Miki Hondzo - US grants

Abstract
CTS-0111598
R. Arndt, Et. Al, University of Minnesota

The PI requests funding for the purchase of a high-resolution stereoscopic particle image velocimetry. This system will be used to characterize complex turbulent flows at very small scales in four different projects under the directions of the PI and the three Co-PI's. The projects include atmospheric boundary layers, relationship between interfacial mass transfer and free-surface turbulence, effect of small-scale motion on biological systems, and two phase flows associated with partial cavitation. All four investigators have currently funded projects in each of the four proposed fields of study and research studies are in active progress.

0127887
Hondzo
The objective of this research is to investigate the growth dynamics of the green alga Selenastrum capricornutum and the blue-green alga Synechococcus leopoliensis in a well-defined flow system. This research will test the hypothesis that the growth and aggregate formation of these algae depends not only on optimal water temperature, light regime, and nutrients, but also on hydrodynamic mixing conditions. To test this hypothesis, experimental studies of these algae will be conducted under laminar, turbulent, and turbulent-intermittent fluid flow conditions in order to characterize the growth, aggregate formation and morphometry as functions of intrinsic fluid flow parameters. Fluid flow conditions will be generated using both a rotating cylinder apparatus and an oscillating grid apparatus. This research could provide data for improved model development for the prediction of alga blooms in freshwater systems.

0414388 Hondzo This planning grant will address seven critical issues that need further definition and resolution for the full-scale development of a proposed NSF program called CLEANER (Collaborative Large-scale Engineering Analysis Network for Environmental Research). Special attention in this project will be paid to design and analysis of two alternative types of environmental field facilities (EFFs), which are viewed as the fundamental units of the CLEANER network. A type 1 EFF would be a regional environmental system that studies a range of interconnected environmental problems; a type 2 EFF would be focused on a single cross-cutting issue of national concern.

This IGERT training grant will bring together scholars of ecology, civil engineering, and the earth sciences to study the interplay between landscape changes and ecosystem processes across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales and across interfaces with an emphasis on non-equilibrium dynamics. Changes in the abiotic and biotic world have taken place over a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. In particular, human activities have greatly accelerated the rate at which the physical and biological world is perturbed through modifications in transport processes. Opportunities for graduate education and research spanning these disciplines and issues will be provided at the University of Minnesota research facilities at Itasca State Park and the National Center for Earth-surface Dynamics (NCED). Key education and training features are a one-year comprehensive, team-taught course that emphasizes data collection using modern instrumentation, data analysis, data interpretation, and model building across spatial and temporal scales and across interfaces. Collaborative projects, virtual seminars with international partners, ethics training and professional preparation will enhance this experience. The core training in the basic sciences and engineering will also include historical, social, and economic topics. This IGERT training program will recruit students from a broad spectrum and prepare them for an international and collaborative workforce. The broader impacts of this IGERT include partnerships with colleges and pre-graduate school internships to recruit from underrepresented groups. The partnership with NCED will provide opportunities for public outreach activities through collaborations with the Science Museum of Minnesota and the Minnesota Historical Society, such as development of teaching materials for K-12 based on historical records in Minnesota. IGERT is an NSF-wide program intended to meet the challenges of educating U.S. Ph.D. scientists and engineers with the interdisciplinary background, deep knowledge in a chosen discipline, and the technical, professional, and personal skills needed for the career demands of the future. The program is intended to catalyze a cultural change in graduate education by establishing innovative new models for graduate education and training in a fertile environment for collaborative research that transcends traditional disciplinary boundaries.

0623873
Muste

The proposed Planning Visit would support seven researchers and three graduate students from four U.S. universities, engaging them in a week-long interaction through scientific discussions, first-hand demonstrations, and collaborative planning at UNESCOs Institute of Water Education in Delft (The Netherlands) and University of Newcastle-upon-Tynes Institute for Research on Environment & Sustainability, Newcastle (United Kingdom). The visit will also be attended by scientists and engineers from the National Center for High-performance Computing in Taiwan. The focus of the Visit will be cyberinfrastructure platforms for science and engineering investigations in watershed-scale environmental and hydrological observatories. The overall goal of the proposed Planning Visit is to assess the progress made during the past decade by these leading international Hydroinformatics programs, and then to utilize, through collaboration, their progress as to advance the emerging efforts of cyberinfrastructure education and research at U.S. centers.

The Planning Visit activities will provide productive opportunities for the foreign and U.S. researchers (including young scientists/engineers and under-represented student groups) to share their knowledge, identify the needs, and formulate the future directions for the development of the next generation of environmental observatories. The scientific and educational exchange and planning to be carried out through the proposed Visit will contribute substantially to U.S. efforts (led by the research consortia CUAHSI and CLEANER) to accelerate the implementation of the cyberinfrastructure-based research in environmental science and engineering. Exposure to the extensive experience of the leading groups conducting cyberinfrastructure will advance the visit participants knowledge and expertise, and will engender a global perspective of their area of study, as well as provide opportunities for professional growth and networking through international collaboration. The Visit will facilitate the finalization of a long-term, multi-institute collaboration, the first trans-Atlantic collaborative effort in cyberinfrastructure applied to watershed research.

Hondzo
0607138

The water quality of streams draining watersheds has been degraded by increasing urbanization. The general symptoms of this degradation include more frequent large flow events, reduction in channel complexity, reduced retention of natural organic matter, and elevated concentrations of nutrients. Newly emerging urban water quality threats, including insecticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, and estrogens, are known or suspected to damage the health of humans and ecosystems. The restoration and management of streams have traditionally attempted to improve the hydrological and water quality conditions in-stream or in riparian zones. Recent studies have indicated the portion of a watershed covered by impervious surfaces and connected to the
stream by stormwater drainage is the primary degrading process of stream ecology and health. These findings suggest that the sustainable restoration and management of stream water quality require quantification of hydrological, chemical, biological, and geomorphological processes, and that these processes must be assessed across a range of scales. Furthermore, interactions among biogeochemical processes across watersheds are either non-linear processes or linear processes dependent on non-linear drivers. The monitoring of such a system inherently requires a change in traditional field sampling strategies. We propose to transform traditional and very limited (in terms of spatial and temporal resolution) field measurements through the integration of multi-scale, spatially-dense, high frequency, real-time, and event-driven observations by a wireless network with embedded networked sensing. Intellectual merit: The objective of our research is to establish a wireless network with embedded sensing capable of monitoring fundamental water quality parameters. Such a network is a key component for watershed observatory networks. The ability of these fundamental water quality parameters to be used for predicting the presence of emerging chemical contaminants in urban streams will also be determined. It is hypothesized that the concentrations of emerging contaminants will correlate with the fundamental parameters measured using the sensor network and that the sensor network will give improved prediction of the loads of these contaminants compared to traditional, discrete grab sampling. Our overall hypothesis is that water quality in streams draining impervious areas of urban land is controlled by the mean and variance of effective
stormwater residence time. The mean and variance of water residence time, the time it takes urban runoff to travel between the impervious urban land and a receiving aquatic body, will be quantified by radio frequency identification technology (RFID), tracer studies, and fluid-flow velocity measurements within the proposed wireless network. A small urban watershed will be equipped with wireless networked sensing to address the following objectives: (1) measurement of fundamental water quality and hydrologic parameters with spatiallydense and high frequency resolution, (2) correlation of general parameters with the presence and/or levels of emerging contaminants, and (3) integration of field measurements to the watershed using primarily the mean
and variance of effective stormwater residence time. Water quality in streams will be observable as a dynamic response to land use gradients and hydrological transients rather than as an equilibrium described byaverage properties. This approach will enable process-based scaling and forecasting of water quality in streams from the in-stream processes to the watershed level.
Broader impact: Wireless networks with embedded networked sensing are designed to quantify spatial and temporal heterogeneities of variables across a variety of scales and are perfectly suited not only for water quality management in streams but also to all environmental processes where interconnectivity among different parts determines the overall state of the system. The network to be developed in this project will focus on an urban stream, but can be expanded to include other watersheds with different land uses in the future. Generated data and scaling relationships will transform urban planning practices and management of water quality in streams draining urban land. Rather than focusing on manipulating in-stream processing only,
a more sustainable approach would be to focus on selection and location of stormwater best management practices (e.g., detention ponds or wetlands). The proposed field measurements are focused on evaluating best management practices for more appropriate and effective hydrologic management. The project will have two educational components. One addresses students and scientists through a revised educational curriculum. The
other is an international collaboration with the Technical University of Denmark through a developed Internet
course on "Integrated Urban Water Quality Management."

Proposal #: 10-61489
PI(s): Papanikolopoulos, Nikolaos;Hondzo, Miki; Morellas, Vassilios; Anaraki, Siavash Pourmakamali; Voyles, Richard M.
Institution: University of Minnesota
Title: MRI RAPID: Collaborative Research: Swarms of Robotic Aquapods to Assess Impact of Oil Spills on Marshlands
Project Proposed:
The project, testing the adequateness of underwater robots to swiftly and repeatedly sample large areas of Golf Oil Spill, aims to determine the spatial heterogeneity of the impacts on the shoreline, revealing "hot spots." These are areas of high oil concentration that constitute a challenge since hot-spots move due to shoreline morphology, wind patterns, and water circulation. To this end, small robots called "Aquapods" will be deployed. Aquapods are miniature robots with a high mobility-to-size ratio. As a form of locomotion, they are based on tumbling which allows them to locomote on the water, under the water, and on sandy and marshy shoreline. A recent version of the Aquapod (developed as part of the IUCRC on Safety, Security, and Rescue) can be completely submerged in water to operate on a lake or stream floor. Additionally, this robot is equipped with a buoyancy control unit that allows the robot to either sink or float in water, thus offering many unique applications in both environmental monitoring and surveillance. The work develops a more advanced system than the first generation radio controlled design, incorporating functionalities more appropriate to monitor oil spill effects.
Broader Impacts:
As the proposed research can drastically improve oil spill cleanup efforts, the potential broader impacts are large. The project exhibits the ability to assess the environmental impact on areas not easily accessible by humans. The PIs have a solid plan to involve middle-schoolers from underrepresented groups in the proposed project. Moreover, the developed instrument will be free for use to the interested groups of scientists. Planned are solid dissemination and education efforts both at the University of Minnesota and the University of Denver.

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).

This project is a renovation of research infrastructure within the St. Anthony Falls Laboratory (SAFL), a facility of the University of Minnesota that is used for a variety of research related to energy and the Earth-surface environment. It is a component of a larger renovation of the Laboratory undertaken by the University of Minnesota. Research conducted at SAFL includes topics such as: hydrological and geomorphological Earth-surface processes, chemical and biological transport in the environment, tectonically driven erosional and depositional systems, two-phase flows, biological fluid mechanics and sustainable energy technologies. SAFL houses a range of facilities, including clean labs, indoor and outdoor channels that route river water and can handle the complexity and materials ? earth, sediment, biota ? of the Earth-surface environment, a wind tunnel, and a large-scale experimental facility to model the evolution of landscapes through erosion, amongst others.

Renovations to the facility will allow SAFL to address research related to societal needs in the 21st century by expanding its research capacity in sustainable energy, notably wind and water energy and biofuels, and in landscape dynamics as a basis for restoration and sustainable management. More specifically, the main elements of research and research training that would be enabled or enhanced by the renovation are: interdisciplinary research in environmental science and engineering; research in turbulence and atmospheric boundary layers, particularly with regard to wind-power optimization; the optimization of methods for sustainable hydrokinetic and hydro-power; biofuels research focusing on optimization of algal bioreactors under variable environmental conditions; and research in environmental restoration and management, including streams, rivers and deltas. Groups that are spatially distributed will be able to participate in this research and research training through collaboration tools, visualization, and virtual experiments using the renovated Laboratory?s cyberinfrastructure.

In addition to providing infrastructure for faculty research, the renovated laboratory will be used by visiting researchers from across and outside the US. The renovation will enhance the training that SAFL offers through its certificate program in Stream Restoration. SAFL engages in a number of formal and informal education activities that are likely to benefit from access to the improved facilities. It partners with an informal science education institution, the Science Museum of Minnesota, to design exhibits on environmental science. Each summer, SAFL hosts undergraduate interns for a program in River and Coastal Restoration. In partnership with the Fond du Lac Tribal and Community College, SAFL participates in science camps aimed at Native American youth. Working with the Science Museum of Minnesota and a number of Science and Technology Center program participants, SAFL staff take part in the Future Earth Initiative aimed at informing the public and policymakers about the results of research in energy and sustainability.

The project develops and tests novel compressive sensing and sensor locating techniques that are adaptable to a myriad of different mobile robot designs while operable on today's wireless communication infrastructures. Unique in-situ laboratory and field experiments provide tangible results to scientists and other stakeholders that can be leveraged to advance these systems into future real-world hazard management scenarios. The research team develops new technological approaches that results in mobilizing more intelligent, automated "eyes and ears on the ground." Outreach efforts include: (i) integration of the activities with practitioners; (ii) Seminars/webcasts to audiences like environmental engineers and first responders; (iii) Annual technology day camps to attract middle-schoolers from under-represented groups to engineering; (iv) Demonstrations to local K-12 institutions; (v) Inclusion of the project themes to the regular curricula; and (vi) International collaborations.

This project introduces Robotics 2.0; a framework that targets autonomous robots that are co-workers and co-protectors, adapting to and working with humans. The research team develops a Cyber-Control Network (CCN) to allow multiple fixed and mobile robotic environmental sensing and measurements to adapt quickly to the changing environment by dynamically linking sub-networks of actuation, sensing, and control together. The design of such CCN ControlWare, and compressive sensing architectures, could be adapted to other large-scale problems beyond disaster response, mitigation, and management, such as power grid monitoring and reconfiguration, or regional urban traffic operations to respond to traffic congestion and incidents. The robotic sensing platforms do not require a-priori knowledge of the hazardous and dynamically changing environments they are monitoring. The Robotics 2.0 framework allows to swiftly respond, to prepare, and to manage various types of disasters.

This project, developing a high efficiency solar power enabled aerial instrument that incorporates sensory and processing requirements into the design methodology, focuses on the development of a (robotic) instrument that fills a niche in certain applications (i.e., small scale solar powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)). The work involves the creation of a platform for real-world information gathering applications with special focus on robust navigation, distributed sensing, and collaborative scenarios. In particular, the development of a small scale solar powered UAV provides a robotic platform capable of communication, sensory coverage, and flight endurance unattainable through traditional UAV design. Existing UAVs utilizing solar power are constrained to large aircraft designs requiring a traditional runway for takeoff and landing. In contrast, electric powered small scale UAVs suffer from minimal flight time. Additionally, aerial robots provide significant advantages over ground based systems as they are unaffected by terrain and obstacles, and provide an information-rich vantage point from the air. Conventional aerial robots are significantly limited by their flight time and therefore their deployment is severely restricted. Flight time has been the central limitation for airborne sensory information and has prevented experimental research and real-world applications from being performed. The development of a high efficiency aircraft that leverages solar energy as a resource provides a solution to the flight time problem.

The methodologies mentioned involve the incorporation of hierarchical planning methods that include high-level reasoning for the optimal number of UAVs/sensors required, and low-level reasoning for efficient sensor placement throughout the environment. Specifically, the use of solar powered UAV platforms will enable work in the areas of precision agriculture and environmental science, requiring strong demand for high endurance systems capable of supporting a variety of sensor and measurement units. (For example, timely and repetitive relevant information regarding crop health is necessary for corrective actions to be implemented.) Additionally, collaborative operation of dynamically placed sensor platforms and devices can only be enabled through the use of small solar powered airplanes like the ones to be implemented. The instrument that this project funds enables work in application areas that require continuous and repetitive operation such as Energy, Environment, Agriculture, etc. Consequently, this work addresses the
- Development of a small scale solar powered platform that is capable of multi-day flight,
- Experimental validation of the scaled down solar UAV instrument,
- Long-term solar powered flight planning based on sensory data collected, and
- Creation of benchmarks that will allow comprehensive evaluation of the small solar powered UAV instrument.