Engineers Create Sustainable Concrete That Reduces Energy Demand,

Greenhouse Emissions
Washington State University researchers have created a sustainable
alternative to traditional concrete using coal fly ash, a waste product of coal-based
electricity generation.
The advance tackles two major environmental problems at once by making
use of coal production waste and by significantly reducing the environmental
impact of concrete production.
Xianming Shi, associate professor in WSU’s Department of Civil and
Environmental Engineering, and graduate student Gang Xu, have developed a
strong, durable concrete that uses fly ash as a binder and eliminates the use of
environmentally intensive cement. They report on their work in the August issue of
the journal, Fuel.
Reduces energy demand, greenhouse emissions
Production of traditional concrete, which is made by combining cement with
sand and gravel, contributes between five and eight percent of greenhouse gas
emissions worldwide. That’s because cement, the key ingredient in concrete,
requires high temperatures and a tremendous amount of energy to produce.
Fly ash, the material that remains after coal dust is burned, meanwhile has
become a significant waste management issue in the United States. More than 50
percent of fly ash ends up in landfills, where it can easily leach into the nearby
environment.
While some researchers have used fly ash in concrete, they haven’t been
able to eliminate the intense heating methods that are traditionally needed to make
a strong material.
“Our production method does not require heating or the use of any cement,”
said Xu.
Molecular engineering
This work is also significant because the researchers are using nano-sized
materials to engineer concrete at the molecular level.
“To sustainably advance the construction industry, we need to utilize the
‘bottom-up’ capability of nanomaterials,” said Shi.
The team used graphene oxide, a recently discovered nanomaterial, to
manipulate the reaction of fly ash with water and turn the activated fly ash into a
strong cement-like material. The graphene oxide rearranges atoms and molecules
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in a solution of fly ash and chemical activators like sodium silicate and calcium
oxide. The process creates a calcium-aluminate-silicate-hydrate molecule chain
with strongly bonded atoms that form an inorganic polymer network more durable
than (hydrated) cement.
Aids groundwater, mitigates flooding
The team designed the fly ash concrete to be pervious, which means water
can pass through it to replenish groundwater and to mitigate flooding potential.
Researchers have demonstrated the strength and behavior of the material in
test plots on the WSU campus under a variety of load and temperature conditions.
They are still conducting infiltration tests and gathering data using sensors buried
under the concrete. They eventually hope to commercialize the patented
technology.
“After further testing, we would like to build some structures with this
concrete to serve as a proof of concept,” said Xu.

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 MIT Engineers Cut Carbon Emissions by
Adding Recycled Plastic to Concrete
By adding bits of irradiated plastic water bottles to concrete, MIT engineers
take plastic out of landfills and lower the cement industry’s carbon emissions.
Discarded plastic bottles could one day be used to build stronger, more
flexible concrete structures, from sidewalks and street barriers, to buildings and
bridges, according to a new study.
MIT undergraduate students have found that, by exposing plastic flakes to
small, harmless doses of gamma radiation, then pulverizing the flakes into a fine
powder, they can mix the plastic with cement paste to produce concrete that is up
to 20 percent stronger than conventional concrete.
Concrete is, after water, the second most widely used material on the planet.
The manufacturing of concrete generates about 4.5 percent of the world’s human-
induced carbon dioxide emissions. Replacing even a small portion of concrete with
irradiated plastic could thus help reduce the cement industry’s global carbon
footprint.
Reusing plastics as concrete additives could also redirect old water and soda
bottles, the bulk of which would otherwise end up in a landfill.
“There is a huge amount of plastic that is landfilled every year,” says
Michael Short, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Nuclear Science and
Engineering. “Our technology takes plastic out of the landfill, locks it up in
concrete, and also uses less cement to make the concrete, which makes fewer
carbon dioxide emissions. This has the potential to pull plastic landfill waste out of
the landfill and into buildings, where it could actually help to make them stronger.”
The team includes Carolyn Schaefer ’17 and MIT senior Michael Ortega,
who initiated the research as a class project; Kunal Kupwade-Patil, a research
scientist in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering; Anne White,
an associate professor in the Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering; Oral
Büyüköztürk, a professor in the Department of Civil and Environmental
Engineering; Carmen Soriano of Argonne National Laboratory; and Short. The
new paper appears in the journal Waste Management.
“This is a part of our dedicated effort in our laboratory for involving
undergraduates in outstanding research experiences dealing with innovations in
search of new, better concrete materials with a diverse class of additives of
different chemistries,” says Büyüköztürk, who is the director of Laboratory for
Infrastructure Science and Sustainability. “The findings from this undergraduate

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student project open a new arena in the search for solutions to sustainable
infrastructure.”
An idea, crystallized
Schaefer and Ortega began to explore the possibility of plastic-reinforced
concrete as part of 22.033 (Nuclear Systems Design Project), in which students
were asked to pick their own project.
“They wanted to find ways to lower carbon dioxide emissions that weren’t
just, ‘let’s build nuclear reactors,’” Short says. “Concrete production is one of the
largest sources of carbon dioxide, and they got to thinking, ‘how could we attack
that?’ They looked through the literature, and then an idea crystallized.”
The students learned that others have tried to introduce plastic into cement
mixtures, but the plastic weakened the resulting concrete. Investigating further,
they found evidence that exposing plastic to doses of gamma radiation makes the
material’s crystalline structure change in a way that the plastic becomes stronger,
stiffer, and tougher. Would irradiating plastic actually work to strengthen concrete?
To answer that question, the students first obtained flakes of polyethylene
terephthalate — plastic material used to make water and soda bottles — from a
local recycling facility. Schaefer and Ortega manually sorted through the flakes to
remove bits of metal and other debris. They then walked the plastic samples down
to the basement of MIT’s Building 8, which houses a cobalt-60 irradiator that
emits gamma rays, a radiation source that is typically used commercially to
decontaminate food.
“There’s no residual radioactivity from this type of irradiation,” Short says.
“If you stuck something in a reactor and irradiated it with neutrons, it would come
out radioactive. But gamma rays are a different kind of radiation that, under most
circumstances, leave no trace of radiation.”
The team exposed various batches of flakes to either a low or high dose of
gamma rays. They then ground each batch of flakes into a powder and mixed the
powders with a series of cement paste samples, each with traditional Portland
cement powder and one of two common mineral additives: fly ash (a byproduct of
coal combustion) and silica fume (a byproduct of silicon production). Each sample
contained about 1.5 percent irradiated plastic.
Once the samples were mixed with water, the researchers poured the
mixtures into cylindrical molds, allowed them to cure, removed the molds, and
subjected the resulting concrete cylinders to compression tests. They measured the

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strength of each sample and compared it with similar samples made with regular,
nonirradiated plastic, as well as with samples containing no plastic at all.
They found that, in general, samples with regular plastic were weaker than
those without any plastic. The concrete with fly ash or silica fume was stronger
than concrete made with just Portland cement. And the presence of irradiated
plastic strengthened the concrete even further, increasing its strength by up to 20
percent compared with samples made just with Portland cement, particularly in
samples with high-dose irradiated plastic.
The concrete road ahead
After the compression tests, the researchers went one step further, using
various imaging techniques to examine the samples for clues as to why irradiated
plastic yielded stronger concrete.
The team took their samples to Argonne National Laboratory and the Center
for Materials Science and Engineering (CMSE) at MIT, where they analyzed them
using X-ray diffraction, backscattered electron microscopy, and X-ray
microtomography. The high-resolution images revealed that samples containing
irradiated plastic, particularly at high doses, exhibited crystalline structures with
more cross-linking, or molecular connections. In these samples, the crystalline
structure also seemed to block pores within concrete, making the samples more
dense and therefore stronger.
“At a nano-level, this irradiated plastic affects the crystallinity of concrete,”
Kupwade-Patil says. “The irradiated plastic has some reactivity, and when it mixes
with Portland cement and fly ash, all three together give the magic formula, and
you get stronger concrete.”
“We have observed that within the parameters of our test program, the
higher the irradiated dose, the higher the strength of concrete, so further research is
needed to tailor the mixture and optimize the process with irradiation for the most
effective results,” Kupwade-Patil says. “The method has the potential to achieve
sustainable solutions with improved performance for both structural and
nonstructural applications.”
Going forward, the team is planning to experiment with different types of
plastics, along with various doses of gamma radiation, to determine their effects on
concrete. For now, they have found that substituting about 1.5 percent of concrete
with irradiated plastic can significantly improve its strength. While that may seem
like a small fraction, Short says, implemented on a global scale, replacing even that
amount of concrete could have a significant impact.

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 “Concrete produces about 4.5 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide
emissions,” Short says. “Take out 1.5 percent of that, and you’re already talking
about 0.0675 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. That’s a huge
amount of greenhouse gases in one fell swoop.”
“This research is a perfect example of interdisciplinary multiteam work
toward creative solutions, and represents a model educational experience,”
Büyüköztürk says.

6
 Bones and Shells May Lead to a New Formula for Concrete
Engineers from MIT are seeking to redesign concrete by using bones and
shells as blueprints for a stronger, more durable concrete.
In a paper published online in the journal Construction and Building
Materials, the team contrasts cement paste — concrete’s binding ingredient - with
the structure and properties of natural materials such as bones, shells, and deep-sea
sponges. As the researchers observed, these biological materials are exceptionally
strong and durable, thanks in part to their precise assembly of structures at multiple
length scales, from the molecular to the macro, or visible, level.
From their observations, the team, led by Oral Buyukozturk, a professor in
MIT’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE), proposed a
new bioinspired, “bottom-up” approach for designing cement paste.
“These materials are assembled in a fascinating fashion, with simple
constituents arranging in complex geometric configurations that are beautiful to
observe,” Buyukozturk says. “We want to see what kinds of micromechanisms
exist within them that provide such superior properties, and how we can adopt a
similar building-block-based approach for concrete.”
Ultimately, the team hopes to identify materials in nature that may be used
as sustainable and longer-lasting alternatives to Portland cement, which requires a
huge amount of energy to manufacture.
“If we can replace cement, partially or totally, with some other materials that
may be readily and amply available in nature, we can meet our objectives for
sustainability,” Buyukozturk says.
Co-authors on the paper include lead author and graduate student Steven
Palkovic, graduate student Dieter Brommer, research scientist Kunal Kupwade-
Patil, CEE assistant professor Admir Masic, and CEE department head Markus
Buehler, the McAfee Professor of Engineering.
“The merger of theory, computation, new synthesis, and characterization
methods have enabled a paradigm shift that will likely change the way we produce
this ubiquitous material, forever,” Buehler says. “It could lead to more durable
roads, bridges, structures, reduce the carbon and energy footprint, and even enable
us to sequester carbon dioxide as the material is made. Implementing
nanotechnology in concrete is one powerful example [of how] to scale up the
power of nanoscience to solve grand engineering challenges.”
From molecules to bridges

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 Today’s concrete is a random assemblage of crushed rocks and stones,
bound together by a cement paste. Concrete’s strength and durability depends
partly on its internal structure and configuration of pores. For example, the more
porous the material, the more vulnerable it is to cracking. However, there are no
techniques available to precisely control concrete’s internal structure and overall
properties.
“It’s mostly guesswork,” Buyukozturk says. “We want to change the culture
and start controlling the material at the mesoscale.”
As Buyukozturk describes it, the “mesoscale” represents the connection
between microscale structures and macroscale properties. For instance, how does
cement’s microscopic arrangement affect the overall strength and durability of a
tall building or a long bridge? Understanding this connection would help engineers
identify features at various length scales that would improve concrete’s overall
performance.
“We’re dealing with molecules on the one hand, and building a structure
that’s on the order of kilometers in length on the other,” Buyukozturk says. “How
do we connect the information we develop at the very small scale, to the
information at the large scale? This is the riddle.”
Building from the bottom, up
To start to understand this connection, he and his colleagues looked to
biological materials such as bone, deep sea sponges, and nacre (an inner shell layer
of mollusks), which have all been studied extensively for their mechanical and
microscopic properties. They looked through the scientific literature for
information on each biomaterial, and compared their structures and behavior, at the
nano-, micro-, and macroscales, with that of cement paste.
They looked for connections between a material’s structure and its
mechanical properties. For instance, the researchers found that a deep sea sponge’s
onion-like structure of silica layers provides a mechanism for preventing cracks.
Nacre has a “brick-and-mortar” arrangement of minerals that generates a strong
bond between the mineral layers, making the material extremely tough.
“In this context, there is a wide range of multiscale characterization and
computational modeling techniques that are well established for studying the
complexities of biological and biomimetic materials, which can be easily translated
into the cement community,” says Masic.
Applying the information they learned from investigating biological
materials, as well as knowledge they gathered on existing cement paste design

8
tools, the team developed a general, bioinspired framework, or methodology, for
engineers to design cement, “from the bottom up.”
The framework is essentially a set of guidelines that engineers can follow, in
order to determine how certain additives or ingredients of interest will impact
cement’s overall strength and durability. For instance, in a related line of research,
Buyukozturk is looking into volcanic ash as a cement additive or substitute. To see
whether volcanic ash would improve cement paste’s properties, engineers,
following the group’s framework, would first use existing experimental techniques,
such as nuclear magnetic resonance, scanning electron microscopy, and X-ray
diffraction to characterize volcanic ash’s solid and pore configurations over time.
Researchers could then plug these measurements into models that simulate
concrete’s long-term evolution, to identify mesoscale relationships between, say,
the properties of volcanic ash and the material’s contribution to the strength and
durability of an ash-containing concrete bridge. These simulations can then be
validated with conventional compression and nanoindentation experiments, to test
actual samples of volcanic ash-based concrete.
Ultimately, the researchers hope the framework will help engineers identify
ingredients that are structured and evolve in a way, similar to biomaterials, that
may improve concrete’s performance and longevity.
“Hopefully this will lead us to some sort of recipe for more sustainable
concrete,” Buyukozturk says. “Typically, buildings and bridges are given a certain
design life. Can we extend that design life maybe twice or three times? That’s what
we aim for. Our framework puts it all on paper, in a very concrete way, for
engineers to use.”
This research was supported in part by the Kuwait Foundation for the
Advancement of Sciences through the Kuwait-MIT Center for Natural Resources
and the Environment, the National Institute of Standards and Technology, and
Argonne National Laboratory.

9
 Limestone Based Cement Reduces Energy Consumption
and CO2 Production by 97 Percent
A team of engineers at Drexel University have developed a “green” version
of ordinary Portland cement (OPC). By using a form of alkali-activated cement
that utilizes slag, limestone, and does not require heating to produce, their cement
reduces energy consumption and carbon dioxide production by 97% and decreases
material cost by 40%.
Drexel University engineers have found a way to improve upon ordinary
Portland cement (OPC), the glue that’s bonded much of the world’s construction
since the late 1800s. In research recently published in Cement and Concrete
Composites the group served up a recipe for cement that is more energy efficient
and cost effective to produce than masonry’s most prevalent bonding compound.
Drexel’s “green” variety is a form of alkali-activated cement that utilizes an
industrial byproduct, called slag, and a common mineral, limestone, and does not
require heating to produce. According to Dr. Michel W. Barsoum, A.W. Grosvenor
professor in Drexel’s Department of Materials Science and Engineering, this
alternative production method and the ubiquity of the mix ingredients, lessens the
cost of materials for Drexel’s cement by about 40 percent versus Portland cement
and reduces energy consumption and carbon dioxide production by 97 percent.
“Cement consumption is rapidly rising, especially in newly industrialized
countries, and it’s already responsible for 5 percent of human-made carbon dioxide.
This is a unique way to limit the environmental consequences of meeting demand,”
Dr. Alex Moseson, one of the lead researchers on the project, said.
While forms of alkali-activated cement have been used as far back as the
1950s and 1960s in several buildings in the former Soviet Union, much of the
inspiration for this research came from the Pyramids in Egypt, as well as buildings
in ancient Rome.
“Our cement is more like ancient Roman cement than like modern Portland,”
Moseson said. “Although we won’t know for 2,000 years if ours has the longevity
of Roman buildings, it gives us an idea of the staying power of this material.”
In contrast to ordinary Portland cement, Drexel’s cement is made of up to 68
percent unfired limestone, a plentiful, cheap, and low-carbon dioxide resource;
American Society for Testing and Materials’ standards for Portland cement limit
the amount to 5 percent. To this base, a small amount of commercial alkali
chemical is added along with the iron slag byproduct. In Portland cement the
substitute for this mixture, called clinker, is produced by firing a number of

10
ingredients in a kiln, thus requiring more energy and generating more carbon
dioxide.
During Moseson’s work in India to commercialize the technology, he
developed products that meet local standards, using entirely local materials and
techniques. He also investigated how the availability of green cement could help
make quality building materials more affordable and accessible to marginalized
populations living in slums, and create jobs by jump starting small-scale cement
manufacturing in the country.
“Our results and the literature confirm that it performs as well or better than
OPC,” Barsoum said. “We are very close to having the cement pass an important
commercialization milestone, ASTM C1157, a standard that judges cement-like
products on performance, such as strength and setting-time, regardless of
composition”
The next step for the cement is getting it to the market, which the group is
working toward via a start-up company called Greenstone Technologies, Inc.

11
 Greenland Telescope Opens New Era of Astronomy
To study the most extreme objects in the Universe, astronomers sometimes
have to go to some extreme places themselves. Over the past several months, a
team of scientists has braved frigid temperatures to set up and observe with a new
radio telescope in Greenland.
Taking advantage of excellent atmospheric conditions, the Greenland
Telescope is designed to detect radio waves from stars, star-forming regions,
galaxies and the vicinity of black holes. One of its primary goals is to take the first
image of a supermassive black hole by joining the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT),
a global array of radio dishes that are linked together.
The Greenland Telescope has recently achieved three important milestones,
beginning with “first light” last December. Following this, the telescope was
successfully synchronized with data from another radio telescope, and was then
used in an observing run of the EHT in April 2018. With these achievements,
scientists from the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy & Astrophysics
(ASIAA) of Taiwan and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA)
in Cambridge, Mass., have shown that the Greenland Telescope is able to explore
some of the Universe’s deepest mysteries.
“We can officially announce that we are open for business to explore the
cosmos from Greenland,” said Timothy Norton of the CfA and senior project
manager for the telescope. “It’s an exciting day for everyone who has worked so
hard to make this happen.”
The Greenland Telescope is a 12-meter radio antenna that was originally
built as a prototype for the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array
(ALMA) North America. Once ALMA was operational in Chile, the telescope was
repurposed to Greenland to take advantage of the near-ideal conditions of the
Arctic to study the Universe at specific radio frequencies, collaborating with the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) and MIT Haystack Observatory.
ASIAA led the effort to refurbish and rebuild the antenna to prepare it for
the cold climate of Greenland’s ice sheet. In 2016, the telescope was shipped to the
Thule Air Base in Greenland, 1,200 km inside the Arctic Circle, where it was
reassembled at this coastal site. ASIAA also built receivers for the antenna.
“It is extremely challenging to quickly and successfully set up a new
telescope in such a cold environment, where temperatures fall below -30 degrees
Celsius,” said Ming-Tang Chen from ASIAA and the Greenland Telescope project
manager. “This is now one of the closest radio telescopes to the North Pole.”

12
 After ASIAA scientists began commissioning the telescope on December 1,
2017, they were able to detect radio emission from the Moon on December 25, an
event astronomers refer to as “first light.” Then in early 2018, the team combined
data from the Greenland Telescope’s observations of a quasar with data from
ALMA. The data from the Greenland Telescope and ALMA were synchronized so
that they acted like two points on a radio dish equal in size to the separation of the
two observing sites, an achievement that is called “finding fringes.”
“This represents a major step in integrating the telescope into a larger, global
network of radio telescopes,” said Nimesh Patel from CfA and the lead scientist for
the Greenland Telescope. “Finding fringes tells us that the Greenland Telescope is
working as we hoped and planned.”
The Greenland location also allows interferometry with the Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and ASIAA’s Submillimeter Array and the East
Asian Observatory’s (EAO) James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT) in Hawaii,
ALMA and other radio dishes, to become the northernmost component of the EHT.
This extends the baseline of this array in the north-south direction to about 12,000
km.
“The Greenland Telescope is a crucial addition to the EHT, allowing for an
even greater separation between the radio dishes in the array and hence better
resolution,” said Keiichi Asada from ASIAA and the Greenland Telescope project
scientist. “We are very excited that the Greenland Telescope is part of this historic
project.”
The Greenland Telescope joined the EHT observing campaign in the middle
of April 2018 to observe the supermassive black hole at the center of the giant
elliptical galaxy M87. This supermassive black hole and the one in our galaxy are
the two primary targets for the EHT, because the apparent sizes of their event
horizons are larger than for any other black hole. Nevertheless, exquisite telescope
resolution is required, equivalent to reading the titles of a newspaper on the Moon
viewed from the Earth. This capability is about a thousand times better than what
the best optical telescopes in the world can achieve.
Scientists plan to use these observations to help test Einstein’s theory of
General Relativity in environments where extreme gravity exists, and probe the
physics around black holes with unprecedented detail.
In 2011, NSF, the Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)/NRAO awarded the
antenna to the SAO, representing the ASIAA/SAO team, for relocation to
Greenland. A future site is under consideration at the summit of the Greenland ice

13
sheet where scientists will be able to take advantage of lower water vapor in the
atmosphere overhead to achieve even better resolution.
The scientists and engineers involved in the first light commissioning of the
Greenland Telescope (GLT) were Satoki Matsushita (ASIAA GLT co-PI), Chih-
Wei Locutus Huang (ASIAA GLT support scientist), Jun-Yi Kevin Koay (ASIAA
Postdoctoral Fellow), Nimesh Patel (CfA GLT lead scientist) and Tim Norton
(CfA GLT senior project manager). The scientists and engineers involved in the
commissioning to detect fringes were Ming-Tang Chen (ASIAA GLT co-PI,
Project Manager), Keiichi Asada (ASIAA GLT Project Scientist), Hiroaki
Nishioka (ASIAA GLT Support Scientist), Kuan-Yu Liu (EAO JCMT Technician),
Chen-Yu Yu (ASIAA GLT Technician), Shoko Koyama (ASIAA Postdoctoral
Fellow), Nimesh Patel and Tim Norton.

14
 Researchers Develop A Fuel Cell That Uses Lignin
Researchers from the Laboratory of Organic Electronics at Linköping
University have developed a fuel cell that uses lignin, a cheap by-product from
paper manufacture and one of the most common biopolymers.
Approximately 25% of a tree is lignin – a biopolymer that glues the
cellulose fibres together to form strong and durable wood. During the chemical
manufacture of paper pulp this lignin is dissolved in either the sulphate or sulphite
process, since the cellulose is the desired component for making paper. Lignin is
cheap and readily available. It is a biopolymer that consists of a large number of
hydrocarbon chains woven together, which can be broken down in an industrial
process to its energy-rich constituent parts, benzenediols. One of these, catechol
makes up 7% of lignin. Researchers at the Organic Energy Materials group at LiU,
led by Professor Xavier Crispin, have discovered that this type of molecule is an
excellent fuel for use in fuel cells.
The fuel most often used in tradition fuel cells is hydrogen gas, which reacts
with oxygen from the air. The chemical energy is converted in the fuel cell to
electricity, water and heat. However, 96% of the hydrogen produced worldwide is
from non-sustainable sources, and is accompanied by carbon dioxide emission.
Other fuels used in fuel cells are ethanol and methanol, but these produce
also carbon dioxide as a by-product. The electrodes necessary to attract the fleeing
electrons are usually made from platinum, which is both expensive and scarce.
Benzenediols, however, are aromatic molecules, and metal electrodes cannot
be used in fuel cells based on benzenediols since the reactions are slightly more
complex. The researchers instead use electrodes made from the popular conducting
polymer PEDOT:PSS. This polymer has the interesting property of conducting
electricity, while at the same time having a surplus of protons. This means that it
functions as both electrode and proton conductor.
“PEDOT:PSS is a perfect catalyst for the reaction with a benzenediol such
as catechol,” says Xavier Crispin
The chemical energy of the fuel is converted to electricity without carbon
dioxide being formed.
“When a fuel such as ethanol is used in a fuel cell, people usually claim that
it has zero impact on the climate, since the carbon dioxide is a component of a
circulation. This means that ethanol is considered to be a green fuel. We can now
manufacture electricity without any emission of carbon dioxide at all, which makes

15
our fuel supergreen. The technology also both cheap and scalable,” says Xavier
Crispin.
Only a few research groups have investigated PEDOT:PSS as a possible
material for both electrodes and catalyst.
“There is a fundamental lack of knowledge about PEDOT:PSS within
electrochemistry,” concludes Xavier Crispin, as he proudly introduces doctoral
student Canyan Che and principal research engineer Mikhail Vagin, who make up
the group that has worked with the fuel cell.
The researchers have calculated that the amount of electricity produced by
the new fuel cell is approximately the same as the current ethanol-based and
methanol-based fuel cells.
“An efficient method to produce catechol from lignin is already available,
and we are first in the world to demonstrate a fuel cell that uses fuel from this
forestry raw material,” concludes Xavier Crispin.
It remains to improve and optimise the function.

16
 Scientists Seek New Ways to Handle Trash for Space Missions
Life aboard the International Space Station requires extreme measures in
efficiency to preserve resources, reduce waste, repurpose materials, and recycle
water and breathable air. Regular cargo resupply missions deliver approximately
12 metric tons of supplies each year, which can lead to significant storage
challenges aboard the orbiting laboratory. When trash accumulates, astronauts
manually squeeze it into trash bags, temporarily storing almost two metric tons of
it for relatively short durations, and then send it away in a departing commercial
supply vehicle, which either returns it to Earth or incinerates it during reentry
through the atmosphere.
Future spacecraft, much farther from Earth, likely will not have the regular
cadence of visiting commercial ships that can remove trash, so NASA is turning to
U.S. industry to advance concepts for trash compaction and processing systems.
The agency has issued a call for prototypes, and eventually, flight demonstrations
to fly on the space station. The solicitation was issued through Next Space
Technologies for Exploration Partnerships (NextSTEP) Broad Agency
Announcement, Appendix F: Logistics Reduction in Space by Trash Compaction
and Processing System.
Storing trash inside a spacecraft not only consumes precious volume, but
also can create physical and biological hazards for the crew. Storage also removes
the option to extract valuable leftover resources that could be recycled or
repurposed. The solicitation seeks solutions that compact trash, remove biological
and physical safety concerns, and recover trapped resources for potential reuse or
repurposing. Proposing companies won’t have to start from ground zero, however.
NASA has been developing waste management systems since the 1980s, including
recent developments such as the Heat Melt Compactor and “trash to gas”
technologies.
The development will occur in two phases. In Phase A, selected companies
will create a concept trash compaction and processing system, conduct design
reviews with NASA, and validate concepts through prototype ground
demonstrations. Throughout this phase, the companies may request use of NASA
facilities to conduct subsystem tests. In Phase B, a flight unit will be developed to
demonstrate a system aboard the space station as early as 2022.
Inherent with the NextSTEP partnership model, private companies must
contribute their own corporate resources toward the development of their trash
compaction and processing systems. In this case, responders are required to show a
minimum of 20 percent contribution toward the overall development cost, or 10

17
percent for small businesses. Proposals are due August 22, 2018. NASA plans to
host an industry day on July 24, to share details about the solicitation, describe
available NASA facilities, and answer questions from potential respondents.
NASA’s Exploration Campaign will usher in a new era of human
exploration, taking humans farther in space than ever before. Operations aboard
the Gateway in lunar orbit, as well as on the surface of the Moon, will require
innovative approaches to live and work more independently from Earth. Logistical
efficiencies afforded by new innovations like trash compaction and processing
systems will make human exploration safer and more sustainable.

18
 Engineers Develop New System to Provide Low-Cost Drinking Water
A new system devised by MIT engineers could provide a low-cost source of
drinking water for parched cities around the world while also cutting power plant
operating costs.
About 39 percent of all the fresh water withdrawn from rivers, lakes, and
reservoirs in the U.S. is earmarked for the cooling needs of electric power plants
that use fossil fuels or nuclear power, and much of that water ends up floating
away in clouds of vapor. But the new MIT system could potentially save a
substantial fraction of that lost water — and could even become a significant
source of clean, safe drinking water for coastal cities where seawater is used to
cool local power plants.
The principle behind the new concept is deceptively simple: When air that’s
rich in fog is zapped with a beam of electrically charged particles, known as ions,
water droplets become electrically charged and thus can be drawn toward a mesh
of wires, similar to a window screen, placed in their path. The droplets then collect
on that mesh, drain down into a collecting pan, and can be reused in the power
plant or sent to a city’s water supply system.
The system, which is the basis for a startup company called Infinite Cooling
that last month won MIT’s $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, is described in a
paper published today in the journal Science Advances, co-authored by Maher
Damak PhD ’18 and associate professor of mechanical engineering Kripa Varanasi.
Damak and Varanasi are among the co-founders of the startup.
Varanasi’s vision was to develop highly efficient water recovery systems by
capturing water droplets from both natural fog and plumes of industrial cooling
towers. The project began as part of Damak’s doctoral thesis, which aimed to
improve the efficiency of fog-harvesting systems that are used in many water-
scarce coastal regions as a source of potable water. Those systems, which generally
consist of some kind of plastic or metal mesh hung vertically in the path of
fogbanks that regularly roll in from the sea, are extremely inefficient, capturing
only about 1 to 3 percent of the water droplets that pass through them. Varanasi
and Damak wondered if there was a way to make the mesh catch more of the
droplets - and found a very simple and effective way of doing so.
The reason for the inefficiency of existing systems became apparent in the
team’s detailed lab experiments: The problem is in the aerodynamics of the system.
As a stream of air passes an obstacle, such as the wires in these mesh fog-catching
screens, the airflow naturally deviates around the obstacle, much as air flowing
around an airplane wing separates into streams that pass above and below the wing

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structure. These deviating airstreams carry droplets that were heading toward the
wire off to the side, unless they were headed bang-on toward the wire’s center.
The result is that the fraction of droplets captured is far lower than the
fraction of the collection area occupied by the wires, because droplets are being
swept aside from wires that lie in front of them. Just making the wires bigger or the
spaces in the mesh smaller tends to be counterproductive because it hampers the
overall airflow, resulting in a net decrease in collection.
But when the incoming fog gets zapped first with an ion beam, the opposite
effect happens. Not only do all of the droplets that are in the path of the wires land
on them, even droplets that were aiming for the holes in the mesh get pulled
toward the wires. This system can thus capture a much larger fraction of the
droplets passing through. As such, it could dramatically improve the efficiency of
fog-catching systems, and at a surprisingly low cost. The equipment is simple, and
the amount of power required is minimal.
Next, the team focused on capturing water from the plumes of power plant
cooling towers. There, the stream of water vapor is much more concentrated than
any naturally occurring fog, and that makes the system even more efficient. And
since capturing evaporated water is in itself a distillation process, the water
captured is pure, even if the cooling water is salty or contaminated. At this point,
Karim Khalil, another graduate student from Varanasi’s lab joined the team.
“It’s distilled water, which is of higher quality, that’s now just wasted,” says
Varanasi. “That’s what we’re trying to capture.” The water could be piped to a
city’s drinking water system, or used in processes that require pure water, such as
in a power plant’s boilers, as opposed to being used in its cooling system where
water quality doesn’t matter much.
A typical 600-megawatt power plant, Varanasi says, could capture 150
million gallons of water a year, representing a value of millions of dollars. This
represents about 20 to 30 percent of the water lost from cooling towers. With
further refinements, the system may be able to capture even more of the output, he
says.
What’s more, since power plants are already in place along many arid
coastlines, and many of them are cooled with seawater, this provides a very simple
way to provide water desalination services at a tiny fraction of the cost of building
a standalone desalination plant. Damak and Varanasi estimate that the installation
cost of such a conversion would be about one-third that of a building a new
desalination plant, and its operating costs would be about 1/50. The payback time
for installing such a system would be about two years, Varanasi says, and it would

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have essentially no environmental footprint, adding nothing to that of the original
plant.
“This can be a great solution to address the global water crisis,” Varanasi
says. “It could offset the need for about 70 percent of new desalination plant
installations in the next decade.”
In a series of dramatic proof-of-concept experiments, Damak, Khalil, and
Varanasi demonstrated the concept by building a small lab version of a stack
emitting a plume of water droplets, similar to those seen on actual power plant
cooling towers, and placed their ion beam and mesh screen on it. In video of the
experiment, a thick plume of fog droplets is seen rising from the device — and
almost instantly disappears as soon as the system is switched on.
The team is currently building a full-scale test version of their system to be
placed on the cooling tower of MIT’s Central Utility Plant, a natural-gas
cogeneration power plant that provides most of the campus’ electricity, heating,
and cooling. The setup is expected to be in place by the end of the summer and will
undergo testing in the fall. The tests will include trying different variations of the
mesh and its supporting structure, Damak says.
That should provide the needed evidence to enable power plant operators,
who tend to be conservative in their technology choices, to adopt the system.
Because power plants have decades-long operating lifetimes, their operators tend
to “be very risk-averse” and want to know “has this been done somewhere else?”
Varanasi says. The campus power plant tests will not only “de-risk” the technology,
but will also help the MIT campus improve its water footprint, he says. “This can
have a high impact on water use on campus.”

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 NASA is Sending a Helicopter to Mars on Next Red Planet Rover Mission
NASA is sending a helicopter to Mars.
The Mars Helicopter, a small, autonomous rotorcraft, will travel with the
agency’s Mars 2020 rover mission, currently scheduled to launch in July 2020, to
demonstrate the viability and potential of heavier-than-air vehicles on the Red
Planet.
“NASA has a proud history of firsts,” said NASA Administrator Jim
Bridenstine. “The idea of a helicopter flying the skies of another planet is thrilling.
The Mars Helicopter holds much promise for our future science, discovery, and
exploration missions to Mars.”
U.S. Rep. John Culberson of Texas echoed Bridenstine’s appreciation of the
impact of American firsts on the future of exploration and discovery.
“It’s fitting that the United States of America is the first nation in history to
fly the first heavier-than-air craft on another world,” Culberson said. “This exciting
and visionary achievement will inspire young people all over the United States to
become scientists and engineers, paving the way for even greater discoveries in the
future.”
Started in August 2013 as a technology development project at NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the Mars Helicopter had to prove that big things
could come in small packages. The result of the team’s four years of design, testing
and redesign weighs in at little under four pounds (1.8 kilograms). Its fuselage is
about the size of a softball, and its twin, counter-rotating blades will bite into the
thin Martian atmosphere at almost 3,000 rpm – about 10 times the rate of a
helicopter on Earth.
“Exploring the Red Planet with NASA’s Mars Helicopter exemplifies a
successful marriage of science and technology innovation and is a unique
opportunity to advance Mars exploration for the future,” said Thomas Zurbuchen,
Associate Administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate at the agency
headquarters in Washington. “After the Wright Brothers proved 117 years ago that
powered, sustained, and controlled flight was possible here on Earth, another group
of American pioneers may prove the same can be done on another world.”
The helicopter also contains built-in capabilities needed for operation at
Mars, including solar cells to charge its lithium-ion batteries, and a heating
mechanism to keep it warm through the cold Martian nights. But before the
helicopter can fly at Mars it has to get there. It will do so attached to the belly pan
of the Mars 2020 rover.

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 “The altitude record for a helicopter flying here on Earth is about 40,000 feet.
The atmosphere of Mars is only one percent that of Earth, so when our helicopter
is on the Martian surface, it’s already at the Earth equivalent of 100,000 feet up,”
said Mimi Aung, Mars Helicopter project manager at JPL. “To make it fly at that
low atmospheric density, we had to scrutinize everything, make it as light as
possible while being as strong and as powerful as it can possibly be.”
Once the rover is on the planet’s surface, a suitable location will be found to
deploy the helicopter down from the vehicle and place it onto the ground. The
rover then will be driven away from the helicopter to a safe distance from which it
will relay commands. After its batteries are charged and a myriad of tests are
performed, controllers on Earth will command the Mars Helicopter to take its first
autonomous flight into history.
“We don’t have a pilot and Earth will be several light minutes away, so there
is no way to joystick this mission in real time,” said Aung. “Instead, we have an
autonomous capability that will be able to receive and interpret commands from
the ground, and then fly the mission on its own.”
The full 30-day flight test campaign will include up to five flights of
incrementally farther flight distances, up to a few hundred meters, and longer
durations as long as 90 seconds, over a period. On its first flight, the helicopter will
make a short vertical climb to 10 feet (3 meters), where it will hover for about 30
seconds.
As a technology demonstration, the Mars Helicopter is considered a high-
risk, high-reward project. If it does not work, the Mars 2020 mission will not be
impacted. If it does work, helicopters may have a real future as low-flying scouts
and aerial vehicles to access locations not reachable by ground travel.
“The ability to see clearly what lies beyond the next hill is crucial for future
explorers,” said Zurbuchen. “We already have great views of Mars from the
surface as well as from orbit. With the added dimension of a bird’s-eye view from
a ‘marscopter,’ we can only imagine what future missions will achieve.”
Mars 2020 will launch on a United Launch Alliance (ULA) Atlas V rocket
from Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida,
and is expected to reach Mars in February 2021.
The rover will conduct geological assessments of its landing site on Mars,
determine the habitability of the environment, search for signs of ancient Martian
life, and assess natural resources and hazards for future human explorers. Scientists
will use the instruments aboard the rover to identify and collect samples of rock

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and soil, encase them in sealed tubes, and leave them on the planet’s surface for
potential return to Earth on a future Mars mission.
The Mars 2020 Project at JPL in Pasadena, California, manages rover
development for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in
Washington. NASA’s Launch Services Program, based at the agency’s Kennedy
Space Center in Florida, is responsible for launch management.

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 New Implantable Device Furnishes Islet Cells With
Their Own Supply of Oxygen
Since the 1960s, researchers have been interested in the possibility of
treating type 1 diabetes by transplanting islet cells - the pancreatic cells that are
responsible for producing insulin when blood glucose concentration increases.
Implementing this approach has proven challenging, however. One obstacle
is that once the islets are transplanted, they will die if they don’t receive an
adequate supply of oxygen. Now, researchers at MIT, working with a company
called Beta-O2 Technologies, have developed and tested an implantable device that
furnishes islet cells with their own supply of oxygen, via a chamber that can be
replenished every 24 hours.
“Getting oxygen to these cells is a difficult problem,” says Clark Colton, an
MIT professor of chemical engineering and the senior author of the study. “The
benefits of this approach are: you keep the islets alive to perform their function,
you don’t need as much tissue, and you reduce the ability of the implants to
provoke an immune response.”
Tests of these implants in rats showed that nearly 90 percent of the islets
remained viable for several months, and most of the rats maintained normal blood
glucose levels throughout that time.
Yoav Evron of Beta-O2 Technologies is the lead author of the study, which
appears in the April 25 issue of Scientific Reports.
Protecting islets
Type 1 diabetes occurs when a patient’s own immune system destroys
pancreas’ islet cells, so the patient can no longer produce insulin, which is
necessary for the body to absorb sugar from the bloodstream. Early attempts to
treat patients by transplanting islets from cadavers were unsuccessful because the
islets didn’t survive after transplantation.
One of the reasons the transplanted islets failed is that they were attacked by
the patients’ immune systems. To protect the transplanted cells, researchers have
begun developing implants in which the islets are encapsulated in a material such
as a polymer. However, a remaining challenge is making sure that the islets receive
enough oxygen, Colton says.
In a healthy pancreas, all islet cells come into contact with capillaries,
allowing them to receive oxygen-rich blood, at an oxygen partial pressure of about
100 millimeters of mercury (mm Hg). (Partial pressure is a measure of the
concentration of an individual gas within a mixture of gases). When doctors first
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tried to transplant islets into diabetic patients, many of the cells did not have any
direct contact with capillaries, so their oxygen supply was too low.
Previous research in Colton’s laboratory discovered that the outer surface of
islets needs to be exposed to at least 50 mm Hg of oxygen to remain viable and
produce insulin normally. Through a series of experiments, the MIT team, working
with researchers at Beta-O2Technologies, determined the operating conditions of
the device needed for islets to stay alive and function for long periods of time
while assembled in a compact form small enough to be implanted in human
patients.
In the device tested in the Scientific Reports paper, islets are encapsulated in
a slab of alginate, a polysaccharide produced by algae, about 600 microns thick. A
membrane on one side of slab keeps out immune cells and large proteins but
allows insulin, nutrients, and oxygen through. Below the slab is the gas chamber,
about 5 millimeters thick, which carries atmospheric gases such as nitrogen and
carbon dioxide in addition to oxygen. Oxygen flows from the chamber, across the
semipermeable membrane, and into the islets embedded in the alginate slab.
As oxygen diffuses through the slab, it is gradually consumed, so the oxygen
partial pressure continually drops. To ensure that the partial pressure remains at
least 50 mm Hg for 24 hours, the researchers found that they needed to begin with
an oxygen partial pressure of 500 mm Hg in the gas chamber.
After 24 hours, the oxygen supply is replenished through a port — a device
implanted under the skin and connected to a catheter that leads to the encapsulated
islets, which are also implanted under the skin.
Long-term survival
In tests in diabetic mice without immunosuppression, the researchers
showed that nearly 90 percent of the islets survived the entire transplant period,
which ranged from 11 weeks to eight months. They also found that most of these
animals’ blood sugar levels remained normal while the devices were implanted,
then rebounded to diabetic levels after they were removed.
Another benefit of this approach is that, because most of the islet cells
remain alive, they are less likely to provoke an immune response. When cells die,
they break down, and the resulting fragments of protein and DNA are more likely
to attract the attention of the immune system.
“By keeping the cells alive, you minimize the immune response,” Colton
says.

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 James Shapiro, a professor of surgery, medicine, and surgical oncology at
the University of Alberta, who has been running an islet transplantation program
there for the past 20 years, says he believes this approach holds great promise and
could help to eliminate the need to give islet transplantation patients drugs to
suppress their immune system.
“This kind of device can protect the cells from immune attack and deliver
oxygen in a way that allows more cells to survive,” says Shapiro, who was not
involved in the study. “This would allow islet cells to be transplanted in patients
without antirejection drugs, which would dramatically improve the safety of what
we’re doing today with islet cell transplantation.”
Researchers at Beta-O2 Technologies are now working on new versions of
the device in which an oxygen storage chamber is implanted below the skin,
separate from the islets. This version would only need to be replenished once a
week, which could be more appealing for patients.
The research was funded, in part, by the Israeli Ministry of Sciences.

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