Aerospace Engineering
Powering the Future
Thursday, March 27, 2025;
3:00 - 4:00 PM
ECoRE 028
Speaker: Sean Bradshaw from Pratt & Whitney Senior Fellow for Sustainable Propulsion
Sean Bradshaw is a senior technical fellow at Pratt & Whitney, where his primary focus is the development of advanced propulsion technologies that will power the future of flight. Pratt & Whitney is a world leader in the design, manufacture, and service of aircraft engines and auxiliary power units.
Sean holds memberships in the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the American Institute of Aeronautics & Astronautics, and the Aeronautics & Space Engineering Board of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.
Sean earned a Bachelor of Science, a Master of Science, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Aeronautics & Astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Hosted by: David Hall, david.k.hall@psu.edu
Architectural Engineering
Innovative, Scalable Modeling Solutions for Sustainable and Resilient Buildings
Friday, March 28, 2025;
10:00 a.m. - 11:00 a.m.
510 Engineering Collaborative Research and Education Building
Speaker: Yunyang Ye from The University of Alabama
Abstract
Buildings have excellent energy-saving and power optimization potential. They are critical shelters for people during climate disasters with increasing intensity, frequency, and duration. Thus, an essential and urgent research topic is improving buildings' sustainability and resilience at various geographical scales. Modeling is an efficient way to address fundamental research questions for this research topic. However, modeling a building is challenging since it is a complex cyber-physical system. When a study is conducted at a large geographic scale, modeling becomes interdisciplinary and needs deep collaborations with various domain experts. To conquer these challenges, this talk will introduce innovative, scalable modeling solutions for sustainable and resilient buildings. Dr. Ye will summarize his past and current related research, which integrate building science, construction engineering, systems and controls, modeling and computational techniques, and artificial intelligence. His research goal is to fill the gap between proof-of-concept research and practical applications toward multi-scale sustainable and resilient buildings. Examples will introduce the innovations and challenges of modeling to solve real-world problems of multi-scale sustainable and resilient buildings.
Biography
Dr. Yunyang Ye is an assistant professor in the Department of Civil, Construction, and Environmental Engineering at the University of Alabama. He was a scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. He received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Tongji University, Shanghai, China, and his doctoral degree from the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on sustainable and resilient buildings, sustainable and smart cities, and grid-interactive efficient buildings. His research spans from the system level to the urban scale, using system modeling methods that hybridize physics-based and cutting-edge artificial intelligence approaches. His spatial-temporary research is interdisciplinary and involves occupant behaviors (social), power systems, transportation (engineering), and climate disasters (science), which provides the nature to conduct broad collaborations. He has led multiple projects and tasks sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation, and ASHRAE, and published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles. He is a youth editor for Building Simulation: An International Journal. He has also served as a guest editor for six special issues, a scientific committee member to organize two international conferences, and the vice chair for ASHRAE Technical Committee 7.4. He has received multiple awards, including the ASHRAE New Investigator Award, the IBPSA-USA Emerging Contributor Award, and the ASHRAE Homer Addams Award.
Hosted by: Brenda Colby, bll36@psu.edu
Center for Neural Engineering
Study anesthesia-induced unconsciousness using a systematic, multi-modal approach
Wednesday, March 26, 2025;
12:15 - 1:15 pm
W306 Millennium Science Complex
Speaker: Nanyin Zhang from Penn State
How consciousness is lost in states such as sleep or anesthesia remains a mystery. To gain insight into this phenomenon, we conducted concurrent recordings of electrophysiology signals in the anterior cingulate cortex and whole-brain fMRI in rats exposed to graded propofol, undergoing the transition from consciousness to unconsciousness. Our results reveal that upon the loss of consciousness (LOC), there is a sharp increase in low-frequency power of the electrophysiological signal. Additionally, simultaneously measured fMRI signals exhibit a cascade of deactivation across a pathway including the hippocampus, thalamus, and medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) surrounding the moment of LOC, followed by a broader increase in brain activity across the cortex during sustained unconsciousness. Furthermore, sliding window analysis demonstrates a temporary increase in synchrony of fMRI signals across the hippocampus-thalamus-mPFC pathway preceding LOC. These data suggest that LOC might be triggered by sequential activities in the hippocampus, thalamus and mPFC, while wide-spread activity increases in other cortical regions commonly observed during anesthesia-induced unconsciousness might be a consequence, rather than a cause of LOC. Taken together, our study identifies a cascade of neural events unfolding as the brain transitions into unconsciousness, offering critical insight into the systems-level neural mechanisms underpinning LOC.
https://psu.zoom.us/j/94639233394
Hosted by: Rebecca Benson, rle4@psu.edu
Nuclear Engineering
Studying Zirconium Hydride Precipitation and Dissolution using Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction (SXRD)
Thursday, March 27, 2025;
4:00PM
Nuclear Innovation Commons, Hallowell Bldg
Speaker: Jonathan Balog from Penn State University
BIOGRAPHY
Jonathan Balog is a 5th year Ph.D. Candidate and Rickover Fellow in Nuclear Engineering, advised by Dr. Arthur Motta in the Materials for Nuclear Power Group at Penn State. Prior to graduate school, Jonathan interned with the Naval Nuclear Laboratory (NNL) and Westinghouse Electric Company. Jonathan was awarded a Rickover Fellowship in 2021 through the Naval Reactors Division of the US Department of Energy (DoE) and NNL. His research has focused on understanding how applied tensile stresses and irradiation damage influence zirconium hydride (ZrHx) precipitation and dissolution kinetics in zirconium alloys. Jonathan graduated from The Pennsylvania State University in 2019 with B.S. degrees in Mechanical and Nuclear Engineering as well as a minor in Engineering Mechanics.
ABSTRACT
Zirconium alloys are used for fuel cladding in light water reactors, and through corrosion, absorb hydrogen which eventually results in the precipitation of zirconium hyrdrides (ZrHx). Hyrdrides are brittle and can impact long-term cladding integrity, thus understanding how external factors such as stress and irritation damage impact hydride kinetics and hydrogen solubility is important. To study how stress and irradiation affect hydride precipitation and dissolution kinetics, in-situ Synchrotron X-Ray Diffraction (SXRD) experiments were performed. Results from these experiments will inform fuel/material performance codes as well as regulators, core designers, and materials engineers when considering longer fuel residence times and increased enrichments.
Hosted by: Jesse Torba, jjt5008@psu.edu
Chemical Engineering
Reinventing the Chemicals and Materials Industry for a Net-Zero and Sustainable Future
Thursday, April 3, 2025;
10:35am
CBEB 001
Speaker: Bhavik Bakshi from Arizona State University
The chemicals and materials industry (CMI) is a major economic driver across the world and its products are essential for our well-being. However, this industry is responsible for 30% of direct greenhouse gas emissions and contributes to ecological degradation due to products such as plastics, artificial fertilizers, and novel chemical entities. Today, many corporations, universities and nations have pledged to achieve net-zero emissions within a few decades. For sustainability, these pledges must be met in an economically feasible manner without exceeding ecological limits and with wide social acceptance. In addition, the transition needs to be resilient, enable ecosystem restoration and address societal inequities. This is a formidable task that requires systematic methods, models and tools. This talk will describe a framework for guiding the transition of the CMI and individual products to a sustainable circular economy. This includes a public-domain model of the global CMI, approach for understanding the trade-offs between economic and environmental goals, methods to guide innovation and associated experimental work and molecular simulation, and long-term planning of roadmaps to achieve environmental goals while accounting for changes in the climate, energy sources, and policies. We will also identify approaches and challenges for ensuring that this transition is nature- and people-positive and resilient. Case studies based on the global chemical industry and circular economy of plastics will convey the practical value of our work. Many challenges remain for future work across all domains of research and education
Bhavik Bakshi holds the Wrigley Professorship at Arizona State University with appointments in the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, School of Sustainability and School of Complex Adaptive Systems. He directs the Center for Transitioning to a Net-Zero Chemicals and Materials Industry at ASU and is also the Richard M. Morrow professor emeritus in the Department of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at The Ohio State University. His research is developing systematic methods to ensure that engineering enables an effective transformation toward sustainability. This is resulting in novel designs of products, processes, supply chains, life cycles, and landscapes that contribute to economic prosperity, respect nature’s limits, and are socially just. In addition to many papers and invited talks, his contributions include a textbook on sustainable engineering, user-friendly software, and short courses taught across the world. He is a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and has received the highest recognitions from its Computing, Sustainability, and Environmental divisions. The American Council for Life Cycle Assessment has recognized him for his Education Leadership and the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded its early career award. He is on the editorial boards of several multidisciplinary journals and has served on government committees such as task forces of the United Nations Environment Program. He received his Bachelor of Chemical Engineering from the Institute of Chemical Technology in Mumbai, MS in Chemical Engineering Practice and Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, with a minor in Technology and Environmental Policy.
Hosted by: Angela Dixon, adc12@psu.edu
