From The Whiting School of Engineering
At
4.25.24
Emily Myrick
Johns Hopkins students’ multidisciplinary, fish-friendly design aims to unlock untapped energy source.
A team of undergraduate students in the Whiting School of Engineering’s Center for Leadership Education’s Multidisciplinary Engineering Design course is contributing to the trend of retrofitting dams to generate power by competing in the Hydropower Collegiate Competition on Monday, April 29, in Des Moines, Iowa.
Part of the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Made program dedicated to increasing clean energy, the event challenges teams to identify an existing dam that is well-suited for conversion, develop a design that effectively retrofits the dam for hydropower production, and create programming that fosters community investment.
Hopkins’ team is one of 12 selected to take part in the challenge, which offers the first- through third-place winners the opportunity to split a $25,000 prize. The students will also present their project at the Whiting School’s annual Design Day on May 1—the same day the students will learn where they have placed in the competition.
The Hopkins team selected Liberty Dam, northwest of Baltimore, as their conversion site based on the low environmental impact of the conversion and the dam’s height, which enables it to produce sufficient power.
Grace Mazur, a senior majoring in environmental engineering, said that while the dam offered many attractive opportunities for conversion, it also posed challenges.
Visit to the Markland Dam on the Ohio River near Cincinnati. From left: Grace Mazur, course TA Trifeena James, and Alissa Burkholder Murphy
“We discovered that converting nonpowered dams to produce power can be really disruptive if you’re using the traditional approach of bringing the water through the dam, which could involve draining the reservoir or taking apart part of the dam. Liberty Dam is about 70 years old, so we didn’t want to design anything that would compromise the structure,” she said.
They identified Liberty’s advanced age as an opportunity to develop a modular solution that does not alter the dam’s current infrastructure. Once selected to compete, the team was awarded $5,000 toward the development of its design and, after midyear reporting, another $10,000 to build a prototype and travel to the competition.
After researching existing designs, the students realized that they could design a more efficient and less disruptive alternative to large turbine-based approaches that maneuver over the top of dams to start a siphon of water. The team landed on an energy-saving dual-siphon system that uses a small pump and siphon to kickstart a larger siphon, carrying water over the dam and into a turbine. Placing the turbine at the end of the siphoned flow also makes the design more fish-friendly—a screen can prevent fish from entering their system.
Jenna Halpin, team member and senior civil engineering major, said that the benefit of this design lies in its modularity.
“It can actually be adapted very, very easily to fit almost any dam that exists currently, and what’s really special is that we are not messing with the structural integrity of the dam, so no matter how old the dam is, as long as it has an appropriate reservoir, we can generate power,” Halpin said.
Mazur found the competition’s focus on sustainability and community appealing.
“I liked that the competition had a community element to it, thinking about how these engineering decisions affect communities and about how to get communities involved in that decision process. I also liked how the project focused on how we can use infrastructure that’s already available instead of creating new things to generate energy,” she said.
To generate community investment, the team focused on K-12 education in Baltimore City, developing five educational modules as well as in March hosting two pop-up events at Lake Roland featuring a homemade water wheel and activities for children.
“The kids are excited to learn about this stuff,” Halpin said. “They were playing on the playground, with a beautiful dam nearby, and came over to our pop-up to ask about our project. We got to see their eyes light up when they learned that water can actually power things. It was really special to see the dots connect for them.”
According to Alissa Burkholder Murphy, senior lecturer in the CLE and director of the Multidisciplinary Engineering Design Program, the team worked so well by leveraging each member’s expertise.
“Environmental engineer Grace Mazur designed a green infrastructure bypass channel for their dam site, while Erin Lee, a chemical and biomolecular engineering major, conducted a system-wide risk assessment, and mechanical engineer Jason Zhong crunched flow rate numbers. And all teammates stepped outside their disciplines to learn computer-aided design and manufacturing methodologies from biophysics major Seth Jayawardane. That kind of teamwork is impressive,” she said.
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The G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering is a division of The Johns Hopkins University located in the university’s Homewood campus in Baltimore, Maryland.
Engineering at Johns Hopkins was originally created in 1913 as an educational program that included exposure to liberal arts and scientific inquiry. In 1919, the engineering department became a separate school, known as the School of Engineering. By 1937, over 1,000 students had graduated with engineering degrees. By 1946 the school had six departments.
In 1961, the School of Engineering changed its name to the School of Engineering Sciences and, in 1966, merged with the Faculty of Philosophy to become part of the School of Arts and Sciences. In 1979, the engineering programs were organized into a separate academic division that was named the G.W.C. Whiting School of Engineering. The school’s named benefactor is George William Carlyle Whiting, co-founder of The Whiting-Turner Contracting Company.
Several departments at the school have been nationally and historically recognized. The Johns Hopkins Department of Biomedical Engineering is recognized as the top-ranked program in the nation. The Department of Geography and Environmental Engineering has consistently ranked as one of the top 5 programs nationally by U.S. News & World Report in recent years.
The Department of Mechanical Engineering is well known for its fundamental and historic contributions, especially in the fields of mechanics and fluid dynamics. Although it has always been a very small department, an uncharacteristically large number of highly acclaimed scholars have been associated with it over the years. These include Clifford Truesdell, Owen Martin Philips, Jerald Ericksen, James Bell, Stanley Corrsin, Robert Kraichnan, John L. Lumley, Leslie Kovasznay, Walter Noll, K. R. Sreenivasan, Hugh Dryden, Shiyi Chen, Andrea Prosperetti, Fazle Hussain, Harry Swinney, Stephen H. Davis, Gregory L. Eyink, Charles Meneveau, Joseph Katz (professor), Lauren Marie Gardner, Gretar Tryggvason and Mohamed Gad-el-Hak. Many of the landmark papers in the field of fluid mechanics (turbulence in particular) were written using data from the Corrsin Wind Tunnel Laboratory. The wind tunnel is still in operation today. The department was also home to the school of rational mechanics. It was recently ranked as one of the top 5 departments in the nation for research activity by the National Research Council (the department was ranked 13th by the generic U.S. News & World Report rankings), and is still considered one of the main centers of fundamental research in fluid dynamics and solid mechanics.
Johns Hopkins University opened in 1876, with the inauguration of its first president, Daniel Coit Gilman. “What are we aiming at?” Gilman asked in his installation address. “The encouragement of research … and the advancement of individual scholars, who by their excellence will advance the sciences they pursue, and the society where they dwell.”
The mission laid out by Gilman remains the university’s mission today, summed up in a simple but powerful restatement of Gilman’s own words: “Knowledge for the world.”
What Gilman created was a research university, dedicated to advancing both students’ knowledge and the state of human knowledge through research and scholarship. Gilman believed that teaching and research are interdependent, that success in one depends on success in the other. A modern university, he believed, must do both well. The realization of Gilman’s philosophy at Johns Hopkins, and at other institutions that later attracted Johns Hopkins-trained scholars, revolutionized higher education in America, leading to the research university system as it exists today.
The Johns Hopkins University is a private research university in Baltimore, Maryland. Founded in 1876, the university was named for its first benefactor, the American entrepreneur and philanthropist Johns Hopkins. His $7 million bequest (approximately $147.5 million in today’s currency)—of which half financed the establishment of the Johns Hopkins Hospital—was the largest philanthropic gift in the history of the United States up to that time. Daniel Coit Gilman, who was inaugurated as the institution’s first president on February 22, 1876, led the university to revolutionize higher education in the U.S. by integrating teaching and research. Adopting the concept of a graduate school from Germany’s historic Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg, [Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg] (DE), Johns Hopkins University is considered the first research university in the United States. Over the course of several decades, the university has led all U.S. universities in annual research and development expenditures. The university has graduate campuses in Italy, China, and Washington, D.C., in addition to its main campus in Baltimore.
Johns Hopkins is organized into 10 divisions on campuses in Maryland and Washington, D.C., with international centers in Italy and China. The two undergraduate divisions, the Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and the Whiting School of Engineering, are located on the Homewood campus in Baltimore’s Charles Village neighborhood. The medical school, nursing school, and Bloomberg School of Public Health, and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center are located on the Medical Institutions campus in East Baltimore. The university also consists of the Peabody Institute, Applied Physics Laboratory, Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, School of Education, Carey Business School, and various other facilities.
Johns Hopkins was a founding member of the American Association of Universities. Nobel laureates and Fields Medalists have been affiliated with Johns Hopkins. Founded in 1883, the Blue Jays men’s lacrosse team has captured national titles.
Research
The opportunity to participate in important research is one of the distinguishing characteristics of Hopkins’ undergraduate education. About 80 percent of undergraduates perform independent research, often alongside top researchers. Johns Hopkins has members of the Institute of Medicine, The Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigators, The National Academy of Engineering, and The National Academy of Sciences. Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university as alumni, faculty members or researchers.
The Johns Hopkins University is among the most cited institutions in the world ranking No. 3 globally [after Harvard University and The MPG Society (DE)] in the number of total citations published in Thomson Reuters-indexed journals over 22 fields in America.
Johns Hopkins received research grants from The National Aeronautics and Space Administration, as a leading recipient of NASA research and development funding. Totals include grants and expenditures of JHU’s Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland.
The Johns Hopkins University also offers the “Center for Talented Youth” program—a nonprofit organization dedicated to identifying and developing the talents of the most promising K-12 grade students worldwide. As part of the Johns Hopkins University, the “Center for Talented Youth” or CTY helps fulfill the university’s mission of preparing students to make significant future contributions to the world. The Johns Hopkins Digital Media Center (DMC) is a multimedia lab space as well as an equipment, technology and knowledge resource for students interested in exploring creative uses of emerging media and use of technology.
In 2013, the Bloomberg Distinguished Professorships program was established by a $250 million gift from Michael Bloomberg. This program enables the university to recruit fifty researchers from around the world to joint appointments throughout the nine divisions and research centers. For The American Academy of Arts and Sciences each professor must be a leader in interdisciplinary research and be active in undergraduate education. Directed by Vice Provost for Research, there are Bloomberg Distinguished Professors at the university, including Nobel Laureates, fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and members of the National Academies.
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