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Wednesday, October 25, 2006

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Total Clips: 4

	Date	Outlet
AU prof: Fuel research will create energy within three years	10/25/2006	Opelika-Auburn News
The Rambling Gleaner	10/25/2006	Baltimore Sun
Student robot competition unleashes engineering skills	10/25/2006	Birmingham News
Alternative Energy: Research to Reality	10/25/2006	WRBL-TV


AU prof: Fuel research will create energy within three years 10/25/2006 Opelika-Auburn News Amy Weaver		Return to Top
It won't be long before the idea of converting natural and organic materials like switchgrass and manure into fuel is no longer just an idea. Dr. David Bransby, an internationally recognized expert on alternative energy and professor of agronomy at Auburn University, said he expects to see some of the technologies developed at Auburn creating energy in the real world within the next three years. A crucial step in that process was the Alternative Energy Solutions from Alabama's National Resources conference held at AU this week. Bransby said AU deliberately invited industry leaders as guests and speakers in order to learn how industry and AU can work together to see ideas through to implementation. "We can't do everything," he said. "Without partnering, we can't take this concept of renewable energy forward." "This will be charting the course for what Auburn University is doing in the next three years," added Ralph Zee, professor of materials engineering and associate dean of research in the Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. And the timing couldn’t be better to move forward. Alternative energy is a major initiative under President Bush and oil prices are high now, Zee said. Consumers will be more apt to grasp the idea if oil costs are high. In this year's State of the Union address, Bush proclaimed a need for alternative energy sources as a way to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil. He launched the Advanced Energy Initiative, a 22-percent increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, to help create alternative sources and called for changes within six years. Auburn started the Auburn Alternative Energy Initiative earlier this month with $3 million for further research. U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., was the keynote speaker Monday and has been a longtime supporter of AU and its research in alternative energy for years, according to Chris Roberts, AU professor of chemical engineering. Having a champion like Sessions in their corner is imperative, Roberts said, to not only fund the research at AU, but support creation of the technology. Bransby said there are technologies developed at AU that are close to being verified for commercial use. And Alabama has the potential to lead the way because of the state’s plentiful sources of biomass - everything from switchgrass to wood chips to farm waste. He would like to see Alabama start with small bioenergy systems. Poultry farmers in the state, for instance, could convert chicken waste into energy to generate heat and power, reducing the amount of waste and the need for propane. "Waste is a pollutant, really a threat to farming in Alabama," Bransby said. The state produces 1.5 million tons of chicken waste annually, he said. And if less people use propane, the cost would drop. Without a sole solution to solve all the countries energy problems, Roberts said the idea is to use different resources in each region. The Midwest, for instance, has abundant amounts of corn and soy beans, while trees and switchgrass are ample in the Southeast. "Our solutions need to be different," he said.
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The Rambling Gleaner 10/25/2006 Baltimore Sun Charlie Madigan, Chicago Tribune		Return to Top
This story about AU and switchgrass was included in a roundup of stories published earlier this year in The Rambling Gleaner, Chicago Sun, and picked up by the Baltimore Sun. Switchgrass? What, exactly, is Switchgrass? "We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass." President Bush, State of the Union address. Corn. Wood chips. Stalks. Okay, I get those. But switchgrass? Tarnation, as they say in the countryside, who ever heard of switchgrass? You may not be aware of this, but Auburn University has produced test plots of switch grass that yielded up to 15 tons of bio-mass per acre. Yields from these grasses could produce 1,150 gallons of ethanol per acre each year, under just the right conditions, so President Bush might well have a point in pointing to switchgrass as one part of the answer to cutting dependency on foreign oil. What, exactly, is switchgrass? You might find it as an ornamental in your yard. Or you might find it as a cash crop in your yard, assuming your yard is a couple of hundred acres and you have a hankering to make some money helping the country get away from all that imported Arab oil. Panicum virgatum is its formal name, with an interesting nickname, "Tall Panicgrass." It is one of the plants that covered the American prairies before handy farmers came along and burned it all up or let their animals graze it into oblivion, according to some accounts. It grows in marshes, on lakeshores and in meadows in large clumps. Its blades can be up to five feet tall, with some types getting much taller, and are about half an inch wide. It's a pretty dependable perennial, which means it seems to die from the ground up in the winter, but comes bursting back to life when spring arrives. President Bush got the tip about switchgrass from his own U.S. Department of Energy, which believes that nationally produced bio-fuels could not only decrease dependence on foreign oil, but provide cleaner energy sources even as they boost income on farms. Oak Ridge National Laboratory physiologist Sandy McLaughlin, who is in charge of the switchgrass part of the push, said the goal of the effort is to build "a foundation for a biofuels industry" that will make fuel from switchgrass competitive with fossil fuels. The plant is discussed on the National Laboratory's website where the scientists go to some length to point out they aren't talking about lawn clippings here. Switchgrass is big and tough, they note, and after a good growing season can stand 10 feet high with stems as thick and as strong as pencils. It collects impressive amounts of solar energy as it grows and turns it into cellulose that can be liquified, gasified or burned directly. It is such an adaptable plant it can grow almost anywhere in the nation. The researchers say many farmers are already growing switchgrass for erosion control or as forage for livestock. Cutting it off at the surface for baling and production of ethanol would leave almost as much plant under ground as is harvested, which means switchgrass won't deplete soils the way other crops can. I'm assuming all of this is pretty good news for the energy world, but I suspect there's going to be some complaining from the other side of the equation, the environmental side. Switchgrass is also a perfect habitat for lots of wildlife. Among the animals that use its seeds or greenery for food are bobwhites, mourning doves, wild turkeys, northern cardinal, brown headed cowbirds, muskrat, eastern cottontail, meadow vole, white footed mice, eastern gray squirrels, darkeyed juncos, eastern chipmunks, Canada geese, mallards, red wing blackbirds, white tailed deer, gold finches, striped skunks and, last but not least, the woodchuck. So, maybe there will be a switchgrass battle on the horizon. There is, unquestionably, a buck to be made here, always either a very good sign, or a very bad sign, depending on where you stand. Somehow, I don't think I will be betting on the woodchucks in this contest.
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Student robot competition unleashes engineering skills 10/25/2006 Birmingham News Liz Ellaby		Return to Top
George Blanks, K-12 engineering outreach director for AU's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering is quoted in this story. AU's College of Engineering and the College of Science and Mathematics are cited as co-sponsors of the robotics competition. It was 10 days before a robotics competition at Auburn University, and Hoover High School sophomore Andy Brayer still was fiddling with a key part of the design last week. Building a plywood "scissors arm" to perform a lifting task has vexed the 80-member school science team for the past five weeks. The arm, when it's finally attached to a small, radio-controlled vehicle, must go forward from a starting gate and reach several feet overhead to lift a bandanna from a clothesline. The team will earn a range of points for removing bandannas from lines strung at varying heights. The more difficult reverse operation -hanging a bandanna back on the line-earns more points. Can the arm extend to reach the highest bandanna? Is the motor powerful enough to extend the arm? Fully extended, will the arm wobble or destabilize the robot? The test will come Saturday, when 20 robotics teams compete in the Laundry Quandary, a series of three-minute matches that call for as much gaming strategy as they do design ingenuity. Stealing the laundry: Blocking is allowed. Robots can roam into another team's quadrant to steal its "laundry." One Hoover student has mapped out the best route, theoretically, to get the most points. "No team knows what the other teams' robots look like until you get there," said Hoover High science teacher Mark Conner. "If your robot doesn't work, those can be the longest three minutes of your life." Conner heads the school's Engineering Academy program. For the third year, he is heading the school's robotics entry in the Alabama BEST (Boosting Engineering, Science and Technology) contest, whose annual games are repeated at 31 "hub" sites in the country. The competitions were formulated by Texas Instruments to encourage students to confront and resolve problems like engineers. "It started as a workforce development tool," said hub co-chair George Blanks, K-12 engineering outreach director for Auburn's Samuel Ginn College of Engineering. That college, and Auburn's College of Sciences and Mathematics, co-sponsor the games as a student recruitment tool. Next year, Auburn will open a second hub in the Birmingham area, and Conner already has already blocked out the dates for the Hoover High School gymnasium. Only five schools in Jefferson and Shelby counties participate in the competition, and Blanks thinks the number should be 25. "We've been doing this six years, and it's a shame more schools don't participate," he said. "Industry people tell me the area needs this kind of program that instills an engineering culture." Cheerleaders and noise: But it's also fun. About 700 students will meet at the competition site at Auburn's student activities center on Saturday. They bring their parents, faculty, friends, and sometimes cheerleaders. The day-long event is conducted with the concentration of a chess game but at the volume of a basketball tournament, he said. "We make more money selling earplugs than we do selling T-shirts," he said. Over a school break last week, Brayer and a half-dozen other students who showed up to work on the robot proved the program is working on all fronts. Tyler Henderson, a senior whose scholarship offers from Auburn amount to a free ride next year, is working with Solid Edge software that creates three-dimensional images of design concepts. "I'm one of the few people who can create an animation with it," he said. He has created a 360-degree view of the Auburn game field from BEST specs, as well as his own robot design. Henderson's concept used a rigid arm that pivoted in two directions from an upright stand. It works in theory but had problems with range, he said. There was a question of where to mount the motor. Solving problems, such as working with deadlines and materials kits provided by BEST, teach the real-life engineering process, he said. Thirty-five members of Conner's team this year remember the dismal day in 2004 when their robot earned just one point at the competition, for successfully turning a switch. "There can be a tremendous gulf between ideas and implementation," he said. Few students have practical skills with machining or simple tools. One student this year had never used a drill press, he said. The scissors arm had to be rebuilt with metal reinforcements because the metal bolts were shearing away the plywood. "One of the criticisms of such contests are that students use trial and error rather than engineering skills to solve problems," Conner said. "I would counter that a lot of engineering really is trial and error." And there is also success for all the trials. This year, Hoover High junior Zachary Diggins has perfected a way to use small servo motors provided in the kit materials to maximize the function of a four-channel transmitter, he said. The transmitter allows limited motions, say, from left to right, back to front, or rotating. Diggins' idea, which Conner plans to use in next year's competition, will overcome those limitations, he said. "We haven't seen any other school use it," he said. "And we'll be keeping the design under wraps for sure."
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Alternative Energy: Research to Reality 10/25/2006 WRBL-TV Jaime Lakin		Return to Top
Corn isn't the only crop that could be fueling the future. One day sooner than you might think your car could be fueled by something that is growing in your own front yard. Christopher Roberts with AU's Department of Chemical Engineering said "anything from trees to agricultural crops to residues that are left in the field" could be among the "bio-mass" that could be used to create energy. "We even had the City of Auburn talking to us yesterday about what they could do with the waste they pick up at the curb from your grass clippings." This week, Auburn University hosted an alternative energy conference focused on finding ways to convert Alabama's agricultural resources into realistic and practical alternatives to fossil fuels. For the two-day conference, national and state leaders as well as industry representatives gathered at The Hotel at Auburn University and Dixon Conference Center to discuss alternative energy sources, research and even technology already in use. All with the goal of putting to use those resources that are already available in the area. And according to David Bransby with AU's Department of Agriculture there's no shortage here. "You could say we're the Saudi Arabia of bio-mass," he said. "We're producing a great amount of bio-mass in the southeast. And that's good news for the region. "If the United States is going to turn to bio-fuels in the future, there is no question that the southeast is going to have to lead the way because that is where the biomass is," he said. So what does that mean for you -- the consumer? According to Roberts there are more advantages than disadvantages. "Some of the fuels we're talking about here -- particularly those from thermo-chemical conversions -- are in deed diesel or gasoline fuels that will fit right into the infrastructure, so there's no need for massive changes," he said. The gases are also "cleaner" and better for the environment. For example, poultry waste is not only waste, but also a pollution problem, Bransby said. "So, if we could use that to generate electricity or heat, we'd really be solving several problems with one plan: we'd be solving an energy problem and a pollution problem." And commercial alternative fuels could become a reality in the next few years, he added. "I would be surprised if there aren't at least small commercial plants up and running three years from now," he said. "It may sound like a long time, but it's not very long. And once the first commercial plants get up and running I believe the whole industry will just explode and take off." It's just a matter of bridging the gap to consumer use. And that was the goal of this conference, Roberts said, to build partnerships between researchers and industry with the ultimate goal educating people about the possibilities. To find out more about AU's research or the Alternative Energy Solutions from Alabama's Natural Resources Conference, visit http://eng.auburn.edu/new_site/research/alt-energy/index.php or www.auburn.edu.
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