Colorado State University Energy Institute (Fall Webinar Series)

Hi everyone.

Second, I'm just meet yourself.

Hi everyone.

Gonna wait a little bit and get everyone on here.

Could see.

I see some people from Colorado, Nevada.

Perfect.

Cool.

Great and I believe everyone is on here.

Cool high and Anya

Hi Camille, how are you doing?

good how are you?

Well hi everyone.

Cool, alright. Well First off we're just going to go ahead and do a couple of introductions and then I will introduce Doctor Marchese who is our he's going to take us on a tour today. So First off my name is Camille. I am a filthy are studying chemical and biological and biomedical engineering really big mouthful to say?

My pronouns are she, her and hers. I am originally from Southern California, but obviously today I'm in Fort Collins, specifically the powerhouse, which is building off campus here in Fort Collins. So Ananya would you like to introduce yourself?

Definitely hi everyone, my name is Ananya. I'm in my third year studying chemical and biological engineering. I'm really excited too. I guess you are coming. All takes us on this tour today as well. And if you have any questions at any point during that or feel free to pop those in the chat and will answer the author of that or as well.

Cool and I'd also like to have doctor marchese here. Go ahead and broadcast his video and he'll go ahead and introduce himself and kind of where we go with today.

OK, you see me OK. Hi everybody, my name is Anthony Marchese. I'm the associate Dean for academic and student affairs in the Walter Scott Junior College of engineering. It's the issue, and I'm also in mechanical engineering professor and my research labs are located here at the powerhouse energy campus, so it's always a great honor and privilege of mine to give tours to this facility as Camille, Ann, and Ann, you know that sensually.

Anybody ever comes and wants to visit? I'll always give it to where the powerhouse 'cause. It's always a lot of fun. I have to admit I have not given one virtually like this so Camille and I are going to be walking around. That's reason we have Max masks on and it should be very similar to to a normal tour that you would be able to take if you were here with us today.

What is that what I wanted to broadcast?

Cool, I'm so yeah, as Doctor Merkezi was saying, we're just going to walk around. Kind of give it to your elbow on the side here the cat box so if you have any questions on on your going to be kind of glancing at that and running it through. If there are any questions that you may have as we walk around, feel free to drop any of those questions, whether it's about anything Doctor Merkezi saying on the tour, anything about student life, or anything about majors that you're interested in. So I guess to start while we get prepped here.

Please go ahead and drop down, kind of where you're from and what majors you are interested in.

Perfect, OK, cool and I'll just follow up alright.

Just happened.

There we go.

OK.

So we are inside at the powerhouse energy campus. One of the very unique things about Colorado State University, particularly our engineering program, is we have one of the world's leading Energy Research Laboratories in the country. In fact, we like to say this is one of the largest freestanding Energy Institute buildings anywhere in the country.

Basically, this whole facility used to be called the engines and energy conversion laboratory, and that's still one of the main laboratories here. We do research on very large internal combustion engines. It's kind of one of our early claims to fame, and we still do a lot of that research, and we are probably one of the largest engine research facilities in the country about. I don't know what about 6. Seven years ago we started raising funds to build a large addition to the building an.

It's now about 100,000 square foot building. We have 20 faculty an over 100 students who who work out here and do research on not just engines. An combustion but alternative energy biofuels. Really anything energy related. So let's see come here. You also broadcasting OK, OK?

So let's see here.

OK, so let's turn around this way.

So behind me, you're actually seeing the door to the old engine's lab and will go in there first and.

Sounds like there's actually some engine is running, so we'll see how that works out.

OK, actually, no engines running.

So I'm walking backwards here. I'll try not to trip, but.

What you're seeing behind me is, as I mentioned, one of the largest engine research facilities at any University in the country.

One of the things that we work on our very large engines and so.

And that you will see here.

For example.

See that behind me? So what you're looking at there is a 3000 horsepower diesel engine manufactured by a company called Cummins, which you may have heard from her dove, and this is the type of engine that's used for large stationary power generation. Also run hydraulic fracking pumps. You probably heard of fracking before, and what we do is we work with Cummins to approve.

Improve the efficiency of this engine and decrease the emissions from this engine, and we've probably done five years worth of research on this engine over the last several years.

Now this engine behind me is so large.

That you almost can't even tell that it's an engine, so believe it or not, that engine is about two stories tall and we are believe it or not, the only facility in the United States. Perhaps in the world that has an engine this large installed.

In our laboratory to do research on so, this engine is actually used for natural gas pipelines, so the natural gas that might be delivered to your home, it actually may travel for over 1000 miles through a pipeline to get through your home. And in order to transport natural gas through a pipeline, you actually have to compress it with a large compressor that is actually also run on natural gas and so.

So that engine right there.

We've had that engine installed here for over 20 years, and we've probably done. I don't know, probably.

10 or $20,000,000 worth of research on that engine alone again, one of the main goals of that research is to reduce the environmental impact of the oil and gas industry, particularly emissions from natural gas, if any of you were watching the debate last night. Actually they talked about methane emissions are actually jobidon tried to talk about methane emissions, and the reason he talked about that is emissions of methane from oil and gas operations is.

On the leading contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. And so, a lot of the research that we do is aimed at reducing those methane emissions.

So.

Let's see what we're going to do here is we're going to walk back.

Into the new building, actually.

What's?

Let's see.

Right behind me here.

Is what we call a fume hood.

And this is where we do testing on bio mass cook stoves, so another research area where we are really one of the world leaders is developing clean cook stoves for developing economies.

So about 1/3 to 50% of the world's population. They still cook all of their food. On bio mass cookstove and the smoke from these cook stoves is one of the leading causes of premature death in women and children.

With some of the research that we've done.

It's a clean. The emissions from the Cookstove and we actually spun out a company called Envirofit International.

Envirofit International and they have sold over 2 million cook stoves, clean cook stoves in.

Various countries such as China, India and South America.

So I'm now walking into.

We're back in the new building.

And just to get an idea of some undergraduate student projects so.

Again, at a research lab like the powerhouse, we have undergraduate students. We have graduate students. We have faculty, we have staff, an undergraduate students. Many of them are working on some of the same engines and research that I already talked about. But other students are also working on their senior design projects. So one of the senior design projects that we've been had had students working on for for many years is called Ecocar.

So behind me here you will see.

There it is, so that's one of our editions of Ecocar and so that's actually a hydrogen fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle that our students built pretty much everything way Ecocar Works is each team is given a car by General Motors and they have three years to convert that car.

Into the highest efficiency vehicle that they could come up with. And so this year.

Can see.

The under the hood.

But there we go, so that's a fuel cell powered vehicle that the students designed and built pretty much everything that you see was designed and built by undergraduate engineering students.

Yeah, yeah, that's great.

So one question I have is if there is renewable energy like geothermal done at this instant, is their renewable energy, like geothermal, absolutely so one of the things I didn't mention is that the building itself is.

A energy research lab from the standpoint it's a very, very highly efficient building, so one of the things about our building is all of the heating and cooling is done by cooling down the building or heating up the building. Just the spine of the building each evening so we don't have a traditional air conditioning system in this building. Instead, what we have is we have.

So if you can see the ceiling.

And hard to see. But in each of the floors there's 25 miles of liquid water tubing throughout the building. So just like the veins in your body and what we do in the evening is we chill down the floors in the walls of the building.

The geothermal heating or cooling. So in the summer it's it's it's cold for the geothermal. Since the water in the ground is cooler than the air. And then.

In the winter we can also use that as a geothermal heat pump. So yes, and then, in addition to that we do a lot of research in that area. Actually walked by the researcher. One of our professors, Todd band hour. So he does research in other very large energy systems, not specifically engines, but he does like combined heat and power.

Can geothermal and things of that nature.

OK.

So let's see how we doing for time.

OK, OK so.

Let's see here.

Oh, this is pretty cool.

So.

When you come in and visit and hopefully join us, you'll see that we have really large machine shop on campus that we call the E Mac. But what we've done here at the powerhouses, we've actually developed another machine shop is actually a rapid Prototyping Laboratory, and this enables us.

See it behind me. So this enables us to build in fabric design, build and fabricate sophisticated research, instrumentation and equipment. And we can build at all in house. We actually have two former students who graduated last year, two mechanical engineering students that actually run this lab so.

See, it's one of the first things that you see when you walk into the into the powerhouse is our rapid prototyping facility, so we have a CNC milling center in a CNC turning center and these students could build just about anything. In fact, one of the things that I do for fun.

Is I supervise our rocket senior design team. We compete in the spaceport America Cup and we're the only team in the country. Actually, that designs and builds a bipropellant liquid rocket. And so the we actually use the machine shop here to build a lot of those components. 'cause it's pretty difficult to build a liquid rocket engine, so we're pretty fortunate to have that capability here in house.

So I'm now on the second floor.

And where we have mostly faculty and graduate students working.

So we're still sort of in the throes of pandemic, as you know, and so normally.

This whole space behind me.

Would be.

Chock full of graduate students. So we would have about 50 graduate students sitting here. Each graduate student gets their own desk and computer, but they're all working from home, so.

They're here in the research labs working, but when they have to go back in front of the computer, they were all working from home. We're just not quite yet at the point where.

We can have.

Students working together closely, but we're getting there.

OK, so right now actually entered another research lab is our lasers and combustion laboratory and this is where.

I do some of my research.

Doctor Michael, do you tell us a little about how graduate students usually get in Ogden Lab and how those opportunities?

And in fact.

Behind me are some of my students working on some projects.

So they're used to seeing me do tours here, but they've never seen me do a tour like this. So so we're actually giving a tour.

Broadcasting it throughout the country to perspective students, since they can't be here together.

So.

Yeah, is there any good to see here?

OK, so I'm going to wander in here. I'm going to break anything. So is my students will tell you that they don't let me touch anything anyway.

But.

Behind here is.

System that my PhD student so dash boy Terry and his team of students I've been working on this project and this thing is called a rapid compression machine and enables us to.

Rapidly compress a fuel air mixture and ignite it, similar to what you might see in an internal combustion engine, but kind of in a more controlled way.

And they're working on project for a company called Caterpillar. You might have heard of them.

Competitor to Cummins in many ways and so one of the fun things about working here. Thanks guys is that we get to work on research projects that are funded by a lot of the companies you might have heard of. Whether it's John Deere or Caterpillar or Cummins or Honda.

Or Toyota. So again, since we have a.

Long reputation of doing work on engines and energy systems. Lot of the companies.

Come to us to do the work and what's cool about that? If you think about it, if you were a student here and mechanical engineering or chemical engineering or electrical engineering, you get to work on projects for companies you know as early as you know, freshman sophomore year, and definitely senior year since a lot of our senior design projects are funded by those same companies.

Why don't we, let's see? Camille, let's go up to the roof.

OK.

So hopefully you're not getting getting dizzy walking around with us.

This tour I sometimes give a 30 minute tour and I sometimes give a 2 hour tour. There's so much to see here that usually can't get through all of it anyway, but.

What I'm going to do here is we're going to go up to.

The 4th floor.

Camille and I are socially distancing.

OK.

You can walk up too if you want.

Hard pass.

Yeah, usually when I get the door I'm going up and down the stairs.

Start to run out of breath.

Yeah, you may have lost.

Alright, so it looks like we might be having some technical difficulties at the moment, but we don't. Maybe we could talk a little bit about what undergraduate research looks like at CSU, but especially just how students get involved in undergraduate research typically as well, I can start off, and so I did get involved in research. My first year itself, and I found it quite easy to get involved. We have a lot of students that actually participate in research at the powerhouse itself.

And that's just because there's a lot of opportunities for undergraduate students to become involved. Some of the ways to become involved are, first of all programs, and then also just reaching out to professors in general. One of those programs we have is called hers, that stands for the honors undergraduate research scholars program, and what that does is essentially depending on if students. Maybe eligibility criteria. Students get sent an email with an application to apply for the program. If you get accepted into the program, the director of the program helps connect you with different research opportunities across camp.

This and the cool thing about that is, let's say you've got a research opportunity that that's outside of your discipline of engineering. That's still great because research itself is very interdisciplinary, and so still being able to acquire that skill set by participating in different research opportunities across campus is still an incredible opportunity, and that's how some students also get paired with research that's happening at our Energy Institute. The other way that allows students use is typically.

Just reaching out to professors, and so, whether that's professors for teaching the class, your taking or guest lectures that come in, or if you go onto our website, we actually have a list of all the faculty within the various engineering department's that we have, and so within each of those all our professors are very involved in research and help them have very distinct research opportunities and research focuses as well. So the cool thing about that is that students get the opportunity to really see the list of all professors.

And decide what type of research they want to do and a lot of professors are very perceptive to undergraduate research simply because they want to make sure they're helping undergraduates get involved because a lot of them either started from undergraduate research or got involved in research later on in life, and so I'm sure doctor marchese can talk a little bit more about this as well, but I was just talking about how there's a lot of opportunities for undergraduate students to become involved in research on campus, and especially how we have a lot of undergraduate and graduate students involved at the.

Energy Institute itself.

Yes, sorry I was on.

Yes.

All right now. Thank you for sharing that. I think just getting involved in research. This is especially important skill just for students to be able to figure out future career interests and things like that as well. And it definitely helps make those connections in industries. Could you tell us a little bit about what disciplines of engineering majors usually get involved in the Energy Institute in terms of like this, it usually mechanical or any other disciplines.

Yes.

Yeah, I just came back to the room that we had started in so.

I think this will be OK.

Great, I just got in the 1st.

No.

Yeah mine open went out too.

Who doctor Casey? I have a question for you. If you would kind of. I don't know if we kind of talked about this already, but I know that you talked about being the advisor for rocket team. Do you kind of want to talk about what opportunities there are for like senior design projects within not only just rocket team but within the mechanical engineering Department as well as the whole engineering college?

Yeah, I think that that's a That's a great overview of the different types of senior design projects. In my fifth year as a biomedical engineering student. I'm also on a senior design project, so it's really cool. Is that because I'm doing that dual degree in biomedical engineering? So just a little bit of back story biomedical engineering here at CSU is a dual degree, which means that you will graduate with two Bachelor science degrees, one in biomedical engineering and another in a partnering major, and those partner majors can be chemical and biological engineering.

Electrical engineering or mechanical engineering and so my senior design project actually spans between Mechanical Engineers and chemical and biological engineers. All four of us studying biomedical engineering and we're actually trying to improve upon the junctional tourniquet and so essentially what that is is turn. It is kind of like a I like to call it a belt that you would wrap around any wound, and specifically junctional tourniquets are used in combat for like.

Gunshot wounds or any explosive wounds, and so those are some things that we're trying to improve upon, and so we're not that cool like competing against different types of senior design projects, but we did. We were able to kind of present our ideas from my internship. Actually this summer with clinical immersion and so through that I was able to make this junctional tourniquet idea and we're working with bear attach engineering, which is a clinical clinical consulting company right here in Fort Collins. So yeah, exactly what doctor Marchese was saying, We are able to meet with those people.

Once a week and they really get to see our work ethic and hopefully, you know, maybe we'll move on from there after we graduate, but I do also want to address the questions in the chat about senior design project. Do you have to wait until your senior year to get involved on a senior design team? Doctor Michael going to take this.

OK, I always forget to mute myself and unmute myself, but yeah, so that's the way it is for me as well. And senior design was interesting. Is that our professor kind of just listed out the projects that there were and then we were able to apply for them. In a sense, we had to write a cover letter sending our resume and so that was good is because it was you were able to kind of get that interview. We don't really interview, but we were able to get that application process underway as well. And I know specifically for electrical engineering and.

Doctor Marchese Ananya. Please feel free to also let me know if I'm missing anything, but there is one thing called open option projects within electrical engineering in which you are able to.

Kind of choosing a project that you can work on starting your sophomore year, and you can kind of work with them until your senior year and you also have vertically integrated projects which kind of are the same thing on on you. If you don't mind kind of elaborating with me on that vertically integrated projects.

Yeah, definitely can. And so this can be able to mentioning. I personally love a lot of the resources that are within our electrical and Computer Engineering Department. So in terms of projects, all our department's in engineering do work. Doing engineering senior design projects, which is usually in that last year. So either the 4th year or that 50 are. But other than that we also have open option project which is really geared towards first year students first year but also some second year.

So in Computer Engineering students, So what it is is students get to take a class. I believe it's a one credit class and they work on different projects. So the project might be something like an electric dirt bike or or an electric bike. Maybe noise counseling, headphones, things like that and those projects themselves. If you think about it, they aren't necessarily innovative in the sense. Have they been already created? Yes, but as a first year student especially, you don't necessarily have all those technical skills to improve on.

And learn about all those designing and manufacturing skills as well. And so as a first year student, it's really great to be able to get that experience and then other than that, we also have VIP projects which are vertically integrated projects and those are the ones where either second year, third year or 4th year students basically get to hop onto a senior design project. And the great thing about that is usually if you've been on a project, let's say for three years, you can become the project lead. Any or last year because you usually have a lot of background information.

On that project at that point, so senior design is definitely a very cool opportunity and I can't wait to tackle it. When I finally get to my 4th year, let's shift gears a little bit and doctor Mark Casey. Could you tell us a little bit about the history of the powerhouse and maybe a little bit about the LEED certification that we have as well?

Thank you so much for speaking on that we definitely have a lot of resources that come out of our engineering successor itself, so we do have diversity programs and engineering and that's doctor more Casey mentioned. There's a lot of resources for student success itself, and so definitely you would like to windows as a CSU student has been very helpful to me and helping me just be able to succeed not only in my classes but also in terms of building a community at CSU itself. So we have talk a lot.

About our different engineering majors in the different things they entail, but we also have a lot of events coming up and justice events that happened throughout the semester itself, where perspective students can find out a lot more about our engineering programs and so one of those is we have one on one appointments with all the student ambassadors, and so we do have student Masters were doing all the different disciplines of engineering. So depending on whatever your interest might be, you can register for a one on one appointment with us. We have virtual tours as well and so it might be nice to just get a view.

Of the CSU campus, but particularly what that looks like in terms of being engineer at CSU. Apart from now we have one of our biggest events coming up called Engineering Exploration Week. Doctor Marchese. Would you like to speak a little bit about our engineering exploration week?

Yeah, and that really resonates with me because five years here at CSU and I don't even want to leave. But you know, I got to graduate at some point in time, but being mindful of time here, I do want to wrap up like like doctor Marchese said, I did drop a couple links in the chat that first one is going to be a seriously CSU engineering website. So kind of just glance at that, but more deep into that website is the virtual engineering exploration week which Ananya was talking bout that will be held on October 19th.

I believe it's going throughout that week, so go ahead and look through that and you can register on that website. Additionally, the next one that I put is kind of the future students page so you can go look through that and book us for a virtual tour or a one on one appointment. The virtual tour is going to be kind of the main engineering buildings on campus, so you already got powerhouse and so now you get to see the two other engineering buildings and the one on one appointments. Or if you just kind of want to talk to one of our engineers to ambassadors or if you feel more comfortable emailing us.

I also dropped our email down there as well and it looks like doctor marchese also dropped his email down there as well, so filthy email us but I do want to ask one more question for both you Doctor Tazeen Ananya. What advice do you kind of have or engineering tips that you have for future students looking into engineering or current students looking to transfer in into engineering? And let's do non let's go you first and then Doctor Marchese will close it off with you.

Awesome, I would definitely say research is very important and not research in terms of getting involved in research as an undergraduate, but more so just as as a student either in high school or in a Community College or anything like that. There's a lot of stuff that's going on in terms of curriculum, but also in terms of extracurricular activities and things like that, but at the same time we have talked a lot about the community that we have at CSU, and I'm sure Camille can agree to this as well, but a huge part of why I stayed at CSU and.

Wanna keep continuing is because of the community that I felt through extracurricular activities, especially, and so I would definitely say research into all the resources that we have. Whether that's different organisations that are there like our diversity programs in engineering or our engineering specific organizations, or something completely outside the realm of engineering itself. Fort Collins, the city itself has a lot to offer, so I would say definitely be willing to explore that and find out all that information and reach out to people to find that out as well.

Perfect well thank you so much to our panelists doctor Mark ASEAN Ananya thank you round of applause. Well yeah, like I said if you do have any other questions please feel free to email us.explore@engr.colostate.edu or email doctor Marchese as well. But thank you so much to everyone who tuned into our web and are today. We hope you enjoyed the tour of the powerhouse and getting to talk to Doctor Marquezine, Ananya and myself. But yeah, so you all have a great day and thank you so much.

Hi everyone.