Faculty Research Grants

CAEE Professors Jin Wen (PI), Patrick Gurian (co-PI), and Michael Waring (co-PI) have received an award from the Department of Energy to establish an Energy Innovation Hub that will be located at the Philadelphia Navy Yard Clean Energy campus. The project, lead by a team at Pennsylvania State University, brings together leading researchers from academia, two U.S. National Laboratories and the private sector in an effort to develop energy efficient building designs that will cut pollution, conserve energy and position the United States as a leader in the energy efficient building industry. The mission of this Energy Innovation Hub is to research, develop and demonstrate highly efficient building components, systems, and models which are applicable to both retrofit and new construction. The Drexel team will study 1) data based models for automatic fault detection and diagnosis; 2) building sensor system design; and 3) how economic, policy and behavioral factors influence building energy consumptions. For this innovative project, the total budget is $122 million over the next 5 years, and Drexel’s share is $2 million.

Dr. Franco Montalto and Dr. Mira Olson received an NSF RAPID grant to install monitoring apparatus in 3 new green streets to be constructed by the NYC Department of Parks and Recreation in NYC. These unprecedented setups will help the research team assess how novel green infrastructure technologies can improve urban ecohydrology. $165,000, 1 year.

A Drexel Engineering Cities Initiative team including Drs. Franco Montalto (CAEE), Michael Piasecki (CAEE), Patrick Gurian (CAEE), and Mimi Sheller (CoAS) has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) RAPID Response Grant entitled “Supporting Haitian Infrastructure Reconstruction Decisions with Local Knowledge: A Case Study Focusing on Water and Sanitation in Leogane”. An overarching hypothesis of the project is that, in the wake of the January 12 earthquake, “sustainable” reconstruction requires a focused effort to incorporate local knowledge into all levels of post-disaster infrastructure decisions, and that rehabilitation priorities based on local knowledge elicited through stakeholder-driven process will differ fundamentally from those developed by technical experts based outside of the service area. To test this hypothesis, the team focuses on water and sanitation issues in Leogane, a town of approximately 80,000 people located about 30 km to the west of the capital and at the quake’s epicenter. The team will present its findings at an NSF-sponsored workshop on Haitian reconstruction to be held in the fall. The total budget for this one year effort is $199,854.

Drs. Michael Piasecki (Drexel, CAEE Department), Rick Hooper (CUAHSI-Consortium of Univ. for Adv. of Hydrologic Sci., Inc.), and Ilya Zaslavsky (San Diego Supercomputer Center) have received a grant from NSF for their project, “GeoInformatics: Development of Community-based Ontology and Standards for Hydrologic Data Discovery and Exchange”. The team will work on the next generation of Water Data Services that bring together the nation’s water data in a federated system of servers linked using a services-oriented architecture. Progress towards WaterML 2.0 is a multi-level effort, that requires bridging the often contradictory information models adopted by data providers, and establishing a common semantically-consistent interoperable framework for hydrologic data. The team proposes to extend this effort by harmonizing the system of hydrologic concepts and existing information models with existing federal information sources. The total budget for this 3 year effort $1.205 million with Drexel receiving $258,314.

Dr. Frank Moon (PI) and Dr. Emin Aktan (co-PI) of our CAEE department have just received a new NIST grant which totals $8,810,000 for five years! The goal of this research is to develop an Automated Nondestructive Evaluation and Rehabilitation System (ANDERS) for bridges, which will use a combination of human-operated and robotic vehicles to allow rapid, comprehensive application across a large number of bridge types. The envisioned ANDERS will be composed of four systems that merge novel imaging and nondestructive evaluation (NDE) techniques with innovative intervention approaches to arrest deterioration processes in bridges. Outcomes of this research will provide detailed and comprehensive detection of early onset of deterioration and result in both time and cost savings compared to traditional approaches – ultimately contributing to a more sustainable approach to bridge preservation and renewal. This multi-institutional research will be conducted in cooperation with Rutgers University, PD-LD, Inc., Mala GeoSciences USA, Inc., and Pennoni Associates. Drexel ‘s portion of the award will be $2,108,282. However, being the lead institution total funding will register as Drexel research expenditure.

Dr. Michael Piasecki of our Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering, has been awarded a collaborative NSF grant on "WATERs: Evaluating Community Watershed Models and Observation Networks under Uncertainty within the Susquehanna River Basin". This is a collaborative grant between Penn State University and Drexel for a total of $400,000 (Drexel's portion $200,000) for 3 years. The project team seeks to determine sensitivity maps and resulting uncertainties associated with an ensemble based data assimilation framework for hydrologic processes on a basin wide scale (Susquehanna River Basin). Drexel's task concerns the CyberInfrastructure component of the project which is to store and integrate the computed uncertainty information into the nationwide CUAHSI network. Overall the modeling and CyberInfrastructure components of this work will help clarify the value of information provided by uncertain measurements of precipitation, evapotranspiration, river flow, soil moisture, and groundwater levels.

Dr. Mira Olson (PI, CAEE) and Dr. Caroline Schauer (Co-PI, MSE), along with collaborators at Johns Hopkins University, have received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for their project entitled "Investigation of Chemotaxis in Porous Media: Visualization Experiments and Modeling". This project develops a labeled micromodel for simultaneous visualization of bacterial and chemical distributions in heterogeneous media and applies Lattice-Boltzmann modeling techniques to quantify bacterial chemotaxis in soil. The Drexel portion of the two year project budget is $255,000.

Dr. Mira Olson (PI, CAEE), along with Co-PI's Dr. Alisa Morss Clyne (MEM), Dr. Patrick Gurian (CAEE), Dr. Peter Lelkes (BIOMED), and Dr. Wan Shih (BIOMED) and Senior Investigators Wei-Heng Shih (MSE) and David Urias (Education), have received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Nanotechnology in Undergraduate Education (NUE) grant totaling $200,000 over two years for their project entitled "Integrated Approach to Environmentally Responsible Nanotechnology Education". This project will develop a new undergraduate course focused on the Environmental and Health Impacts of Nanotechnology and will develop a nanomaterials risk assessment framework for integration into the undergraduate curriculum. In addition, it will create research co-op opportunities in environmental and health impacts of nanomaterials.

Dr. Joe Wartman of the Dept. of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering has received a major NSF grant for $1,200,000 for a 3 year project "Topographic Effects in Strong Ground Motion - from Physical and Numerical Modeling to Design." This project is a collaborative effort with Virginia Tech., the University of Arkansas, Georgia Tech., and the University of Puerto Rico. Joe is the Principal Investigator (PI) for the entire project and Drexel is the lead institution. Although Drexel’s portion is $265,000 the entire budget will go through Drexel with other institutions serving as subcontractors. This grant, made through NSF Network for Earthquake Engineering Simulation (NEES) program, and will focus on a poorly understood phenomenon known as “Topographic effects”, whereby seismic ground motion is amplified in the vicinity of topographic features such as hillsides, ridges, and canyons. The study will use a range of research methods, including laboratory experimentation, field instrumentation at a mine in Utah, and numerical simulations, to provide a greater fundamental understanding and quantification of the topographic effects phenomena. This knowledge will be used by the research team to develop new seismic safety building codes and guidelines for the international community.

Dr. Joe Wartman (PI) of the Dept. of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering has received a new $935,000 NSF grant for a 3 year project "Seismically Induced Rock Slope Failures: Mechanisms and Prediction.” Over the last several decades, rock avalanches have been responsible for the deaths of many tens-of-thousands of people throughout the world. This project will study earthquake-induced rock avalanches, which are among the most common, dangerous, and least understood of all natural hazards. Research will substantially advance the fundamental understanding of the rock-slope failure process under seismic conditions through an integrated program of physical modeling and discrete element method numerical simulations that will drive the development of improved rock-slope failure assessment guidelines, analysis procedures, and predictive tools. The University of Montana will also be a research partner in this activity.

Prof. Emin Aktan, Roebling Professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering has received an NSF grant for a collaborative research project with a budget of $500,000 for 2 years entitled "The Learning Bridge". Drexel is leading a consortium including Purdue, Texas A&M and Northeastern Universities with the Drexel share being $275,000. Drexel CO-PI's include Franklin Moon (CAEE), Thomas Hewett (PSYC), Patrick Gurian (CAEE) and Franco Montalto (CAEE). Other collaborating organizations include Pennoni Associates, Burlington County Bridge Commission and ASCE CAP^3 initiative. Researchers will be serving as liaisons between the ASCE, NSF and NAE efforts for reforming civil engineering education. It is believed that after the 1950's, we lost the ability to observe infrastructures in a holistic manner as the education, practice and the responsibilities of practicing engineers along the life-cycles of actual constructed systems became overly fragmented. The grant is for exploring how we may bring back the earlier way of training engineers and architects by observing how actual constructed systems and infrastructures were/are planned, financed, designed, constructed, operated and managed over their life-cycles.

The Engineering Cities REU site has been renewed by NSF for three years and will run beginning in the summer of 2010. The site co-directors are Drs. Mira Olson and Patrick Gurian (CAEE). Senior investigators involved in the site are Drs. Trish Gallagher, Joe Wartman, Franco Montalto, Chuck Haas, Frank Moon, Christian Hunold, David Urias, Gena Ellis, Scott Knowles, Jin Wen, and Grace Hsuan.

Environmental Engineering Professors Patrick Gurian and Mira Olson have been selected by the Water Environment Research Foundation to lead a consortium of five universities (Drexel, University of Arizona, Carnegie Mellon, Michigan State, and Utah State) in the development of a framework for assessing risks from pathogens in biosolids. The project will develop new models of pathogen transport and formulate policy recommendations informed by quantitative risk estimates. The budget for this project is $600,000.

Civil Engineering Professor Aspasia Zerva has received a grant of $250,260 from the National Science Foundation for a three year study entitled "Spatial Variability Effects on the Seismic Response of RC Highway Bridges."