Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Events for March
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PhD Seminar
Fri, Mar 04, 2016 @ 03:00 PM - 04:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Rebecca Peer, Environmental Engineering PhD Candidate, University of Southern California
Talk Title: Spatiotemporal analysis of environmental trade-offs in electricity generation
Abstract: The US power sector is a leading contributor of emissions that affect air quality and climate. It also requires a lot of water for cooling thermoelectric power plants. Although these impacts affect ecosystems and human health unevenly in space and time, there has been very little quantification of these environmental trade-offs on decision-relevant scales. This work quantifies hourly water consumption, emissions (i.e. carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and sulfur oxides), and marginal heat rates for 252 electric generation units (EGUs) in the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) region in 2011 using a unit commitment and dispatch model (UC&D). Annual, seasonal and daily variations, as well as spatial variability are assessed. When normalized over the grid, hourly average emissions and water consumption intensities (i.e. output per MWh) are found to be highest when electricity demand is the lowest, as baseload EGUs tend to be the most water and emissions intensive. Results suggest that a large fraction of emissions and water consumption are caused by small number of power plants, mainly baseload coal-fired generators. Replacing 8-10 existing units with modern natural gas combined cycle units would result in reductions of 19-29%, 51-55%, 60-62%, and 13-27% in CO2 emissions, NOx emissions, SOx emissions, and water consumption, respectively, across the ERCOT region for two different conversion scenarios.
Host: Kelly Sander
Location: Seeley G. Mudd Building (SGM) - 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry
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PhD Seminar
Fri, Mar 11, 2016 @ 11:00 AM - 12:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Evangelos Pantazis, PhD Candidate, University of Southern California
Talk Title: A design methodology framework at the intersection of Architecture, Engineering and construction using Multi-Agent Systems
Abstract: This talk will review research on the prototyping of multi-agent systems (MAS) for architectural design. It proposes a design exploration methodology at the intersection of architecture, engineering, and construction. The motivation of the work includes exploring bottom up generative methods coupled with optimizing performance criteria including geometric complexity and objective functions for environmental, structural and fabrication parameters. The work focuses on the development of a design methodology and initial experiments to provide design solutions, which simultaneously satisfy complexly coupled and often contradicting objectives.
The prototypical experiments vary in complexity and focus on different design domains, namely: a) facade design, and the development of non structural building component (facade panels) that is adjusted based on the environmental performance of the facade b) shell design; and the development of structural building component (reciprocal frames) for form finding actual construction of lightweight shell structures using digital and robotic fabrication.
The developed system and algorithms are described, and initial results of the multi-agent derived efficiencies are presented
Biography: Evangelos Pantazis is currently pursuing a PhD at the Viterbi School of Engineering, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Southern California. Evangelos holds a Masters of Advanced studies in the field of Computer Aided Architectural Design from the ETH in Zurich (2012). He received his Diploma in Architecture with honors from Aristotles University of Thessaloniki (2010), and has also graduated from the MOKUME jewelry design school in 2007, where he was trained as a jeweler.
Professionally, Evangelos has gained experience in several international offices, including Graft in Berlin, Germany, Melhado Architectes in Londrina, Brasil and Studio Pei Zhu in Beijing/China. Soon after, he co-founded Topotheque design office, a studio that focuses on computational design with its various tangent disciplines such architecture, product deisgn and graphic and plastic art. His latest work is focusing on non-linear design strategies for architectural and design purposes, their integration with performance analyses and their materialization using digital fabrication.
Host: Burcin Becerik-Gerber
Location: 101
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Kaela Berry
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Astani Civil and Environmental Engineering Seminar
Thu, Mar 24, 2016 @ 02:00 PM - 03:00 PM
Sonny Astani Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Conferences, Lectures, & Seminars
Speaker: Dr. Roland Cusick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Talk Title: Elucidating the potential of capacitive energy storage technologies for brackish water desalination
Abstract: See attachment
Host: Dr. Adam Smith
More Information: Cusick Announcement.pdf
Location: Thomas & Dorothy Leavey Library (LVL) - 17
Audiences: Everyone Is Invited
Contact: Evangeline Reyes