For Oregon BEST, Johanna Brickman brings university researchers and businesses together to develop new solutions to environmental problems. (Photo: Lynn Ketchum, OSU Extension and Experiment Station Communications)

PORTLAND, Oregon – Oysters and clams build their shells locally. Using only the most immediate minerals, chemicals and organic compounds to craft their shelters, the mulluscs are masters of waste-free, energy-efficient, life-sustaining construction.

A group of humans led in part by the Oregon University System has embarked on a similarly molluscan task: to construct a “living building” that taps directly into nature. Like a biological organism, the Oregon Sustainability Center in downtown Portland is designed to create energy from the sun, capture water from the sky and recycle outputs to the Earth. Workspaces will be alive with sensors giving continuous feedback to tenants on the fundamental questions driving the project: How are we protecting the planet? How can we do better?

“The built environment, as a form of both art and problem-solving, is a real, tangible expression of human connection to the Earth,” notes Johanna Brickman, an expert in sustainable architecture and a key participant in the endeavor. “It’s the shell that we build for ourselves.”

The center’s planned use of 100-percent local, eco-friendly materials is just the beginning. More broadly, its creators envision it as a crucible for innovation. A “triple-net-zero” building — one that emits no carbon, generates its own energy, and produces no waste — it could showcase the world’s most advanced technologies in green construction.

The center is the serendipitous brainchild of the Oregon State Board of Higher Education, the City of Portland, the Oregon Environmental Council and Earth Advantage Institute, all of which were heading down the same built-environment path in 2008 when they bumped into each other and decided to join forces. The university researchers, architects, engineers, urban planners, environmentalists and entrepreneurs leading the project anticipate its role as an internationally recognized seedbed for life-sustaining technologies when it opens, possibly as early as 2013. But with a price tag of $62 million, it has hit a stumbling block: strapped state and city budgets. Financial support for the project will remain uncertain, The Oregonian reported in December 2011, until the Legislature votes in February and the Portland City Council votes in the spring.

Synergies of Energy

Johanna Brickman is all about the synergies of design, construction and adaptation to a rapidly changing environment. When she arrived in Portland in the late ‘90s, her resume featured degrees in studio art and environmental studies, four years of organic farming, and a stint as an artist for a Southern California architect. It all coalesced in a new position created for her at one of Portland’s leading firms, Zimmer Gunsul Frasca Architects, to “inform their design from a sustainability perspective.” She began digging into alternative materials. “Organic farming taught me a lot about systems thinking — the interconnectedness of things,” she says. “In my work, I’m always looking at the intersection of culture and natural systems — anthropology, policy, biology — and how all of that merges with self-expression.”

With LEED certification just emerging as the “industry’s catapult” toward sustainability, Brickman grew her team at ZGF to eight before taking on her current challenge: speeding up commercialization of emerging technologies and spurring technical solutions to environmental problems by bringing university researchers and private businesses together. “If you push these two groups together as much as possible and force that interaction, you’d be surprised at what pops out,” says Brickman.

Brickman manages the Sustainable Built Environment Program for Oregon BEST (Built Environment & Sustainable Technologies Center), a legislatively created research center that drives innovation in green building and renewable energy by connecting businesses with more than 200 researchers from Oregon State, Portland State, University of Oregon and Oregon Institute of Technology. Nearly half are from OSU. Rick Spinrad, OSU’s vice president for research, sits on BEST’s board of directors.
“Of the folks who have been involved in our research team, OSU has been disproportionately represented,” Brickman says.

“They’ve had a lot of interest and a lot of engagement. In terms of doing applied research, it’s been really rewarding to work with the OSU folks.”

Extending Resources

Scott Shull is Intel’s liaison with Oregon BEST. “We’re looking at closing the loop with the office worker, with the individuals who are in the building,” says Shull, a director in Intel’s Eco-Technology program and a member of Oregon BEST’s university-industry research consortium. “Intel, having spent 30 years making computing personal said, ‘Well, we can lead the way in making energy personal, too.’”

The “concept vehicle” Intel has developed is a PC equipped with light- and climate-sensing devices. “We call it POEM — personal office energy manager,” says Shull. “It detects ambient conditions — What’s the light? What’s the temperature? What’s the humidity? We’ll be able to integrate all this information, report it to the user and coach them if they want to do better.”

Oregon’s preeminence in life-sustaining policies, especially in transportation and land-use planning, is unquestioned, Brickman says. “We’re a state that has long relied on its natural resources for its success. Along with that comes an awareness of the need to preserve, to extend, to care for those resources — and an understanding of how that’s tied to your own sustainability.”

Illustration by Marc Lehman, University Marketing

For researchers at Oregon State and Portland State, this black box is a microbial fuel cell, a renewable energy source that uses bacteria to convert biodegradable materials, like wastewater, into electricity. And the knobs in this scenario are connected to nanostructures, such as carbon nanotubes. Frank Chaplen and Hong Liu of OSU’s Department of Biological and Ecological Engineering and Jun Jiao of Portland State’s Department of Physics are using nanotubes to boost the power output of microbial fuel cells.

Some evidence in the scientific literature suggests that adding nanostructures to the surface of the fuel cell’s anodes, components on which the bacteria live, could improve the power output, but the researchers didn’t know how or why. Not only that, it’s difficult to control the properties of nanostructures, like width or density. With so many variables to work with, they were struggling to solve their problem in a reasonable amount of time.

This is where Alan and Xiaoli Fern come in. Chaplen asked the couple, who teach in OSU’s School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), to create a mathematical solution. In this case, Chaplen was looking for a mathematical algorithm, a procedure expressed as a set of rules, that would inform the researchers which of the myriad variables would be best to tackle first — in other words, which way to turn the knobs.

Alan Fern is an expert in automated planning and decision theory, which uses computing power to make intelligent decisions about sequential problems. His wife, Xiaoli, specializes in active machine learning, a discipline that aids in identifying the most useful data points for solving a problem.

And so, for the first time, although they have been together since graduate school, the Ferns’ academic interests converged, and they began working on the problem together.

“Traditional research has focused mostly on design problems that have clean, analytical solutions, which require many simplifying assumptions. We come at the problem from a different angle. We start with realistic, messy problems and design algorithms that solve them with raw computing power,” Alan Fern explains.

Mathematical Challenge

They saw the fuel cell project as an opportunity to make a difference, not only for microbial fuel cell research, but for experiments that are difficult to control. For example, in the fuel cell project, instead of requiring an exact density of the nanomaterial, their algorithm could account for a range of densities.

It was just the kind of math-oriented challenge that graduate student Javad Azimi was looking for when he joined the project as a research assistant, helping to design the algorithms and writing the software.

“I really love math, and I like working with real data. So when they told me about it, I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it!’” Azimi says.

The team set to work on helping Chaplen and Liu find out which nanomaterials (such as gold, iron or carbon nanotubes) and what properties (such as length, width and density) would most likely produce the best power output.

“These statistical models try to capture the researcher’s uncertainty about regions they haven’t explored and take advantage of regions they have explored fairly thoroughly,” Alan Fern adds.

They also performed simulations that can be run repeatedly by a computer. The Ferns and Azimi used this type of modeling to inform decisions about the best experiment to run next and which experiments would be advantageous to run simultaneously, or as computer scientists say, in parallel. Answering such questions saved Chaplen, Liu and Jiao both money and time.

”These experiments are very time consuming, and the researchers can’t afford to run them sequentially, so they have to be in parallel, and we can help them figure out which experiments would complement each other in terms of the information they provide,” Xiaoli Fern adds.

More Electricity

Using this approach, the team was able to successfully identify nanomaterials that enhanced power production by 10 to 20 times. Their efforts were funded by a four-year grant from the Oregon Nanoscience and Microtechnologies Institute in collaboration with the U.S. Army Research Laboratory.

The Ferns and Azimi have also applied their work to data from a project examining hydrogen produced by cyanobacteria, another potential renewable energy source.

In the future, they expect to continue working with the microbial fuel cell team. In fact, they have already submitted another grant proposal, which would help Jiao advance the understanding of nanostructure properties. Nanotechnology has diverse applications in many areas including medicine, electronics and green energy production.

Azimi said that after presenting their research in papers and at conferences he has discovered that it could apply to areas that they hadn’t considered, such as improving the movement of robots.

“Because we are working to solve real problems with our algorithms, I believe the impact of our work will be really high,” says Azimi, who plans to continue this work for his dissertation.