preclinical tests of the drug, which goes by the name Horizant and is a longer-lasting version of an epilepsy drug that is already on the market. The epilepsy drug was approved despite having raised similar safety questions, because the seriousness of the condition it treated justified the risk.

A Jeffries analyst estimated that Horizant could have generated up to $500 million in annual sales.

Hamner establishes ties to Norway

The Hamner Institutes for Health Sciences, an RTP research institute, set up a second partnership to help biotech companies overseas speed up their drug development.

A few months ago, the Hamner established ties to China, now a link to Oslo, Norway, and one of the leading European clusters to develop cancer treatments followed.

As part of the emerging international network, the Hamner will provide the Norwegians access to three comprehensive cancer centers located in North Carolina, the Shanghai Center for Disease Control, and Tianjin Institute for Hematology. Training and education will include post-doctoral training in innovative drug safety technologies, business training for entering the U.S. market, and regulatory training for compliance with FDA standards. Oslo will contribute its research and Phase I resources and potential access to its own growing European network of collaborators.

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

Monday

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

6:30 p.m.

Friday

9:45 a.m.

4911 S. Alston Ave., Durham

Food Tour: Counter Culture Coffee: Master roasters teach how to distinguish flavors in coffee

More information here.

10 a.m. to noon

Park Research Center, Research Triangle Park

ScienceOnline2010: Workshops on blogging, podcasting and social media tools

More information here.

5 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Friday Center, 100 Friday Center Drive, Chapel Hill

Solar fuels and energy storage: The unmet needs

Forum: A public dialog on a sustainable energy future – mapping the way

More information here.

6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m.

Saturday

9 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.

7 p.m.

Sunday

9 a.m. to 2 p.m.

On his way to the coast, Macdonald (photo on right) passed dozens of hog farms. North Carolina is the second largest U.S. hog producer behind Iowa. More than 10 million hogs live in the state, the vast majority of them near the coast.

The farms usually have open-air lagoons to collect and store the oodles of manure the hogs produce. Strict regulations limit their number and size, but the lagoons still pose serious health and environmental risks. They also lower property values.

On his drives, thoughts of hog manure were swirling in Macdonald’s head. “That’s considered an environmental contaminant,” he remembered thinking. “We should look at it as an energy source.”

Hog farmers already do. Some collect the methane that rises from the lagoons, capture it and burn it to generate electricity for the hog barns. Others burn dried hog manure for the same purpose. But Macdonald had an even better idea.

It’s not unusual for a university professor like Macdonald, who has students at N.C. State University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is more than a teacher. Professors can also be inventors and entrepreneurs. Thousands of jobs in the RTP area exist, because university professors had ideas and formed companies to bring the ideas to market.

Biomedical engineering research lends itself to product development and spinning out startups is an integral component of the joint graduate program that NCSU and UNC-CH started in 2003.

Macdonald is one of four faculty members in the program who are working on ideas that have the potential to become businesses.

Mark Tommerdahl and Robert Dennis have come up with a sensory testing machine that can guide treatment of chronic pain, diagnose autism in people who otherwise function quite well and aid rehabilitation after a stroke. Glenn Walker is collaborating with a cardiologist at WakeMed to develop a catheter that can change in stiffness. And Macdonald is working on a bioreactor that turns hog manure into methane and then stows away in a closet.

Good vibrations

Cortical Metrics is “a garage business,” Tommerdahl said. “It’s me and Bob.”

The garage is a machine shop off the UNC-CH campus, where Dennis builds a sensory testing device (photo on right) that weighs a few pounds and fits into a backpack. The device generates gentle vibrations and taps certain spots on the fingers. Number and sequence of the taps follow protocols written by Tommerdahl, who is director of the UNC-CH Laboratory for Neurosensory Diagnostics.

The sense of touch in the fingers is so fine, the device provides information about what goes on in parts of the brain. The information is not only more detailed than medical images but also less expensive to obtain, Tommerdahl said. “[The test is] a cross between a blood pressure cuff and an eye exam. It gives you insight into how healthy the brain is. If certain metrics are off, you should have it looked at.”

A test takes about 20 minutes and the person tested must answer questions related to the taps. The answers provide researchers clues how well neighboring regions in a person’s cerebral cortex, the outer layer of the brain, are connected and able to communicate.

Since Cortical Metrics was founded in 2007, the company has sold devices to researchers in Boston, Toronto and New York City. The devices are used for a wide variety of research, from carpal tunnel syndrome to traumatic brain injuries.

But until they get a flurry of device orders, Tommerdahl and Dennis have no plans to expand the company or hire employees.

A catheter with character

Placing a stent to keep an artery in the brain, neck or heart from clogging takes about an hour in the operating room.

An interventional cardiologist mounts the tiny wire-mesh scaffold on the tip of a catheter and slips both through a small incision into a large blood vessel in the leg. The catheter pushes along in the blood vessel, but soon the doctor must switch catheters.

Blood vessels are like windy mountainroads, said Walker (photo on left). To get the stent around the turns, multiple catheters of different stiffness are required, which the doctor has to insert and pull out carefully to avoid damaging the blood vessel.

Walker, whose expertise is in microfabricated instrumentation, figured that a catheter with adjustable stiffness could cut the time it takes to place a stent to 15 minutes and reduce the cost of the procedure.

“We want to make it more of a one-shot deal,” he said.

That’s what he and Dr. Ravish Fachar, an interventional cardiologist at WakeMed in Raleigh, have been working on since they met during a lunch a few years ago.

The Coulter Foundation in Miami has been supporting their collaboration with nearly $500,000 over four years. Walker plans to build the first prototype next year. The tube would be made of a polymer, or plastic, that changes stiffness when an electrical current is applied with the help of a switch.

“We will commercialize,” he said, but it isn’t clear yet whether he and Fachar will sell the rights to their invention to a large company like Boston Scientific or Johnson & Johnson, or whether they will retain the rights and use a company Fachar has already founded.

Manur to methane

The model for Macdonald’s hog manure digesting bioreactor is the water cleaning mechanism in an aquarium.

A tube within a tube sucks the manure up and mixes it with different kinds of bacteria. The first batch of bugs breaks down the cellulose, fats and proteins, which a second batch then digests into amino acids, glucose and fatty acids. A third batch then turns the work product of the second batch into methane.

Macdonald wants to use bacteria that need no oxygen. Also known as anaerobic bacteria, these bugs live in some of the most inhospitable places, including deep below the ocean floor. They can also flourish in the human digestive tract and cause diseases such as appendicitis.

The bioreactor will be built “green,” which means that harmful gases and chemicals will be scrubbed out. Macdonald even plans to extract the cellulose so it can be diverted to ethanol production.

The “green” methane would then be burned to generate electricity.

“This technology would completely eliminate the lagoons,” Macdonald said.

In May, he founded a company called BioRxn to develop and commercialize the bioreactor. He built a prototype (photo on right).

But grant funding for the project has so far been elusive, so plans to hire two part-time technicians and a full-time director of research are on hold for now.

No reason to give up on the idea, though. There is always another round of funding coming up. Macdonald said he plans to apply again.