Event Description
The Civil, Architectural, and Environmental Engineering department is hosting an Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors (AEESP) Distinguished Lecture.
Bruce E. Logan, PhD
Evan Pugh Professor, the Stan & Flora Kappe Professor of Environmental Engineering, and Director of the Engineering Energy & Environmental Institute at Penn State University Energy generation from water: Just add salt
The amount of power that could be generated from the salinity difference between river water and seawater is ~2000 GW. The evaporation and condensation of thermal salt solutions, such as ammonium bicarbonate, could also enable the capture of some of the 1000 GW of waste heat energy at industries and existing power plants in the US alone. Three technologies are primarily being investigated to capture energy from solutions with high and low salinities: pressure retarded osmosis (PRO), based on creating pressurized solutions that can power turbines; reverse electrodialysis (RED), where electrochemical potential is captured directly as electrical current using stacks of membranes; and capacitive mixing (CapMix) and battery like reactions that are used in cyclical charging and discharging processes to generate net electrical power. Two new technologies have been invented at Penn State based on using salinity gradients for energy production, including thermal ammonia regenerative batteries (TRAB); and hydrogel expansion (HEx). In this lecture I show how PRO, RED and Capmix can be incorporated into different types of microbial electrochemical technologies such as microbial fuel cells, and introduce TRABs and show how they could be used to greatly enhance energy recovery using waste heat sources. Bio: Dr. Logan’s current research efforts are in bioenergy production and the development of an energy sustainable water infrastructure. Dr. Logan has mentored over 110 graduate students and post docs, and is the author or co-author of over 400 refereed publications (h-index=94) and several books. He is the founding Deputy Editor of the new ACS journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters, and a member of the US National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and a fellow of AAAS, the International Water Association (IWA), the Water Environment Federation (WEF), and the Association of Environmental Engineering & Science Professors (AEESP). Dr. Logan is a visiting professor at several universities including Newcastle University (England) and Tsinghua University (China), with ties to several other universities in Saudi Arabia, Belgium and China. He received his Ph.D. in 1986 from the University of California, Berkeley. Prior to joining the faculty at Penn State in 1997, he was on the faculty at the University of Arizona. |
