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Covid-19 shutdown led to increased solar power output
As the air cleared after lockdowns, solar installations in Delhi produced 8 percent more power, study shows. More
Aurelia Butler
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Building a more sustainable MIT — from home
Like most offices across MIT, the Office of Sustainability (MITOS) has in recent months worked to pivot projects while seeking to understand and participate in the emergence of a new normal as the result of the Covid-19 pandemic. Despite now working off campus, the MITOS team methodology — one that warrants collective engagement, commitment to innovative problem solving, and robust data collection — has continued.
An expanded look at resiliency
When the MIT community transitioned off campus, many began to use the word “resilient” for good reason — it’s one way to describe a community of thousands that quickly learned how to study, research, work, and teach from afar in the face of a major disruption. In the field of sustainability, resiliency is frequently used when referring to how communities can not only continue to function, but thrive during and after flooding or extreme heat events as the result of climate change.
In recent months, the term has taken on expanded meaning. “The challenges associated with Covid-19 and its impact on MIT and the greater community has provided a moment to explore what a sustainable, resilient campus and community looks like in practice,” says Director of Sustainability Julie Newman.
The MIT campus climate resiliency framework codified by MITOS — and in response to a changing climate — has long been organized around the interdependencies of four core systems: community (academic, research, and student life), buildings, utilities, and landscape systems. This same framework is now being applied in part to the MIT response to Covid-19. “The MIT campus climate resiliency framework has enabled us to understand the vulnerabilities and capacities within each core system that inhibit or enable fulfillment of MIT’s mission,” explains Brian Goldberg, MITOS assistant director. “The pandemic’s disruption of the community layer provides us with a remarkable test in progress of this adaptive capacity.”
The campus response to the pandemic has, in fact, informed future modeling and demonstrated how the community can advance its important work even when displaced. “MIT has been able to offer countless virtual resources to maintain a connected community,” Goldberg explains. “While a future major flood could physically displace segments of our community, we’ve now seen that the ability to quickly evacuate and regroup virtually demonstrates a remarkable adaptive capacity.”
Taking the hive home
Also resilient are the flowering plants growing in the Hive Garden — the Institute’s student-supported pollinator garden. Maintained by MIT Grounds Services alongside students, the closure of campus meant many would miss the first spring bloom in the new garden. To make up for this, a group of UA Sustainability Committee (UA Sustain) students began to brainstorm ways to bring sustainable gardening to the MIT community if they couldn’t come to campus. Working with MITOS, students hatched the idea for the Hive@Home — a project that empowers students and staff to try their hands (and green thumbs) at growing a jalapeno or two, while building community.
“The Hive@Home is designed to link students and staff through gardening — continuing to strengthen the relationships built between MIT Grounds and the community since the Hive Garden started,” says Susy Jones, senior project manager who is leading the effort for MITOS. With funding from UA Sustain and MindHandHeart, the Hive@Home pilot launched in April with more than four dozen community members receiving vegetable seeds and growing supplies. Now the community is sharing their sprouts and lessons learned on Slack with guidance from MIT Grounds experts like Norm Magnusson and Mike Seaberg, who helped bring the campus garden to life, along with professor of ocean and mechanical engineering Alexandra Techet, who is also an experienced home gardener.
Lessons learned from Covid-19 response
The impacts of Covid-19 continue to provide insights into community behavior and views. Seeing an opportunity to better understand these views, the Sustainability Leadership Committee, in collaboration with the Office of Sustainability, the Environmental Solutions Initiative, Terrascope, and the MIT Energy Initiative, hosted a community sustainability forum where more than 100 participants — including staff, students, and faculty — shared ideas on how they thought the response to Covid-19 could inform sustainability efforts at MIT and beyond. Common themes of human health and well-being, climate action, food security, consumption and waste, sustainability education, and bold leadership emerged from the forum. “The event gave us a view into how MIT can be a sustainability leader in a post Covid-19 world, and how our community would like to see this accomplished,” says Newman.
Community members also shared a renewed focus on the impacts of consumption and single-use plastics, as well as the idea that remote work can decrease the carbon footprint of the Institute. The Sustainability Leadership Committee is now working to share these insights to drive action and launch new ideas with sustainability partners across campus.
These actions are just the beginning, as plans for campus are updated and the MIT community learns and adapts to a new normal at MIT. “We are looking at these ideas as a starting place,” explains Newman. “As we look to a future return to campus, we know the sustainability challenges and opportunities faced will continue to shift thinking about our mobility choices, where we eat, what we buy, and more. We will continue to have these community conversations and work across campus to support a sustainable, safe MIT.” More - in Security
MIT research on seawater surface tension becomes international guideline
The property of water that enables a bug to skim the surface of a pond or keeps a carefully placed paperclip floating on the top of a cup of water is known as surface tension. Understanding the surface tension of water is important in a wide range of applications including heat transfer, desalination, and oceanography. Although much is known about the surface tension of fresh water, very little has been known about the surface tension of seawater — until recently.
In 2012, John Lienhard, the Abdul Latif Jameel Professor of Water and Mechanical Engineering, and then-graduate student Kishor Nayar SM ’14, PhD ’19 embarked on a research project to understand how the surface tension of seawater changes with temperature and salinity. Two years later, they published their findings in the Journal of Physical and Chemical Reference Data. This spring, the International Association for the Properties of Water and Steam (IAPWS) announced that they had deemed Lienhard and Nayar’s work an international guideline.
According to the IAPWS, Lienhard and Nayar’s research “presents a correlation for the surface tension of seawater as a function of temperature and salinity.” The announcement of the guideline marked the completion of eight years of work with dozens of collaborators from MIT and across the globe.
“This project grew out of my work in desalination. In desalination, you need to know about the surface tension of water because that affects how water travels through pores in a membrane,” explains Lienhard, a world leading expert in desalination — the process by which salt water is treated to become potable freshwater.
Lienhard suggested Nayar take measurements of seawater’s surface tension and compare the results to the surface tension of pure water. As they would soon find out, getting reliable data from salt water would prove to be incredibly difficult.
“We had thought originally that these experiments would be pretty simple to do, that we’d be done in a month or two. But as we started looking into it, we realized it was a much harder problem to tackle,” says Lienhard.
From the outset, Nayar hoped to get enough accurate data to inform a property standard. Doing so would require the uncertainty in the measurements to be less than 1 percent.
“When you talk about property measurements, you need to be as accurate as possible,” explains Nayar. The first hurdle he had to surmount to achieve this level of accuracy was finding the appropriate instrumentation to make reliable measurements — something that turned out to be no easy feat.
Measuring surface tension
To measure the surface tension of water, Lienhard and Nayar teamed up with Gareth McKinley, professor of mechanical engineering, and then-graduate student Divya Panchanathan SM ’15, PhD ’18. They began with a device known as a Wilhelmy plate, which finds the surface tension by lowering a small platinum plate into a beaker of water then measuring the force the water exerts as the plate is raised.
Nayar and Panchanathan struggled to measure the surface tension of salt water at higher temperatures. “The issue we kept finding was once the temperature was above 50 degrees Celsius, the water on the beaker evaporated faster than we could take the measurements,” Nayar says.
No instrument would allow them to get the data they needed — so Nayar turned to the MIT Hobby Shop. Using a lathe, he built a special lid for the beaker to keep vapor in.
“The little lid Kishor built had accurately cut doors that allowed him to put a surface tension probe through the lid without letting water vapor get out,” explains Lienhard.
After making progress on obtaining data, the team suffered a massive setback. They found that barely visible salt scales, which formed on their test beaker over time, had introduced errors to their measurements. To get the most accurate values, they decided to use fresh new beakers for every single test. As a result, Nayar had to repeat nine months of work just prior to his master’s thesis being due. Fortunately, since the main problem was identified and solved, experiments could be repeated much faster.
Nayar was able to redo the experiments on time. The team measured surface tension in seawater ranging from room temperature to 90 degrees Celsius and salinity levels ranging from pure water to four times the salinity of ocean water. They found that surface tension decreases by roughly 20 percent as water goes from room temperature toward boiling. Meanwhile, as salinity increases, surface tension increases as well. The team had unlocked the mystery of seawater surface tension.
“It was literally the most technically challenging thing I had ever done,” Nayar recalls.
Their data had an average deviation of 0.19 percent, with a maximum deviation of just 0.6 percent — well within the 1 percent bound needed for a guideline.
From master’s thesis to international guideline
Three years after completing his master’s thesis, Nayar, by then a PhD student, attended an IAPWS meeting in Kyoto, Japan. The IAPWS is a nonprofit international organization responsible for releasing standards on the properties of water and steam. There, Nayar met with leaders in the field of water surface tension who had been struggling with the same issues Nayar had faced. These contacts introduced him to the long, rigorous process of declaring something an international guideline.
The IAPWS had previously published standards on the properties of steam developed by the late Joseph Henry Keenan, professor and one-time department head of mechanical engineering at MIT. To join Keenan as authors of an IAPWS standard, the team’s data needed to be verified by measurements conducted by other researchers. After three years of working with the IAPWS, the team’s work was finally adopted as an international guideline.
For Nayar, who graduated with his PhD last year and is now a senior industrial water/wastewater engineer at engineering consulting firm GHD, the guideline announcement made the long months collecting data well worth it. “It felt like something getting completed,” he recalls.
The findings that Nayar, Panchanathan, McKinley, and Lienhard reported back in 2014 are broadly applicable to a number of industries, according to Lienhard. “It’s certainly relevant for desalination work, but also for oceanographic problems such as capillary wave dynamics,” he explains.It also helps explain how small things — like a bug or a paperclip — can float on seawater. More
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D-Lab moves online, without compromising on impact
It’s not a typical sentence you’d find on a class schedule, but on April 2, the first action item for one MIT course read: “Check in on each other’s health and well-being.” The revised schedule was for Susan Murcott and Julie Simpson’s spring D-Lab class EC.719 / EC.789 (Water, Climate Change, and Health), just one of […] More
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IdeaStream 2020 goes virtual
MIT’s Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation hosted IdeaStream, an annual showcase of technologies being developed across MIT, online for the first time in the event’s 18-year history. Last month, more than 500 people worldwide tuned in each day to view the breakthrough research and to chat with the researchers. Speakers from 19 MIT teams that […] More
- in Security
Near real-time, peer-reviewed hypothesis verification informs FEMA on Covid-19 supply chain risks
Every corner of the globe has suffered from supply chain disruptions during the coronavirus pandemic. Beginning in January with a focus on China manufacturing, the MIT Humanitarian Supply Chain Lab (HSCL) began providing evidenced-based analysis to the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to inform strategic planning around the supply chain risks. By March, the […] More
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Ice, ice, maybe
From above, Antarctica appears as a massive sheet of white. But if you were to zoom in, you would find that an ice sheet is a complex and dynamic system. In the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences (EAPS), graduate student Meghana Ranganathan studies what controls the speed of ice streams — narrow, fast-flowing […] More
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Why the Mediterranean is a climate change hotspot
Although global climate models vary in many ways, they agree on this: The Mediterranean region will be significantly drier in coming decades, potentially seeing 40 percent less precipitation during the winter rainy season. An analysis by researchers at MIT has now found the underlying mechanisms that explain the anomalous effects in this region, especially in […] More
