BBISS Research

Collaborations are key to successful sustainability research and so we foster collaborative relationships with researchers and institutions all around the world. Projects in which BBISS faculty and students are currently engaged include:

• SINEWS: Sustinable Infrastructure for Energy and Water Systems – funded by the National Science Foundation, Office of Emerging Frontiers in Research and Innovation, Resilient and Sustainable Infrastructure Program, SINEWS is conducting research that will better engineer water and power infrastructures in the context of their physical and socio-economic environment to assure efficiency (thereby enhancing sustainability), and to reduce the risk of supply or demand driven system failures (thereby increasing resilience) through integrated planning, technological development and demand management. PI: John Crittenden.
• Rate Constants and Toxicity Estimation for the Computer Discovery of Byproducts Fate in Advanced Oxidation Systems – funded by the National Science Foundation, this project sheds light on developing modules to predict reaction rate constants for elementary reactions that are predicted by a previously developed computer-based reaction pathway generator and to estimate toxicity of intermediate products in aqueous phase advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). Concentration profiles of organic contaminants and intermediate products will be obtained by solving ordinary differential equations. The predicted kinetic information and toxicity can be used to identify important pathways of AOPs and these can be used to guide the design of experiments that are used to examine the reaction mechanisms of important byproducts. This project will help researchers and engineers gain a quantitative insight of hydroxyl radical induced reactions, and provide important information for quantifying the efficacy of AOPs as alternative water treatment processes. PI: John Crittenden.
• Forecasting Air Quality in Georgia – in this program investigators from Georgia Tech working with staff from the Georgia Environmental Protection Division provide daily air quality forecasts. Further, investigators at Georgia Tech are responsible for developing, maintaining, and operating the computational, technical, and administrative tools needed by forecasters to make timely and accurate predictions, to develop procedures and protocols for forecasting, to maintain an archive of forecasts and calculated performance metrics for individual and team forecasts, and to advise and participate in public relations and media outreach activities that serve to raise awareness, educate, and inform the public about air quality. Ozone forecasting commenced in the Atlanta metropolitan area in the summer of 1996. In 2003, the program expanded to include forecasting for fine particulate matter. The program expanded again in 2006 when ozone forecasting for the Macon metropolitan area began, and again most recently in 2008 with the addition of forecasting of fine particulate matter for the Columbus metropolitan area. PI: Michael Chang.
• Sustainable Cities: People and the Energy-Climate-Water Nexus – The BBISS is part of a Research Coordination Network (RCN) funded by the National Science Foundation's Science, Engineering and Education for Sustainability (SEES) program. Anu Ramaswami, of the University of Colorado, Denver will establish this RCN across more than 20 U.S. universities and two national laboratories. This RCN will coordinate work on the theme of sustainable cities, with a focus on reducing energy use and carbon emissions, and mitigating climate-risks to water supply and public health in cities. The network will collaborate with international sustainability research networks (in Australia, the EU and Asia), and with policy-makers in U.S. and other cities.

Major proposals that the BBISS has submitted recently have focused on the development of a robust blueprint for the next generation of urban infrastructure by:

• understanding and predicting the emergent properties of urban infrastructure and their resilience to stressors,
• indentifying how the flows of resources are utilized within complex urban systems, and approaches to reduce material and energy demands by learning how these resources are utilized on a system-wide scale,
• using the cyberinfrastructure to gather information, to monitor, to model and to visualize the complex evolving properties of urban infrastructure systems,
• integrating the human perspective into urban infrastructure to produce socially sustainable outcomes and policies, and
• developing the pedagogy of engineering complex systems in the context of sustainable and resilient urban infrastructure.

Urban infrastructure is undergoing large scale rebuilding and expansion. Infrastructure lasts a long time and has an impact over its entire life cycle. Designing infrastructure to be sustainable now will have a major impact on the sustainability of urban settings for the future.