Amy E. Landis

Anticipatory Life Cycle Analysis of In Vitro Biomass Cultivation for Cultured Meat Production in the United States

Cultured, or in vitro, meat consists of edible biomass grown from animal stem cells in a factory, or carnery. In the coming decades, in vitro biomass cultivation could enable the production of meat without the need to raise livestock. Using an anticipatory life cycle analysis framework, the study described herein examines the environmental implications of this emerging technology and compares the results with published impacts of beef, pork, poultry, and another speculative analysis of cultured biomass. While uncertainty ranges are large, the findings suggest that in vitro biomass cultivation could require smaller quantities of agricultural inputs and land than livestock; however, those benefits could come at the expense of more intensive energy use as biological functions such as digestion and nutrient circulation are replaced by industrial equivalents. From this perspective, large-scale cultivation of in vitro meat and other bioengineered products could represent a new phase of industrialization with inherently complex and challenging trade-offs.

Enhancing anaerobic digestion of food waste through biochemical methane potential assays at different substrate: inoculum ratios

Food waste has a high energy potential that can be converted into useful energy in the form of methane via anaerobic digestion. Biochemical Methane Potential assays (BMPs) were conducted to quantify the impacts on methane production of different ratios of food waste. Anaerobic digester sludge (ADS) was used as the inoculum, and BMPs were performed at food waste:inoculum ratios of 0.42, 1.42, and 3.0g chemical oxygen demand/g volatile solids (VS). The 1.42 ratio had the highest CH4-COD recovery: 90% of the initial total chemical oxygen demand (TCOD) was from food waste, followed by ratios 0.42 and 3.0 at 69% and 57%, respectively. Addition of food waste above 0.42 caused a lag time for CH4 production that increased with higher ratios, which highlighted the negative impacts of overloading with food waste. The Gompertz equation was able to represent the results well, and it gave lag times of 0, 3.6 and 30days and maximum methane productions of 370, 910, and 1950mL for ratios 0.42, 1.42 and 3.0, respectively. While ratio 3.0 endured a long lag phase and low VSS destruction, ratio 1.42 achieved satisfactory results for all performance criteria. These results provide practical guidance on food-waste-to-inoculum ratios that can lead to optimizing methanogenic yield.

Towards a commodity solution for the internet of things

Embedded-class processors found in commodity palmtop computers continue to become increasingly capable. Moreover, wireless connectivity in these systems provides new opportunities in designing flexible and smarter wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In this paper, we present Lynx, a self-organizing wireless sensor network framework. Leveraging palmtop systems as sensor hubs, Lynx provides fundamental functionality to make a distributively managed, customizable WSN system implementation. Second, we describe Ocelot, a mobile distributed grid-like computing engine for commodity palmtop platforms. The combination of Lynx and Ocelot provides sensor nodes that are capable of collecting, recording, processing, and communicating data without any central server support. Significant energy savings can be achieved for light to medium weight tasks through the Lynx and Ocelot combined system compared to traditional server-class grid-solutions such as BOINC. We demonstrate Lynx and Ocelot in the context of life-cycle building energy usage.

Evaluating the Life Cycle Environmental Benefits and Trade-Offs of Water Reuse Systems for Net-Zero Buildings

Aging water infrastructure and increased water scarcity have resulted in higher interest in water reuse and decentralization. Rating systems for high-performance buildings implicitly promote the use of building-scale, decentralized water supply and treatment technologies. It is important to recognize the potential benefits and trade-offs of decentralized and centralized water systems in the context of high-performance buildings. For this reason and to fill a gap in the current literature, we completed a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the decentralized water system of a high-performance, net-zero energy, net-zero water building (NZB) that received multiple green building certifications and compared the results with two modeled buildings (conventional and water efficient) using centralized water systems. We investigated the NZBs impacts over varying lifetimes, conducted a break-even analysis, and included Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis. The results show that, although the NZB performs better in most categories than the conventional building, the water efficient building generally outperforms the NZB. The lifetime of the NZB, septic tank aeration, and use of solar energy have been found to be important factors in the NZBs impacts. While these findings are specific to the case study building, location, and treatment technologies, the framework for comparison of water and wastewater impacts of various buildings can be applied during building design to aid decision making. As we design and operate high-performance buildings, the potential trade-offs of advanced decentralized water treatment systems should be considered.

Improving efficiency of wireless sensor networks through lightweight in-memory compression

Data compression is an enabling technique to many applications, such as data center storage, multimedia streaming, and lightweight computing platforms, amongst others. These special-purpose compression approaches typically achieve incomparable compression ratios as core features of the application and dataset are leveraged to reduce duplication of identical or similar features in the original data. Sensor data in systems such as wireless sensor networks, often includes a variety of data types. However, within a particular data or sensor type, typically the data has a low dynamic range which can be leveraged to increase its compressibility. In this paper we present a memory and network system co-design approach that stores data using in-place lightweight compressed pages in memory, and utilizes this compressed data to send shortened blocks over a wireless point to point network. Additionally, we propose a technique named source-aware layout reorganization (SALR) to improve the compressibility of the sensor data, using either software- or hardware-based approaches. We demonstrate that our proposed lightweight compression approach in hardware with SALR, while achieving a slightly lower compression ratio to traditional software compression, can outperform software compression in wireless communication by 7.3% for relatively slow Bluetooth links and 65.4% with faster WiFi-Direct links.

Sustainable Engineering Cognitive Outcomes: Examining Different Approaches for Curriculum Integration

AbstractAs continued globalization of the world’s economic, environmental, and societal interactions strains the planet to meet anthropogenic demands, universities are striving to integrate sustain...

Assessment of Students' Mastery of Construction Management and Engineering Concepts through Board Game Design

AbstractAlthough the use of games to help students learn is explicit in the literature, little research has been conducted on student-developed games to assess student learning. The objective of th...

Do single-use medical devices containing biopolymers reduce the environmental impacts of surgical procedures compared with their plastic equivalents?

Background While petroleum-based plastics are extensively used in health care, recent developments in biopolymer manufacturing have created new opportunities for increased integration of biopolymers into medical products, devices and services. This study compared the environmental impacts of single-use disposable devices with increased biopolymer content versus typically manufactured devices in hysterectomy. Methods A comparative life cycle assessment of single-use disposable medical products containing plastic(s) versus the same single-use medical devices with biopolymers substituted for plastic(s) at Magee-Women’s Hospital (Magee) in Pittsburgh, PA and the products used in four types of hysterectomies that contained plastics potentially suitable for biopolymer substitution. Magee is a 360-bed teaching hospital, which performs approximately 1400 hysterectomies annually. Results There are life cycle environmental impact tradeoffs when substituting biopolymers for petroplastics in procedures such as hysterectomies. The substitution of biopolymers for petroleum-based plastics increased smog-related impacts by approximately 900% for laparoscopic and robotic hysterectomies, and increased ozone depletion-related impacts by approximately 125% for laparoscopic and robotic hysterectomies. Conversely, biopolymers reduced life cycle human health impacts, acidification and cumulative energy demand for the four hysterectomy procedures. The integration of biopolymers into medical products is correlated with reductions in carcinogenic impacts, non-carcinogenic impacts and respiratory effects. However, the significant agricultural inputs associated with manufacturing biopolymers exacerbate environmental impacts of products and devices made using biopolymers. Conclusions The integration of biopolymers into medical products is correlated with reductions in carcinogenic impacts, non-carcinogenic impacts and respiratory effects; however, the significant agricultural inputs associated with manufacturing biopolymers exacerbate environmental impacts.

Hybrid Dynamic-Empirical Building Energy Modeling Approach for an Existing Campus Building

AbstractA hybrid modeling framework was constructed to investigate the uncertainty in modeling the energy consumption of an existing campus building with minimal instrumentation. The hybrid framework consisted of a dynamic model of the building’s conditioned spaces, coupled with an empirical model of the building’s HVAC system. The empirical model was calibrated using linear regression of available HVAC system temperature and flow measurements from a building automation system to develop estimates of internal loads and relationships between envelope heat gains/losses and indoor/outdoor temperatures. Crabtree Hall, a 40-year-old building at the University of Pittsburgh, was used as an illustrative case study for this approach. A separate data collection time frame was used for empirical model verification in addition to the initial model development time frame. Comparative results from the model showed a 20% normalized RMS deviation for hourly net heating and cooling for the average day in a given month. T...