News J-WAFS, MITEI, and ESI collaborate on successful student poster session  

Carolyn Blais, J-WAFS May 9, 2023

This past April, many events were hosted across MIT to celebrate Earth Month. Earth Day takes place on April 22 every year, so the entire month of April is a time to raise awareness about environmental issues affecting the planet. MIT’s Climate Nucleus generously sponsored many of the Institute’s Earth Month events, including one co-hosted by J-WAFS, the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI), and the Environmental Solutions Initiative (ESI). The event consisted of a student poster session and a colloquium with Massachusetts State Senator Mike Barrett, Senate Chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy. The poster session and the colloquium took place on Wednesday, April 19 in MIT building E51.

Senator Barrett gave a presentation and spoke about the plan to decarbonize Massachusetts. He focused largely on an initiative to bring offshore wind farms to the state, and described some of the complications that have arisen with the implementation process. He then took questions from the audience. 

• Watch a recording of the colloquium
• Read more about the colloquium

The theme of the poster session was “MIT research for a changing planet” and it featured work from 11 MIT students with projects in water, food, energy, and the environment. The students, who represented a range of MIT departments, labs, and centers, were on hand to discuss their projects and engage with those attending the event. Attendees could then vote for their favorite poster, after being asked to consider which poster most clearly communicated the research problem and the potential solution. At the end of the night, votes were tallied and the winner of the “People’s Choice Award” for best poster was Elaine Liu. Liu's poster featured her work on managing failure cascades in systems with wind power. See the chart below to view more information about all of the posters.
 

Name	Graduation year	DLC	Poster title	Project overview
Alexa Canaan	2023	Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research	Benchmarking Residential Energy Consumption: A Utility's Approach to Smart Meter Data and the European Energy Crisis	The European Energy Crisis is putting increasing pressure on the global energy supply and the residential sector is a key sector with variable consumption patterns that accounts for 40% of global energy consumption and residential buildings accounting for 27% of global energy consumption. We use utility smart metering data at the hourly energy consumption level and daily peak consumption level from a subset of Iberdrola’s Spanish residential customers. Critically, we act as a model for utilities hoping to use smart metering data effectively. We test several different clustering methods and analyze energy consumption at different levels of granularity to identify the best benchmarking practices at all levels. We hypothesize that time, weather, and household characteristics are significant factors to identify energy consumption for a household and that outlier observations of energy consumption highlight opportunities to conserve more energy, a novel approach. We also perform residual analysis to identify households that are most sensitive to changes in temperature. This creates a strong foundation for demand-response with customers. As Europe heads towards a long-term energy crisis, it is crucial that utilities have a framework to follow for their analysis before performing interventions with customers. Further potential uses for this methodology at the governmental, utility, and local/individual levels are also included at the end to motivate potential case studies.
Ambre Decilap	2023	Mechanical Engineering	Low-Cost Brooders for Farmers in Cameroon	The poultry industry in Cameroon is highly essential, but inefficient. It makes up 42% of domestic meat production in Cameroon, in the form of imported broiler chicks (chicks raised for meat) which are raised and sold locally. However, due to growing chicks' inability to control their temperature well, they must be raised in a sufficiently warm environment (33°C or higher for the first week, then 30°C). For small-scale chicken farmers without access to reliable heating, this is a serious problem - unheated chicks die from illness with a 28% mortality rate during the brooding period (i.e. the period from one-day old chicks to 30-day old chicks). This makes the business significantly less profitable for small-scale farmers without access to infrastructure such as the electricity grid. Our community partners, the Antenna Foundation and African Solar Generation, have cooperated on the Clever Chicken Program which aims to make chicken farming more sustainable. Finding a more accessible way to provide chicks with an appropriate thermal environment is one of the goals of this program. While ASG currently sells boxes which run on solar power, this can be prohibitively expensive for smallholder farmers. As such, my research team in D-Lab is exploring utilizing phase change materials as thermal batteries to keep insulated boxes of chickens warm without the need for electricity. This helps to address the UN Sustainable Development Goals of both ending poverty and hunger.
Bella Carmelita Carriker	2024, Master's student	Architecture, Urban Risk Lab	Climate Resilience through Urban Farming	As Civilian Climate Corps continue to develop and expand across the United States, there remains a large gap in the comprehensive documentation of their positive impacts on climate.  Our team at the Urban Risk Lab has been working on establishing a measurement framework for these impacts on climate, beginning at the scale of neighborhood and city efforts. For the past year, I have been working with Eastie Farm, a grassroots urban farming non-profit in East Boston, in response to their interest in outlining climate impact measurement strategies and creating tools for their Climate Corps program for young adults. These measurements include six broad categories of metrics: **water** (rainwater collection and flood prevention), **energy** (carbon neutrality, geothermal heating), **heat** (urban heat island reduction), **waste** (compost, landfill diversion), **produce** (food output, annual growing week), and **biodiversity** (pollinators, birds, native plants). These categories were chosen  based on measurements for similar urban farming projects, input from Eastie Farms’ team and one of Eastie Farms’ funders, the Massachusetts Department of Agriculture. There is also a particular focus on helping to bridge community level climate efforts to city,  state, and federal initiatives, as well as funding streams.
Chen (Emily) Song	2023, PhD student	Chemical Engineering	Direct three-dimensional observation of filtration through liquid-infused membranes using confocal laser scanning microscopy	The treatment of oily wastewater has always been a challenge, especially for the removal of emulsified oil from water due to the kinetic stability resulting from the small droplet size and the presence of stabilizing agents. Membrane technology is capable of treating such mixtures, but fouling of the membrane makes this technology less attractive. Liquid-infused membranes (LIMs) have shown the potential to resolve the issue of fouling, and their practicality to remove emulsified oil droplets from a stable emulsion has been demonstrated. However, the low permeability compared to conventional hydrophilic membranes is the major drawback of this technology. Therefore, a thorough understanding of the mechanism of transport for the dispersed oil phase is needed so that LIMs can be effectively modified to promote high flux. We use confocal laser scanning microscopy (CLSM) to observe directly and reconstruct in 3D the sequence of events responsible for coalescence of oil and the formation of oil channels. We also demonstrate that the key to anti-fouling behavior is the higher affinity to the pore wall for infused liquid than permeating oil phase. Using image analysis, we find that the speed to open the oil channels and the number of channels open govern the permeate flux through the LIMs. Oil concentration in the feed affects the capture of oil droplets and the subsequent coalescence of oil, which in turn affects the channel opening process. The channel opening process also depends on the viscosity of the infused liquid and the operating pressure. Overall, this work offers insight into the selective permeation of a dispersed phase through LIMs.
Elaine Liu	2024	Mathematics	Advisory Tool for Managing Failure Cascades in Systems with Wind Power	This project concerns the potential of renewable energy integration in the existing transmission infrastructure in the electrical power system. We consider the resilience of systems with wind power upon wind reduction by evaluating the potential of corrective actions, such as generation and load dispatch, on minimizing the effects of transmission line failures. Three functions (grid, consumer-centric loss, and resilience impact) are used to statistically evaluate the criticality of initial contingent failures and wind reductions. Our model is probabilistic and Markovian. It is learned with Monte Carlo, convex optimization, and adaptive selection. The efficiency of our mdoel is illustrated with numerical simulation on the IEEE-30 and IEEE-300 bus systems with both AC and DC models. We highlight the impact of wind reductions and propose physically implementable solutions, providing the data-drive intelligence for greater renewable integration.
Georgia Van de Zande	2023, PhD student	Mechanical Engineering	Bringing the Water and Energy Efficiency of Precision Irrigation to Resource-Constrained Farmers: The Design of an Automatic Scheduling- Manual Operation Irrigation Tool	As freshwater supplies decrease but population growth increases the demand for food, farmers must adopt water- and energy-efficient irrigation practices to continue their livelihoods. As engineers, we must provide them with solutions that make sustainable agriculture possible. Our work introduces a design concept for an automatic scheduling and manual operation (AS-MO) tool that addresses the efficiency needs of resource-constrained farmers and integrates well into their current practices and constraints. Farmers and key market stakeholders in Kenya, Jordan, and Morocco evaluated two iterations of the design concept, providing feedback on how to improve future iterations of the tool. Results show that farmers in Kenya and Jordan in particular value the proposed AS-MO tool concept, with a possible market also existing in Morocco. This tool has the potential to bring the efficiency benefits of precision agriculture to farms who could not otherwise afford cutting-edge agriculture technology.
Hans Gaensbauer	2027, PhD student	Electrical Engineering and Computer Science	13C NMR for Soil Carbon Monitoring	We are investigating 13C NMR as a tool for scalable, rapid measurements of soil carbon for use in monitoring natural carbon sinks. Traditionally, loss on ignition testing is used to measure organic carbon in soil samples, but this technique is slow and difficult to apply in situ at a large scale. The high selectivity of 13C NMR makes it an attractive candidate for quantifying organic soil carbon, but low sensitivity and complicated sample preparation  have prevented its widespread use. We are working to demonstrate ways in which 13C NMR can contribute to in situ measurements of soil organic carbon by developing and evaluating scalable sample preparation protocols, while also documenting challenges with and constraints on the use of NMR spectroscopy as a tool for quantitative soil carbon analysis.
Jie Yun	2024, PhD student	Civil and Environmental Engineering	The comparison of Barley, Oat, Wheat, Rye and Brachypodium leaf elongation under drought	This is a study to compare the physiological traits under drought for the five species in Podia family. However, the study will not end here. When we find interesting patterns, we will extend the project to study the gene expression and regulation mechanisms of those physiological traits, with the goal to improve crop drought resistance.
Linzixuan (Rhoda) Zhang	2025, PhD student	Chemical Engineering	Poly(Œ≤-amino ester)-Based Heat-Stable Microparticle Platform  for Micronutrient Encapsulation and Delivery	Micronutrient deficiency is impacting over 2 billion people worldwide and accounts for at least 7% of the global healthcare burdens, especially in low-to-middle-income countries. Food fortification with micronutrients has been established as a cost-effective and widely applicable intervention in the targeted regions. However, its implementation, especially in marginalized communities, is constrained by two technical challenges: 1) the protection of micronutrients from common cooking and storage conditions; 2) the efficient release of the encapsulated micronutrients upon oral consumption. Here, we present a microparticle platform using a group of novel biodegradable poly(Œ≤-amino ester) (PAE) materials for micronutrient protection and delivery. Fabricated by modified oil/water emulsion-based methods, the PAE microparticles were spherical solids with smooth surface and size of 100 to 200 ÔÅ≠m, rendering them suitable for downstream processing as food additives. Robust protection efficiency was achieved for vitamin A (VA) with over 80% of recovery after two-hour boiling in water (a mimic of cooking condition). In stark contrast, only less than 10% was recovered after boiling as free forms. This remarkable protection efficiency of PAE microparticles did not compromise its rapid release upon digestion, as 90% of VA was released within only 10 minutes of simulated gastric fluid treatment (a mimic of stomach environment). Furthermore, PAE particles demonstrated long-term stability of protection, as evident by 75% recovery of VA under accelerated storage conditions (40 ¬∞C and 75% humidity) for one month compared to no recovery for unprotected VA. The scope of micronutrients compatible with this platform also included vitamin E, iron, and zinc, which were successfully encapsulated, protected, and released by the PAE microparticles individually and/or collectively.
Mrigi Munjal	2025, PhD student	Materials Science and Engineering	Unlocking Industrial-scale Sodium-Ion Batteries: Systematically Probing Challenges in the Development of Sodium-Ion Battery Cathodes	Sodium-ion batteries (SIBs) have been increasingly gaining attention for applications like grid-scale energy storage largely owing to the abundance of sodium and the resultant favorable $/kWh figure. Consequently, the published literature in this field has been increasing exponentially, making it difficult for researchers to keep up with the latest developments and challenges. Improving the performance of SIB electrode materials will enable these batteries to compete with mature technologies like lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) at scale. SIBs can potentially leverage the well-established manufacturing infrastructure knowledge of LIBs but several materials and synthesis-based challenges for electrode materials need to be addressed for SIBs to mature from lab-scale to market-scale. This work aims to systematically extract challenges in the performance and synthesis of Cathode Active Materials (CAMs) and the underlying causes of these challenges from published academic literature. The developed methods are also geared towards extracting the approaches adopted to address and mitigate these challenges. This work makes use of several natural language processing tools like BERT-based sentence embeddings for extracting and processing these sentences of interest. The extracted challenges and improvements are organized by electrode material types and by their relation to performance outcome or synthesis complexity in order to expedite the scientific investigation of industry-grade SIB materials. Utilizing a combination of the two, the scalability implications can be studied and analyzed. A similar exercise on LIB literature can provide hints towards furthering a faster development of these materials. The subsequent aim is to utilize these challenges and mitigation approaches towards studying the contextualized scaling up of SIBs and other electrochemical technologies in emerging market economies.
Seunghoon Lee	2021, currently a postdoc	Center for Real Estate	The Benefits and Costs of a Small Food Waste Tax and Implications for Climate Change Mitigation	Given that life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from wasted food is comparable to that of road transport, managing excessive food demand is essential for achieving climate change mitigation goals. A textbook solution is levying a corrective tax on food waste, but limited evidence exists on the benefits and costs of these taxes. By exploiting plausibly exogenous expansions in a small food waste tax—on average 6 cents per kg—in South Korea, I document three main findings. First, the tax reduces annual food waste by 20% (53kg) and grocery purchases by 5.4% (46kg), worth $172 for an average household, without compromising household nutritional needs. These estimates suggest that the program cost of reducing 1 ton of carbon dioxide is only $18, or even negative when savings on the waste treatment budget is considered. Using the household production model, I then explore abatement strategies and corresponding costs and find that an average household increases their time spent on meal production by 7%, or 68 additional hours per year. Finally, the demand elasticity of groceries implies that the price effect explains only 5% of the reduction in grocery purchases. Instead, the tax seems to affect household behavior via non-pecuniary channels, in particular, by raising attention to food waste. The findings indicate that a small tax on food waste can be a powerful and cost-effective climate change mitigation tool by inducing environmentally advantageous changes in household behavior.